2 September 2022

Pink-eyed terminators

Rachel mentioned Boris Johnson’s (in)famous digital/AI speech to the UN. That reminded me of the time I quoted it back at Oliver Dowden, then the minister for digital government. She joked I should set it to music. I had an idea. Someone basically made it happen. And then someone sent me some bonus comedy about said speech.

The internet can be great, sometimes.

Hasta la vista, baby (a picture of Arnold Schwarzenegger from one of the Terminator films)

As for everything else:

spEak You’re bRanes Thanks to everyone who’s already filled in the feedback form telling me what you think about this newsletter. It’s open for one more week — please do take a few minutes to help improve Warning: Graphic Content. (One bit of feedback has been about length of the newsletter, so sincere apologies for what follows today.)

Eventing Data Bites returns with a bang after the summer break next Wednesday… I’ll be chairing two events for the IfG at Labour conference and one at Conservative conference (please get in touch if you have a Gavin-shaped hole on your panel)… I’m going to be discussing some of the work I’ve been doing for mySociety at Code for All’s Summit, which takes place 19–22 September… And speaking of mySociety, the last of our TICTeC Labs civic tech surgeries, on civic tech in hostile environments, takes place next week. We’ve also got a call for proposals out for some work on amplifying civic tech’s storytelling and reach.

The good, the bad and the ugly Picking up a running theme, there’s some more good examples of dataviz in sport below. One of those comes from F1, which I think could have done better with this effort — why not have an equal distance between all 44 laps of the race, which would have made their point even more powerfully? This, from BBC Sport, is all kinds of wrong, not least starting the bars at a point other than 0 and underlining why it’s always worth moving away from the Excel default. Though it turns out having a style guide doesn’t always save you — squint and you can see The Guardian has different reds for Bournemouth and Arsenal, but nobody’s actually thought about how to make the chart readable.

Raise your voice My choir, the New Tottenham Singers, is starting term with lots of opportunities to try us out: three free rehearsals (Tuesdays 6, 13 and 20 September) and a couple of free taster sessions (Saturday 10 September). Give us a go, and please spread the word.

Canon fodder The UK government has, for what I think is the first time, published an official list of cities in the UK. Praise be! (Though some further info — dates, reasons — might be nice.) If you’re wondering why that matters, well… it might have avoided Gibraltar not knowing it was a city for 180 years. And might have saved Rochester losing its city status.

Have a good weekend
Gavin

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Today’s links:

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Ukraine

• Six months of the war in Ukraine (Reuters)
• Heavy explosions in Kherson as Ukraine battles to retake city* (FT)
• Ukraine: the $10bn steel plant at the heart of Russia’s economic warfare* (FT)
• Russia Confounds the West by Recapturing Its Oil Riches* (Wall Street Journal)

Education, education, education

• It’s #ResultsDay2022 for GCSEs (The Sutton Trust)
• A-level results: Mapping England’s grade gap* (New Statesman)
• Amid NHS staff shortages, the UK reintroduces cap on medical students* (New Statesman)
• Did independent schools really “fiddle” their A-Level grades more than other schools in 2021? (FFT Education Datalab)
• This year’s A-level results in England explained in five charts (The Guardian)

Crises? What crises?

• The collapse of emergency healthcare in England may be costing 500 lives every week (John Burn-Murdoch, FT)
• People no longer believe the NHS will treat them quickly if they fall ill, according to new polling (Sunday Times)
• UK inflation rate calculator: How much are prices rising for you? (BBC News)
• How utility companies have become public enemy number one* (New Statesman)
• Can your favourite pub afford to keep the lights on this winter?* (New Statesman)
• Cost of living: One third of households already struggling to pay energy bills even without next price cap hike (Sky News)
• Energy crisis: UK households worst hit in western Europe, finds IMF (The Guardian)
• Stratospheric energy bills will completely wipe out incomes for low income households (JRF)
• How much could insulating Britain save the average home? (The Guardian)
• In at the deep end: The living standards crisis facing the new Prime Minister (Resolution Foundation)
• A chilling crisis: Policy options to deal with soaring energy prices (Resolution Foundation)

UK politics

• How much will Tory leadership candidates help with energy bills?* (New Statesman)
• Will we ever trust our politicians again? (Sunday Times)
• THE KIDS AREN’T ALRIGHT: THE 4 FACTORS DRIVING A DANGEROUS DETACHMENT FROM DEMOCRACY (Onward)
• The end of Boris Johnson’s premiership (IfG)
• Public more likely to think Boris Johnson has done a bad job as PM than any other since WWII (Ipsos)
• Becoming a minister: Getting to grips with departmental budgets (IfG)
• Business investment: Not just one big problem (IfG)

Roe back

• After Roe’s End, Women Surged in Signing Up to Vote in Some States* (New York Times)
• America’s fight over abortions has fired up women voters* (The Economist)
• An abortion desert has ballooned in the US South, where bans are hitting Black women hardest (Bloomberg)
• Google will now label medical facilities that provide abortions — and ones that might not — in maps and search results, following a Bloomberg analysis (Bloomberg)

Work

• How unions are winning again, in 4 charts (Recode)
• The Bitter Fight For Unions at Starbucks, One Year Later (Bloomberg)
• Workplace diversity programmes often fail, or backfire* (The Economist)
• In rich countries, working women and more babies go hand in hand* (The Economist)

Debt-defying

• The Toll of Student Debt in the U.S.* (New York Times)
• How US student loan debt has weighed down a generation of borrowers* (FT)

Death-defying

• Cause-of-death contributions to the change in male life expectancy in the USA 2010–2020 (via @mildanalyst)
• How US life expectancy fell off a cliff* (FT)

Climate of fear

• Europe’s driest summer in 500 years threatens crops, energy production (Reuters)
• Climate graphic of the week: Record lows for rivers across China, US and Europe sap economies* (FT)
• How severe drought is affecting much of the northern hemisphere* (The Economist)
• China drought highlights economic damage wrought by global warming* (FT)
• Arizona Needs to Cut 300,000 Olympic Pools’ Worth of Water. Here Is Who Will Be Hit the Hardest.* (Wall Street Journal)
• Alaska’s snow crabs have disappeared. Where they went is a mystery.* (Washington Post)
• Harvard’s Status as Wealthiest School Faces Oil-Rich Contender in the University of Texas* (Bloomberg)
• A FAILURE OF ENFORCEMENT* (Washington Post)
• Methane hunters: what explains the surge in the potent greenhouse gas?* (FT)
• Electricity use by income decile (via Neil O’Brien)
• Climate graphic of the week: China coal power generation nears record during heatwave* (FT)
• How hurricanes wreck baby names (Axios, via Cath)

World

• Why are Pakistan’s floods so bad this year?* (The Economist)
• See the scale of Pakistan’s flooding in maps, photos and videos* (Washington Post)
• Can Japan revive nuclear power?* (The Economist)
• How China Could Choke Taiwan* (New York Times)
• France has withdrawn its final troops from Mali* (The Economist)

Out of this world

• Back to the Moon (Reuters)
• An Inside Look at NASA’s Most Powerful Rocket Ever, the SLS* (Wall Street Journal)

Viral content

• The growing evidence that Covid-19 is leaving people sicker* (FT)
• Vaccinating students and staff protected vulnerable groups from covid-19* (The Economist)
• How Fixes to the $800 Billion Covid Relief Program Got Money to More Small Businesses* (Bloomberg)

US

• Explore The Ways Republicans Or Democrats Could Win The Midterms (FiveThirtyEight)
• How second-choice votes pushed a Democrat to victory in Alaska* (Washington Post)
• Five US States Will Decide If the 2024 Election Can Be Stolen* (Bloomberg)
• Donald Trump’s endorsements are reshaping the Republican Party* (The Economist)
• Trump Has the Smallest Collection of Paper Records, but His Electronic Files Rival Obama’s* (Wall Street Journal)
• Can computer simulations help fix democracy?* (Washington Post)
• Machine Politics: How America casts and counts its votes (Reuters)
• Fear of Rampant Crime Is Derailing New York City’s Recovery* (Bloomberg)
• Fundraising remains predictive of success in Congressional elections* (The Economist)
• Can the Federal Reserve tame the highest inflation in roughly 40 years without causing sharply higher unemployment?* (FT)
• Race, Class and Traffic Deaths* (New York Times)
• It Now Costs $300,000 to Raise a Child* (Wall Street Journal)

Sport

• The wins, losses and comebacks that made up Serena Williams’s career* (Washington Post)
• Serena Williams’s Once-In-A-Lifetime Serve (FiveThirtyEight)
• The Toss* (New York Times)
• The highs and lows so far this season (F1)
• Is it time to analyse attacking data differently?* (The Athletic)

Entertainment etc

• Critics and Fans Have Never Disagreed More About Movies* (Bloomberg)
• THE BIG [CENSORED] THEORY (The Pudding)
• Live Performance Is Back. But Audiences Have Been Slow to Return.* (New York Times)
• Where we’re spending our screentime, in 3 charts (Recode)
• Where Do Memes Come From? The Top Platforms From 2010–2022 (Know Your Meme)

#dataviz

• Here are 10 short pieces that may help you improve your data journalism & visualisation (@alastairotter)
• Paper below also shows importance of visualising full timeline of data (via Adam Kucharski)
• Is this Voronoi chart good or bad? (via Jon Schwabish)
• Armed to the teeth (Annabelle Rincon)

Meta data

Clearing out

• Freedom of Information — FOI Clearing House Review (Sue Langley for Cabinet Office)
• Government’s ‘Orwellian’ unit to be disbanded after openDemocracy revelations (openDemocracy)
• Cabinet Office FoI clearing house set to become ‘centre of excellence’ (Civil Service World)

Open for the best, expecting the worse

• The UK government could join Malta, Malawi and El Salvador in being declared ‘inactive’ by the accountability and transparency body it set up (UK Open Government Network)
• Rob Whiteman: Alarming breakdown of officer-member relationships must be tackled (LGC)
• Open Banking lessons learned review (CMA)
• Will Open Public Transport Data Benefit Citizens? (Open Heroines)
• Regulatory guidance for the transparent release and use of statistics and data (OSR)
• TO DEFEAT AUTOCRACY, WEAPONIZE TRANSPARENCY (War on the Rocks)
• ODI: Smart data promise could founder against paywalls (Computer Weekly)

A farewell to harms

• The Times view on the Online Safety Bill: A Threat to Freedom* (The Times)
• Sweeping Children’s Online Safety Bill Is Passed in California* (New York Times)
• A Dad Took Photos of His Naked Toddler for the Doctor. Google Flagged Him as a Criminal.* (New York Times)
• Why OnlyFans wants us to regulate the internet* (New Statesman)

Anti-social media

• Facebook-Cambridge Analytica data breach lawsuit ends in 11th hour settlement (The Observer)
• TikTok’s extraordinary rise signals a more multipolar internet* (FT)
• Instagram says precise location is never shared (BBC News)
• Jack Dorsey says his biggest regret is Twitter became a company (Reuters)
• Norway wants Facebook fined for illegal data transfers (Politico)
• ‘It’s a modern-day Facebook’ — how BeReal became Gen Z’s favourite app (The Observer)
• Ex-security chief accuses Twitter of cybersecurity mismanagement in an explosive whistleblower complaint (TechCrunch)

AI got ‘rithm

• What does GPT-3 “know” about me? (MIT Technology Review)
• AI Snake Oil (Avind Narayanan, Sayash Kapoor)
• Opening the Pandora’s Box of AI Art (Andy Baio)
• Shaping artificial intelligence for your future business needs (CIPD)
• Embedding machine learning and artificial intelligence in weather and climate science and services: A framework for data science (Met Office)

UK government(s)

• EXCLUSIVE: Truss backs Dorries to stay as culture chief — if she wants to (Mail on Sunday)
• UK science superpower claim is ‘bollocks’, says ex-vaccines chief (The Observer)
• Data sharing: How can we make sure the UK is a world leader? (Computer Weekly)
• Updating our estimates of the pandemic’s effects on the UK’s economy — the new ONS estimates explained (ONS)
• New vision for a world-leading digital property market (HM Land Registry)
• UK launches Israel talks to boost trade between services superpowers (DIT)
• Draft principles for unlocking the value of Scotland’s public sector personal data for public benefit (Scottish Government)
• Government’s cyber plan delivers ‘a complete revolution in how we provide assurance’ (Public Technology)
• Driving responsible innovation in self-driving vehicles (CDEI)
• Government Legal Department investigating ‘regrettable’ leak of officials’ data (Civil Service World)
• An update on One Login for Government (GDS)
• Looking at the Data Protection and Digital Information Bill has prompted us to think about the difference between data subjects and decision subjects (Connected by Data)

Roe back

• Google employees demand end to collection of abortion data (Computer Weekly)
• Kochava faces legal action over sale of location data (BBC News)

Data-based

• How the AP, USA Today, and Northeastern built a database of mass killings that tracks more than shootings (Nieman Lab)
• Sent to jail for feeding the pigeons: the broken system of antisocial behaviour laws (TBIJ)

Measurement matters

• A history and defence of opinion polling* (The Economist)
• Beyond GDP: changing how we measure progress is key to tackling a world in crisis — three leading experts (The Conversation)

Very online

• Flicking the kill switch: governments embrace internet shutdowns as a form of control (The Guardian)
• ‘Blending’ online and offline provision in community wellbeing services: what does it mean and why does it matter? (Wales Centre for Public Policy)

Tech

• Tech Startup Manifesto 2022 (Coadec, The Entreprenuers Network)
• The seer and the seen: Surveying Palantir’s surveillance platform (The Information Society)

Tips

• A data playbook (Citizens Advice)
• If you’re a Google Sheets user, stop what you’re doing and check this out… they just dropped 10 new functions on us!!! (Ben Collins)
• If you were to recommend one book for aspiring analysts to read… whether educational, historical, non-fiction or fiction… what would it be? (Government Analysis Function)

Everything else

• Schools have responsibility but not control over pupils’ data, report says (Public Technology)
• Biomass: Giant ‘space brolly’ to weigh Earth’s forests (BBC News, via ODI The Week in Data)
• Thames Water reviews data centres’ water use as London hosepipe ban looms* (FT)
• The quantum computing bubble* (FT)
• Once more unto the data breach, dear friends (Culture Data & Research Network)
• Why workplace communities matter (Centre for Digital Public Services)
• ADR UK funds major new data linkage projects to address vital policy questions (ADR UK)

Opportunities

• ENTER: Information is Beautiful Awards 2022 (Data Visualization Society)
• EVENT: Data Bites #33 (IfG)
• EVENT: Code for All Summit 2022 (Code for All)
• EVENT: UK Health Camp 2022
• EVENT: LocalGovCamp22: Birmingham
• JOBS: Looking for a new job in the #dataforgood sector? Want to use your data skills to inform support and change? Our Jobs Board is Back! (DataCollectiveUK)
• JOB: DWP opens recruitment for £200k digital chief (Civil Service World)
• JOB: Chief Data Officer (Cabinet Office)
• JOB: Senior Ethical Hacker (Cabinet Office)
• JOBS: Data leadership, strategy & data governance roles in the MoJ’s Data Improvement Programme Team, Data & Analysis (MoJ)
• JOB: Vice President: Global Programmes (Luminate)
• JOB: Executive Director (Global Integrity)
• JOB: Executive Director (International Budget Partnership)
• JOB: Director of Research (British Academy)
• JOBS: Editor, Tech and Trade; Junior Editor, Tech and Trade; Senior Tech Reporter; Tech Reporter (Politico, London)
• JOB: A very fond farewell from Giselle (DataKind UK)
• CONSULTANCY: We’re looking for a consultant to investigate open data needs for AI applications (Open Data Charter)
• CONSULTANCY: Our team is looking for a Short Term Consultant to help us drive the development and impact of the Risk Data Library Standard (Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery, World Bank)

And finally…

Words

• Japan declares war on floppy disks for government use (Ars Technica)
• This guy wins at Linkedin (via Chris Bakke)
• The Twisted Life of Clippy (Seattle Met)
• How do GIS folks find a spouse? (Kevin Haynes)
• Legacy (Dan Hon)
• Viral Post Generator: Use AI to write the perfect LinkedIn post (Tom Orbach and Taplio)
• An American tries to join his British newsroom’s Fantasy Premier League… With a little help from an algorithm* (FT)

Pictures

• @swilkesphoto compresses time into a single image using a cool technique (@waitbutwhy)
• The UK has among the lowest number of bank holidays compared to Europe* (New Statesman)
• Since it’s doing the rounds again (@iamsimonyoung)
• Helpful use of colour there, @guardian (via Ben Stanley via Alice)
• there’s a lot of good work to be done out there (via RJ Andrews)
• Redrawing the lines: the exhibition exploding the myths around maps (The Guardian)
• The UK Pub Census: Kings and Queens (via Ben Judah)
• Things are getting very nerdy today at @ftdata (Federica Cocco)
• Adrian Fisher wants you to get lost. So much so, he’s made a career out of it.* (FT)
• Post Office automation, 1950s-style (via me)
• An AI-generated artwork won a state competition, and people don’t know what to think (The Verge)

Music

• Bizarre FOI find of the day: Scotrail has openly published a two-hour long sound file containing every single element of its automated station announcements (Jon Brady)
• Ambient Scotrail beats (Matt Eason)