Iva Brunec
@ivabrunec.bsky.social
data scientist in toronto / maps and dataviz / almost useless trivia knowledge https://ivabrunec.github.io/
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
My Password is Louvre@bmceuen.bsky.social · last yr.It would appear CNN was also at the eugenics conference? Why are all these mainstream news orgs at a 200-person event where all the speakers are eugenicists and racists? www.cnn.com/2025/04/11/u...
#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...
Inside a Powerful Database ICE Uses to Identify and Deport People 🔗 www.404media.co/inside-a-pow...
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...
404media.co
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...
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...
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...
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!
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...
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...
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.
‘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.
ctvnews.ca
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
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.
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.
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
Josh Scherr@joshscherr.bsky.social · last yr.Seeing a lot of genAI art used in the service of fascism lately
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
Dan Sohege@danielsohege.bsky.social · last yr.This is the inevitable outcome of transphobic ideology. It harms cis people as well as trans if you don't fit a stereotype. If you don't look or act a specific way conjured up in the minds of the gender critical brigade you are, what they consider, a fair target. www.thepinknews.com/2025/03/27/c...
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...
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?
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...
I don't know why, but the misspelling of principle/principal is really my biggest English language pet peeve.
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.
Am I losing it or is the process of moving a SQL runner query to a Looker dashboard completely unintuitive?
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...
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...
Brian Levine@brianlevine.bsky.social · last yr.Thrilled to see this paper out in @naturehumbehav.bsky.social after years of work by Drs. @diamondn.bsky.social and @stefsimpson.bsky.social, with Drs. Stuart Fogel, Daniel Baena, and Brian J Murray! @baycrestfoundation.bsky.social
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?
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...
joke's on you I DID 'go cry about it' and compassion has made me more powerful