ISSUE 275 · March 10, 2020

Insight

Exponential growth and epidemics

In this short explainer, Grant Sanderson takes a practical look at exponential growth, especially as it relates to epidemics. Most pressingly, here's how to know when an epidemic is coming to an end.
YouTube | 3Blue1Brown

Covid-19, your community, and you

With all the information going around regarding Covid-19, it can be hard to know what's hype and what's important. In this post, Jeremy Howard and Rachel Thomas offer a level-headed perspective of the situation, key reasons to be concerned, and what you can do to help.
fastai

Cultivating Algorithms

At StitchFix, data science isn't buried under some other team. It's a top-level department, which gives it a high level of accountability and influence within the organization. This is a must-read post that explores how that works, including details about specific roles and processes.
MultiThreaded

Tools and Techniques

COVID-19 epidemiology with R

Interested in playing with coronavirus data? This post highlights a few of the R packages that outbreak epidemiologists are using for data acquisition, wrangling and visualization.
R Views

What's so hard about PDF text extraction?

Extracting data from PDF documents can be a lot more complicated than you might think. In this post, the team at FilingDB walks-through some of the challenges they encountered while parsing tens of thousands of documents.
FilingDB

Model training libraries from PyTorch ecosystem

Jakub Czakon interviewed the creators and core contributors of popular model training libraries to get first-hand insights into their projects. This is a useful post that summarizes key aspects of each library and how they're each unique.
Neptune

451 Research: Mode increases the speed of better decision-making

Mode provides data experts with a code-based environment to build dashboards, develop machine learning models, analyze data, and discover insights more productively. Read the report.
// sponsored

Resources

COVID-19 - publications, data sets and clinical trials

This curated collection of resources from Dimensions is being updated daily. Also available as a Google Doc >>
Figshare | Dimensions

Data Viz

Visualization Grammar

Nice set of slides that's kind of a visual cheat-sheet for Vega's visualization grammar. Includes simple examples along the way.
Eitan Lees

Announcing Bokeh 2.0

Bokeh is a visualization library for creating interactive, web-based visualizations in modern browsers. It's a Python library that will work with any language that can generate the right JSON, including R via the rbokeh binding. Bokeh 2.0 is a major release that brings enhanced security options, new widgets, improved Jupyter integration, and more.
Bokeh

Conferences & Events

Metis Webinar | Exploring the Adoption of Python in the Workplace This webinar is a MUST for companies considering Python for data and analytics projects. Invite your team to learn why Python is popular in the data science community and how companies are reacting to the shift. We'll end with a live demonstration and Q&A. March 26, 12:00 pm ET.
Postponing Strata Data - Out of an abundance of caution, the Strata Data & AI Conference that's been planned for March 15-19 in San Jose, CA will not be happening. Instead, it's being merged with the Strata Data & AI New York event in September. Info here >>

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