502: quantum of sollazzo

#502: quantum of sollazzo – 24 January 2023

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.

I’m very pleased to announce that I’ll be one of the keynote speakers at csv,conf,v7 in Buenos Aires in April. csvConv is one of the best data conferences out there, which brings together a diverse group to discuss topics including data sharing, data ethics, data analysis and more. It’s a great honour to be invited to speak there, and my keynote will be about what I’ve learned in over 10 years of being a data wrangler, open data activist, and proud member of the public sector data furniture. All details can be found here.

We have still more sponsored content by Ed Freyfogle, organiser of location-based service meetup Geomob, co-host of the Geomob podcast, and co-founder of the OpenCage, who has offered to introduce a set of points around the topic of geodata. His first entry starts a few paragraphs below on addresses, and why they can be a nightmare.

Speaking of Open Cage, they have moved the immensely fun-to-play #FridayGeoTrivia game to Mastodon. All details are in this toot. To play, you need to name countries that match a certain set of conditions, and use the appropriate emoji in your reply. The next round will be on Friday 27th January, and kicks-off with a toot by @opencage@en.osm.town at 17:00 Berlin 🇩🇪/4pm London🇬🇧/ 11am New York 🇺🇸 time.

The most clicked link last week was Lisa Hornung’s collection of no-code data tools.

‘till next week,
Giuseppe @puntofisso

✨ Topical

Discover the world’s protected areas

“Protected Planet is the most up to date and complete source of data on protected areas and other effective area-based conservation measures (OECMs), updated monthly with submissions from governments, non-governmental organizations, landowners and communities.“

Migrant Worker Death Map

“An Analysis of Precarity, Violence, and Disregard for Migrant Life in Singapore“

Who Benefits from Income and Wealth Growth in the United States?

“Realtime Inequality provides the first timely statistics on how economic growth is distributed across groups. When new growth numbers come out each quarter, we show how each income and wealth group benefits. Controlling for price inflation, average national income per adult in the United States decreased at an annualized rate of -2% in the third quarter of 2022, and average income for the bottom 50% shrunk by -2.4%. National income is similar to GDP and a better indicator of income earned by US residents. Visit the Methodology page for complete methodological details.“

The decline of the city grid

“The oldest form of city planning is falling out of fashion”, says The Economist
Quantum readers will definitely be able to spot a certain Geoff Boeing quality to this article :-)

🛠️📖 Tools & Tutorials

YouPlot

“A command line tool that draw plots on the terminal.“

Making predictions from a mixed model using R

Mixed models are statistical models that account for both fixed and random effects, and can be used in sports prediction for their ability to take into account repeated measurements on specific individual variables (e.g. multiple passes from a midfielder). This blog post shows how to make predictions with such a model in R.

Bringing “balance” to your data

Meta is releasing a software package to assess bias in survey data./

Machine Learning in Weather & Climate

A MOOC by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts.

Pure.css

“A set of small, responsive CSS modules that you can use in every web project.“
At 3.5KB when used in full, this library is pretty interesting.

Addresses, and why they can be a nightmare.

Good news: Open, global datasets like OpenStreetMap make getting lots geodata easier than ever.

Bad news: Now you have to sort through it, which can be an i18n nightmare.

Example: Given this geodata for a location in Spain - which address would a normal person expect?

"components": {
        "ISO_3166-1_alpha-2": "ES",
        "ISO_3166-1_alpha-3": "ESP",
        "ISO_3166-2": [
          "ES-CT",
          "ES-B"
        ],
        "_category": "building",
        "_type": "building",
        "city": "Barcelona",
        "city_district": "Sarrià - Sant Gervasi",
        "continent": "Europe",
        "country": "España",
        "country_code": "es",
        "county": "Barcelonés",
        "county_code": "B",
        "house_number": "68",
        "neighbourhood": "les Tres Torres",
        "political_union": "European Union",
        "postcode": "08017",
        "road": "Carrer de Calatrava",
        "state": "Cataluña",
        "state_code": "CT",
        "state_district": "Barcelona"
      },

At OpenCage we’ve open-sourced the templates we use to convert address data into well formatted strings for the 240+ territories around the world, so we know the correct answer is Carrer de Calatrava, 68, 08017 Barcelona, España. This is just one of many small steps we’ve taken to make developer’s lives easier.

Anyone looking for an entertaining view of the technical complexity of addresses should read “Falsehoods programmers believe about addresses”. Meanwhile, in the category of not sure whether to laugh or cry, we have last year’s news of the German town that voted “no” to adopting street names.

If your project calls for well-formatted addresses, give the OpenCage geocoding API a try.

🤯 Data thinking

Reinsurers defend against rising tide of natural catastrophe losses, for now

I think this is the first climate insurance related piece that I link to.

📈Dataviz, Data Analysis, & Interactive

Scroll down to see how time flies

How the relative share of the duration of a single year over the time you’ve lived can be visualized.
(via Nicola Del Monaco)

Analyzing labor markets in Python with LODES data

“This post will illustrate how to analyze the origins of commuters to the Census tract containing Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino, CA. In doing so, I’ll highlight some of the data wrangling utilities in pandas that allow for the use of method chaining, and show how to merge data to pygris shapes for mapping. “

Twelve European countries broke temperature records in 2022

“Continent records hottest ever summer as analysis shows temperatures rising twice as fast as global average”, with brilliant dataviz by Niels de Hoog and Ashley Kirk.

Origin and development of a Snowflake Map

The USGS has published this “reproducible code demonstrating the evolution of a recent data viz of CONUS snow cover”. It’s in R.

Does Your Local Museum or University Still Have Native American Remains?

“Use this database to find out where Native American remains were taken from and which institutions report still having them. Check on institutions near you.“
Aside from the very interesting topic, I’m linking to this for the use of “spikes map” in something other than politics.

🤖 AI

ChatGPT Can’t Kill Anything Worth Preserving

“If an algorithm is the death of high school English, maybe that’s an okay thing.“

quantum of sollazzo is supported by ProofRed’s excellent proofreading. If you need high-quality copy editing or proofreading, head to http://proofred.co.uk. Oh, they also make really good explainer videos.

Supporters* casperdcl and iterative.ai Jeff Wilson Fay Simcock Naomi Penfold

[*] this is for all $5+/months Github sponsors. If you are one of those and don’t appear here, please e-mail me