476: quantum of sollazzo
#476: quantum of sollazzo – 12 July 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.
It's great to see that Journocoders is restarting. If you've never heard of Journocoders, it's a nice series of events held in several cities, in which a short hands-on tutorial is followed by a social session. For those of you in London, consider attending, as this session about TikTok data analysis is promising.
The most clicked link last week was the article about the silly practices of tech interviews. It seems to have resonated with a few of you, as it was also shared widely on social media.
'till next week,
Giuseppe @puntofisso
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Topical
How frequently the word "resign" is used in the UK Parliament
Using my Parli-N-Grams platform, we learn that 2022 has seen an unprecedented rise in mentions.
Wild First Half in Markets Sets Stage for More Big Moves in Rest of 2022
"Charts size up what might lie ahead for businesses and the economy"
Would carbon food labels change the way you shop?
A part-interactive exploration of food-related carbon emissions by the Financial Times.
Summer in America is becoming hotter, longer and more dangerous
It's not just America, but there is good data on this, illustrated here by the Washington Post.
Tools & Tutorials
s3-ocr: Extract text from PDF files stored in an S3 bucket
Simon Willison – of Django, Lanyrd, and Datassette fame – has built another pretty useful tool: a utility that runs Amazon Textract OCR against every PDF file in a S3 bucket, and gets the results back as a searchable SQLite database.
Visualizing Electoral Data: Polarization and Mobilization During the 2021 Chilean Presidential Elections
An analysis of Chilean Presidential elections, one of those rare cases in which the second round vote had higher turnout than the first, in a context of high polarization.
taxsim.app
taxsim.app is an interactive US Individual Income Tax simulator. See also the discussion on hackernews.
Releasing Color.js: A library that takes color seriously
This new Javascript library is work in progress, but it's one to keep an eye on, as it might be useful for your web dataviz needs.
D3 Notebooks
D3 creator Mike Bostock has a useful collection of Observable notebooks which includes this notebook on density plots.
HIRONEX: Historical road network extractor
This tool allows the automatic, unsupervised extraction of road networks from historical maps.
Correlation vs covariance: it’s much simpler than it seems
"What is correlation? How can we compute correlation between two continuous variables? And what are the differences with covariance?"
Analogies and differences of correlation and covariance.
Checkbox Accent Color Pixel Art
Not sure why, but I feel that this code snippet might be useful for some quirky dataviz.
We found the best JavaScript newsletter.
Bytes is probably the funniest web dev newsletter you'll ever read (trust me). If you like our newsletter, I've got a feeling you'll love Bytes too. There's a reason 100k developers read it every week.
Data thinking
Are Vertical Line Charts Ever a Good Idea?
There's an ongoing debate on the use of vertical line charts. Nightingale has a good summary.
Political affiliation moderates subjective interpretations of COVID-19 graphs
Mmm. Not sure how to feel about this. An academic paper tells us that these researchers "exposed separate groups of participants to charts displaying (a) COVID-19 data or (b) COVID-19 data labeled ‘Influenza (Flu)’". The groups perceptions and interpretations of these chart was different, and correlated to their political views.
Dataviz, Data Analysis, & Interactive
Shipping lanes 1700-1850
"These maps show the locations of ships log book entries between 1700-1850."
(via Guy Lipman)
How the population changed in ...
A brilliant example of how Government websites can really become interactive and give citizens the information they need without becoming gimmicky and losing their "official" vibe. Here the ONS has released a web app that allows the user to look for population changes from the early results of the 2021 Census, in the context of their local area.
(via WebCurios)
Design and Healing: creative responses to epidemics (exhibition videos)
This is a page collecting the videos from a recent exhibition about different ways of producing dataviz during the pandemic, by the MASS Design Group and Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in New York. "This exhibition presents architectural case studies and historical narratives alongside creative design responses to COVID-19."
(via Lisa Riemers)
AI
News sites are using DALL-E to generate fake headline images
The results are not quite there yet, but that doesn't prevent them from being creepy. There are some good questions in the thread about whether this should be possible, at least in the sense of "allowed by the major platforms", and on what this says in terms of evolving journalistic standards.
Jukebox: A Generative Model for Audio
Jukebox is "a neural net that generates music, including rudimentary singing, as raw audio in a variety of genres and artist styles". Released with all code and model weights by OpenAI. You can listen to what it creates, and you'll agree that it's very audio-uncanny-valley.
(via WebCurios)
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