Data Links #56

How-to

• Implementing your own recommender systems in Python.

• If you use ggplot2 (and really, you should), here's The Book, courtesy of the author himself

• An illustrated introduction to the t-SNE algorithm.

Tech

• Artificial intelligence produces realistic sounds that fool humans.

Researchers from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) have demonstrated an algorithm that has effectively learned how to predict sound: When shown a silent video clip of an object being hit, the algorithm can produce a sound for the hit that is realistic enough to fool human viewers.

• An AI wrote this movie and it's strangely moving.

Sunspring isn't the product of Hollywood hacks—it was written entirely by an AI. To be specific, it was authored by a recurrent neural network called long short-term memory, or LSTM for short. At least, that's what we'd call it. The AI named itself Benjamin.

• Scientific journal subscription costs in Finland 2010-2015: a preliminary analysis.

Finland becomes to our knowledge the first country where annual subscription fees for all individual publishers and all major research institutions have been made available, spanning the years 2010-2015. Similar information has been previously released for some, but not all publishers and research institutions in the UK and US; and related activities are ongoing in several countries [...]

Here I provide a brief preliminary analysis of the data on journal subscription fees that was collected and released by the Ministry of Education Open Science Initiative in Finland. I have abbreviated some terms as detailed in the source code of this analysis is maintained in Github.

• Why predicting a mass shooting is mathematically impossible.

Visualizations

• Brexit monitor.

• This is how banks get too big to fail.