Data Lab Link Roundup: $1.90/day, haunted by big data, probability by profession, Bokeh, years left to live, and the statistical life of Martians

Here are some things that recently caught our attention:

• We’ve talked before about population and life expectancy so it’s no surprise that we’re fond of Nathan Yau’s superb visualization “Years you have left to live, probably” which presents US survival curves in a refreshing manner.

• The World Bank has just updated the international poverty line from $1.25 to $1.90 per day. There’s a lot to read about both the rationale behind, and the implications of this revision. A good place to start is this blog by our colleagues in the research department and the associated technical paper explaining the data, methodology and results. If you’re a little more visually inclined, we’ve also produced a series of “understanding poverty” explainers.

• Like me, David Evans is a fan of “The Martian” - Andy Weir’s hit novel that’s just received the hollywood treatment. In the story, hundreds of millions are spent trying to bring astronaut Mark Watney home from Mars. David quotes Richard Thaler who notes  “we rarely allow any identified life to be extinguished solely for the lack of money. But of course thousands of “unidentified” people die every day for lack of simple things like mosquito nets, vaccines, or clean water.” More on why the difference between an “identified life” and a “statistical life” matters.

• Maciej Ceglowski, founder of bookmarking service Pinboard gave an excellent talk on being “Haunted by Data” at the Strata + Hadoop conference.   His slides and notes are also available and to quote his memorable opening on the “big data” landscape: “I ask you to imagine data not as a pristine resource, but as a waste product, a bunch of radioactive, toxic sludge that we don’t know how to handle.”

• And on the subject of data visualization, Bokeh is definitely worth a look. It’s a Python interactive data visualization library that for me has two great features: it works seamlessly with IPython and it produces web-friendly visualizations without leaving the comfort of Python for the strange world of Javascript. For a quick overview, I’d highly recommend watching Sarah Bird’s talk at PyCon earlier this year.

• And if you’re in need of a chuckle, I’d highly recommend Ben Orlin’s illustrations of “What does probability mean in your profession?”