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.
Last week, I was interviewed by Rory Cellan-Jones, who until recently was the BBC's Technology Correspondent, on the work I'm leading in the NHS AI Lab Skunkworks. His write-up can be found in his newsletter "Always On", and you can also listen to the recording of the interview on his podcast. I entirely stand by this excerpt, which captures the reason why I do what I do:
Every week I include a six-question interview with an inspiring data person. This week, I speak with Sonja Kuijpers, the data visualization legend behind one-woman Studio TERP, and also an Information Is Beautiful Awards finalist. Sonja has also launched this incredibly good online course on Effective Data Visualization, which is currently on sale.
'till next week,
Giuseppe @puntofisso
This week's edition is sponsored by OpenCage
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Try the API now on the OpenCage demo page.
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"The explosive eruption of the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai volcano may be one of the largest recorded in such detail. The blast was visible from space, with images of the massive ash plume going viral over the following days. But just how big was it?"
Great satellite visualization work by Reuters Graphics.
"Real time sentiment analysis of the last 500 Tweets mentioning 'Quirinale'".
Very good idea, and the source code is available.
Speaking of presidential elections, France will have one soon, and there are multiple scenarios with plenty of candidates (more than one per party, as per French tradition) that are starting to be explored, with Emmanuel Macron still the overall frontrunner, but not by much. This article from Le Monde comes with a simple simulator. Here's the original French and here the automatic translation into English.
"Wages are rising, and just about anyone who wants a job can get one in certain industries. The demand for labor is not expected to abate anytime soon."
Although this article is centred on the US, the trends it describes are visible pretty much everywhere in the Western world, albeit to a different extent.
A look at why some UK cities are less productive than their EU counterparts, focused on weak transport links and low-density housing, with the consequence that the city centre is less reachable. By Niko Kommenda and Peter Foster at the Financial Times.
Useful for photographers and photojournalists, this website allows you to get a pretty accurate map of shade throughout the day.
Something I've done! Well, I just adapted it, to be fully honest – I found an interesting Observable notebook that extracts and visualises weather data from the NOAA database, and managed to modify it to visualize weather data about UK cities. It's not difficult to adapt to other locations, when available.
Many thanks to Andrea Borruso for helping me debug it, and making me realise what a noob I've become at coding...
How could I not link to The Economist's latest "Off the chart" when it talks about how they create their beautiful maps? Adam Meara explains how the team switches between projections like Mercator, Albers, Robinson, and azimuthal, sometimes using this projection wizard tool.
An interesting Twitter thread by Jim Gleeson, one of the analysts involved in the report, which includes the beautiful map below.
"How journalists can find the human angle in the data."
Via the brilliant J++ newsletter.
"Musicmap attempts to provide the ultimate genealogy of popular music genres, including their relations and history. It is the result of more than seven years of research with over 200 listed sources and cross examination of many other visual genealogies."
Honestly mind-blowing.
(via Massimo Conte)
Six Questions interviewee and Datawrapper's support engineer Edurne Morillo analyses data about LEGO sets.
I link to this for two reasons. First, I didn't know this: "Since 2017, the Data Visualization Society launches an annual State of the Industry (SOTI) Survey. The 2021 survey has responses to 60+ questions and was taken by over 2,100 people and the DVS launched a competition to visualise the results into insights."
Second, because this submission by Anne-Sophie Pereira De Sá (which explains her Tableau dashboard) is pretty good for exploring the tools in the survey.
(via Massimo Conte)
An app that detects French cheese in images. Because why not.
"In this limited preview (aka ‘Alpha’ release) the model is currently only able to predict the type of cheese. Future iterations will be built if there is demand. As AI and machine learning experts, we may need to pull in additional experts who are more than just novice cheese lovers."
It didn't work for me when I tried it, but the wine pairing it suggested was spot on.
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