471: quantum of sollazzo

#471: quantum of sollazzo – 7 June 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.

Well, COVID caught me in the end. As I write, I've tested positive for five days in a row, but I'd already been having symptoms for a week, so I hope it's not going to last much longer. I'm always a late adopter, am I not? Luckily, it's very mild, with a sore throat and some headache, but my reptilian temperature of 34.7C is not increasing.
Having to stay at home, I managed to spend some time playing with the radio and I even built my first homebrew vertical antenna, using a collapsible 10m pole, with which I managed a brief contact with Chechnya, which is over 3,000km from my location. Not bad at all for a piece of wire attached to a pole. If you're into ham radio, please let me know – it would be nice to have others to share this hobby with.

Every week I include a six-question interview with an inspiring data person. This week, I speak with Rachael Dottle, graphics journalist at Bloomberg News.

'till next week,
Giuseppe @puntofisso

Six questions to...

Rachael Dottle

Rachel is a graphics journalist at Bloomberg News.

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

My daily data work goes something like: open 10,000 tabs of research papers, news stories, data sources, and documentation on the topic of my current story or project. I obsess over how I’m probably not depicting enough nuance in my data visualization for whatever I’m working on.

When I recover, I analyze, clean data, sketch and make. I like to use R and the tidyverse for quick sketches.

I’ve been using svelte as a framework for building interactive graphics since I joined Bloomberg. Recently, I’ve been relying less on D3, but it’s still there, too. I’m tool agnostic and I will use anything and everything to make the thing I want to make.

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

I’m proud of my most recent piece for Bloomberg on US student loan forgiveness and the complicated situation millions of borrowers are facing as Biden weighs how much to forgive and for whom. This one involved a lot of Department of Education data and I think the data itself was somewhat straightforward but I tried to present the facts in an engaging way with a series of visuals. 

I myself have student loans so it was a project I pitched to alleviate some of my anxiety about the limbo I’m in. I feel like getting into the topic through research and data helped me. I did a lot of piecing together datasets from various financial reports and so while the data is not that complicated it took some time to put together. I used R, Adobe Illustrator, svelte and D3.js for this one.

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

I was really impressed with all The Washington Post graphics and data coverage on the US abortion access news, the effects of a Roe v. Wade reversal and who is most impacted. It’s hard to keep track of all the state differences in laws and the data isn’t widely available, a team would have to collect and maintain it themselves. It’s a lot of data work and fact checking. This piece in particular has so much detail tracking everything.

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

That collection of different recorded cat meows. Is this it? That’s a dataset.

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

I wish I’d learned earlier that you don’t have to do everything perfectly to do the data visualization and data analysis you want.

You don’t have to first be a Python or R expert to get things done. You can be a mediocre coder, that doesn’t make your analysis or visualization less good if the analysis is sound, it’s sound. 

Use whatever tool you’re most comfortable using, it could be Excel or literal drawings. If you make a thing that tells the story accurately and with solid data work, that’s still a valid methodology. Reproducibility is important, but don’t let the high barriers to entry of certain programs stop you from pursuing your work.

Data is or data are...

I don’t care!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I use both.

Topical

Deaths by Firearm, Compared Against Injury-Related Deaths

Some really mind-boggling trends in this CDC data analysis by FlowingData.

Why Africa’s first Covid vaccine factory struggles to find customers

"With high prior rate of infection and apathy, demand is dwindling for jabs on the continent", says the Financial Times (with a beautiful chart by John Burn-Murdoch.)

Here’s How Crossrail Will Transform London Travel

Bloomberg City Lab takes a look at the consequences of the new train line that brings passengers across London.

Summer Worker Shortage Means Things Will Be Closed. Again.

"Pools, restaurants and camps cut operations even though demand is back. Labor costs are higher and so are prices. ‘What, no one is applying?’"

Tools & Tutorials

Flip coords

"Have lat,lng but need lng,lat? Or vice versa?". A very handy tool by our friends (and multiple times sponsors) Open Cage.

Controlling for "X"?

"Understanding linear regression mechanics via the Frisch-Waugh-Lovell Theorem".
This tutorial contains a bit of maths, but I hope it will be useful to understand what it means to control for covariates using the Frisch-Waugh-Lovell Theorem.

SQLite fiddle

Just a simple tool to play with an SQLite database in a browser.

VectorWiki

Not quite data per se, but this resource of 120,000+ SVG and PNG logos and icons could be handy for those who work on corporate/government data analysis and visualization.

Remote Sensing and Data Tools for Environmental Investigations

As environmental analysis and investigations are becoming increasingly popular, GJIN has published this tutorial with a few resources on remote sensing, satellite analysis, and GIS, alongside some datasets.

DataStation Community Edition

"DataStation is an open-source data IDE for developers. It allows you to easily build graphs and tables with data pulled from SQL databases, logging databases, metrics databases, HTTP servers, and all kinds of text and binary files."

Breaking into data journalism

A great episode of Conversations with Data, featuring Paul Bradshaw (Birmingham City University), Michelle McGhee (The Pudding), and Carmen Aguilar Garcia (Sky News).

Data thinking

There is no such thing as 'Data'

Provocative writing by Benedict Evans as usual, which stretches the idea a little too far while being fundamentally right.

The Existential Threat of Data Quality

If you work with data, you know that cleaning the data is the first, most important, and most time-consuming task in the life of every data analyst/engineer/scientist. This article gives the perspective of the issue of Data Quality at Convoy.

Oil is the New Data

"Big Tech is forging a lucrative partnership with Big Oil, building a new carbon cloud that just might kill us all."

Dataviz, Data Analysis, & Interactive

In search of the least viewed article on Wikipedia

"Though Wikipedia page view data is publicly available (as a massive raw data dump, and through an API), there’s unfortunately no easy way to sort out the least viewed pages, short of a very slow linear search for the needle in the haystack…"
And so the author went wrangling.

Supporting the most vulnerable in Lewisham

Citizens Advice Lewisham asked DataKind for help identify ‘vulnerability hotspots’ in the borough, and where to place community hubs in order to reduce service access barriers. This blog post illustrates the project and shares its findings.

Building integrity in Kenya

"Citizens demanding better public buildings and services in Kenya: a story in data."

May 2022 set a new record for the inflation rate in Germany. Here is an overview of the last 70 years.

A DataWrapper Weekly Chart by David Wendler looking at historical inflation.

AI

MLU-Explain

A good set of visual explainers of machine learning concepts.

DALLE-2 has a secret language.

Interesting Twitter thread summarising an academic paper.