446: quantum of sollazzo
#446: quantum of sollazzo – 15 November 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.
Many thanks to the brilliant folks at DataJournalism.com for adding "Quantum of Sollazzo" in their list of 8 must-read newsletters for data journalists, and on the first spot! They describe Quantum of Sollazzo's 10-year archive as "an incredible repertoire for the data curious". This was very flattering and a true highlight of the past week.
Speaking of lists of newsletters, I have a favour to ask :) Can you submit this newsletter to the brilliant newsletter aggregator that is The Pudding's "Winning the Internet"? The form is here and all you have to do is enter "Quantum of Sollazzo" and press submit.
If you read this newsletter you probably know my platform parli-n-grams, a search engine that shows the frequency of words and phrases in debates at the UK Parliament. Well, last week it turned 8 years old. It's a terrible hack I once put together in a few hours for a hackday in 2014, and it's kept running and updating for all these years with minimal intervention. Among its moments of glory is the image below, a snapshot of when Allegra Stratton used it on ITV's Peston on Sunday and yours truly got their "Geek of the week" accolade :-)
I was interviewed by one of my favourite Italian journalists, Isaia Invernizzi, for an article he wrote about AI in healthcare. You can read the original Italian here and the automatic translation into English here.
My friends at the You Got This! conference are running another event in January, which I strongly recommend. "You Got This is a community event series focused on discussing core skills needed for a happy, healthy work life.
We talk about the skills you don't get taught and just have to work out - it shouldn't have to be this way. Discover talks, workshops, and social events around our core community themes."
The Friday workshop is very affordable (and there's a bursary if you can't afford it), while the Saturday conference is free.
Every week I include a six-question interview with an inspiring data person. This week, I speak with Edafe Onerhime, Data Architecture Governance Lead & Executive Director at JP Morgan Chase, an outstanding open data heroine and, personally, a true inspiration in the data world.
The Prepared is a newsletter for non-engineers who love engineering. In this week's issue, learn about Rolls-Royce's mini nuclear reactors, 3D printing recycled wood, and swabbing smartphones to detect COVID-19. Subscribe for free here!
'till next week,
Giuseppe @puntofisso
Six questions to...
Edafe Onerhime
Edafe is Data Architecture Governance Lead & Executive Director at JPMorgan Chase.
What is your daily data work like and what tools do you use?
My work has evolved from purely a technologist for 15 years, to focusing on helping organisations get sustainable value from data over the last 10 years. At JPMorgan Chase, I lead data governance in infrastructure. My audience are product owners and architects of various stripes. So I use a lot of their tooling - like MagicDraw for UML and Erwin for models. I also see the odd JSON snippet! Like many senior data leaders, I’m not in the weeds of development or coding, though I still need to understand the tooling, technology, and workflow.
Tell me about a data project that you're proud of...
Only one?! There are so many to choose from. I'm very proud of the Open Standards for Data GuidebookIt's a unique resource I created for the Open Data Institute.
Data standards power collaboration (with data) at scale. A successful data standard may seem simple but there are many failures and abandoned standards. The guide helps anyone understand why, how, and what you need to be successful. You don't need to be a data person to take advantage of the lessons - it's written with policy makers, technologists, and business leaders in mind.
...and a data project that someone else did and you're jealous of.
The first that springs to mind is Data Mesh conceived by Zhamak Dehghani. It is less of a data project, and more of a data paradigm. I love that Zhamak has simplified the mess of data lake (or let's face it, data swamps!) architecture by standing on the shoulder of giants. Zhamak has re-imagined how data scientists, data analysts, and data architects get value from data using Domain-Driven Design or DDD. Data Mesh focuses on people and technology, which occupies the same space as data governance – so it resonates.
If I say "dataset", you think of...
Set of data and venn diagrams (old school!) and then data files and finally, a logical encapsulation of data.
Give someone new to data a tip or lesson you wish you'd learned earlier.
Data is not agnostic. It is designed, collected, curated, and interpreted by humans – or at least, the hand of humans is present in the process. It has changed societies and impacts lives. Which is why we as technologists must consider how we decolonise data for equity and all of humankind. Especially relevant in October and in Black History Month UK.
Data is or data are...
I’m agnostic! Whatever works?
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Topical
The 6,089 Dundee WW1 victims: Search their names, ages, ranks and addresses
On the run up to Remembrance Day, Lesley-Ann Kelly and colleagues at The Courier have published this poignant analysis of the 11,000 WW1 roll of honour records from Aberdeen and Dundee, using poppies as the basis on which to build an interactive representation of the deaths data.
Evicted in less than 10 minutes: courts fail tenants broken by pandemic
"People in dire financial straits are losing their homes in a matter of minutes because of a legal system that has failed to account for the catastrophic impact of the pandemic, with judges powerless to prevent evictions being ordered."
Interesting (investigation](https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2021-09-23/evicted-in-less-than-10-minutes-courts-fail-tenants-broken-by-pandemic) by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism.
Can data lie?
"Why One of the Internet's Oldest Images Lives On Without Its Subject's Consent". This is a pretty good scrollytelling article by The Pudding.
Texas Congressional Redistricting Is More Extensive Than Most Maps Reveal
"How much have the congressional districts been redrawn?", asks this Observable notebook, ready to be replicated.
The number of new infections is higher than it has been since January - and everything else about the corona virus in Switzerland in 23 graphics
Quite a few interesting visualizations in this article appeared on the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, originally in German and here automatically translated into English.
The World's Addiction to Palm Oil Is Only Getting Worse
"Seventeen climate summits ago, one of the world’s first sustainability efforts in global food production was set up to stop palm oil plantations from destroying the rainforest. Yet more than 80% of the market remains untouched by the effort because no one wants to pay for it."
Seventeen summits ago? We're doomed, aren't we.
How ProPublica Used Genomic Sequencing Data to Track an Ongoing Salmonella Outbreak
"For a ProPublica reporter who did Ph.D. work in bioinformatics, data on bacterial DNA helped reveal how a once-rare salmonella strain spread through the chicken industry. Salmonella infantis is multidrug-resistant and is still making people sick."
Hard science, data, journalism, social activism – all in one article by ProPublica. Extraordinary.
Tools & Tutorials
How we built our own index to measure inflation
A great little piece in The Economist's data team newsletter explains how they built the "Uluru Index", which measures the concept of concentration of inflation.
Population Builder
Population Builder is a web app developed by Oli Hawkins that "lets you build a population estimate for a set of small areas in Great Britain". The most recent update covers estimates as of mid-2020. It's pretty easy to use: point and click the delimited boundaries (census output areas) and the corresponding area estimate is added to the total.
What I Learned About My Writing By Seeing Only The Punctuation
"I made a web tool that lets you spy your hidden literary style" – which follows on from the punctuation analysis in literature that we saw in issue 442. The actual web tool is at Just The Punctuation.
(via Lorenza Toffolon)
Survival Analysis in Python
"This tutorial is an introduction to survival analysis using computation rather than math."
It's a work-in-progress collection of notebooks.
Vaximap.org: optimal routes for home visits
A web tool that does a kind of Travelling Salesman to visit housebound patient and administer vaccines. "So far, 32,228 routes have been built for 342,302 patients." (via Massimo Conte)
Data thinking
Observable shares its first Research Report: State of Dataviz 2021
"Insights from our passionate community of data collaborators"
Science confirms it: Websites really do all look the same
"We studied 10,000 websites and found that their design has become more uniform over time. What does this mean for the future of creative expression on the internet?"
Clarity and Aesthetics in Data Visualization: Guidelines
A short essay by NYU Professor Enrico Bertini with some handy tips on better charts.
Failure is part of the visualization process
Another of this newsletter's favourite academics, UCL Geography's James Cheshire, has written this short piece about the difficulties he himself faced when producing maps for his recent book "Atlas of the Invisible".
Dataviz & Interactive
Coworkers asked what maternity leave was like
This is, I think, the first time on record that I share a TikTok video as a data visualization.
(via Julia Higginbottom)
More trains, fewer emissions
This article by Lorenzo Ferrari and Gianluca De Feo at OBC Transeuropa look at European train routes that are carbon savers in comparison with flights.
Why Hania Rani and Giovanni Allevi are so successful
"The two pianists developed a musical language that set them apart from other contemporary composers."
Data journalist Francesco Piccinelli uses Spotify data to analyse the music production of a bunch of popular composers. Francesco's "DaNumbers" newsletter is a must-read if you like this kind of thing.
MapBusters
"Land's End to John o' Groats edition"
A brilliant game to play with population data, by "Six Questions" graduate Ahmad Barclay.
Percentage of Hacker News job postings that mention a remote option
A simple chart, with script and data available.
I've got to admit that I'm totally in two minds about this. Remote work is good, bad, and both. It all depends on context.
When will the heat break?
"I started wondering: how long can I reasonably expect these temperatures to last? How late into the year will we be getting these heat waves? And how early will they start?"
Erin Davies makes one of her amazing thematic dataviz collections, with a total of over 40 maps and line charts.
COP26 Retweet Network
"Network of publicly visible retweet interactions related to COP26. Zoom out to see full structure and look out for fringe communities."
(via Massimo Conte)
An endless summer day in December
"This week’s chart has two kinds of symmetry. If you stay put throughout the year, you’ll be traveling along a single colored line, corresponding to your town’s latitude."
By Datawrapper's blogger Rose Mintzer-Sweeney.
The Cognitive Bias Codes
A big svg image containing a classification of cognitive biases and links to their Wikipedia page.
AI
On Delphi, AI, computational ethics and the morality of pineapple pizza
A Twitter thread by Prof Mirco Musolesi, with some good pointers.
Facial Recognition as a Less-Bad Option
This will be a controversial article, and it's already being shared on social media to that effect. It raises an interesting point: AI-driven facial recognition tool use by the police gets a lot of (often justified) criticism; but what are we comparing it against?
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.
