I'm knackered, but for good reasons – last week was a whirlwind of incredibly interesting things at work both in my immediate team and working with the organisation more broadly.

It was also announced that I've made the DataIQ100 2021, a "power list" of the most influential data and analytics practitioners. I followed the list in the past, seeking inspiration, so it was really nice to be added to it. To complement it, the top spot was snatched by Ming Tang, NHS England's National Director for Data, someone I respect massively and whose teams I have the privilege to work with (also, here's a piece of trivia: she was on my job interview panel!). You can read my full profile here.
 

I contributed some thoughts to an article by Ravi Gosh for Elephant Magazine. "How Visual Language Helps Us to Navigate the Pandemic" covers the use of data visualization from an art point of view. The article touches the issues of information vs persuasion, uncertainty, and misinterpretation, in the context of how COVID-19 has fostered the development of a new, not always "correct", visual language.

"Staying informed is key to feeling safe in the midst of a global pandemic, but how successful are the visual tools used to simplify complex—often contradictory—information?"

 

Environment

Glocal Climate Change
Ornaldo Gjergji of OBC Transeuropa, has built an impressive dataset of rising temperatures between the 1960s and the 2010s in 100,000 municipalities in Europe, as part of his investigation on climate change. It's a truly impressive piece of work, which I've covered before in its earlier developments. New articles based on it are here and here. Ornaldo also explains the approach in this video.

Every Country Has Its Own Climate Risks. What’s Yours?
Featuring 3D visualisations and scrollytelling, this article by the New York Times will make you engage with the climate risk of your country, and explore whether it's going to be manifested by rain, hurricanes, flooding, droughts, fires, and more.
COVID

Travel Restrictions Today
Using data from the Humanitarian Data Exchange, this visualization aims to give a general understanding of how governments around the world are handling international travel during COVID-19.
"The focus is on the most recent global news, meaning previously published news may not be represented."
Data is updated daily. 
 
Geospatial

Earth at a Cute Angle
"We’re used to seeing things from the side. Walking around at ground level, standing on a mountaintop, or even gazing out an airplane window, we’re never looking straight down. Our everyday perspective is more like this view of San Francisco from Maxar’s Worldview-3 satellite. Although not the most common type of imagery from orbit, these oblique views (also known as off-nadir views) connect our own lifetime of experiences with the unfamiliar view from space."
Cute, but I would say that it depends: especially in highly urbanised areas with regular grids (think Manhattan, Paris, or Barcelona), the regularity shown from nadir photos is particularly hypnotic.
 

Tutorials

How we made Typerighter, the Guardian’s style guide checker
"Lots of regular expressions, and a timely demonstration by an editorial colleague, led to a two year side-project that eventually ended up in production."
This is a really interesting write-up by the Guardian engineering team. Extra points for illustrating it with the misspelled word "Grauniad".
 
World Map (with Svelte)
"Create a world map, with sized & colored bubbles for each country. Check this out on desktop and mobile."
Quick how to for Svelte, a popular JavaScript framework.
 
Loud Numbers – Devlog #31
Miriam and Duncan gave a talk at Outlier Conference about their data sonification project "Loud Numbers". Although the talk itself isn't available yet, they've published a lightly edited transcript of the Q&A session at the end of their talk. Good read for all you data sonification folks.


Tools

GutenSearch
"Look inside the books of Project Gutenberg."
BudgetML: Deploy ML models on a budget
"BudgetML lets you deploy your model on a Google Cloud Platform preemptible instance (which is ~80% cheaper than a regular instance) with a secured HTTPS API endpoint. The tool sets it up in a way that the instance autostarts when it shuts down (at least once every 24 hours) with only a few minutes of downtime. BudgetML ensures the cheapest possible API endpoint with the lowest possible downtime."
This could be of interest to data journos and analysts trying to run their wrangling and models quickly and cheaply, but who do not need a production environment.


Politics

A term of untruths
"The longer Trump was president, the more frequently he made false or misleading claims."
 
Search for instances of Parliamentary procedure in debates and contributions
As Commons Librarian Phil Gorman explains you can now search specifically for maiden speeches, government defeats, standing order no24 applications (application for emergency debate), unparliamentary expressions, and queen's consent.
 
The oldest U.S. Senate to date, but not the least representative
Yet another great Datawrapper's take on a chart seen elsewhere, with almost step-by-step instructions and some reflection on the meaning of the data.
 
Data Privacy

#DataPrivacyDay – A thread by Dr Carissa Véliz, Hertford College
"It's #DataPrivacyDay so get up speed with our resident expert on all things privacy, Philosophy Fellow Dr Carissa Véliz".
A Twitter thread with links to article to data privacy 
(via Barry Tennison)

AI 

Machine Learning for Kids: A Project-Based Introduction to Artificial Intelligence
IBM Watson software developer Dale Lane, someone whose tutorials and write-ups I've often followed as they're no-nonsense and overall nicely written, has now published a fantastic book on how to introduce kids to AI, using simple Scratch programmes.