570: quantum of sollazzo
#570: quantum of sollazzo – 16 July 2024
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 had a great week following London Data Week and Open Data Camp last week. I was involved in a lot of interesting developments in the day job on how we operate data, and sat on two interview panels – one to get a Lead Product Manager in my team, and one in support of The Pension Regulator – where a set of truly excellent candidates gave me a lot of food for thought.
London Data Week also got me this fantastically awkward picture, where it looks like I'm trying to hypnotise Theo and Eddie. Probably to get their data...
Last week, the most viewed article was The Pudding's highly visual look at the evolution of climate zones under climate change.
The Quantum of Sollazzo grove now has 15 trees. It helps managing this newsletter's carbon footprint. Check it out at Trees for Life.
'till next week,
Giuseppe @puntofisso
✨ Topical
The challenge of green transition in the national Recovery and Resilience Plans of southern and eastern EU countries
The European Data Journalism Network and Openpolis: "After analysing the NRRP green transition targets in 11 southern and eastern European countries, we found that country-by-country analyses are needed to compensate for information gaps at the European level."
How are Americans doing financially?
USA Facts: "In 2023, nearly a third of US adults felt they were worse off than in 2022."
This is, of course, significant in an what is an election year for the US.
Reform UK Surge Turned a Labour Election Win Into a Tory Wipeout
Bloomberg analyses the recent UK General Election, using an intriguing arrow-based map.
🛠️📖 Tools & Tutorials
How fast is javascript? Simulating 20,000,000 particles
"The challenge, simulate 1,000,000 particles in plain javascript at 60 fps on a phone using only the cpu. Let’s go."
An overview of the Sparse Array Ecosystem for Python
"There are many examples of loosely-connected systems that lend themselves well to an expression in terms of sparse arrays."
This article explores Python libraries providing sparse array storage and compute capabilities.
Font Interceptor
"Font Interceptor downloads all fonts in use on a target website".
The Orange Book of Machine Learning
"The essentials of making predictions using supervised regression and classification for tabular data" in this open access book by Carl McBride Ellis
CSS One-Liners to Improve (Almost) Every Project
"A collection of simple one-line CSS solutions to add little improvements to any web page."
braille-tools
"CSS and Javascript to display Braille grade 1 in web pages (for sighted people)."
📈Dataviz, Data Analysis, & Interactive
High Altitude Cartography
"Our chief goal would be to develop certain kinds of maps. Maps that show how hard it is to climb certain mountains. Whatever these maps look like, the first-person experience of climbing will evolve independent of these shapes. The map will help one plan and prepare oneself mentally for the hardships that await. It will, one hopes, even correlate with the challenges confronted during the climb. But it will never quite replace the climb."
The map is not the territory, the map is not the territory now.
The history of left-handedness
"There’s this one line chart that I’ve often seen shared by people on social media when talking about discrimination, stigma, and acceptance".
Failures to act
"Almost 1,300 people say New Hampshire failed to act to protect them from child abuse at youth facilities. Here’s what the allegations reveal."
An interesting investigative collaboration between the New Hampshire Public Radio and The Pudding.
College Admission Rates for U.S. Schools Compared
Flowing Data's Nathan Yau: "A few years removed from applying to colleges, I wondered what admission rates are like these days. The United States Department of Education had the data. Below are rates for about 1,400 institutions that award at least a bachelor’s degree and have at least 500 undergraduates."
Code Galaxies
These are software libraries displayed as galaxies. Interactive.
🤖 AI
Technical writing is too important to leave to language models
"The interesting thing about this is that your opinions don’t have to be right to have an impact. What matters is whether it’s authentic–and developers have finely trained bullshit detectors. Just the act of making the case for your ideas produces professional trust in that you, too, are in the trenches trying to chip away at a shared problem, and not some growth hacker trying to SEO optimize another tutorial-listicle."
There is so much useless auto-generated content these days on the internet, and LLMs are making this worse. Randy looks at this issue from the perspective of a technical writer.
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