#506: quantum of sollazzo – 21 February 2022

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 the Washington Post’s look at what food is better for the planet.

If you’re reading this: what would you like me to create next? Just reply back :)

‘till next week,
Giuseppe @puntofisso

✨ Topical

State of the Union – In Numbers

“A nonpartisan, data-driven snapshot by USA Facts”.

How the NBA scoring record evolved from Wilt to Kareem to LeBron

“James, 38, keeps scoring as if he is still in his 20s. This season is tied for his third-best mark (30.2 points per game), trailing only the 30.3 points he averaged last season and his 31.4 in 2005-06.“

Disappearing Saint-Louis

“In Senegal, rising seas have led to devastating coastal erosion. If there is a war against climate change, the UNESCO World Heritage city of Saint-Louis is on the front lines. And the ocean is winning.“
Brilliant inclusion of a highly-technical illustration in the middle of a great story. Well done NPR team.

War Crimes Watch Ukraine

A searchable archive of “documented incidents involving potential war crimes in Ukraine” by PBS.

The State of Data Journalism 2022

“The second edition of The State of Data Journalism Survey results is now public! Explore the insights from the largest data journalism survey of the year.“
Mostly nicely visualized with Flourish.

🛠️📖 Tools & Tutorials

What’s new in Matplotlib 3.7.0 (Feb 13, 2023)

Quite a lot of interesting features in matplotlib’s newest release, including error bars on polar plots (themselves drawn in polar coordinates),

Blocktype

Something to watch, as it hasn’t launched yet.
“Blocktype is an online tool, that gives you a fast and accurate way of evaluating a sites development potential, without needing to hire an architect or a planner. “
Euan Mills, one of the co-founder, tweets: “We’ve added some perimeter blocks to the @BlocktypeApp library, and it’s pretty fun to play around with. Apparently, if we replaced Palace of Westminster with #housing at only 6 storeys we could house 2,200 people, and provide over 17,000 sqm of open space!! “

NeoGPT-Explorer

Source code for a “knowledge-graph based chatbot using GPT3 and Neo4j”.
Data engineer Tomaz Bratanic says on LinkedIn: “a repository that constructs a knowledge graph based chatbot using GPT3 and Neo4j that can search and summarize the information in news articles.“
Watch out for a blog post.

Introduction to ICA: Independent Component Analysis

“Have you ever found yourself in a situation where you were trying to analyze a complex and highly correlated data set and felt overwhelmed by the amount of information? This is where Independent Component Analysis (ICA) comes in. ICA is a powerful technique in the field of data analysis that allows you to separate and identify the underlying independent sources in a multivariate data set.“

How I built my own Stock Watchlist Dashboard in Tableau via Google Sheets

A useful tutorial on getting started with Tableau and Google Sheets.

A critical field guide for working with machine learning datasets

Published as part of the Knowing Machines research projects, this is an… oddly formatted web page with a lot of interesting content.

PySport

A collection of Python packages related to sports analytics and visualizations. (Is chess a sport?)

QGIS is the mapping software you didn’t know you needed

Basically, an end-to-end practical look at what QGIS is for.

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🤯 Data thinking

Big Data is dead

“For more than a decade now, the fact that people have a hard time gaining actionable insights from their data has been blamed on its size. “Your data is too big for your puny systems,” was the diagnosis, and the cure was to buy some new fancy technology that can handle massive scale. Of course, after the Big Data task force purchased all new tooling and migrated from Legacy systems, people found that they still were having trouble making sense of their data. They also may have noticed, if they were really paying attention, that data size wasn’t really the problem at all.“

Switch from Shapefile

“ESRI Shapefile is a file format for storing geospatial vector data. It has been around since the early 1990s and is still the most commonly used vector data exchange format.
While Shapefiles have enabled many successful activities over the years, they also have a number of limitations that complicate software development and reduce efficiency.
We, members of the geospatial IT industry, believe that it is time to stop using Shapefiles as the primary vector data exchange format and to replace them with a format that takes advantage of the huge advances that have been made since Shapefile was introduced.“

📈Dataviz, Data Analysis, & Interactive

World Data Visualization Prize 2023

The shortlist for this recent competition has been published.

FBI Crime Data Explorer

Quite a bit of downloadable data in this interactive site.

The United States Frequency Allocation Chart

“This crazy, beautiful chart illustrates the incredible complexity of managing one of our nation’s most crucial – and invisible – national assets: the radio spectrum.“

🤖 AI

ChatGPT is a blurry JPEG of the web

“OpenAI’s chatbot offers paraphrases, whereas Google offers quotes. Which do we prefer?“

quantum of sollazzo is supported by ProofRed’s excellent proofreading. If you need high-quality copy editing or proofreading, head to http://proofred.co.uk. Oh, they also make really good explainer videos.

Supporters* casperdcl and iterative.ai Jeff Wilson Fay Simcock Naomi Penfold

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