584: quantum of sollazzo
#584: quantum of sollazzo – 19 November 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.
It's a shorter issue this time as I was away for TRGCON and my brain was all focussed on rehearsing my talk – back to normal service next week.
The most clicked link last week was Count.com's introduction to metric trees.
I'm just back from TRGCON '24 and it was one of the best things I've done in my life!
"Todo es posible" is the motto of TRGCON — everything is possible.
When David Bonilla reached out to invite me to give a talk at TRGCON '24, an event I had never heard of, my first reactions were: "is this a really good scam attempt?" and "have they reached out to the wrong Giuseppe?". Man, how wrong I was. The reality: total serendipity. I had been lucky to be found by someone totally outside of my "bubble". As I'm about to fly back to London after an AMAZING event where I literally didn't know anyone, my brain is still buzzing and my heart is very full.
I was a bit terrified of speaking to this 700+ audience at an event that was exclusively in Spanish – mine was one of the only two talks at the event to be in English. The terror turned out to be excitement. I'll post more about my talk later, and a video will be published soon, but, in short I shared a few stories about data that have taught me something, and discussed how these lessons became part of my personal "framework" to be effective using data, whether I'm developing data pipelines, advocating for better data, or using data to back an argument with evidence. I discussed how Agile helps us working in the UK Government run things smoothly, and how the Gov.Uk Service Standard is a brilliant resource to ask ourselves if we're doing things right, to verify we're serving the right user needs, to assure the services we're creating are reliable, maintainable, and sustainable. I shared my view that data is the ultimate multidisciplinary area of knowledge.
Despite my very limited Spanish, I managed to follow and be inspired by the other talks. How not to praise enough Clara Jiménez Cruz on her brilliant work and talk on misinformation and fact-checking, something that is close to my heart and with important connotations about public trust, an important topic for us in public service; Trisha Gee spoke about how to set up DevRel as something that can sit anywhere in an corporate organisation, which resonates a lot with the efforts I've always made to turn data into a service to the organisations I work with, a journey with and for colleagues, not something done to them; and Rafael Pons Fedelich speaking on the challenges he's found in launching a popular mobile app – a reality check for those of us who complain about things being "slow" in Government and "fast" in the startup world (the grass is always greener etc...)
I'm really humbled of having been part of this all – an outstanding conference to be inspired from, a new community of makers to learn from, and a good reminder that... I should try and learn Spanish!
Photo Credits: Andres Garcia
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. If there are many questions, I'll select one each couple of weeks and answer it on here :-)
Don't be shy!
The Quantum of Sollazzo grove now has 20 trees. It helps managing this newsletter's carbon footprint. Check it out at Trees for Life.
'till next week,
Giuseppe @puntofisso
✨ Topical
Anatomy of three Trump elections: How Americans shifted in 2024 vs. 2020 and 2016
CNN: "Exit polls reveal a divided country"
The energy transition will be much cheaper than you think
"Most analysts overestimate energy demand and underestimate technological advances"
Hidden Patterns in Folk Songs Reveal How Music Evolved
"The chart visualizes two recordings of the English folk song “Scarborough Fair”—one sung, one spoken—by Patrick Savage, a study author and participant. The song unfolds at around half the speed of the spoken version, and its pitches are generally higher."
The outstanding viz is by Duncan Geere and Miriam Quick.
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
Psyc 6135: Psychology of Data Visualization
Academic Michael Friendly runs a very interesting course at York University (in Canada), where he explores "a variety of issues related to data visualization from a largely psychological perspective". These are the course notes.
visprex
A tool (with open source code) to "visualise your CSV files in seconds without sending your data anywhere".
consuming the firehose for less than $2.50/mo*
"All data on Bluesky is extremely public, and with 15 million users (as of today and with mind-boggling growth), there's a lot of public data to play with.
You can get the firehose as a websocket JSON feed with Jetstream. This connects you to everything happening on the network in real time. It's extremely easy to get started and very fun."
If you were looking at creating Bluesky apps, this might be a good place to start looking.
Grid maps: where charts meet maps for easy data comparison
Flourish: "Explore small multiples like never before and discover a better way to compare regional data".
📈Dataviz, Data Analysis, & Interactive
A year of movement in review
Not quite open source, but this is such a beautiful data visualization!
From what it says, the original traces are .gpx exports from Strava, merged into buckets using geojson-merge, and visualised in Mapbox Studio as static maps.
🤖 AI
This is Dario Amodei.
"He's the CEO behind Claude, one of the world's most advanced AIs. [...] He revealed our timeline to superintelligence."
A Twitter thread.
This might be the most perceptive take I have read on AI this year, and it's from a poem written in 1961 🤯
Peter Chamberlin has shared a little gem.
### Why the deep learning boom caught almost everyone by surprise
"“Pre-ImageNet, people did not believe in data,” Li said in a September interview at the Computer History Museum. “Everyone was working on completely different paradigms in AI with a tiny bit of data.”"
(via Barry Tennison)
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