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451: quantum of sollazzo
#451: quantum of sollazzo – 21 December 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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Every week I include a six-question interview with an inspiring data person. This week, I speak with Elisabeth Gamperl, managing editor of the visual desk at the Süddeutsche Zeitung and member of its editorial innovations team. It's interview number 27. Soon to be a website somewhere? Any ideas in this respect are much welcome.
My virtual keynote for CIVICA on how to run experimental AI projects in the NHS is now available online (17 minutes into the video, immediately after Timandra Harkness). And if you're interested in my day job, a case study on how to use AI for better bed allocation in hospitals, with source code openly available, has just been published by my team.
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Speaking of jobs, a very interesting data job has been just advertised by Global Canopy, a self-described "data-driven not for profit that targets the market forces destroying nature ''[...] and does this by improving transparency and accountability." They are looking for a researcher who cares about their mission and is data-savvy.
And with that... Quantum of Sollazzo will now take a 3-week break over the festive period. I haven't taken a break in what feels ages (lockdowns might have contributed to producing content, I suppose). Have a great break, whatever you celebrate, and see you in 2022!
'till next year,
Giuseppe @puntofisso
Six questions to...
Elisabeth Gamperl
Elisabeth is managing editor of the visual desk at the Süddeutsche Zeitung and member of its editorial innovations team.
What is your daily data work like and what tools do you use?
As the managing editor of the newly formed visual desk (we started on october the 1st!), we are going to establish new workflows between the editorial and visual departments to create more engaging visual journalism. We are also constantly trying to find new ways to tell stories by using interactive tools and multiple forms of media. I am also part of the editorial innovations team where we are continuously improving an in-house content managing system which makes it easier for our journalists to use multimedia in their stories. It is very exciting to work with coders and designers on a product. We experiment with new technical possibilities and if it is useful for the whole newsroom, we implement it in our cms.
Tell me about a data project that you're proud of...
The story I would like to mention here is a collaboration between our data team and our interdisciplinary team. The pandemic reached its painful peak in early 2021. We wanted to build a digital monument for the victims of the pandemic. Each silhouette in the story represents a person who died of Corona. By the time you get to the end of the story, you've encountered nearly two million silhouettes. We’ve interwoven individual fates with the key dates and events of the first year of the pandemic. While highlights of the crisis appear in the foreground, a counter for each data point shows how many died at that time.
...and a data project that someone else did and you're jealous of.
I am a huge fan of gamification. Therefore, I really enjoyed this emotion-recognition interactive from the Financial Times. The team tested a technology that tracks facial expressions. The user is part of the story. I also love the navigation: you feel like you are in an insta story.
If I say "dataset", you think of...
Experiments! 3D modelling, graphic animation, data-fed audio.. There are so many ways to present datasets in an exciting way.
Give someone new to data a tip or lesson you wish you'd learned earlier.
Learn the basics of UX design. It helps thinking in a user-centered way and you will find new angles for your stories.
Data is or data are...
Definitely “data are”. In digital journalism it should always be plural, because it is always teamwork.
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Topical
Americans overestimate social mobility in their country
Ok, this is an old one but I've just discovered it. In this chart by the Economist from 2018, we learn that the US and Europe are opposites when assessing social mobility in their countries.
COVID-19 Online VIsualization Collection
This isn't just a collection of articles about COVID-19: it also comes with its own visualizer (see image below).
Hearts and minds
"How Europeans think and feel about immigration", beautifully visualized by Federica Fragapane and Alex Piacentini and released under MIT License.
(via DataNinjaIt)
Santa Helpers
In Germany, "you can hire amateur Santas with fake beards or premium Santas with white beards of their own". Marten at Datawrapper has put together a dataset of Santas agencies and mapped it. Just because it's Christmas.
2021 Delivered
Instacart's yearly report about grocery deliveries in the US is pretty fun.
Who are the Democrats?
This article, longside its twin Who are the Republicans?, tries to describe through data the community represented by the major parties, where they are aligned, and where they split into tribes.
Tools & Tutorials
Interactive Tools for machine learning, deep learning, and math
A handy list on Github.
Gallicagram
"Gallicagram is an application which plots the evolution of use one or several syntagms use throughout time in the numerised corpus of Gallica, and others libraries." Here's an introduction to it in French (here automatically translated into English).
You know how obsessed I am about n-grams, don't you, don't you (you probably think this n-gram is about you)?
(via Francesca Chiodi)
pyworld3
"PyWorld3 is a Python implementation of the World3 model, as described in the book Dynamics of Growth in a Finite World."
If you didn't know, here's the Wikipedia description of World3: "The World3 model is a system dynamics model for computer simulation of interactions between population, industrial growth, food production and limits in the ecosystems of the earth. It was originally produced and used by a Club of Rome study that produced the model and the book The Limits to Growth (1972)."
Data thinking
How the R number took over our lives — and what we can learn from it
An interesting piece by Gavin Freeguard which is a preview of a longer piece he's writing for Wellcome Data on the birth of the COVID R number which, in the early stages of the pandemic, seemed to be an international obsession, and often a widely misunderstood one.
Why is “Data Scientist” such a controversial title?
"And why being a scientist still matters to me", another interesting article that strengthens my conviction that specialisation (of job titles, yet alone of real roles) is not always a good idea.
Dataviz, Data Analysis, & Interactive
Data Sonification Archive
"This curated collection is part of a broader research endeavor in which data, sonification and design converge to explore the potential of sound in complementing other modes of representation and broadening the publics of data."
AI
A Call to Build Models Like We Build Open-Source Software
A brilliant article explaining why the widespread use of pre-trained models might not be a great idea. Colin Raffel argues effectively that the open source model of development should apply to the building of AI models: "Most pre-trained models are never updated — they are left as-released and reused until a better model comes along. There are many reasons why we might want to update a pre-trained model."
Kill or cure?
A hilarious website that displays the results of a classifier... that tries to "help to make sense of the Daily Mail’s ongoing effort to classify every inanimate object into those that cause cancer and those that prevent it."
It uses crowdsourcing, and the source code is available, which might be handy to run similar projects.
(via Leonardo Macchia)
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