As part of the Data visualisation and communication course from the EPFL extension school, which I already mentioned in a previous post, one of the optional tasks after finishing the first of four sub-courses was to find timeseries data and plot it. A very open question! There is so much timeseries data – the vast… Read More Timeseries plot – Swiss residents

As I’ve started a course a couple of months ago on data visualisation, which is all in R, I’ve recently come across the R community’s #TidyTuesdays. If you haven’t worked with the programming language R, then you probably did not get the meaning of the last sentence – that’s fine, I was there not too… Read More Getting started with #TidyTuesdays

Recently I have been stretching my programming skills – mostly ith the course from the EPFL extension school called ‘Data Visualisation and Communication’, which is quite extensive when doing next to a full time job and covers all things visualisation in R. As I have done all my previous visualisations in python, this is all… Read More Learning something new is frustrating (but fun!)

Have you seen the climate stripes? These ones show the average global, yearly temperature deviation from the mean of the yearly temperatures between 1961 and 1990, from 1850 to 2020. In other words, you take some reference period (1961 to 1990) and check how different was each year from that reference period. Quite obviously it… Read More Hearing the climate stripes

This post is about and inspired by two books about what is happening in the age of the machine and big data, when algorithms wield control. One is ‘Weapons of math destruction’ by Cathy O’Neil, and the other one is ‘Hello world. How to be human in the Age of the Machine’ by Hannah Fry.… Read More How to be human in the age of the machine

Also, stolz ist man ja nicht auf dieses erst fünzigjährige Jubiläum. Gar nicht. Syrien, die Philippinen, Moldau, Burundi, Senegal, Venezuela, Spanien, Eritrea, China, Togo, und ganz viele andere Länder haben das Frauenstimmrecht vor der Schweiz eingeführt. Vielleicht müsste man die kleinere Zahl nennen – wieviele Länder das erst nach der Schweiz eingeführt haben. Und überall… Read More Lesestoff zum Jubiläum des Frauenstimmrechts

Kurz gesagt – in a nutshell is an animation studio/design agency with an amazing YouTube channel, explaining the world in chunk-size bites at a time, wonderfully illustrated, of course. The one video I’d really like you to see is the one on vaccines: But maybe you also want to learn about the deep sea, strange… Read More Kurz gesagt: vaccinations

Over the last couple of months, I managed to read some non-fiction, this time somewhat further removed from the usual popular (natural) science books but totally worth the time, sometimes eye-opening. I’ll start with a quick description of Cordelia Fine’s ‘Delusions of Gender’. I am re-reading it, and am quite surprised I didn’t blog about… Read More Recent reads on gender, feminism and racism

I’ve written before about Hans Rosling and his amazing talks about global development. Today I stumbled about another excellent youtube video that takes a more critical stance. Why don’t you look for yourself: There are some valid points – first and foremost that averages can be misleading. To illustrate, a hypothetical example: if, from four… Read More Going beyond averages

Thanks to a friend I recently stumbled across this article by Melanie Mitchell in the New York Times on machine learning and its limitations. It highlights that despite the huge advances especially in deep learning, machines are still pretty far from ‘understanding’ things the way we do. They make mistakes we never would, are susceptible… Read More Getting at meaning is hard