ISSUE 398  ·   August 2, 2022

In the News

Revealing the structure of the protein universe

Knowing the shape of a protein helps researchers understand how it interacts with other compounds, what it does, and how it can be modified. AlphaFold is an AI system that can predict the 3D structure of a protein from just its 1D amino acid sequence. Last week, Deepmind released the predicted structures of all 200M+ proteins known to science - almost the entire protein universe! Here's what it means.
Deepmind | Demis Hassabis

Who Is Collecting Data from Your Car?

These days, cars are like smartphones with Internet-connected apps that collect huge amounts of data. Most drivers have no idea what that data is or who it might be flowing to. This article dives into this nascent industry — the players, the stakes, the opportunities, and the issues.
The Markup | Jon Keegan and Alfred Ng

Data Elixir Partners

Interview Query

Interview Query is an adaptive learning platform that will help you develop your skills and prepare for your next interview. Questions come from actual interviews and cover a wide range of topics in data science, analytics, SQL, machine learning, and more. Choose your own learning path and get an inside look at specific companies, interviews, and roles. 

Tutorials, Projects & Opinions

Art from Code

This is an awesome series of tutorials by Danielle Navarro from her workshop at the recent rstudio::conf. Covers specialized R packages for generative art as well as techniques that are commonly used by generative artists like flow fields and iterative function systems. "Perhaps we can become better data scientists through art, and vice versa..."
Danielle Navarro

A data scientist’s guide to statistical genetics

Genetics shapes much of our lives and our genomes are easy to study using common data science tools. In this new series, Nadav Brandes explores human genetics from a data science perspective. After the intro post, Part 2 is essentially a crash course in genetics and Part 3 begins a tour of open problems in statistical genetics. Great series.
Incrementally | Nadav Brandes

Counting Things

In this first post in a series, Pedram Navid dives into metrics and shows how even simple questions like, "how many users do we have?" is a lot more nuanced than you might think. The goal here isn't to just define metrics, but to show the thinking behind them.
Data Based | Pedram Navid

Resources

Building Modern Data Teams

Great collection of articles and resources to help companies build high performing data teams. Covers a wide range of topics, from strategies for building data-driven organizations, data quality, what data teams do, data team development, careers, and more.
Amplify Partners | Emilie Schario

Code & Tools

nbdev+Quarto: A new secret weapon for productivity

nbdev offers Python programmers a common set of tools for tasks like code development, testing, documentation and distribution — all from within Jupyter notebooks. Now in a major new release, nbdev has teamed up with Quarto to give nbdev new superpowers. This post explores what you can do with nbdev2 and where things are going.
fast.ai | Hamel Husain and Jeremy Howard

LovelyPlots

LovelyPlots is a collection of matplotlib style sheets to nicely format figures for scientific papers, thesis and presentations while keeping them fully editable in vector graphics apps, such as Adobe Illustrator. 
GitHub | Killian Sheriff

Career

Academia versus Big Tech

9 months ago, Oliver Müller left academia for a Data Analyst position at Google. In this thread, he breaks down what he learned about Academia versus Big Tech jobs and why, ultimately, he's going back. This thread hit a nerve on Twitter and has had more than 20,000 likes on its first day.
Twitter | Oliver Müller

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