488: quantum of sollazzo
#488: quantum of sollazzo – 18 October 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.
We're approaching 500 issues of "quantum". Not sure how I feel about it, other than I'm very bad at letting go of things, especially when they're fun :) But I'm happy about the niche and cosy feeling that this newsletter has developed over time. Thank you for being a part of it.
Last week I gave a keynote about AI in the NHS to the Transport for London Analyst Conference. It was my first time back in front of a live audience since 2020 and I really enjoyed it. I had forgotten the excitement of being in front of 100+ pair of eyes! I also can't remember ever getting so many questions, from an audience that was not my usual audience: presenting AI in healthcare to a crowd of transport analysts and data scientists was probably one of the biggest "semantic distances" I've ever had to bridge. It did not disappoint – I ended up staying for the whole conference, and I learned more than I thought, especially thanks to a few presentations about NLP and AI vision.
I'll present a variation of this talk again in November to a public health audience, then I'll try to publish a write-up that brings the two together and addresses the questions raised.
The most clicked link last week was, of course, Topi Tjukanov's 30-day Map Challenge, which you can still join!
'till next week,
Giuseppe @puntofisso
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Topical
Revealed: The schools that won the highest number of Oxbridge offers
An "interactive tool to see how many Oxbridge offers pupils at every school in the UK and abroad received", by Connor James Ibbetson and colleagues at the Telegraph.
Could your vote swing the Senate?
"How much does my vote matter?", in the US Senate race, asks Rose Mintzer-Sweeney of Datawrapper.
The Good Country Index
"The Good Country Index measures what countries contribute to the world outside their own borders, and what they take away: it’s their balance-sheet towards humanity and the planet"
How did the COVID-19 pandemic change America, according to new Census data?
"The percentage of people working from home tripled between 2019 and 2021, while housing got more expensive relative to income."
More great stuff from the USA Facts team, looking at US Census data.
Tools & Tutorials
Cometmaps
A brilliant tutorial, as ever, by Alasdair Rae. Cometmaps are useful to represent complex electoral swing variables.
Maigret
An open source tool to "collect a dossier on a person by username from thousands of sites".
Five Inspiring Data Visualization Galleries
"In this article, we decided to list some of our favorite online chart libraries that we believe can inspire you to create your own chart."
By Kosma Hess for Nightingale.
Analyzing Reddit communities with Python — Part 5: topic modeling
"How to find topics in Reddit data".
An Algorithm for Polygon Intersections
Not sure why, but I think that this could be useful to some of you here. Game developers, obviously, but there's surely some data viz use.
Manage your business’s Apple devices with Jamf
Check out the Jamf Now mobile device management (MDM) solution, an Apple-only platform empowering employers to manage iPhones, Macs, iPads and Apple TVs at scale. Streamline your device management today with a free account including three devices.
Dataviz, Data Analysis, & Interactive
How fateful?
Using data from Google's location history, Channon Perry tries to understand how fateful meeting their partner was – i.e. how close to each other they had been before actually meeting. All code is available, so you can now assess your own relationships' and friendships' fatefulness.
Proving that everything is bigger in Texas
"How many other airports can fit into DFW?"..
America’s Chain and Independent Restaurants
"We used a dataset of nearly 800,000 independent and chain restaurants for the Continental United States and defined a chain restaurant using multiple methods (notably, by the number of restaurants with the same name). We found that car-dependency, low walkability, high percentage voters for Donald Trump (2016), concentrations of college-age students, and nearness to highways were associated with high rates of chainness."
Code here and dashboard here.
‘THERE IS NO SCENT!’ WHAT YANKEE CANDLE REVIEWS CAN TELL US ABOUT COVID-19 TRENDS
TL;DR: Yankee Candles started receiving loads of bad reviews due to the candles, allegedly, having no scent. Plot twist: they had no scent because the buyers had COVID-19.
"For Northeastern's Nicholas Beauchamp, what started off as a joke tweet turned into a paper that could have implications for public health."
(via Lisa Riemers)
Augmented Collective Intelligence Database
"Over 800 examples of real-life building blocks of collective intelligence, augmented by digital technologies - useful when designing new solutions, e.g. during innovation workshops, as they provide practices and most importantly analogies to stimulate creativity.
For example: imagine that you want to design a collectively intelligent system that allows the world to plant many trees, effectively, at scale, and at low cost, to fight climate change. To do so, you want to engage the social and market systems and their organic, exponential properties instead of relying on traditional hierarchical mechanisms."
(via Massimo Conte)
AI
10 Things You Should Know About AI in Journalism
Mattia Peretti, who manages the JournalismAI research project at the London School of Economics, shares 10 essential points that reporters should know about AI in journalism.
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