422: quantum of sollazzo
#422: quantum of sollazzo – 18 May 2021
The data newsletter by @puntofisso.
Last week, I was mentioned in Matt Muir’s born again Web Curios, the newsletter formerly known as Imperica Web Curios, which gives me the opportunity to link to one of my favourite sources of nerdery. Beware it’s addictive
My former colleague and health data guru Dr Tim Taylor sends me this two interesting articles from Nature, to be read together: in the first, Scientists call for fully open sharing of coronavirus genome data; while the second tells us Why some researchers oppose unrestricted sharing of coronavirus genome data. There’s an interesting dualism global South vs wealthy countries. It makes for an interesting read.
This week’s interview to a data hero is to Debora Aru, a data journalist who reached the Mirror front page a few times. Enjoy her takes. You usual links are below the interview.
‘till next week,
Giuseppe @puntofisso
Six questions to...
Debora Aru, Data Journalist at Reach
What is your daily data work like and what tools do you use?
My work is normally spread over the week and I write stories for our local titles across the UK. Normally I pitch a story on the Friday for next the week. On the following Monday, I start collecting and cleaning the data I want to use for my story, and I interview experts on the topic, who can explain data and trends. I then write the story using local figures for every area that requested a version of it.
Tell me about a data project that you're proud of...
We set up and run a Covid-19 vaccine calculator that tells people when they're likely to be invited to vaccination. It has been updated following the latest vaccination priority list released by the government, who promise to have the entire adult population vaccinated by the end of July. These dates are estimates based on Office for National Statistics population figures for mid-2019, and the latest seven-day average for the number of people vaccinated.
...and a data project that someone else did and you're jealous of.
It's How well do you really know your country?, a quiz by Alberto Nardelli and others at the Guardian. It shows well how people are ignorant about topical issues in their own country.
If I say "dataset", you think of...
Pain. Jokes apart, I think of tables to sort out and look up with local areas I want to analyse.
Give someone new to data a tip or lesson you wish you'd learned earlier.
Learn a programming language. RStudio or Python, for instance. Will make thing much easier and will help with more complex data analysis.
Data is or data are...
"Data is plural."
Topical
64% of people in UK have never worked from home
So reports Steve Chambers in this quote tweet that links to an interesting data release by the Office for National Statistics: Homeworking in the UK, broken down by unitary and local authority districts, 2020
Pret Sandwich Sales Show Office Workers Staying Home
Or, as Bloomberg describes it, the Pret Index
(via Darren McCormac)
The Booming U.S. Recovery Is Leaving Some Communities Completely Behind
“The U.S. economy is on a multi-speed track as minorities in some cities find themselves left behind by the overall boom in hiring, according to a Bloomberg analysis of about a dozen metro areas.”
Why Black Women Are Often Missing From Conversations About Police Violence
“Most people fatally shot by police get little to no attention from national media outlets. But this media landscape is especially stark for Black women, who are also far more likely to be killed by police than other women, according to The Washington Post’s database of deadly police shootings.“
Grim piece, but greatly researched and illustrated. Also, a little spoiler: one of its authors will soon be featured in the “Six questions to…” section.
Tools & Tutorials
Counting Animals Using Satellite Imagery
Ok, a podcast is not quite a tool or tutorial, especially as this is the story of a company who does satellite imagery analysis, but some of the issues mentioned might be interesting to hear for those of you who like satellite data wrangling. By the very excellent Mapscaping podcast.
Introducing Observable Plot
Observable Plot is a new a new open-source JavaScript library for exploratory data visualization, developed by the authors of D3 (of which it’s not a replacement.)
Isochrones
Wikipedia describes isochrones as “a map that depicts the area accessible from a point within a certain time threshold.”. You’ve probably seen one before. I’ve recently come across two tools that allow you to create an isochrone. One is iso4app, while the other is simply a feature of OpenRouteService. Both are based on OpenStreetMap.
Clustergam: visualisation of cluster analysis
Martin Fleischmann, a researcher in urban morphology and geographic data science at the University of Liverpool, introduces a Python library to create clustergrams, which are two-dimensional plots capturing the flows of observations between clustering classes as you add more clusters. Yeah, it’s a little mind-bending, but once you see it you’ll get it.
Dataviz
Lighthouse Map
Just a brilliant map of lighthouses, in real colours, by the talented folks at Geodienst. As the open source release README file says, it takes the data from the “blinking beacon” feature of OpenStreetMap (who knew it existed, and if you want to geek out on how much data there is on lighthouse features, head here).
Long Tiny Loop
This was a utterly geeky but fascinating surprise at the last Geomob meetup (you can see a video here).
“Long Tiny Loop is a fitness challenge […]. Your goal is to traverse the longest possible non-self-intersecting loop within the smallest possible region, without revisiting any streets or intersections.“
It’s pretty interesting because of the amount of geometrical formulas involved to make the calculations of the leaderboard (i.e. the “difficulty” of each loop).
Why nobody knows how to pronounce my name in Japanese
“A writing system with three scripts & thousands of kanji characters”, as told by Datawrapper’s Aya Tanikawa.
The best bit, though, is realising that Murakami’s 1Q84 includes, in the original Japanese version, a piece written only with hiragana and katakana characters and skipping Kanji, because this somehow “simulates” dyslexia. Absolutely mind-bending for someone only used to alphabetic script systems.
We speak about Asian Americans as a single block. Here’s how incredibly complex they are
Well, it’s a bit like discovering hot water, but I guess this is probably unknown by many in the US context. The article presents some interesting data visualizations.
Interactive
Shipmap
Great interactive dataviz by the folks at Kiln, using data from UCL. On the map, “you can see movements of the global merchant fleet over the course of 2012, overlaid on a bathymetric map. You can also see a few statistics such as a counter for emitted CO2 (in thousand tonnes) and maximum freight carried by represented vessels (varying units).” But you can also simply hit play and here the story, with the added pleasure of Goldberg Variations in the background. (via Maurizio Napolitano)
Become a GitHub Sponsor. It costs about the price of a coffee per month, and you’ll get an Open Data Rottweiler sticker (and other stuff). Or you can Buy Me A Coffee.
quantum of sollazzo is also supported by ProofRed’s excellent proofreading service. If you need high-quality copy editing or proofreading, head to http://proofred.co.uk. Oh, they also make really good explainer videos.
