481: quantum of sollazzo
#481: quantum of sollazzo – 16 August 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.
Last week I attended Journocoders. It's been a while after my last time there, and it was good. I also met again with folks I've featured in this newsletter before, like the Financial Times and former parliamentary data analyst Oli Hawkins. We worked at a photogrammetry tutorial that taught us how to take photos to create a 3D model (using the cloud – tricky on your laptop, but feasible if you really want to!), clean it with Blender, and embed it into a web page. My rather dirty results are in the picture below and you can see the tutorial in the Journocoders Notion.
The most clicked link last week was Nightingale's analysis of gender pay gap
'till next week,
Giuseppe @puntofisso
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Topical
73.2% of EU gas storage is filled
"The European Union’s reliance on Russian gas and the risk that Moscow could cut supplies has pushed the bloc to fill storage sites to an 80% target by Oct.1, when the European heating season begins. The chart below shows the percentage of gas filled in EU storage sites."
Why Abortion May Be A Winning Issue For Democrats
FiveThirtyEight looks at the political consequences of overturning Roe v Wade.
Great American Road Trips Are Impossible for Most Electric Cars
This article got some attention over the past week, including by FlowingData (one of my favourite sources) and, of course, it captured mine – in my previous job I worked on EV charging data. TL;DR: EV infrastructure planning is complicated.
European food companies break their plastics promises
This is a great investigation by the EDJNet and led by Deutsche Welle on the promises made by European food and drinks companies regarding plastics. All data and code is also available on Github.
Vast New Study Shows a Key to Reducing Poverty: More Friendships Between Rich and Poor
"An analysis of 21 billion Facebook friendships, covering 84 percent of U.S. adults aged 25 to 44, puts cross-class relationships at the heart of income mobility."
This comes from the New York Times summary, but you can find the original study on Nature.
Tools & Tutorials
Story Recipe: Using Census migration data to find out where young adults are moving
"Where to find the data, how to explore it, and questions to ask to reproduce the story for your community"
This recipe is for the US, but it might offer some ideas on other countries too.
(via Jeremy Singer-Vine's Data Is Plural)
Quarto: A Game Changer For Rendering Jupyter Notebooks
"With Quarto, your Jupyter notebooks can now be easily published into various professional formats".
Oh, this is really handy – it enables easy rendering in a variety of formats including pdf, html, revealjs, ppt, wikis, etc. Quarto is an open source framework that supports more than just Python and Jupyter: it works with R, Julia, and Observable.
(via Guy Lipman)
Interactive Journalism
"A Twitter-bot that shares interactives, graphics, and other stories built using code from newsrooms around the world."
And, in case you feel inspired, the bot's authors have released its source code.
(via Massimo Conte)
Geospatial Site-Selection Analysis Using Cosine Similarity
"Identifying similarities between geographic areas based on neighbourhood amenities.".
This uses osmnx as the geographic framework. Of course, the fact cosine similarity is used gives me an opportunity to blow my own trumpet (I'm a little obsessed with similarity measures, and my EU hack uses the same formula).
sqlite-html
"A SQLite extension for querying, manipulating, and creating HTML elements."
p5.play
"p5.play is a 2D game engine made by Computer Science teachers to help you turn your game ideas into JavaScript code!"
Examples include some basic physics, Pong, and Asteroids.
Crimes with Python's pattern matching
"You can do some weird stuff with this."
Photogrammetry Guide
Yes, I geeked out a little on photogrammetry after last week's Journocoders. This is a "guide covering Photogrammetry including the applications, libraries and tools that will make you a better and more efficient Photogrammetry development."
Introduction to streaming for data scientists
"As machine learning moves towards real-time, streaming technology is becoming increasingly important for data scientists."
Although this article is an introduction, it's pretty comprehensive.
The Random Forest Algorithm
"How the majority vote and well-placed randomness can enhance the decision tree model."
Another interactive tutorial by MLU-Explain.
Animating a globe with a scatterplot
Datawrapper's backend developer Hendrik Bartusch shows how he used their API to animate as scatterplot on a globe.
Check out Malthus
Malthus helps you connect with new prospects and leads for your business or agency needs to help drive sales and growth. View thousands of handpicked companies that just raised millions and are likely to outsource and engage in B2B sales.
Data thinking
Medianism
Medianism is a website that purportedly is about "Economics that regards people more democratically". It takes its name from the idea that "a much better measure of “the economy” is median income", as opposed to GDP, "because that is a more accurate reflection of the economic well being of most people."
What's the plot of your data story?
"What a data story is and where to begin when crafting one."
The point of a dashboard isn't to use a dashboard
Good blog post by Terence Eden. "A dashboard shows that you have access to your data. And that is a huge deal."
Google Maps' Moat is Evaporating
If you remember that popular old article about Google's advantage vs Apple Maps and others, this one claims that the advantage is now gone. It gets you to the point of almost believing that Google Maps will close at some point.
Dataviz, Data Analysis, & Interactive
Dynamic World
"Global 10m resolution near realtime land cover dataset, producing probabilities per pixel for 9 land types, useful for change-detection products and derivative maps."
Wow.
(via Ananth Iyer)
Earbirding
This whole website is great, but the "how to visualize sounds" pages are pretty incredible in giving ideas about simple yet effective visualizations.
AI
AI and Open Data
The Open Data Charter has launched a new project looking at "AI and Open Data: Open Data Needs for AI and International Development."
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