483: quantum of sollazzo
#483: quantum of sollazzo – 30 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.
It was a public holiday in the UK, and I spent some time relaxing and seeing friends, so this issue of QoS is shorter than usual.
The most clicked link last week was the Office for National Statistic’s excellent visualization of the Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings. A great example of data communications in the public sector.
Quite a few jobs are available this week in the data space!
‘till next week,
Giuseppe @puntofisso
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Topical
Average internet speed across Europe
The European Data Journalism Network has updated their European high-speed broadband dashboard with new data (including new countries in Eastern Europe). They also offer a search function to see the time series of download speeds between 209 and 2022, with aggregations at country-, region-, province-, and city-level (for over 100,000 residents). The dataset is openly available.
Ornandlo Gjiergi has used the data to look at the slow Internet speed in the Balkans, which seem to point to badly spent EU cohesion funds, with Romania being the exception
John Burn-Murdoch on the NHS A&E crisis
What an amazing thread (and linked article).
“The collapse of emergency healthcare in England may be costing 500 lives every week, a close match for non-Covid excess deaths. Let’s look at how we reach that conclusion, by taking a deep-dive into non-Covid excess mortality and its possible causes“
See If Police in Your State Reported Crime Data to the FBI
“There are growing gaps in U.S. crime stats. Use our tables to check on your state and local agencies.“
Mass killings in America
“Horrific shootings in schools and in public spaces such as movie theaters, grocery stores and shopping malls dominate the news, and most Americans believe this seemingly indiscriminate violence poses the greatest threat when it comes to mass carnage. An analysis of data by The Associated Press, USA Today and Northeastern University, however, shows that these types of crimes, while terrifying, actually represent a small fraction of the mass killings in America.“
Can computer simulations help fix democracy?
Strong hints of Betteridge’s Law here.
“A technological revolution has made it harder for politicians to get away with gerrymandering. But there could be a glitch.“
Simulations by the Washington Post.
Tools & Tutorials
Turning SQLite into a distributed database
“We decoupled SQLite’s storage layer onto FoundationDB to offer massive yet “bottomless” scalability, point-in-time reads, and the strictest level of consistency.“
A bit on the heavy tech side, but I’m really enjoying the number of recent articles showing what an enterprise-grade DB Sqlite can be.
How to measure a subcontinent
“The first GPS satellite was launched in 1973 and humans have been creating detailed maps of places long before that. How did we do it to any level of precision?” Triangulation, triangulation, triangulation.
Six Tools To Help With Geolocation
From an OSINT perspective, a good article explaining how Geolocation tools can help investigative journalism.
ipyvizzu-story
I’ve featured Vizzu before – they’re a startup building open source dataviz tools. They’ve recently released a data storytelling tool, ipyvizzu-story, that allows users to build and present animated data stories in Jupyter (and other Python-based computational notebooks). An example showing the history of the US Federal R&D budget between 1955-2020 is also available
Causal Inference: What If. R and Stata code for Exercises
“This book presents code examples from Hernán and Robins (2020), which is available in draft form from the following webpage.“
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
The Rise of DataOps 🚀
“Let’s face it — traditional data management doesn’t work. Today, 75% of executives don’t trust their own data, and only 27% of data projects are successful. Those are dismal numbers in what has been called the “golden age of data”. DataOps promises to solve this problem, and it’s on fire right now.“
Dataviz, Data Analysis, & Interactive
How long do animals sleep?
In the jungle, the mighty jungle… Datawrapper’s Aya Tanikawa looks at animal sleeping patterns.
American cultural regions mapped through the lexical analysis of social media
Or as the Washington Post – that I thank for making me aware of this paper – asks “What counts as Midwest?”. Good for them, all the code is available as open source on Github.
AI
AI Power Consumption Exploding & AI snake oil
I’m linking to these two articles at once.
“Machine learning is on track to consume all the energy being supplied, a model that is costly, inefficient, and unsustainable.” Now, this is a bit of a DailyMail-esque headline, and I discussed with a few of you about this link. I don’t think its calculation are accurate, but it does point to a broader problem: the energy footprint of our digital world, especially in the AI realm where power-hungry GPUs are used widely. What do you think?
This good slide deck on how to recognise AI snake oil is also a good starter to challenge assumptions and hype about AI.
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