ISSUE 453 · September 19, 2023

Trends

Centaurs and Cyborgs on the Jagged Frontier

A recent study found that consultants using GPT-4 outperformed those who did not, by a LOT. But AI is weird. No one really knows the full range of capabilities of the most advanced LLMs, like GPT-4. No one really knows the best ways to use them, or the conditions under which they fail. And, unless you use AI a lot, you won’t know which is which. This is a key post to help you get the most out of these new tools.
One Useful Thing | Ethan Mollick

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Posts & Tutorials

Simple data pipeline powertools: sqlite, pandas, gnuplot and friends

For years, the European Central Bank has been publishing zip files of data every day. It's low tech but it's robust and it's popular. This is a great post that shows how to stitch together very simple tools to access and plot specific data from files like these across the Internet.
csvbase | Cal Paterson

SQL join flavors

There are three variations of JOIN defined in the SQL Standard but there's more to it than that. This post walks through five variations of JOIN, with examples that make it easy to see how they work and why you'd choose one over another.
Anton Zhiyanov

What Key is 'Hey Joe' in?

Nice tutorial that combines concepts from music, mathematics and physics. Ultimately, it shows how to determine the tonality of a given set of notes using a mathematical model for tonality known as the Spiral Representation. There's a lot here, including a Jupyter notebook, useful diagrams, and linked references along the way.
Alfredo Gonzalez-Espinoza

The intuition behind the Dirichlet distribution

Andrew Heiss's latest post explores the Dirichlet distribution using an intuition-based approach that uses lots of visuals and not much math. 
Andrew Heiss

Geolocating Sydney’s weirdest property

No matter who you are or where you are, there is probably enough data for a sufficiently motivated person to find you. In this post, Dean Marchiori shows how to use R and Open Street Map to geolocate a property in Sydney from just a photo and a tweet.
Dean Marchiori

Little Climate Pictures

This gallery of data-driven Little Climate Pictures kicks off a visualization competition that ends in November. Follow the links for step-by-step visualization tutorials and cleaned datasets for sea level, arctic sea ice, atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations and wildfire.
ESA Climate Office

Career

How the Best Chief Data Officers Create Value

Many organizations aren't large enough to warrant a Chief Data Officer (CDO) but for those that are, their CDOs often don't meet expectations and have short tenures. After in-depth interviews with 17 CDOs who are considered to be at the frontier of the role, this article explores the issues and what successful CDOs actually do.
Harvard Business Review | Suraj Srinivasan and Robin Seibert

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