537: quantum of sollazzo
#537: quantum of sollazzo – 17 October 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 was featured on Stefano Gatti's Italian newsletter "La Cultura Del Dato" (literally "The culture of datum", but probably more akin to "Data culture"). The automated translation into English is here.
Beyond the flattery of being included, it's a pretty good newsletter with a lot of data goodies every week, and Stefano always includes a link to the auto-translation.
The most clicked link last week was Malcolm Chisholm's annotated receipt, showing the relationship between data, meta data, reference data, master data, event data, and other data in a common object.
'till next week,
Giuseppe @puntofisso
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✨ Topical
The Nobel Prize-winning theory on why the gender gap is still a thing
Lisa Charlotte Muth of Datawrapper (featured in Quantum #434), taking a cue from this year's Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences (which was awarded to a solo woman for the first time) looks at gender pay gap.
Monitor del debate
"The words most used by the candidates and the mentions of each other in the second duel".
Interesting language analysis of the election debate in Argentina. Original Spanish here and auto-translation into English here.
Why the haze has reached Singapore’s shores again
"Experts say this is largely due to climate patterns, among other factors. Scroll to find out more."
Beautiful scrollytelling article.
Is high inflation in Hungary really caused by the war in Ukraine?
"Consumer prices in Hungary were 16 percent higher in August than a year earlier, as the Hungarian government continues to talk of wartime inflation. Can we actually talk about wartime inflation in Hungary? "
"Unfulfilled and unsatisfied in your 9 to 5? Terrified of trying your hand at starting a business? Tried and failed before? If I can show you how to leverage email to escape the 9 to 5 grind, would you be interested? If so, join the "9 to 5 Houdini" e-newsletter to learn how to leverage email to escape the 9 to 5 grind..."
🛠️📖 Tools & Tutorials
Oort
"Oort is a "programming game" where you write Rust code to control a fleet of spaceships. Your code is responsible for the engines, weapons, radar, and communications of ships ranging from tiny missiles to massive cruisers."
If you've ever wanted to learn Rust, you now have a reason to :-)
A Beginnr's Guide to Sequence Analytics in SQL
"Sequences: they’re all around us. More specifically, they’re in your data warehouse with timestamps, payloads, and mysterious columns from Segment. Many of the real, course-changing insights that data teams dream are hidden deep inside these elusive event streams. This post will help you find them, using your favorite neighborhood query language."
This is specifically for the Segment platform, but has some good insight.
Open Social Distributor documentation
It's not quite data, but I know many of you like this kind of social media tool. Open Social Distributor "is a tool for managing social posts across multiple platforms. Simple to configure, and able to run as a command line client, or as a service in a Docker container or an AWS CloudFormation stack."
Developed by my good friend and dev genius Lewis Westbury, it's a version 0.1, and command line operated, but is developing into much more. "At current time, you can build, configure, and use the CLI to post a messages, threads, and images to a variety of social networks."
Make your own space pictures with big telescope data!
"Including from the JWST and Hubble!". Randy Yu from Counting Data summarises a recent article about using JWST and shows how to add Hubble imaging.
Deploy Shinylive R App on Github Pages
"This repo provides a step-by-step guide for deploying an R Shinylive app to Github Pages. For deploying a Python Shinylive app to Github Actions check this tutorial."
A Python version is here.
Automate the exploratory data analysis (EDA) to understand the data faster and easier
A nice and comprehensive tutorial showing the basics of automated EDA in both R and Python.
Visualizations on Statistics and Signal Processing
"Below you find a collection of widgets to illustrate key concepts in statistics and signal processing."
Tutorial: data-driven news discourse analysis with Python
The 2nd part has now been published.
The Power of Generative AI in Urban Planning: Text2Map Revolution
"What if we could relieve architects of this headache and empower them to independently gather and process the necessary data without the need for GIS experts and costly software?"
Mmm, not so fast.
📈Dataviz, Data Analysis, & Interactive
Eclipse 2024
Lucky you if you're in North America. This website gives you a minute by minute geographic tracker for the very narrow path where the total (and partial) eclipse will be visible.
Mini Tokyo 3D
A 3D, interactive visualization of real-time data of the Tokyo transport system. The best bit is when you realise that, if you open the live camera views on select stations, you can see the train both in the video and the 3D dataviz.
Birdsongs Visualizer
Brilliant application of the Fourier Transform.
(via Web Curios)
The Set of Numbers
Brilliant visualization. The one below has gone viral, but there's way more on here.
The online maze of a job
"Applying to jobs online is like navigating a maze.
Amidst the special torture that is resume parsing software, the inability to reuse information across different application tracking systems (ATS), and the existence of a certain company that rhymes with every day of the week, it can get pretty frustrating.
I wanted to explore what factors make a job application more or less frustrating.
For example, what industries have the worst application processes? Do big companies ask for more information than small companies? What is it about websites like Workday that make them really hard to use?
To answer these questions, I applied to 250 jobs. One by one."
🤖 AI
Who blocks OpenAI, Google AI and Common Crawl?
"In total, 543 of 1,149 news publishers surveyed by the homepages.news archive have instructed OpenAI, Google AI or the non-profit Common Crawl to stop scanning their sites, which amounts to 47.3% of the sample."
Challenges in evaluating AI systems
Anthropic: "Here, we outline challenges that we have encountered while evaluating our own models to give readers a sense of what developing, implementing, and interpreting model evaluations looks like in practice."
quantum of sollazzo is also supported by Andy Redwood’s proofreading – if you need high-quality copy editing or proofreading, check out Proof Red. Oh, and he also makes motion graphics animations about climate change.
Supporters*
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