490: quantum of sollazzo
#490: quantum of sollazzo – 1 November 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.
This webinar on the 18/11 by the data.europa.eu academy could be of interest: Understanding open data: legal openness: “In order to unleash the full potential of data, it needs to be legally open. This means the data must be placed in the public domain or under liberal terms of use with minimal restrictions. Organisations and governments use open data licenses to explain the conditions under which their data can be used. Data owners need to take decisions regarding legal openness of their data when making it available to the public.“
The most clicked link last week was the Coastal Risk Screening Tool. Terrifying, isn’t it?
‘till next week,
Giuseppe @puntofisso
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Topical
Tragic fallout from the politicisation of science in the US
“Many countries had partisan divides on Covid vaccination, but they were more lethal in the US than anywhere else”. Aptly analysed and illustrated by John Burn-Murdoch for the Financial Times.
Liz Truss’s brief, tumultuous tenure as prime minister – in six stark charts
“Her stint was marked by financial instability, plummeting public approval and a high rate of ministerial departures”, illustrated by The Guardian’s Ashley Kirk and team.
Dollars to Megabits, You May Be Paying 400 Times As Much As Your Neighbor for Internet Service
“An investigation by The Markup found that AT&T, Verizon, EarthLink, and CenturyLink disproportionately offered lower-income and least-White neighborhoods slow internet service for the same price as speedy connections they offered in other parts of town“
(via Jeremy Singer-Vine, who also worked as a data coach for this article)
The American Opportunity Index
“A corporate scorecard of worker advancement.“
Biden’s job rating is similar to Trump’s but lower than that of other recent presidents
Usual interesting stuff from the Pew Research Centre. The partisan gap chart below really is something interesting.
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Tools & Tutorials
WordStream Maker
Imagine a scrolling word cloud: that is WordStream, an online tool to interactively visualize topic evolution in a text. Source code is here.
(via Dan Hon’s newsletter)
Predict #TidyTuesday giant pumpkin weights with workflowsets
Data scientist Julia Silge shows how to build a model to predict giant pumpkin weights, in response to the Tidy Tuesday challenge.
(via Jeremy Singer-Vine’s Data Is Plural)
Common Plots
I think I’ve linked to this whole “Coding for Economists” manual before, but this specific page about how to visualize common plots in a variety of libraries is really good. Hats off to the ONS’ Arthur Turrell.
“In this chapter, we’ll look at some of the most common plots that you might want to make–and how to create them using the most popular data visualisations libraries, including matplotlib, plotnine, seaborn, altair, and plotly.“
The Data Science Interview Book
Nicely looking and well structured.
How can we tell when a responsive visualization retains the message of a source view?
“This post summarizes the paper “An Automated Approach to Reasoning About Task-Oriented Insights in Responsive Visualization”“
You might not need JavaScript
To begin with, I didn’t know you could make an Image Slider this easily – pretty elegant, widely supported, and easy to debug.
Great collection.
Data thinking
From race-based to race-conscious medicine: how anti-racist uprisings call us to act
From The Lancet, this article.
Dataviz, Data Analysis, & Interactive
Getting started with NHS mental health data
“A practical guide for analysts”, by Health Foundation data analyst Sebastien Peytrignet.
Carbon intensity of electricity consumption (hourly readings)
Using data from Electricity Maps, Grant Chalmers has crafted this animated visualization of carbon intensity over the (then) past 20 days.
(via Dan Klein)
SuperTunnel Simulator
“Simulate a tunnel through Earth, starting from where you are“
How committed are my projects?
Datawrapper’s Pascal Bürkle looks at his focus and motivation.
AI
Using AI to find optimal placement schedules for nursing students
One from my day job’s team. Linking to it because it’s easy to reuse for other use cases involving the allocation of resources to finite slots with constraints. It uses a genetic algorithm. I’m expecting young zealots to shout “but that’s not A.I.” at me in 3… 2… 1… :P
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