468: quantum of sollazzo

#468: quantum of sollazzo – 17 May 2022

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 Federica Cocco, a statistics journalist at the Financial Times and member of the dream team of FT Data.

In other news, I’ll take part to the Data Journalism UK 2022 conference run by the BBC Shared Data Unit and Birmingham City University. I’ll be on a panel talking ahout innovation and platforms in data journalism, with a focus on Quantum of Sollazzo. It’s the first time someone invites me to speak about the newsletter, and I’m super-flattered. Here’s the full programme:

Last but not least, there’s a very interesting hackathon (with chunky prizes) happening, Breaking the Bottleneck, organised by Hackerearth. “This Hackathon will focus on three different industry segments severely disrupted by the pandemic: Food, Consumer Packaged Goods, and Healthcare.. ”.

‘till next week,
Giuseppe @puntofisso

Six questions to...

Federica Cocco

Federica is a Statistics Journalist at the Financial Times.

What is your daily data work like and what tools do you use?

I work for the FT’s statistics team, a subset of the data team that specialises in economics but we actually work on pretty much anything. We write news and analysis on economic trends, policy, demography, the labour market, commodities and a variety of other subjects and also assist other journalists, like Martin Wolf for example. We respond to the news which means my days are very different from each other but they generally involve looking at data on the OECD website, or financial terminals like Bloomberg and Refinitiv.

Tell me about a data project that you're proud of...

I like working on stories that combine a human angle with data because, you know, spreadsheets are people too! While I strongly believe a lot more stories should be backed up by evidence (in the form of data), equally a lot of data-driven stories still neglect the human angle. Through my work, I try to combine the two. I worked on a story about how young people were affected by the pandemic which I think perfectly encapsulates this principle.

...and a data project that someone else did and you're jealous of.

I am a “scrollytelling” sceptic, mostly because I think it’s just a gimmick. But I enjoyed being proven wrong by this ProPublica investigation on how much taxes America’s billionaires actually pay.

If I say "dataset", you think of...

People, interactions, patterns. Datasets look like abstract numbers but through our stories they should come alive. I remember working on a monstrous dataset representing remittances, i.e. money sent by migrant workers to their families back home. I pictured them sweating in the kitchens of New York, in the building sites of Dubai, in care homes in Italy, in a field in Ukraine or working for a bank inside a skyscraper in Canary Wharf. This was the result.

Give someone new to data a tip or lesson you wish you'd learned earlier.

I know a lot of data journalists feel frustrated sometimes because the rest of the newsroom doesn’t see them as real reporters. I think attitudes are changing massively but as well as the culture needing to shift in our favour, I think we need to meet editors halfway. These are my tuppence worth on how we can work towards this.
1. I get the impression that many data journalists are more comfortable working on longer-term analysis projects rather than newsy scoops. But data stories can and should be newsy. They should have a top line, and not just allow readers to look up their postcode to see how their high street or local hospital is performing. They also need to make a broader point.
2. Don’t be a silo, build relationships with other reporters in the newsroom. There should be more crosspollination of skills!
3. Numbers and data are just the beginning. If you are writing about, say, consumer confidence going up, describe the queues outside a pancake shop in Tokyo.

Data is or data are...

Data is, because that’s what comes up colloquially. I think we should write like we speak - the most important thing is that things are clear. That said, I am an obsequious follower of the FT’s sub-editors and they say data are plural.

Topical

Majority of women ages 15 to 44 would face new post-Roe abortion limits

“If the Supreme Court overturns the nearly 50-year-old federal legal protection for abortion in Roe v. Wade, 52 percent of women of childbearing age in the United States would live in states where their right to the procedure is imperiled.“
The Washington Post looks at the data.

One in five people in EU prisons are in pretrial detention

“People waiting for a final sentence often suffer worse conditions than convicted prisoners, even if they’re innocent.“
This is an EDJNet-led investigation with journalists from nine countries.

What’s Your Rate of Inflation?

“Inflation is at the highest level in four decades. But how you experience it can vary greatly depending on what you eat, how much you travel and your other spending habits. Answer seven questions to estimate your personal inflation rate.“
Great interactive article by the New York Times

Thunder Roads

I’m not massively a F1 fan, but this dataviz is just amazing.

Tools & Tutorials

Draw the line: introducing a chart type that invites you to participate

I absolutely love this little embeddable tool by Flourish – it allows you to create “draw the line chart” types of quizzes in your data-driven articles.

Datasette Lite: a server-side Python web application running in a browser

“Datasette Lite is a new way to run Datasette: entirely in a browser, taking advantage of the incredible Pyodide project which provides Python compiled to WebAssembly plus a whole suite of useful extras.“
Neverending goodies coming from Simon Willison.

OldestSearch.com

“Search the oldest results on internet.

Tutorial - How to build a 3D hiking app

A comprehensive tutorial. “More specifically, you’ll: - Get data from the Geneva Territory Information System (SITG). - Explore metadata and access web services. - Create a web scene with ArcGIS Scene Viewer (including setting up a local scene, choosing a basemap, adding layers, capturing slides and clipping to an extent). - Build a 3D Viewer App (including using the web scene you created earlier and configuring the app’s details, interactivity, and look and feel). - Publish your 3D hiking app. - Make a short URL to customise your app even further.“

Building a Musical Instrument with the Web Audio API

Wow. Stuff that I didn’t even think possible.
“That web app is KeyboardAccordion.com, which like everything else I create in my free time is open source. I noticed that there are just enough keys on a computer keyboard to correspond to the accordion layout, and they’re arranged in a similar pattern. With this, I can keep track of the notes, scales, and chords and start figuring out how to put it all together.”

10 Tips - Preview the Mac app people forget about

If you have a Mac, Preview is the app you generally use to view PDFs and PNGs. I use it to edit this newsletter’s images. Well, it turns out it’s got quite a few extra functions – some of them I was aware about (like signing PDFs), but some of them are entirely new and exciting to me, like the ability to remove Geolocation meta info from a photo

Horizon Chart Explanation

“A Horizon Chart is a specialized type of chart for time series data. It is especially useful for showing data with large amplitudes in a short vertical space. The idea was introduced by Saito et al. in Two-Tone Pseudo Coloring: Compact Visualization for One-Dimensional Data. Panopticon commercialized and coined the term Horizon Chart. Like any novel visualization, one downside is the cost for your audience to learn and understand that chart. Therefore, I have built this interactive visualization to help make it easier to understand how Horizon Charts work.“

Data thinking

Data conversations

Citizens Advice’s Dan Barrett tells us how they get data into work conversations his team engages with.

The Future of Data Catalogs

“Let’s visit a website just to “browse the metadata,” said no one ever“
A typically enjoyable article by Prukalpa Sankar, with a lot of great technical insight.
“Traditionally, data catalogs were built to be passive. They brought metadata from a bunch of different tools into another tool called the “data catalog” or the “data governance tool”. The problem with this approach — it tries to solve a “too many silos” problem by adding one more siloed tool.“

How to build geocoded precinct boundaries from address lists: the Italian case

Not sure if this should be under the “tutorials” section, but it’s a bit beyond that. Gabriele Pinto, an Italian researcher, has created a methodology to “reconstruct the approximate polygons of precincts from voter’s address lists that rely on the Voronoi diagram and Census blocks shapefile“
(via Jeremy Singer-Vine)

How to get rid of gerrymandering: the math is surprising

“Gerrymandering distorts the will of the people, but the basic math of geographic representation makes it difficult to get rid of, unless we get rid of representation for geographic districts.“
TL;DR: The problem is not getting rid of gerrymandering, it’s getting rid of it while keeping local representation.

Dataviz, Data Analysis, & Interactive

Explore Milwaukee’s history through its many home styles

“Milwaukee’s housing patterns reflect not only aesthetic trends but also how historical events like immigration, war and civil rights shaped the city.“
Some great visualization of buildings here.

How is Felix Today?

I’m not entirely sure why anyone would want to do this…
(Although we all do, to some extent, but we don’t publish it on a web page.)

Sex and the census

“Are more Americans men or women?“

Ross Spiral Curriculum

The Ross Curriculum is a learning/teaching method, here greatly visualized via an interactive spiral. “The Ross Spiral Curriculum is a literary narrative of the evolution of human consciousness. It is taught chronologically through the grades as a dynamic system expanding in complexity. Cultural History is at the core of the Ross Curriculum, interwoven with all of the other domains. While each discipline offers its own rigorous curriculum, integration between domains creates a dynamic choreography of learning.“
(via Massimo Conte)

AI

A quick guide to the most important AI law you’ve never heard of

“The European Union is planning new legislation aimed at curbing the worst harms associated with artificial intelligence.“

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