There's been a committed effort by people like Richard Hanania into mainstreaming race science and eugenics and it's, shamefully, mostly worked. Hanania in particular is a crude, blathering moron bigot using fourth rate statistics to justify his gutter bigotry

#30daychartchallenge day 10: multimodal. I could probably find activities with even more variability but I was curious about the shape of how Canadians tend to spend their days across age: work, school, sleep. Code: github.com/ivabrunec/30...

Inside a Powerful Database ICE Uses to Identify and Deport People 🔗 www.404media.co/inside-a-pow...

Taking some Sunday inspiration for day 6: Florence Nightingale day. I did a coxcomb graph of the amount of time Canadians spend on DIY projects, by month. Big month coming up. Code: github.com/ivabrunec/30...

A simple one for day 5 of #30daychartchallenge: ranking. A lollipop chart of the amount of time Canadians spend with different groups of people, at different ages. Code: github.com/ivabrunec/30...

Day 3 of #30daychartchallenge: circular. Circles in a circle. Is it good dataviz? No. But it is circular. Canadians' self-reported workaholic status, each circle = 1 person, size of circle = hrs of work. Basically, don't believe people who say they're workaholics. Code: github.com/ivabrunec/30...

Today in "Toronto's consultation process needs reform": the city sent me an invitation by mail to a consultation about a retroactive approval for an *enclosed front porch* about 5 doors down. Which we can't even see from the front or back of our house. Why should I get to weigh in on that!

Day 2 of #30DayChartChallenge: Slope. Canadians spent a *lot* more time alone in 2022 compared to 2005. But that comparison is especially stark for young Canadians. Code: github.com/ivabrunec/30...

I decided I'll try to make all my charts for #30DayChartChallenge this year from a single data source - the Canadian Time Use Survey. First up: Day 1 - Fractions. What % of Canadians don't get their 8h of sleep? Code: github.com/ivabrunec/30...

Today's newsletter: www.readtpa.com/p/navigating...

NYU canceled a planned speech by the former president of Doctors Without Borders because she planned to discuss the humanitarian crisis in Gaza and cuts to US AID. This is what actual campus censorship looks like.

Also, *because* these COBOL systems are old ... ... the code is *very* bug-free The maintainers have had decades to find and fix all the flaws in the system In contrast, as any developer will tell you, the newer a code base is ... ... the more bugs it's gonna have, the more it'll crash 3/9

My cat was fully grey when he was found about 5 months ago. Now he's getting patches of orange which fully tracks because he's always behaved like an orange cat, brain cells-wise.

If you accept that non-citizens have no right to due process, you are accepting that citizens have no right to due process. All the government has to do is claim that you are not a citizen; without due process you have no chance to prove the contrary.

the AI studio ghibli graphic the White House just tweeted mocking someone's deportation actually filled me with a level of despair that i can't even put to words

I understand the purpose and utility of centering these incidents but it would be nice if people just cared because other people's lives were being ruined and not potentially their own

Text data from Amazon's annual reports for this week's #tidytuesday. A meteoric rise in how frequently the word 'billion' appears. (It's a looong graph!) Code: github.com/ivabrunec/ti...

With the rise of everyday LLM use, do we think people are getting better at describing things verbally, or just lazier and rely more on re-prompting? Or a third thing, purposeful and goal-driven alignment with LLM language to get the most out of prompts?

I'm a full week behind, but here's last week's #tidytuesday visualizing palm tree data: exploring a grid layout of many tiny polygons, each representing the shape and color of a fruit in the database. Code: github.com/ivabrunec/ti...

I don't know why, but the misspelling of principle/principal is really my biggest English language pet peeve.

You don’t really have to frame the kidnapping, abuse, and humiliation of people as important and serious because it means the same could potentially be done to citizens. It can just be important and serious that people are being kidnapped, abused, and humiliated.

jesus fucking christ man

Am I losing it or is the process of moving a SQL runner query to a Looker dashboard completely unintuitive?

Played around with this week's #tidytuesday data on Pixar films & plotted the balance between runtime, Rotten Tomatoes, and Metacritic scores. Code: github.com/ivabrunec/ti...

Excited to see this big collaborative project out in the world @naturehumbehav.bsky.social ! Sleep actively enhances memory for the temporal sequence - but not sensory details - of our real-life experiences, even months-to-years later. 🧠 oscillations matter. Original 🧵: bsky.app/profile/diam...

Thinking about the concept of Severance as a wfh person. Would it be an 8h block no matter what and my innie and outie technically just share the house like roommates who never meet, or would a switch flip every time I left my desk to go bug my cat?

I just had a horrifying realization about Elon's grand plans here. They're going to do a join on a several different data sets with different collection latencies, data quality practices, etc. They're going to act like all the data is perfect, the schema all match, there are no special cases...

joke's on you I DID 'go cry about it' and compassion has made me more powerful

A study found that two-thirds of high school students couldn’t tell real news stories from ads on a website, and 96% failed to identify an organization's fossil fuel industry ties when assessing bias. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.3102/... #MisinfoResearch

Fresh #dataviz tool find: this excellent notebook about color models - the detail is I N S A N E

Euryptids, or 'giant sea scorpions', were among the largest arthropods ever to have lived. For ~200 million years (Silurian to Late Devonian), they scuttled at the bottoms of oceans, lakes & swamps. Then they disappeared & only their cousins, the horseshoe crabs, remember their passing.

Here's something I've been chipping away at for a bit. Hoping it's useful, but either way it exists! Sharing my thoughts and experiences for academics thinking about data science (or industry in general). ivabrunec.github.io/blog/academi...

NEW: Pregnancy became far more dangerous in Texas after the state banned abortion, according to ProPublica’s first-of-its-kind analysis, which found the sepsis rate for women hospitalized as they miscarried in the 2nd trimester shot up by more than 50%. https://propub.li/43487Tj

🧵 Our special election issue, “7 Years of Doug Ford,” is now live. From health care to education, online gambling to the Greenbelt, this is the best collection of stories about how the lives of Torontonians have changed during Ford’s time as premier. thelocal.to/7-years-of-d...

Toronto, man. Sent a polite but unhappy email to my councillor asking why pedestrians have to clamber over massive piles of snow courtesy of plows clearing the road (now pristine) and got back a snitty reply about how it was 55cm of snow. I know! It's all on the sidewalk!

After 2 long years, I finally wrote a new blog post about git stashes! I am CONSTANTLY switching between branches at work, so I learned more than I would have liked about stashes, but admittedly, I can't work without them now! 📖 Git Stash for Newbies on The Tidy Trekker:

I visited the prehispanic art museum in Oaxaca last week which really delivered on cool little guys as pottery

previous thing I wrote on whether what we do is true software engineering vickiboykis.com/2022/12/05/t...

Here is what the censoring of data.cdc.gov looks like over time

It's amazing that all cities don't do this.

Every time I read an interview with Judith Butler they sound so rational and humane, the opposite of the demonized caricature. english.elpais.com/culture/2024...

As the EOs and orders keep coming, I keep thinking of the exhibit in the Berlin Jewish Museum that displays the 962 anti-Jewish laws and policies in order as they came down. These kinds of drumbeats are designed not just to oppress but to normalize oppression. www.jmberlin.de/en/jmb-journ...

OpenAI Furious DeepSeek Might Have Stolen All the Data OpenAI Stole From Us

Does anyone have a recent reference for how many graphs (not figures, individual graph panels) there are in an average scientific publication? The most recent number I can find is ~60 *per issue*, from 1994: link.springer.com/chapter/10.1...

I wrote about the hypocrisy underlying our national conversation around housing. People & politicians blame immigrants for unaffordable housing (ignoring the real causes), then quietly rely on immigrants to fill the most precarious, low-paying jobs to build our housing supply.

This is an astonishing statistic, which most people don’t appreciate. When we phase out fossil fuels, we can eliminate 40% of international shipping along with it.

Every now & then Toronto City Council likes to remind people that almost every single one of them drives in to work. Normally it's only during TTC debates. But sometimes they like to surprise you with it.

Yesterday's post on our @pnas.org study of London taxi drivers. Yellow lines = imagined journeys, described street-by-street. Some were 30 streets, which if using a tree-search over 26,000 possible states would take a very very long time. Daniel McNamee's models show how they compress this problem: