July 30, 2025

Dear Reader,

Welcome to the 287th edition of the Data Science Briefing! This week, we continue celebrating the 6th anniversary of this humble newsletter!

We’re proud to announce that a brand new Data Visualization with Python on-demand video is now available on the O’Reilly website: Python Data Visualization: Create impactful visuals, animations and dashboards. This in depth tutorial is almost 7h in length and covers fundamental and advanced usage of matplotlib, seaborn, plotly and bokeh as well as tips on how to use Jupyter widgets. Check it out!

The latest blog post on the Epidemiology series is also out: Demographic Processes. In this post we explore how to include birth and death rates in your epidemik models. Check it out!

This week’s newsletter offers a diverse look into the evolving landscape of data science and machine learning, from practical storage solutions to cutting-edge research and development. Anthropic’s teams are leveraging Claude Code, their agentic coding tool, to accelerate workflows across disciplines: from data scientists efficiently navigating massive codebases and visualizing data without needing to program in JavaScript, to marketers automating the generation of hundreds of ad variations within minutes. This showcases how AI is breaking down barriers between technical and non-technical work, enabling teams to prototype and automate complex processes with ease.

On the infrastructure side, an innovative approach to bulk storage describes how using Linux’s Logical Volume Manager (LVM) to cache frequently accessed data on SSDs, while maintaining HDDs for larger, slower storage, can blend speed and cost-effectiveness for large projects and local AI workloads. And as AI’s reach expands, new research reveals a dramatic effect on web traffic: Google’s AI Overviews, now a regular part of search results, have been shown to nearly halve click-through rates to external websites, signaling a significant shift in how users access information and raising fresh questions about the future of digital content and web traffic.

Recent academic and industry research offers remarkable insights into the frontiers of AI, public health, and neural architectures. An ambitious, data-driven study mapping three decades of urban life shows how AI and computer vision are transforming our understanding of public spaces, revealing faster pedestrian movement and shorter gatherings in major U.S. cities. Meanwhile, a systematic review of mathematical models from SARS outbreaks compiles hundreds of parameters and risk factors, painting a clear picture of the disease’s high fatality, transmissibility, and its propensity for superspreading, a resource designed to inform future pandemic responses. At the edge of neural networks, new work introduces curved statistical manifolds to model “explosive” phase transitions and enhanced memory capacity, pushing classical associative memory frameworks into novel, non-linear territory.

Also making waves: a provocative analysis on large language models (LLMs) challenges their Bayesian credentials, showing that while they approximate Bayesian behavior on average, they systematically violate key theoretical properties in individual cases. Finally, a new Hierarchical Reasoning Model, inspired by multi-timescale processing in the brain, is outperforming much larger models on reasoning tasks, renewing hopes for architectures that enable general-purpose, robust problem solving. These advances collectively point to an AI and data science landscape that is rapidly growing in both sophistication and cross-disciplinary impact.

This week’s book is “Behavioral Network Science: Language, Mind, and Society” by T. T. Hills. You can find all the previous book recommendations on our website. In this week’s video, we have Paul Dirac and the religion of mathematical beauty!

Data shows that the best way for a newsletter to grow is by word of mouth, so if you think one of your friends or colleagues would enjoy this newsletter, go ahead and forward this email to them. This will help us spread the word!

Semper discentes,

The D4S Team