Analytics Dispatch 8/15/2016
Data journalists go for gold
MUST-READ
What I Wish I Knew About Data For Startups
One entrepreneur reflects on his learnings from four years of working with data at a startup. It's a goldmine of advice on building a strong, scaleable data culture. Don't skip this one. Seriously. - Jean-Nicholas Hould
NO IKEA, PLEASE
Design Better Tables
"The ire raised by data tables is due, no doubt, to just how awful they can look when they’re not well designed. The design of a table is its linchpin: if it’s done right, it makes complex data easy to scan and compare. If it’s done wrong, it can render information completely incomprehensible." - Mission Log
BRAIN MELT
Top 20 Pandas, NumPy, and SciPy Functions on Github
Some of the most popular Python functions, visualized in Python. - Alexander Galea
DATA SPIDERS
Goods: organizing Google’s datasets
Most companies store their data in a central repository where everyone can go to publish or retrieve a dataset. Google manages their data in different way: they've built (surprise!) a crawling engine to index datasets and gather metadata about them. This gives folks the freedom to make and use datasets however they like.
- The Morning Paper
ICYMI
Text analysis of Trump's tweets confirms he writes only the (angrier) Android half
This sentiment analysis of Donald Trump's went viral went this week. Apparently, tweets from Trump's Android account are more negative than those from his iPhone account, leading to the conclusion that the iPhone tweets are from Trump's campaign staff, and the Android tweets are from The Donald himself. - Variance Explained
People are talking about: the Summer Olympics
Sports make for great stories. When it came to covering this year's Olympics, data journalists (especially those at The New York Times) brought their A game. (And there's still a week to go!)
- A Visual History of Which Countries Have Dominated the Summer Olympics (The New York Times)
- Old Olympians Ride Horses; Young Ones Do Flips (FiveThirtyEight)
- How Katie Ledecky obliterated her own world record in the 400m freestyle (The Guardian)
- Micheal Phelps vs. Himself (The New York Times)
- Which Olympic Sport Is Hardest On Its Goalies? (FiveThirtyEight)
- How the U.S. Crushed the Competition in the Women’s Gymnastics Team Final (The New York Times)
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