The Data Behind Happiness

Folks are doing internet searches for the word “happy” more than ever before. And no, the Pharrell Williams song released late in 2013 isn’t single handedly driving the interest. The upward trend clearly started before the song was released!

With several senseless acts of violence across the globe in recent months, we decided to devote this post to a brighter topic: what makes people happy how do they avoid stress?

Key Points:

1. Income plays a role in happiness

2. Relationship issues are a leading cause of stress

3. Genetics may play a large role in overall happiness

Motivation for this post stems from Samuel W. Bennett’s Get Data.

These interactive graphs were made using Plotly’s web app. To securely share graphs and data within a team and make interactive dashboards, sign up for a Plotly Professional plan or contact us about Plotly On-Premise.

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Google Trends: Pokemon More Relevant than Trump, Clinton

Google Trends, Google’s search analysis tool launched in 2006, allows the user to compare the volume of searches between two or more terms. Given the confluence of big news-making events around the globe, including “Brexit,” “PokemonGO,” and of course “Donald Trump,” we thought it would be slick to illustrate their significance in Plotly.

We investigated a few other words (“Beer”), phrases (“Moving to Canada”), correlations (Beer & Temperature), and more to diversify the post. Hope you have as much fun reading as we did plotting!

Pokemon, Trump & Clinton

If you’ve got an interesting find, graph it in Plotly, and tweet it @plotlygraphs.

These interactive graphs were made using Plotly’s web app. To securely share graphs and data within a team and make interactive dashboards, sign up for a Plotly Professional plan or contact us about Plotly On-Premise.

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Spurious Correlations

If you have used Plotly even just a handful of times, chances are that you have encountered the load screen that offers the age-old advice “correlation does not imply causation.”

Correlation doesn’t imply causation

Click the link on that load screen, and you will land on this site. There, a simple comic reaches into the correlation and causation cookie jar.

Correlation and causation comic

An increase in sales can’t directly be attributed to a new marketing startegy, just like cheese consumption can’t directly be attributed to death by tangled bedsheets (despite the graph below!). A “correlation means causation” argument needs to pass further testing, analysis, and study.

Harvard Law’s Tyler Vigen authored Spurious Correlations, a “ridiculous book of charts” involving bizarre correlations. For fun, we plotted some of the goofiest ones we could find. If you’ve got an interesting find, tweet it @plotlygraphs.

These interactive graphs were made using Plotly’s web app. To securely share graphs and data within a team and make interactive dashboards, sign up for a Plotly Professional plan or contact us about Plotly On-Premise.

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How the Internet Talks

FiveThirtyEight contributor Randy Olson and senior editor Ritchie King teamed up to “parse every Reddit comment from late 2007 through August 2015.” The result was a data visulation tool that tracked the rise and fall of word, abbreviation, and internet slang popularity. Reddit’s users have posted “more than 1.7 billion comments” since launch, so the site represented a language data mine of sorts that was begging to be tapped.

We thought the tool was really cool and that it could be made even more effective by allowing the data to be interactive on the hover. Olson and King made this task quite easy as a “download the data” button conveniently rests on the right of the interface. From there, uploading the data to Plotly is simple.

Below, you’ll find some of our favorite examples. If you’ve got an interesting find, tweet it @plotlygraphs.

These interactive graphs were made using Plotly’s web app. To securely share graphs and data within a team and make interactive dashboards, sign up for a Plotly Professional plan or contact us about Plotly On-Premise.

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The Man Who Has Endowed $44.3 Billion is a Frugal Clothes Buyer

Bill Gates, co-founder of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation that has a 15-year endowment of U.S. $44.3 billion is a self-proclaimed frugal clothes and jewelry buyer. The U.S. $28 billion that Gates himself has donated to the largest private foundation in the world could have bought him 26 million pair of Versace’s most expensive jeans, but he’d rather focus on seeing human society accomplish the 3 following things in the next 20 years:

1. “First is an energy innovation to lower the cost and get rid of green house gases. This isn’t guaranteed so we need a lot of public and private risk taking.”

2. “Second is progress on disease particularly infectious disease. Polio, Malaria, HIV, TB, etc.. are all diseases we should be able to either eliminate of bring down close to zero. There is amazing science that makes us optimistic this will happen.”

3. “Third are tools to help make education better - to help teachers learn how to teach better and to help students learn and understand why they should learn and reinforce their confidence.”

This post will provide a deeper insight on the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, taking the foundation’s 2014 transparent contribution graphs and making them interactive in Plotly.

These interactive graphs were made using Plotly’s web app. To securely share graphs and data within a team and make interactive dashboards, sign up for a Plotly Professional plan or contact us about Plotly On-Premise.

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Mobile Ate the World

Benedict Evan’s “Mobile Ate the World” shows how the mobile footprint has grown exponentially in the past decade or two. We thought some of his graphs were really cool and decided to take them to the next level by making them interactive in Plotly.

These interactive graphs were made using Plotly’s web app. To securely share graphs and data within a team and make interactive dashboards, sign up for a Plotly Professional plan or contact us about Plotly On-Premise.

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Plotly Student Ambassador of the Month: Teddy Ward, Duke University

Plotly’s student ambassador of the month is Teddy Ward, an Earth and Ocean Sciences and Computer Science student at Duke University. Teddy has successfully recruited 10 Duke students to Plotly and is aiming to introduce to site to 100+ more! He was gracious enough to answer a few questions about how he uses Plotly and applies it to his work flow. Plotly recently sent him an awesome company t-shirt to rep in North Carolina.

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Its easy to add background images to charts. Just embed the chart in an iframe and place the background image behind it, then turn down the iframe opacity. Play around with this idea here: http://slides.com/jackparmer/deck-7/fullscreen