622: quantum of sollazzo
#622: quantum of sollazzo – 2 September 2025
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.
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Giuseppe @puntofisso.bsky.social
🛎️ Things that caught my attention
A good one from Nesta – their Centre for Collective Intelligence Design, in collaboration with the UK government’s Incubator for Artificial Intelligence, has trialled an approach to involve the public in assessing AI tools for public services: How does the public feel about AI analysing UK government consultation responses? They used an approach called deliberative polling, delivered through their platform Zeitgeist, involving a total of 144 members of the UK public in both online and in-person workshops. The result is an ‘AI Social Readiness Advisory Label’ for the Consult tool – a summary of public views on benefits and risks, as well as recommendations for future development and deployment of the tool, which uses AI in the analysis of consultation responses.
Zeitgeist offers video calling, polling, rich stimuli including animation and video, and transcription in a single interface for in-person and remote facilitated workshops. The team are developing other functionality too, with an ambition to support a wider variety of deliberative methods, including citizens assemblies.
Thanks to Lewis Westbury for highlighting it.
Ian Watt sends me this good article about Human Literacy as a response to AI Literacy (and similar calls for single-subject literacy): "You and I probably both keep hearing that students should be working toward AI literacy. That you should know what to type into prompt windows, because it will save you time. That will get you jobs in the economy of tomorrow, where I guess typing into a window to save time will be a valuable skill.
What do you type into the boxes? That’s AI literacy. There's more to it, of course: how to make sense of what comes out of the box. But how about this one: Why do you type into the boxes? That’s human literacy. You can't have AI literacy without it, but we’ve set much of that aside over the last few decades. Nobody really asks why we are asking you to cut and paste clusters of words between windows, where the sentences will be elongated by a machine for you to paste somewhere else."
Alasdair Rae (Quantum issue) has created these amazing visualizations of NBA shots.
This AI-driven scam story is pretty demoralising. It's based on "fake AI generated "damage" on goods" and terrible policies on the marketplaces.
✨ Topical
How are public schools in the US funded?
USAFacts looks at school funding nationwide and in each US state.
The rise of the bisexuals
Leo Benedictus: "It looks like the number of young bisexual people in the UK has risen about sixfold since 2014. (Pinch of salt alert: this data is very uncertain.)"
Thermal Trace
The EU's Copernicus project has launched this new platform that allows the exploration of 80+ years of temperature and thermal stress data. A blog post is here.
(via Anna Lombardi)
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🛠️📖 Tools & Tutorials
School of Data’s New Platform: A Fresh Look for a Renewed Mission
Open Knowledge (formerly the Open Knowledge Foundation) are refreshing their School of Data.
json-editor
A JSON Schema Based Editor. Here's is a demo and you can download the code from GitHub. "JSON Editor takes a JSON Schema and uses it to generate an HTML form. It has full support for JSON Schema version 3 and 4 and can integrate with several popular CSS frameworks (bootstrap, spectre, tailwind)."
Monorail
"Monorail turns any CSS keyframe animation into an interactive graph." Open source repository on GitHub.
chartdb
Chartdb is a "database diagrams editor that allows you to visualize and design your DB with a single query."
An Illustrated Guide to OAuth
"... the crux of OAuth is an access token, which is sort of like an API key for a specific user. An app gets an access token, and then they can use that to take actions on the user's behalf, or access data for a user." A good tutorial.
What are OKLCH colors?
"OKLCH is a newer color model that is designed to be perceptually uniform. This means that colors are much more accurate in terms of how humans perceive them and it makes working with them much easier." You can try it out here.
Also take a look at this explanation of colour models.
D2: Declarative Diagramming
D2 is "a modern language that turns text to diagrams".
Base
Base is a self-described "small, powerful, comfortable SQLite editor for everyone". It's freemium, with a free reduced features version.
AI Agents for Beginners - A Course
Microsoft has released this course in 11 lessons, with a GitHub repo also available.
🤯 Data thinking
How maps create nations
Vintage Kontinentalist (2018): "Maps are powerful, albeit low-key, tools that inscribe and shape how people perceive themselves, or understand the outside world. By looking at the traditional maps of Siam (modern day Thailand), China and Japan, the influence Western technologies had on them, we can uncover their culture, beliefs, fears and priorities."
The “correct” map
"The Mercator map creates distortions. Just like the Peters map and any map with any projection on a plane. This is the story of the correct map, the map that does not exist."
Also, Correct The Map is aiming "to correct the map by adopting the Equal Earth projection, which more accurately reflects the true size of Africa.".
📈Dataviz, Data Analysis, & Interactive
Red flag: Jobs at risk from AI
The Outlier's Alastair Otter: "A recent study by Microsoft Research found that these are the types of jobs that most people now consult AI tools about.
An analysis of 200,000 conversations with Microsoft Bing Copilot found that information gathering, writing, and communicating are the most common user goals for AI assistance. The study looked at three variables for jobs to predict how ‘applicable’ AI would be to replace these roles: coverage (how many of the tasks in a particular job could be done by AI), scope (how many hours of a work day could AI cover) and completion (how well could AI complete tasks) to come up with a composite score."
The Size of Adobe Reader Installers Through The Years
"At the time of writing, the most recent Adobe Reader 25.x.y.z 64-bit installer for Windows 11 weights 687,230,424 bytes. ... For comparison, the size of SumatraPDF-3.5.2 installer is 8,246,744 bytes."
I've only got one question: WHY?!
Carbon Mapper
Carbon Mapper promises to offer "accessible and actionable emissions data": "our data portal includes observations of methane and CO2 super-emitters across the globe. Data is sourced from multiple sensors onboard aircraft, satellites, and other space-based systems. It’s added to the portal on a frequent and ongoing basis."
Mapping Paul's Journeys Across the Roman World
"4 journeys. 2 Kingdoms. 1 mission.
Use the interactive map below to explore every one of Paul's stops along his journey, the roads he traveled, and the stories that came about."
Was Mozart the most productive composer who ever lived?
Datawrapper's Guillermina Sutter Schneider looks at Mozart's opus. He was famous for having "learned how to read music before he learned how to read actual words". A bit like me and my Commodore 64 coding skills (well, sort of: I used to just copy the letter shapes and got BASIC programmes from the manual).
High-value homes sold§
"In August 2025 Owen Boswarva estimated the number of homes that sold for over £1,500,000 in each constituency of England and Wales. We have taken inspiration from Owen and have found the number of high-value homes sold each year since 2018."
(via Chris Weston)
🤖 AI
How good are generalist AI tools at identifying public figures in videos?
Indicator Media's Alexios Mantzarlis: "I tested seven of them. One came out on top."
The Bubble That Knows It's a Bubble
Craig McCaskill: "The four words that precede every crash: “This time is different.” Except this time, the person warning about a bubble is Sam Altman, the CEO most responsible for creating it. When OpenAI’s chief executive warned last week that investors were “overexcited” about AI, markets reacted immediately. Nvidia fell 3.5%, Palantir dropped nearly 10%, and the selloff spread globally."
Why Did a $10 Billion Startup Let Me Vibe-Code for Them—and Why Did I Love It?
"I spent two days at Notion and saw an industry in upheaval. I also shipped some actual code."
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