438: quantum of sollazzo
#438: quantum of sollazzo – DATE July 2021
The data newsletter by @puntofisso.
Hello, regular readers and welcome new ones :) This is Quantum of Sollazzo, the newsletter about all things data. I am Giuseppe Sollazzo, or @puntofisso. I've been sending this newsletter since 2012 to be a summary of all the articles with or about data that captured my attention over the previous week. The newsletter is and will always (well, for as long as I can keep going!) be free, but you're welcome to become a friend via the links below.
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If you speak Italian, you can read this interview with me by the legendary DataNinja School for their magazine, in which I discuss what working as Head of AI Skunkworks is like, what data is involved, and what tips I have for those willing to embrace data and AI for the first time. (And if you don't speak Italian, here's the Google Translate English version of it).
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My "Six Questions" series is taking a few weeks' break after 14 issues while I prepare the next series. Which gives me the opportunity to ask: who would you like to be featured in the next series of interviews?
'till next week,
Giuseppe @puntofisso
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Topical
Which German party is the most unlucky when it comes to election dates?
Past "Six Questions" interviewee Lisa Charlotte Rost Muth – she got married, congrats! – at Datawrapper takes a look at underperformers in German federal elections, i.e. parties that had great polls over time but didn't get a satisfactory share of votes on polling day.
The Black Mortality Gap, and a Century-Old Document
"1 in 5 African American deaths happens earlier than if they were White. Black doctors say the Flexner Report holds clues to the health system’s role in racial health disparities."
Tracking Hurricane Ida’s Projected Path
This is interesting to see after it's passed. That higher temperatures have caused the water to warm, and in turn strengthened, the hurricane, should not go unnoticed.
Tools & Tutorials
twitter-to-sqlite
This is a brilliant little tool by Python guru Simon Willison. It does what it says on the tin: download twitter data into an easy-to-use SQLite database, ready for your data analysis and hacks. It requires Twitter API credentials.
Making Sense of Satellite Data, An Open Source Workflow: Accessing Data
The first episode of a 5-article series – all linked if you scroll down – about using satellite data, including downloading "sample datasets, examples of opening an manipulating imagery in QGIS, [...] exporting the data to GIMP for further processing".
Data Visualization and Design Foundations - Fall 2021
A course at CUNY led by Dr. Lev Manovich is sharing its contents via this online board.
(via Massimo Conte)
More on Excalidraw
A few issues ago we met Excalidraw, a tool to draw faux-hand-drawn charts. It turns out that Excalidraw supports plugin libraries, such as this brilliant collection of commonly used charts. The same author also created an Excalidraw ChartPicker, "designed to help you pick a suitable chart based on your dataset".
(via Paul Rignall)
timefind
"timefind lets you find the exact moment that something was added to a website.
It quickly flips through Web Archive snapshots using binary search, pinpointing the date of the modification."
It's a command line tool, for now, but it might develop into a GUI.
Tidy Geospatial Networks in R
"sfnetworks is an R package for analysis of geospatial networks. It connects the functionalities of the tidygraph package for network analysis and the sf package for spatial data science."
Dataviz & Interactive
Alphamaps
"Let’s turn your data into instant geopolitical insights".
Alphamaps was a finalist at the EU Datathon 2019. They developed a tool that allows the user to create statistical maps from openly available data, and order their prints.
AI
Villagebot
Matt Allinson, a science communicator based in Finland, has created VillageBot, "a neural network that has been trained on a list of the 18,084 English place names on Wikipedia."
You can try it here or read more about how it works on Matt's blog, where you'll also find heavily commented source code snippets. I'm booking a holiday to Wood Reth-le-Sagen.
quantum of sollazzo is 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.
