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474: quantum of sollazzo
#474: quantum of sollazzo – 28 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.
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The most clicked link last week was the website of the Who's watching Westminster project report, with about 6% of all clicks.
'till next week,
Giuseppe @puntofisso
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Topical
EU’s 3 billion trees by 2030 goal: where we stand
"In May 2020, the European Commission published its biodiversity strategy, which included the aim to plant three billion new trees by 2030 to help tackle climate change and create jobs."
This illustrated piece shows that, well, 3 billion trees is actually a lot.
What the Fed’s interest rate hike means for mortgages
"The rapid rise in mortgage rates means home buyers will need to pay significantly more for a home loan compared to even just eight months ago."
Soaring UK Petrol Cost Is Stretching Budgets More Outside London
"Drivers in northeast England are feeling the biggest crunch, while Londoners are using less of their wages than rest of the country."
Another interesting take on regional variations.
How big is occupied Ukraine? Use our interactive map to find out
TL;DR: Ukraine is big, the occupied territories are too.
Législatives 2022 : la carte des circonscriptions qui ont basculé d’un camp à l’autre
Results from the French general election. Interesting new approach to visualizing changes in vote share per region based on hexmaps, although I'm not sure I really like it – I still think that spike maps (see below) are slighlty better at doing this, although they only work one party at a time.
Tools & Tutorials
Markwhen
This is brilliant. A tool that allows you to use markdown to produce timelines, maps, and more.
LoudNumbers VCV library
Fancy synthesizing some data? The smart folks behind the Loud Numbers project have released a plug-in library for VCVRack.
Duncan Geere of LoudNumbers also shared the following two links...
csv2midi
The csv to midi online tool by Evan King basically turns a simply structured csv file (see instructions) into a MIDI file, which works great for quick sonification projects.
Data Mapper
But then Duncan wasn't satisfied, as he asked: "what if you don’t want a MIDI file, you just want a list of notes in a given scale? Or “low”, “medium”, “high” volume settings? Or any other ordered list of categories?"
So he built a tool that does just that – Data Mapper is an Observable tool that allows you to "load in a CSV, give it an ordered list of values, and it’ll map your data onto this values from low to high."
Of course, this works for any data mapping purposes other than sonification (Duncan suggests colours).
Sim CB
"You are the top banker in charge of the central bank. Your role is to maximize economic potential by putting the right amount of money in circulation, to increase the GDP of your village: the number of apples it produces. Your only lever changes the central bank interest rate. Good luck!"
How the cost of living crisis is hammering UK households – in charts
In the UK we have the "highest inflation rates since the 1980s and wage stagnation have squeezed household budgets", report Niels de Hoog, Ashley Kirk, and Hilary Osborne in this chart-powered article.
R Workflow
"R Workflow for Reproducible Biomedical Research Using Quarto", by academic Frank E Harrell Jr.
One-liner for running queries against CSV files with SQLite
"I figured out how to run a SQL query directly against a CSV file using the sqlite3 command-line utility", says Simon Willison.
Effective Shell
Effective Shell is an online book "This book is for anyone who is interested in computing, and wants to learn more about the exciting, but sometimes daunting world of The Shell."
There are quite a few practical suggestions in this book, including on text manipulation, and on how to build a personal toolkit.
You can now create beautiful spike maps without coding
If you're a long standing reader, you know how much I love spike maps – yes, I did release a Jupyter notebook to implement them in Python.
Now, Flourish have released their own no-code version.
Dataviz, Data Analysis, & Interactive
Runaways
Yet another variation on the theme "show the orientation of airport runaways". This time, it follows your pointer.
(via Naive Weekly)
Calendar Collective
"Calendar Collective is a living archive of alternate calendars". It might give you good ideas for your data visualization projects.
(via Naive Weekly)
Where is there more livestock than people?
Six Questions graduate Erin Davies continues her brilliant exploration of the USDA Quickstats.
UNAVCO measures the Earth in sub-millimeter detail
"With Observable, [software engineer] Brooks and his team build live demos of UNAVCO’s data APIs, visual tools to query data, and exploratory dashboards for analysis in notebooks that are easy to share and readily accessible."
For example, the notebook in the image below displays live data on station maintainance.
Where houseplants really come from
"Yes, you read that right, that giant yellowish Monstera crying for help in a corner of your living room did have ancestors deep in the South American rainforest."
This is a fun personal quantification project that I should replicate at my allotment...
AI
NHS AI Lab Skunkworks project: Synthetic Data Generation
Day job link klaxon – but it's potentially useful to others. My team has now released an open source pipeline for generating and evaluating synthetic data generation models. We used it to explore the generation of mock patient data, as described on our website.
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