Water, water, every where,
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Nor any drop to drink.
The other day I responded to a post on Linkedin. It was along the lines of “Hi, I’m new to working with data, I want to learn a little bit. Any advice?”
I blurted something in reply, “You could look here, or there or….” It seems as we’ve lived through (I use the word ‘lived’ cautiously) 2020, we have been bombarded with data. Much of this was already around us, but 2020 has given us time and space to see it. We’ve also seen some interesting hooks to draw us in. On the other page I noted the ‘Titanic Dataset Challenge’ on kaggle, we are starting to see the gamifaction of things – we see it already with Zwift and the like, in exercise, so we are starting to see this is other areas. Self-learning is a natural extension, I guess.
Anyway, ‘The Queen’s Gambit’ was a popular tv series – I will confess to not having seen it yet! – and just the other week Maven Analytics ( https://www.mavenanalytics.io/data-playground ) added a chess dataset to their data playground and offered up a challenge. Build the best dashboard summarising the data. I must add this to my ‘To Do’ list. There are also some other brillant datsets to play with and try your skills.
We have a gazzillion sources of data for Covid19. The UK government seems ot have been pretty good at posting data online – I am restricting myself to just a view of the data, no political opiniosn expresed here. In the US, John Hopkins has published datasets too, and across the globe we seem to have realised that data might help us get out of the pandemic. What was that quote from Lord Kelvin “If you can measure a thing, you can control a thing”. I have probably got it slightly wrong, but its 2021 and I think I can be indulged just a little.
Some datasets we can explore when we get time:
NHS England Covid19 Vaccinations
Maven Analytics Data Playground
There are plenty of others, I will try and get around to them and see what we can do.
Full Metal Aardvark 