448: quantum of sollazzo
#448: quantum of sollazzo – 30 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.
Every week I include a six-question interview with an inspiring data person. This week, I speak with Donata Columbro author of Italian-language book "Ti spiego il dato". Some of you might know her as the headteacher of data school DataNinja".
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Riccardo Di Sipio sent me a correction that made me feel a little stupid. In issue 447 I linked to the Economist's brilliant graphic showing the travel journey of probe Lucy, and I wrote "the approach they took to visualising the 12-year journey of Lucy, a space probe that visited eight different asteroids". In fact, Lucy has just departed and will visit eight asteroids. Thank you, Riccardo. I'll go and brew coffee.
'till next week,
Giuseppe @puntofisso
Six questions to...
Donata Columbro
Donata is a cofounder of Dataninja, journalist, and data humanizer.
What is your daily data work like and what tools do you use?
My daily work with data consists of reading newspapers, surfing Twitter and Instagram, looking for news that contains charts or numbers and collect them to a special bookmark folder I use when I prepare my training on how to understand data. I rarely produce data visualization myself, but instead I help people to improve their data literacy through online courses and Instagram videos where I talk passionately about the data culture we should all need to embrace. It doesn't mean to be "driven by data", but to "understand that data drives your life", so you need to become... their friend, or least aware that they are all around us.
Tell me about a data project that you're proud of...
I'm proud of my Instagram data literacy project #tispiegoildato. I started it in 2019, before the pandemic, as an educational project about how to read data and charts. It grew with many covid related questions from my followers, but I kept talking about other kind of news and data for more than a year, and now it has become a published book (Ti spiego il dato), Quinto Quarto ed. 2021). I am very thankful to my Instagram audience because I have learned so much from their doubts and questions, they really trained me on how to speak about data to the general public. I find that as data people we tend to consider our slang as universal and clear for anybody but...it's not :)
...and a data project that someone else did and you're jealous of.
Since I don't produce data projects but mainly talk and write about data, I wish I would have written Data Feminism, a must read book by Catherine D'Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein on how to change the practice of data science by being more inclusive, challenging our privileges and pursuing a data justice culture.
If I say "dataset", you think of...
Boxes full of different kinds of everyday small objects I collect to count the days when I care about my mental health (candies = I went to therapy, leaves = I've done some meditation, ...). I only started a few weeks ago but it looks like a real dataset now.
Give someone new to data a tip or lesson you wish you'd learned earlier.
Don't be afraid to ask for help or for advice, even if it means admitting you don't know something.
Data is or data are...
Data are! (maybe because I'm translating in Italian while I read...)
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Topical
Who is the biggest polluter?
Depends how you ask, says Reuters Graphics in this highly visual article.
Which vaccine is the most effective against the Delta variant?
"The mRNA jabs seem best—but all offer protection". From The Economist, a chart with a title that can only be the work of Alex Selby-Boothroyd...
Post-Brexit maps map of freight routes
One of those immediately understandable maps, by the Irish Maritime Development Office.
(via Gavin's Warning: Graphic Content)
On vaccines and the Simpson's Paradox
A good Twitter thread. The Simpson's Paradox is a statistical phenomenon that shows a trend that only shows when you split data by groups, and disappears on the combined data – or, even more counterintuitively, reverses when you do. And of course there is so much grouped data about vaccines...
(h/t Paola Masuzzo)
Naomi Campbell's fashion charity is under investigation
A very interesting Twitter thread on telling stories through company accounts, by journalism practitioner and lecturer Paul Bradshaw.
Tools & Tutorials
Estimating the Geographic Area of a Real Estate Agent
"we have millions of prospective likely-to-sell homes that are not already associated with an agent’s CRM contacts. To which agent or agents should we recommend each of these properties?"
Well, this is a peculiar application for a sector, real estate, which is not quite my greatest strength... but it's a clear display of use of Multivariate Kernel Density Estimation in the wild.
First steps with GPT-3 for frontend developers
Last week, OpenAI announced that access to their GPT-3 API has become public (well, you still have to apply!), so this tutorial might be handy if you're planning any natural language application.
Population-weighted centres of local administrative units (LAU) in Europe
"This repository includes datasets pre-processed to facilitate common operations and full correspondence with commonly used sources. Full correspondence is possible only through some compromise solutions: ensure that the data provided are fit for purpose for your specific use case. Please open an issue if you find problems with the data or have suggestions for improvement."
Why is this useful? As the EDJnet folks explain, the data "provide concordance between local administrative units (LAUs) and NUTS regions, which is so often an obstacle for data journalism projects looking at local and/or geographical data."
Useful data with an open approach. Giorgio Comai had previously explained how the dataset was created.
When does a table become too big?
Have you ever needed to work on 2 billion rows?
Data thinking
A day in the life of a visual data journalist at The Economist
This is a pretty cool piece on the Off The Charts newsletter, in which Helen Atkinson, a visual data journalist, chronicles a day in the office.
Data Advantage Matrix: A New Way to Think About Data Strategy
Prukalpa Sankar, a featured "Six Questions" interviewee, has written a new interesting article about the approach to creating data strategies. Having been involved in data strategies for now a few years, I find this really helpful to think about the different angles of a business-driven technical data strategy.
Data Governance Has a Serious Branding Problem
"The story of where data governance started and how everything went wrong" in another interesting article by Prukalpa. "Control, not collaboration" is something I've seen time and time again.
Neutral bots probe political bias on social media
Academic paper klaxon.
"Social media platforms attempting to curb abuse and misinformation have been accused of political bias. We deploy neutral social bots who start following different news sources on Twitter, and track them to probe distinct biases emerging from platform mechanisms versus user interactions. We find no strong or consistent evidence of political bias in the news feed. Despite this, the news and information to which U.S. Twitter users are exposed depend strongly on the political leaning of their early connections. "
Dataviz & Interactive
Mapping the Cities of US Highway Signs
Created as part of the 30 Day Map Challenge (launched by "Six Questions" graduate Topi Tjukanov), this Observable notebook looks at segments of US roads that are listed as heading towards various cities.
(via Soph's Fair Warning)
From Osaka to Johannesburg by bike
Edurne Morillo, a "Six Questions" graduate and a support engineer at DataWrapper, shows cycling lanes around the world and explains how she did it.
Theban Mapping Project
This academic project is trying to fully map Thebes and the Valley of the Kings with very cool results.
(via Web Curios)
AI
AI Journalism Starter Pack
The POLIS think-tank at the London School of Economics have released this useful "guide designed to help news organisations learn about the opportunities offered by AI to support their journalism."
Why can't the current legal system handle liability for harm caused by artificial intelligence?
An interesting discussion on legal StackExchange.
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