#511: quantum of sollazzo – 28 March 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.

I had missed this excellent xkcd strip.

The most clicked link last week was Prof Naranayan's slide deck about snake oil in AI.

'till next week,
Giuseppe @puntofisso

✨ Topical

World Happiness, Trust and Social Connections in Times of Crisis

The World Happiness report offers some good insight.

#IPCC SYR Figure SPM.1

From the IPCC reports, this picture "shows how current and future generations have different experiences with climate change".

Urban Flash Flooding in England Project

"This page contains the outputs of a project funded by Subak to compile historic data on the impacts of recent urban flash flood events in England using information contained in newspaper reports. It aims to map these events in as much detail as possible, looking for information at street and building level."
They have also shared their full methodology (PDF).

Wealthy Executives Make Millions Trading Competitors’ Stock With Remarkable Timing

"...dozens of top executives...have traded shares of either competitors or other companies with close connections to their own. ...These transactions are captured in a vast IRS dataset of stock trades made by the country’s wealthiest people, part of a trove of tax data leaked to ProPublica."

CT troopers routinely log 'excessive' hours. Auditors say it may be costing the state millions.

"State police rules place few limits on how much troopers can work."
Illustration by Taylor Johnston, which we covered in Quantum #456.

Privacy breach fines near €3 billion

Good look at GDPR fines by Karthik Muthuswamy, featuring my all-time favourite, the spikes map.

188.750 victims

Raffaele Mastrolonardo took some inspiration from the legendary New York Times story to create an Italian version of their poignant "one dot, one victim", telling the story of the lives lost to COVID.

Upper legislative houses tend to be biased and malapportioned

"Variation in district sizes benefits conservatives, but not in lower chambers."

🛠️📖 Tools & Tutorials

mapwidget

"The mapwidget package provides a set of custom map widgets for creating interactive maps in a Jupyter environment using different JavaScript mapping libraries, such as Cesium, Leaflet, Mapbox, MapLibre, and OpenLayers. The widgets are built on top of the anywidget Python package."

Advanced Visualization Generator

"Create stunning visualization like Sankey, Network, Beeswarm and more. Export directly in Tableau Desktop, Tableau Public, CSV, and SVG with only one click."

StataViz by Asjad Naqvi

Not a type of tech I usually cover, but this portfolio with links to STATA libraries might be useful to some of you.

How virtual environments work

Aspiring pythonistas will appreciate this short tutorial.

Commandlinefu.com

"commandlinefu.com is the place to record those command-line gems that you return to again and again. That way others can gain from your CLI wisdom and you from theirs too. All commands can be commented on, discussed and voted up or down."
A short version of Stack Overflow for CLI, basically.

Structured text tools

"The following is a list of text-based file formats and command line tools for manipulating each."

Try DataCamp

DataCamp helps individual learners make better use of data. Build data skills online while learning from the world’s top data scientists. Help close the talent gap with DataCamp.

🤯 Data thinking

A Eulogy for Dark Sky, a Data Visualization Masterpiece

I don't get Apple's strategy on this, btw. This blog post traces the journey of this very popular weather app, famous for how it displays weather data.

📈Dataviz, Data Analysis, & Interactive

Special Database 18: 3,248 Mugshots Used for Training Image Recognition Systems

"The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has maintained a dataset of mugshot photos of 1,573 people for decades, including 175 minors, until we asked about them."
A scary story.

Journey Planner Challenge

"You need to visit 5 tube stations. Place them in the order in which it will take the least time to do so!"
More addictive than I thought!
(via Daniele Bottillo)

Car thefts are rising. Is a TikTok challenge to blame?

"Car thefts started rising last summer in Baltimore, Cleveland, and other cities across the country."

Scraping London Marathon data with {rvest}

"{rvest} is an R package within the {tidyverse} which helps you scrape data from web pages. This blog post will showcase an example of scraping data from Wikipedia on London Marathon races and winners."

Every Possible Wordle Solution Visualized

"2,309 words interactively laid out"

🤖 AI

The case for slowing down AI

"Pumping the brakes on artificial intelligence could be the best thing we ever do for humanity."
The question is: how.

ChatGPT as Code

"For the sake of this exercise, let’s say we want to program the voice assistant to perform three tasks:
Remember and trigger one-time reminders or alarms.
Remember and trigger repeating reminders or alarms.
Give you a weather forecast.
Answer basic questions"

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

[*] this is for all $5+/months Github sponsors. If you are one of those and don't appear here, please e-mail me