Milan's Data Science Insights #005

Welcome to Issue #005! Let's kick it off with some timely data science topics.

1. UEFA Euro 2024

The 2024 UEFA European Football Championship is going full blast, so before the championship is over, make sure to check my Python tutorial on how I created the UEFA Euro 2024 Map featured on Towards Data Science. For more data science on soccer, you can find the FIFA World Cup 2022—The Network Edition on Nightingale. Additionally, two fresh titles from the ArXiv for all those soccer fans out there - The myth of declining competitive balance in the UEFA Champions League group stage and?UEFA Champions League entry is incentive incompatible again from the 2024/25 season.

2. Tutorials

Since my latest newsletter, my YouTube tutorial channel has taken off - thank you, everyone, for watching my videos! With two new videos per week, there are already six episodes - check them out:

- #001 - Introduction to GeoPandas

- #002 - Making Shapely Smile

- #003 - River Maps

- #004 - Top5 Favourite Python Lines

- #005 - Raster Population Maps

- #006? - Public Transport Stops

3. Courses

After my geospatial data science course, many of you have asked me how to get on board with Python. My answer is finally here - as I launched my first course on Udemy: INTRODUCTION TO PYTHON - Python for Geospatial Data Science, which is a 3.5-hour-long video course with supplementary code on getting started with Python from the beginning. Hope to see you there!

4. Research Paper Digest

And now it is time for the latest digest on interesting articles and publications around data science, geospatial data, and network science:

• The summer heatwaves are here in the northern hemisphere - an eye-opening piece connecting to that by Dimitrova et al., Temperature-related neonatal deaths attributable to climate change in 29 low- and middle-income countries. As the paper states, “4.3% of neonatal deaths were associated with non-optimal temperatures. Climate change was responsible for 32% (range: 19-79%) of heat-related neonatal deaths, while reducing the respective cold-related burden by 30% (range: 10-63%)”

• A review new paper, Reviewing climate change attribution in UK natural hazards and their impacts by researchers from Bristol and Exeter, assesses 29 different natural hazard types falling into the categories of temperature-, wind-, and water-dominated, from flash floods to freezing rain. An interesting read for everyone working with weather data.
• On the urban planning note, a fresh paper from Nature Cities, Worldwide delineation of multi-tier city–regions, sets up to quantify the different tiers of urban centers based on their population, and using catchment analysis, show that more than half the people on the planet can reach at least one type of urban center within three hours, illustrating a striking interconnectedness in the global urban ecosystem.
• An enormous effort by Yu Dong in her piece 330 Weeks of Data Visualizations: My Journey and Key Takeaways where she wraps up more than five years of her life via data and awesome Tableau visuals and the catchy dataviz details about the initiative called Makeover Mondays.

• Fresh from the ArXiv, Wang et. al shared their work titled Intercity Connectivity and Urban Innovation, an attempt to link network science and economic output of cities: "Here, we map intercity networks for the world's two largest economies (the United States and China) to explore whether a city's position in the networks of communication, human mobility, and scientific collaboration explains variance in a city's patenting activity that is unaccounted for by its population."

• A nice summer coding mini-project on Towards Data Science by P. Jadhav following A. Karpathy’s work: GPT from Scratch with MLX - Define and train GPT-2 on your MacBook. I can’t wait myself to test this.
• Connecting to this issue’s timely topic, soccer, here comes an absolutely unique data visualization experiment on soccer - From Data to Yarn: Crocheting the Russian Football League’s 2022/23 Season by Anna Ivashechkina, who crotcheted 16 soccer figures, each with a particular design characterizing the club and its performance over the season (number of points, goals, dry matches, cards and so on).
• Finally, a fresh mapping project from the Visual Capitalist - Mapped: Highest and Lowest Doctor Density Around the World ranks global countries based on the number of doctors per capita.

5. Random

To wrap this issue up, here comes the usual random topic - a data science salary survey and world map by 365DataScience. Do you find these figures accurate? Let me know!

Until next time,

Milan