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Iva Brunec

@ivabrunec.bsky.social
2.2K followers 458 following 158 posts

data scientist in toronto / maps and dataviz / almost useless trivia knowledge ivabrunec.github.io

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Reposted by Iva Brunec
Left Outside @leftoutside.bsky.social · 13/04/2025
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Maia @maiamindel.bsky.social · 12/04/2025
There's been a committed effort by people like Richard Hanania into mainstreaming race science and eugenics and it's, shamefully, mostly worked. Hanania in particular is a crude, blathering moron bigot using fourth rate statistics to justify his gutter bigotry
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Iva Brunec @ivabrunec.bsky.social · 10/04/2025
#30daychartchallenge day 10: multimodal. I could probably find activities with even more variability but I was curious about the shape of how Canadians tend to spend their days across age: work, school, sleep. Code: github.com/ivabrunec/30...
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404 Media @404media.co · 09/04/2025
Inside a Powerful Database ICE Uses to Identify and Deport People 🔗 www.404media.co/inside-a-pow...
404media.co
Inside a Powerful Database ICE Uses to Identify and Deport People
The database allows filtering according to hundreds of different categories, including visa status, “unique physical characteristics (e.g. scars, marks, tattoos),” “criminal affiliation,” license plat...
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Iva Brunec @ivabrunec.bsky.social · 06/04/2025
Taking some Sunday inspiration for day 6: Florence Nightingale day. I did a coxcomb graph of the amount of time Canadians spend on DIY projects, by month. Big month coming up. Code: github.com/ivabrunec/30...
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Iva Brunec @ivabrunec.bsky.social · 06/04/2025
A simple one for day 5 of #30daychartchallenge: ranking. A lollipop chart of the amount of time Canadians spend with different groups of people, at different ages. Code: github.com/ivabrunec/30...
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Iva Brunec @ivabrunec.bsky.social · 04/04/2025
Day 3 of #30daychartchallenge: circular. Circles in a circle. Is it good dataviz? No. But it is circular. Canadians' self-reported workaholic status, each circle = 1 person, size of circle = hrs of work. Basically, don't believe people who say they're workaholics. Code: github.com/ivabrunec/30...
Circle-packing dataviz depicting hours worked color-coded by workaholic-status.
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Iva Brunec @ivabrunec.bsky.social · 03/04/2025
Today in "Toronto's consultation process needs reform": the city sent me an invitation by mail to a consultation about a retroactive approval for an *enclosed front porch* about 5 doors down. Which we can't even see from the front or back of our house. Why should I get to weigh in on that!
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Iva Brunec @ivabrunec.bsky.social · 02/04/2025
Day 2 of #30DayChartChallenge: Slope. Canadians spent a *lot* more time alone in 2022 compared to 2005. But that comparison is especially stark for young Canadians. Code: github.com/ivabrunec/30...
Data visualization depicting a stark increase in self-reported time spent alone in the canadian time use survey from 2005 to 2022. Density plot below depicts two distributions with very different peaks.
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Iva Brunec @ivabrunec.bsky.social · 01/04/2025
I decided I'll try to make all my charts for #30DayChartChallenge this year from a single data source - the Canadian Time Use Survey. First up: Day 1 - Fractions. What % of Canadians don't get their 8h of sleep? Code: github.com/ivabrunec/30...
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Radley Balko @radleybalko.bsky.social · 30/03/2025
NYU canceled a planned speech by the former president of Doctors Without Borders because she planned to discuss the humanitarian crisis in Gaza and cuts to US AID. This is what actual campus censorship looks like.
ctvnews.ca
‘Climate of fear’: Montreal doctor says NYU cancelled her presentation
A Montreal doctor says her presentation at NYU was abruptly cancelled and believes the university did so out of fear of being pressured by the Donald Trump administration.
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Clive Thompson @clivethompson.bsky.social · 30/03/2025
Also, *because* these COBOL systems are old ... ... the code is *very* bug-free The maintainers have had decades to find and fix all the flaws in the system In contrast, as any developer will tell you, the newer a code base is ... ... the more bugs it's gonna have, the more it'll crash 3/9
Screenshot reading: 

"The sheer age of those COBOL systems is, oddly, actually something that works in their favour. Because they’re old, they have been relentlessly debugged. When a program is first written, it inevitably has problems. Sometimes it’s a typo, a misplaced command; other times, the user does something the programmer never expected, and things crash. When you get a new app, if it’s buggy and crash-prone, this is why: the creators sent it out into the world with lots of these little flaws. It can take days, weeks, or years to discover all the problems."
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Iva Brunec @ivabrunec.bsky.social · 29/03/2025
My cat was fully grey when he was found about 5 months ago. Now he's getting patches of orange which fully tracks because he's always behaved like an orange cat, brain cells-wise.
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Timothy Snyder @timothysnyder.bsky.social · 24/03/2025
If you accept that non-citizens have no right to due process, you are accepting that citizens have no right to due process. All the government has to do is claim that you are not a citizen; without due process you have no chance to prove the contrary.
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Kylie Cheung @kylietcheung.bsky.social · 27/03/2025
the AI studio ghibli graphic the White House just tweeted mocking someone's deportation actually filled me with a level of despair that i can't even put to words
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L @banalplay.bsky.social · 27/03/2025
I understand the purpose and utility of centering these incidents but it would be nice if people just cared because other people's lives were being ruined and not potentially their own
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Iva Brunec @ivabrunec.bsky.social · 27/03/2025
Text data from Amazon's annual reports for this week's #tidytuesday. A meteoric rise in how frequently the word 'billion' appears. (It's a looong graph!) Code: github.com/ivabrunec/ti...
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Iva Brunec @ivabrunec.bsky.social · 26/03/2025
With the rise of everyday LLM use, do we think people are getting better at describing things verbally, or just lazier and rely more on re-prompting? Or a third thing, purposeful and goal-driven alignment with LLM language to get the most out of prompts?
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Iva Brunec @ivabrunec.bsky.social · 26/03/2025
I'm a full week behind, but here's last week's #tidytuesday visualizing palm tree data: exploring a grid layout of many tiny polygons, each representing the shape and color of a fruit in the database. Code: github.com/ivabrunec/ti...
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Iva Brunec @ivabrunec.bsky.social · 25/03/2025
I don't know why, but the misspelling of principle/principal is really my biggest English language pet peeve.
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Zito @zeets.bsky.social · 24/03/2025
You don’t really have to frame the kidnapping, abuse, and humiliation of people as important and serious because it means the same could potentially be done to citizens. It can just be important and serious that people are being kidnapped, abused, and humiliated.
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Iva Brunec @ivabrunec.bsky.social · 17/03/2025
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kate wehwalt @katewagner.wehwalt.net · 17/03/2025
jesus fucking christ man
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Iva Brunec @ivabrunec.bsky.social · 17/03/2025
Am I losing it or is the process of moving a SQL runner query to a Looker dashboard completely unintuitive?
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Iva Brunec @ivabrunec.bsky.social · 16/03/2025
Played around with this week's #tidytuesday data on Pixar films & plotted the balance between runtime, Rotten Tomatoes, and Metacritic scores. Code: github.com/ivabrunec/ti...
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Nick Diamond @diamondn.bsky.social · 12/03/2025
Excited to see this big collaborative project out in the world @naturehumbehav.bsky.social ! Sleep actively enhances memory for the temporal sequence - but not sensory details - of our real-life experiences, even months-to-years later. 🧠 oscillations matter. Original 🧵: bsky.app/profile/diam...
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Iva Brunec @ivabrunec.bsky.social · 10/03/2025
Thinking about the concept of Severance as a wfh person. Would it be an 8h block no matter what and my innie and outie technically just share the house like roommates who never meet, or would a switch flip every time I left my desk to go bug my cat?
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Jacob Harris @jacobharr.is · 07/03/2025
I just had a horrifying realization about Elon's grand plans here. They're going to do a join on a several different data sets with different collection latencies, data quality practices, etc. They're going to act like all the data is perfect, the schema all match, there are no special cases...
It wasn’t immediately clear why DOGE sought the health agency’s database. But Musk’s team has expressed interest in recent days in checking personal tax records against federal benefits, grants and student loans — a measure that could enable it to link together traditionally siloed government systems to search for duplicative or wasteful payments.
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Ceej @ceejoyner.bsky.social · 07/03/2025
joke's on you I DID 'go cry about it' and compassion has made me more powerful
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Matthew Facciani @matthewfacciani.bsky.social · 03/03/2025
A study found that two-thirds of high school students couldn’t tell real news stories from ads on a website, and 96% failed to identify an organization's fossil fuel industry ties when assessing bias. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.3102/... #MisinfoResearch
journals.sagepub.com
Students’ Civic Online Reasoning: A National Portrait - Joel Breakstone, Mark Smith, Sam Wineburg, Amie Rapaport, Jill Carle, Marshall Garland, Anna Saavedra, 2021
Are today’s students able to discern quality information from sham online? In the largest investigation of its kind, we administered an assessment to 3,446 high...
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Peter @pjpscriv.co.nz · 01/03/2025
Fresh #dataviz tool find: this excellent notebook about color models - the detail is I N S A N E
observablehq.com
Perceptually uniform color models and their implications
This notebook was created as a learning exercise to teach myself about color theory. I have interleaved some lightly altered prose from a variety of sources which I found informative, which I have mad...
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c0nc0rdance @c0nc0rdance.bsky.social · 27/02/2025
Euryptids, or 'giant sea scorpions', were among the largest arthropods ever to have lived. For ~200 million years (Silurian to Late Devonian), they scuttled at the bottoms of oceans, lakes & swamps. Then they disappeared & only their cousins, the horseshoe crabs, remember their passing.
Size comparison of six of the largest eurypterids (sea scorpions). They are (from largest to smallest): Pterygotus grandidentatus, Pentecopterus decorahensis, Acutiramus macrophthalmus, A. bohemicus, Carcinosoma punctatum, and Jaekelopterus rhenaniae. Source Images: Compiled from these three comparisons by myself: Pterygotus, Acutiramus, and Jaekelopterus Pentecopterus Carcinosoma

CREDIT:  Slate Weasel, Wikimedia
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Iva Brunec @ivabrunec.bsky.social · 26/02/2025
Here's something I've been chipping away at for a bit. Hoping it's useful, but either way it exists! Sharing my thoughts and experiences for academics thinking about data science (or industry in general). ivabrunec.github.io/blog/academi...
ivabrunec.github.io
Data science is not a backup plan: Advice for academics thinking about industry
Disclaimer: This is subjective advice, as is all advice. What worked for me may not work for you. Anyone offering to give you tips that guarantee success if you pay them is almost definitely a grifter...
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ProPublica @propublica.org · 20/02/2025
NEW: Pregnancy became far more dangerous in Texas after the state banned abortion, according to ProPublica’s first-of-its-kind analysis, which found the sepsis rate for women hospitalized as they miscarried in the 2nd trimester shot up by more than 50%. propub.li/43487Tj
propub.li
Texas Banned Abortion. Then Sepsis Rates Soared.
ProPublica’s first-of-its-kind analysis is the most detailed look yet into a rise in life-threatening complications for women experiencing pregnancy loss under Texas’ abortion ban.
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The Local Magazine @thelocal.to · 20/02/2025
🧵 Our special election issue, “7 Years of Doug Ford,” is now live. From health care to education, online gambling to the Greenbelt, this is the best collection of stories about how the lives of Torontonians have changed during Ford’s time as premier. thelocal.to/7-years-of-d...
thelocal.to
7 Years of Doug Ford | The Local
After seven years in office, Doug Ford has left his mark on Toronto. From health care to education, online gambling to the Greenbelt, we examine the record of the Progressive Conservative leader seeki...
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Iva Brunec @ivabrunec.bsky.social · 20/02/2025
Toronto, man. Sent a polite but unhappy email to my councillor asking why pedestrians have to clamber over massive piles of snow courtesy of plows clearing the road (now pristine) and got back a snitty reply about how it was 55cm of snow. I know! It's all on the sidewalk!
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Meghan Harris, MPH @meghansharris.bsky.social · 18/02/2025
After 2 long years, I finally wrote a new blog post about git stashes! I am CONSTANTLY switching between branches at work, so I learned more than I would have liked about stashes, but admittedly, I can't work without them now! 📖 Git Stash for Newbies on The Tidy Trekker:
tinyurl.com
Git Stash for Newbies. – The Tidy Trekker
In this post, we’ll look at the basics of git stash, how to create and use Git stashes, why you’d want to use stashes in the first place, and other relevant things to know about git stash because…
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Iva Brunec @ivabrunec.bsky.social · 17/02/2025
I visited the prehispanic art museum in Oaxaca last week which really delivered on cool little guys as pottery
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Vicki @vickiboykis.com · 08/02/2025
previous thing I wrote on whether what we do is true software engineering vickiboykis.com/2022/12/05/t...
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J. Emory Parker 🏳️‍🌈 @jaspar.bsky.social · 07/02/2025
Here is what the censoring of data.cdc.gov looks like over time
Chart showing the rapid removal of 103 items from data.cdc.gov between Jan 31, 2025 and Feb 7, 2025
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David Ho @davidho.bsky.social · 07/02/2025
It's amazing that all cities don't do this.
fastcompany.com
A million cars have disappeared: What NYC is like after one month of congestion pricing
Congestion pricing began on January 5. One month in, traffic is down, public buses are faster, and transit ridership is up.
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Doug Henwood @doughenwood.bsky.social · 02/02/2025
Every time I read an interview with Judith Butler they sound so rational and humane, the opposite of the demonized caricature. english.elpais.com/culture/2024...
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danah boyd @zephoria.bsky.social · 01/02/2025
As the EOs and orders keep coming, I keep thinking of the exhibit in the Berlin Jewish Museum that displays the 962 anti-Jewish laws and policies in order as they came down. These kinds of drumbeats are designed not just to oppress but to normalize oppression. www.jmberlin.de/en/jmb-journ...
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David Ho @davidho.bsky.social · 30/01/2025
OpenAI Furious DeepSeek Might Have Stolen All the Data OpenAI Stole From Us
404media.co
OpenAI Furious DeepSeek Might Have Stolen All the Data OpenAI Stole From Us
OpenAI shocked that an AI company would train on someone else's data without permission or compensation.
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Iva Brunec @ivabrunec.bsky.social · 29/01/2025
Does anyone have a recent reference for how many graphs (not figures, individual graph panels) there are in an average scientific publication? The most recent number I can find is ~60 *per issue*, from 1994: link.springer.com/chapter/10.1...
link.springer.com
Graphs in Print
Diagrams for presenting quantitative data are an important component of print communication. Their rate of use is high and rising. This reflects in part the recent development of software tools for ge...
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Inori Roy @royinori.bsky.social · 29/01/2025
I wrote about the hypocrisy underlying our national conversation around housing. People & politicians blame immigrants for unaffordable housing (ignoring the real causes), then quietly rely on immigrants to fill the most precarious, low-paying jobs to build our housing supply.
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Dr. Jonathan Foley @globalecoguy.bsky.social · 09/12/2024
This is an astonishing statistic, which most people don’t appreciate. When we phase out fossil fuels, we can eliminate 40% of international shipping along with it.
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And, boo! 👻 @g026r.leftblank.org · 29/01/2025
Every now & then Toronto City Council likes to remind people that almost every single one of them drives in to work. Normally it's only during TTC debates. But sometimes they like to surprise you with it.
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Hugo Spiers @hugospiers.bsky.social · 28/01/2025
Yesterday's post on our @pnas.org study of London taxi drivers. Yellow lines = imagined journeys, described street-by-street. Some were 30 streets, which if using a tree-search over 26,000 possible states would take a very very long time. Daniel McNamee's models show how they compress this problem:
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