Samples of Thoughts

I recently downloaded my own Facebook data and wanted to find out what kind of data gems I could find. There are some clear advantages when analyzing your own data, foremost, you’re the expert and know the “ground truth” behind the data. That said, there can still be big surprises! In my case, the most interesting parts of the analysis could be boiled down in two graphics. Since there’s also a time factor in the data, I thought this is a good opportunity to learn about animated plots and indeed, it works quite beautifully with the two plots. »

I recently stumbled across this data set about visa costs. It is a collection of visa costs for all countries for different kind of visas (tourist, business, work, transit, and some other visas). Each row corresponds to visa relations between a source country (the country applying for the visa) and a target country (the country issuing the visa) together with the cost for the different visa types. Since I had a bit of free time on my hand, I decided to do some “plotcrastinating”, play around with the data and try out some new visualizations. »

I recently participated in a hackathon organised by EU’s anti-disinformation task force where they gave us access to their data base. The data base consists of all disinformation cases the group has collected since it started in 2015. Their data can also be browsed online on their web page www.euvsdisinfo.eu. The data contains more than 7000 cases of disinformation, mostly news articles and videos, that were collected and debunked by the EUvsDisinfo project. »

In my data team at work, we’ve been using Docker for a while now. At least, the engineers in our team have been using it, we data scientists have been very reluctant to pick it up so far. Why bother with a new tool (that seems complicated) when you don’t see the reason, right? Until I was about to hold my Houseprice Talk again and wanted to make some small changes to my xaringan slides and nothing worked. »

The European Election is coming up and for the first time, I have the impression this election is actually talked about and might have an impact. I don’t remember people caring that much about European Elections in the years before, but this, of course, could also just be because I got more interested in European politics. Unfortunately, European politics are complex and this is also mirrored in the quantity of parties that are up for vote in Germany. »