581: quantum of sollazzo
#581: quantum of sollazzo – 29 October 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.
The most clicked link last week was USA Fact's analysis of the causes of death in the USA.
It's AMA o'clock!
Some of you have come to me suggesting this, so let's give it a try. AMA – Ask Me Anything by submitting a question via this anonymous Google form. I'll select one every few weeks and answer it on here :-) I've received a few already but don't be shy.
The Quantum of Sollazzo grove now has 15 trees. It helps managing this newsletter's carbon footprint. Check it out at Trees for Life.
Good to see my embroidered map of London on Mappery :)
'till next week,
Giuseppe @puntofisso
✨ Topical
SpaceX vs Cards Against Humanity: Satellite Imagery Shows Activity on Land at Centre of Legal Case
I thought this was just one of those Internet battles of 2024, but it reached the legal system to the point that Bellingcat have been verifying news related to it: "Elon Musk’s SpaceX has been accused of trespassing on land owned by US game company, Cards Against Humanity, for more than six months as per a lawsuit filed and announced on September 19, 2024. However, satellite imagery shows that the land has been in use for more than 12 months."
(via Alex Wrottesley)
State of the sector: Data maturity in the nonprofit sector 2024
Data Orchard have issued their yearly report.
Abortion mazes
The Pudding explores abortion legislation in the US by likening its difficulty level to mazes of increasing complexity.
Join The Rest
Algorithms keep giving you more of the same. Our weekday newsletter is dedicated to the rest. A song and an interesting story about it, every weekday. Refreshing, insightful and snackable.
🛠️📖 Tools & Tutorials
Color Buddy
"Color buddy is a tool for building color palettes."
It comes with charts as examples.
Everything I built with Claude Artifacts this week
Simon Willison: "I’m a huge fan of Claude’s Artifacts feature, which lets you prompt Claude to create an interactive Single Page App (using HTML, CSS and JavaScript) and then view the result directly in the Claude interface, iterating on it further with the bot and then, if you like, copying out the resulting code."
100 years of U.S. election results
Flourish has released another map dataviz that can be duplicated and reused.
Alternatives to cosine similarity
"Cosine similarity is the recommended way to compare vectors, but what other distance functions are there? And are any of them better?"
Inventory of methods for comparing spatial patterns in raster data
"This blog post series will explain the motivation for comparing spatial patterns in raster data, the general considerations when selecting a method for comparison, and the inventory of methods for comparing spatial patterns in raster data. Next, it will show how to use R to compare spatial patterns in continuous and categorical raster data. Lastly, it will discuss the methods’ properties, their applicability, and how they can be extended."
📈Dataviz, Data Analysis, & Interactive
Uh oh, the Earth continues to spin faster
Randy Yu (Counting Stuff): "Three years since I wrote about this last time, it's still happening, meaning a negative leap second continues to be a possibility."
A retrospective of 15 years of data visualization projects
Gregor Aisch, Datawrapper's co-founder, analyzes the visualizations he's created since 2009.
We have collected over 1m data points covering download/upload speeds and signal strength for the four mobile network operators
Westminster City Council's Head of Digital Place David Wilkins: "The volume of data enables us to not only see day averages for mobile not-spots but we can see the areas impacted most by peak footfall."
🤖 AI
The Subprime AI Crisis
Not an optimistic take: "I believe that the artificial intelligence boom — which would be better described as a generative AI boom — is (as I've said before) unsustainable, and will ultimately collapse."
Questionable practices in machine learning
Academic paper klaxon: "Evaluating modern ML models is hard. The strong incentive for researchers and companies to report a state-of-the-art result on some metric often leads to questionable research practices (QRPs): bad practices which fall short of outright research fraud. We describe 43 such practices which can undermine reported results, giving examples where possible. Our list emphasises the evaluation of large language models (LLMs) on public benchmarks. We also discuss "irreproducible research practices", i.e. decisions that make it difficult or impossible for other researchers to reproduce, build on or audit previous research."
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