The world is messy and complex, even overwhelming. How can we make sense of it all?

In a word: Data.

The quantity of data we currently collect is almost unimaginable. From the economy to health care to education, the data we collect can help us to analyze, understand, and improve the world.

Bamboo Weekly aims to help you improve your skills in data analysis by looking at news-related, real-world data with the Pandas library and Python programming language. Here’s how it works:

• On Wednesdays, I send a short description of the news item I want to investigate, a question I want to ask, and a data set you can use to answer it.

• On Thursdays, I send my solution to the problem, along with an explanation of why I solved it that way.

• In the comments, subscribers can discuss the question, my solution, and how else we might have solved it. I’m fully expecting to discover new features and options in Pandas, as well as techniques that I didn’t know about, from subscribers’ comments.

Here are the types of topics I plan to address in Bamboo Weekly:

• How can we calculate inflation?

• Which countries won significantly more Olympic medals in 2022 than they had in the past?

• What cities have seen a drop in rental prices in the last six months?

Questions? Suggestions for topics I should cover? Interesting data sets I should know about? Please send them to me at reuven@lerner.co.il.

I’m having lots of fun learning about the world, and about Pandas, with Bamboo Weekly. I hope that you’ll join me!