Introduction to Probability for Data Science is a free-to-download book by Purdue statistics professor Stanley H. Chan:

We need a book that balances the theory and practice. We need a book that provides insights and not just theorems and proofs. We need a book that motivates the students, telling them why probability is so essential to their work. We need a book that highlights the impacts of the subject. From over than half a decade of teaching the course, I have distilled what I believe to be the core of probabilistic methods. I put the book in the context of data science, to emphasize the inseparability between data (computing) and probability (theory) in our time.

Download a free PDF copy or buy a physical copy.

Here’s the good stuff for August.

Meteorologist Greg Dutra was delivering the daily weather news for ABC Chicago and accidentally discovered that his map was interactive when he touched the screen:

This wasn’t in the training manual! @TBrownABC7 @valwarnertv and I go OFF THE RAILS when I discovered the TV is a touch screen while on-air on @ABC7Chicago 😂 pic.twitter.com/almrdxqz3d

— Greg Dutra (@DutraWeather) August 4, 2022

It’s good, wholesome joy from a data display, in case you forgot what that looks like.

With a fun view of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Tristan Guillevin walks through a network of characters and movies from 2008 through 2012. Each white-filled circle represents a movie, and each black-filled circle represents a character, connected to the movie he or she appeared in.

See also the 3-D network by The Straits Times from a few years back that goes into more depth with interactions between characters.

When the FBI switched to a new data collection system, which relies on local police departments to report their numbers, about 40% of agencies didn’t switch over. The Marshall Project made an interactive to see who’s reporting data in your state:

Many criminologists fear the missing data means the nation would not get reliable crime data for years to come. If a local police department did not report crime data to the FBI, it would also mean scholars, policy makers and the public cannot compare what’s happening with crime in their community with other places.

It’s getting hot in cities around the world, each city with its own set of problems. The Washington Post combined all the problems into one fictional city called Meltsville. There are travel delays because the road is melting, bridges are cracking from heat expansion, and it’s generally a hard place to live.

Highlighting research by Xingying Huang and Daniel L. Swain, who studied “plausible worst case scenario” extreme storm sequences, The New York Times provides a glimpse of what that might look like in California. There are maps, there are charts, and there is an augmented reality view to put rain in your living room.

If you’ve eaten at a restaurant lately, you might have noticed a substantially higher bill than you’re used to. You’d be right to assume that it’s because of things like inflation and pandemic-induced prices, but you might not realize how much the cost of ingredients, labor, and a new takeout business model has gone up for restaurants. Priya Krishna and Umi Syam, for The New York Times, redesigned a single receipt to show a more detailed breakdown.

The receipt presentation and color-coded scrolling are tops. It’s a well-made table that works with the copy to highlight items.

Communicate to fewer people to reach more.

Dominic Royé mapped river discharge in Europe over the past few months:

A single map for the worst #drought in 500 years in Europe. The river discharge anomaly based on reanalysis data from June to August 12 2022, shows an average negative anomaly of -29%, even reaching less than -62% at some points. #rstats #dataviz pic.twitter.com/LSGMfS52Lm

— Dr. Dominic Royé (@dr_xeo) August 14, 2022

This climate change thing seems real.

Reuters goes with the radar chart to show gas supplies, as European countries prepare for the winter and possibly no gas from Russia. The circular shape shows the annual cycle, the gray shows the previous five-year average, and the blue shows the current year’s supply.

While reading this NYT article, by Jodi Kantor and Arya Sundaram, on the drawbacks of activity and time tracking for work, the article itself tracks your reading behavior. You see counters for the time you spend reading and scrolling, clicks, keystrokes, idle time, and active time. It comes complete with snippy comments and a final grade — and a bitter taste for productivity tracking.

Davey Alba and Jack Gillum, for Bloomberg, found that Google Maps commonly points people to crisis pregnancy centers, non-medical locations that encourage women to follow through with pregnancy, when they search for “abortion clinic”.

As part of a teaching initiative by Amazon, MLU-Explain is a series of interactive explainers on core machine learning concepts. Learn about training sets, decision trees, random forests, and more. Seems like a good way to spend a Friday night if you ask me.

Jon Keegan and Alfred Ng, for The Markup, identified 37 companies that collect data from connected cars. On where it goes and how the companies profit:

Once a driver gets into a car, dozens of sensors emit data points that flow to the car’s computer: The driver door is unlocked; a passenger is in the driver’s seat; the internal cabin temperature is 86° F; the sunroof is opened; the ignition button is pressed; a trip has started from this location.

These data points are processed by the car’s computers and transmitted via cellular radio back to the car manufacturer’s servers.

As the trip continues, additional information is collected: the vehicle location and speed, whether the brakes are applied, which song is playing on the entertainment system, whether the headlights are on or the oil level is low.

The data then begins its own journey from the car manufacturer to companies known as “vehicle data hubs” and on through the connected vehicle data marketplace.

Charles Piller, for Science, highlights the work of Matthew Schrag, who uses image analysis to look for falsified data, recently scrutinizing a link between a protein and Alzheimer’s:

“So much in our field is not reproducible, so it’s a huge advantage to understand when data streams might not be reliable,” Schrag says. “Some of that’s going to happen reproducing data on the bench. But if it can happen in simpler, faster ways—such as image analysis—it should.” Eventually Schrag ran across the seminal Nature paper, the basis for many others. It, too, seemed to contain multiple doctored images.

Science asked two independent image analysts—Bik and Jana Christopher—to review Schrag’s findings about that paper and others by Lesné. They say some supposed manipulation might be digital artifacts that can occur inadvertently during image processing, a possibility Schrag concedes. But Bik found his conclusions compelling and sound. Christopher concurred about the many duplicated images and some markings suggesting cut-and-pasted Western blots flagged by Schrag. She also identified additional dubious blots and backgrounds he had missed.

It just needs a little polish.

Serena Williams announced her retirement from professional tennis. As is required for any milestone by a great athlete, a step chart from The New York Times shows her world ranking over time.

I like the focus on the higher rankings, which is fitting for the occasion, and dotted lines that indicate the smaller chunks of time Williams ranked below 20.

We hear about electric vehicles being the future, but for that to happen, people eventually need to be able to drive long distances without getting stranded. For Bloomberg Green, Kyle Stock and Jeremy C.F. Lin frame this in the context of American summer road trip. If you drive a non-Tesla EV, you’re going to run into some challenges.

Using a combination of satellite imagery, crowdsourced databases, and analyses, The New York Times identified airstrips used for illegal mining in Brazil:

To confirm these locations and connect them with illicit mining, Times reporters built a tool to help analyze thousands of satellite images. They examined historical satellite imagery to determine that 1,269 unregistered airstrips still appeared in active use within the past year. They documented telltale signs of mining nearby, such as clear cut areas of rainforest and pools that miners use to separate dirt from ore. And they determined that hundreds of the airstrips in mining areas are within Indigenous and protected lands, where any form of mining is against the law.