Sondre Ulvund Solstad
@Sondreus
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@TheEconomist Senior Data Journalist & @Harvard University @IQSS affiliate Data/sims/models ➡️ articles++ | rarely here so use: sondresolstad @economist .com
London, UK
Joined May 2009
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Where in Russia do people oppose the war? I tracked the use of protest hashtag #нетвойнеI ("no war"), and found opposition in all of Russia’s 50 largest cities, in all 11 time zones and in 83 out of 85 federal subjects.
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In Vladimir Putin’s Russia, holding a blank piece of paper can land you in jail. Helped by
@OvdInfo
, I analysed the latest data on anti-war protest in Russia.
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What is the pandemic's true death toll? After months of work, we are launching our daily updating estimate of excess deaths around the world. With official deaths at 4.5m, I estimate the true tally to be between 9.3m and 18.1m, as of today
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It has been months in the making, but it is finally ready. For this week's issue of
@TheEconomist
, we have used thermal imaging and radar to provide an entirely new view of the war
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I was just named Data Journalist of the Year! I won the award for what the judges called "pioneering" work using satellites to cover war. Huge thanks go my colleagues at
@TheEconomist
who make my work possible. More here
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Very happy to say that
@TheEconomist
's Data team has launched an open "call for papers" for
#research
on any topic. We are looking for exciting and important new studies - if that sounds like your work, please send it to us
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What would "veganuary" for everyone, all year round, look like from space? I had a look at the numbers, and found that it could free up roughly 1/3 of all habitable land.
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In this week's issue of
@TheEconomist
, I take a look at the latest research on greenhouse gas emissions. I find that cows are slow-cooking all of us.
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More Russians are asking Google “how to leave Russia” than have done so in the last 18 years since such data became public. We used search data from the country to track discontent:
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On
@TheEconomist
's cover this week: our model of the true death toll from covid-19 (1/23)
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Ukraine is outgunned and outnumbered, but not, I find, as much as some numbers suggest. As clashes continue, it appears to have inflicted more casualties in the first 24 hours than Russia suffered over eight years of engagements in Syria.
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Has Twitter's algorithm treated politicians on the right unfairly? The data, as far as I can tell, suggests yes. It has tended to give them a greater boost.
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Certainly, here is a possible tweet about your article: Over 10% of science is now, in part, written by LLMs. Let’s delve into the data
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For this week's issue of
@TheEconomist
, I had a look at a gigantic multi-year experiment run by
@Twitter
. (If you are reading this, you probably participated.)
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Our Ukraine war tracker is now live. Using data from satellites and a custom machine-learning-based algorithm, it updates several times daily. You can check it here:
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Our model of excess deaths around the world allow fair comparisons. I found that adjusting for population, the death rate is now about eight times higher in America than in the rest of the rich world.
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Do top football players who get covid-19 ever fully recover? Among the best of the best, even a tiny drop in performance matters. We looked at the latest research:
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If politicians want to loot, they often bring flags.
For this week's cover of
@TheEconomist
, I investigated links between paranoid nationalism and corruption.
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What is the extent of destruction in Gaza? Our analysis suggests at least 92,000 people will have no home to return to when the fighting stops.
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How do you compare foods’ greenhouse-gas emissions? My solution is bananas. Check out your favorite food - by weight, calories, or protein - in our interactive chart
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No reliable data is available on how many people continue to attend protests. But the number of arrests appears to have slowed. Between March 9th and 20th, there were 1,065 documented arrests, compared with 14,009 in the two weeks prior.
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There is no question about the bravery of Iranian protesters. But what is less clear is how widespread the protests are, if they are still growing - and how they might end. I looked at data on tens of thousands of events to find out (charts:
@_rospearce
)
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Sometimes a chart needs 1m points to make just one.
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How many Russian soldiers have died in Ukraine? The answer matters: both to understand how the war has gone so far, and how it might proceed.
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These two maps tell two very different stories of the pandemic - only one of them is not dependent on testing which many poor countries cannot afford:
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Is violence on the Lebanon / Israel border spiraling out of control? I built a system to automatically map the fighting. It suggest that currently, the answer is no.
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I wrote a short piece about Omicron. By my rough estimates, informed by input from
@TWenseleers
, Omicron infections are now in the hundreds of thousands.
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An updated look at the latest Russian war dead estimates - Russia has probably lost more soldiers in the past 17 months than it did in the preceding 70 years.
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The situation in Sudan has been getting worse, fast. How bad? The limited information coming out of the country tell of shelling, mass graves, and burned villages. I looked at what the satellites could tell - and it was much worse than I imagined.
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Opportunity:
@TheEconomist
's Data team has an open "call for papers" for
#research
on any topic. We want to share the insights of exciting and important new studies - if that sounds like your work, please take 2 minutes to send it to us
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The pandemic is changing. For people relying on
@TheEconomist
estimates of the pandemic's true death toll, here is how we keep up.
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Just won the Future of Media award! Very happy to accept the award for data journalism together with
@AlexSelbyB
for "The pandemic's true death toll"
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In this week's "Off the Charts", I write about how
@TheEconomist
uses voting data to detect election fraud. Wonder where we found it? Sign up for the data team's weekly newsletter here:
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@shashj
Perhaps of interest:
@jonasgahrstore
shared estimates of Russian casualties with Putin directly a few days ago in their call (Putin had no comment).
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Using two satellite-based systems, we have calculated the intensity of fighting and degree of physical destruction in every corner of the country
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The first 30 days of Ukraine's counter-offensive, as seen from space:
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Happy to share that
@TheEconomist
's Data team has an open "call for papers" for
#research
on any topic. We are looking for exciting and important new studies - if that sounds like your work, please send it to us
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For ten days, there were no death counts reported from Gaza. The reason was however a lack of data rather than dead. I had a look at the new numbers and their reliability. They imply total dead could now be over 20,000, of which over 8,000 are children.⬇️
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We are
#hiring
! The Economist's data team is offering a one-year paid traineeship to an aspiring political data journalist. Details at the link below. If you think the right person might be someone in your network, do share:
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Our cover this week. The methods to help malnourished children and mothers are proven and cheap. Implement them at scale, and their benefits could, I project, be in, and last, over 400m lifetimes
If babies are not fed well, starting in the womb, their brains don't develop properly. This problem is widespread—but would be cheap to fix
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Glad to present
@TheEconomist
efforts to uncover the pandemic's true death toll this afternoon. Thank you for the invite
@WHO
.
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Massive activity all along the front line currently, as well as at the Belgorod border: over war-related* 1200 high-temperature events were detected by our system in the past 24 hours. No sign in this data that things are slowing down
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That includes deaths to covid-19, but also those lost to overburdened hospitals - and lives saved due to fewer ill with influenza. Rather than trying to distinguish between types of deaths, our approach is to count all of them
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I had a look at the sequencing data to track the spread of the delta mutation. Evidence suggests it may soon be the most prevalent strain in America, France, Germany, Italy, Mexico, South Africa, Spain and Sweden, among others.
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I see many claims floating around, but according to Twitter's own data from an experiment involving 58m users, their algorithm has in the past favored political parties on the right. ⬇️
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Do you want your research to be written about in
@TheEconomist
? Please send it to us. Our submission platform is 100% open and details are at the link - please feel free to share this with you network
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To read our analysis, and see which outlets and parties were amplified the most by Twitter's algorithm, check out the link below:
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In addition, at least 39 have been arrested for social media posts. As I documented a few weeks ago: dissent there has been widespread
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The organization has documented over 15,000 arrests in Russian anti-war protests, in 168 locations across the country.
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Ukraine war activity - in terms of fire events probably corresponding to heavy shelling - is now at the highest detected level since the invasion began. See where + caveats here:
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I wrote about the Delta variant, rapidly gaining dominance at the expense of other mutations of sars-cov-2 (chart shows why). June 11 PHE brief found increased transmissibility, hospitalization risk, and resistance to vaccines relative to other mutations.
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Where countries build their military bases suggest what they plan to do with them. I had a look at every military airfield built or expanded in China in the last decade--and what I found is good news
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A bit of good news amid much gloom: tools to fight malaria are getting better. For this week's issue of
@TheEconomist
, I calculate that using them could avert 20m deaths over the next two decades.
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Estimating excess deaths for every country in the world, for every day, for multiple years, is a complex process. We are 100% transparent: you can view all our data, estimates, changelog, and code here
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How many Russian soldiers have died in Ukraine? Estimates vary, so I collected all of them. By my calculations, the latest figures imply 1% of Russian men under 50 have been killed or wounded in Ukraine in the past two years.
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The big push of Ukraine's counter-offensive appears to be over, my data suggests. Activity, as far as I can detect, is down 90% compared to late September.
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A common tale of the pandemic has also been one of "waves": but our data suggest that globally, there has been a gradual rise, with one exception: India's delta wave, which we estimate killed millions (global wave below)
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@MaxCRoser
Thanks for sharing
@MaxCRoser
. To everyone: feel free to suggest improvements to our model here - it is 100% open source.
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These arrest figures are all lower bounds. Without access to internal government tallies, should these even exist, the OVD-Info’s data can only capture part of the picture of Mr Putin’s crackdown on dissent.
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Is Ukraine's counter-offensive about to be transformed from a slow slog to a sudden rush? My analysis, just out:
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@olliecarroll
FWIW we also detected abnormal fire activity within the city for the first time in weeks recently. Though most fire activity picked up by satellites is north of the city
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More here, including on why the drop in arrest numbers in recent weeks should not surprise.
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One month ago, we called on researchers to send us their best work. Today, I'm happy to say that an
@TheEconomist
is featuring a "call for papers" submission for the first time: a fascinating study of "wolves’ passports", "enemies of the people", and skills of former prisoners.
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It matches this to over 100 other indicators, and then uses a machine learning algorithm to project excess deaths where they are unknown. That was, for instance, the case for India as a whole
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Beyond it, the model uses total mortality data from 82 countries, as well as subnational data from Jakarta. Much of it collected by
@ArielKarlinsky
in his datasets
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In their study, researchers at Twitter found that the algorithm favors right-wing parties: giving tweets from these parties' legislators a larger boost than it does for those on the left. Audience with algorithm compared to with "old-school" feeds below (see e.g. Britain, US):
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For all my projects, I have uploaded full replication code and data on Github (unless I legally or ethically can't). You can find the code and data behind our excess death model here: (23/23)
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And that was just from a small sample: I could geolocate less than 5% of #нетвойнеI posts on Twitter and Instagram (I collected 51,773 in total).
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Honoured to receive a commendation from the
@RoyalStatSoc
yesterday for excellence in investigative journalism, together with team at
@TheEconomist
:
@MatterofMatt
@Eaterofsun
@martgnz
@DanRosenheck
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@EricTopol
Thank you sharing this
@EricTopol
. Should anyone seeing this have questions about our methods and these estimates, I can answer them.
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How different is Omicron? A new study suggests it is the start of an entirely new virus cluster, a first since the pandemic began.
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Using such other data, we can also view the pandemic death counts in new ways. Here are two: estimated excess deaths per population over 65 years old, and implied infection fatality rates
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A true tally of 2 to 4 times the official one might seem striking enough. But knowing where the uncounted victims of the pandemic are is important too
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The current overall official toll in India is less than 450 thousand: we estimate the true tally to be between 1.1m and 7m
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(The code and data is available here)
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They found the same held for right-wing media in the US. I recommend reading their very interesting research in full here:
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Just shortlisted for Data Journalism of the Year at the
@Wincottfound
Awards! Team effort with
@ARobertsjourno
@garamnd
@MatterofMatt
@bofrankln
and
@futuraprime
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All this work allowed me to estimate excess deaths that were unknown. Official data suggest 3.3m have died so far: I found the most likely number to be 10m, with a likely range of 7-13m (20/23)
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For 99% of Twitter users, a deep learning algorithm decides. What difference does that make? Our analysis suggest more right-wing politics and less reliable media sources.
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@LuisRMartinezA
@TheEconomist
A pleasure to feature this
@LuisRMartinezA
. To everyone: I am always on the lookout for excellent and important new research to share with our readers - please send papers my way.
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You can also look up individual countries and regions, and compare them: Here is the US vs EU, per 100k population
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In a bit of personal news, I'm now an affiliate at
@IQSS
, in addition to and hopefully complementing my role
@TheEconomist
.
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This data can only provide a broader context.
@TheEconomist
team in Ukraine follows the situation on the ground. See our latest report from Kyiv here:
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You can read the full piece here - which includes an introduction to this work through the battle for Antonov airport, maps of destruction in individual cities, and more on what the fire data tell
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Latest update: people with damaged or destroyed homes is now at 281,000 -- 11.1% of all buildings.
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I developed a machine learning algorithm that uses pre-war patterns in fires to investigate those which have taken place since the fighting began. It classifies fires in excess of plausibly normal activity as related to the war
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These online protests are not without risk to the people engaging in them. More here:
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Those joining the movement have included Ivan Urgant (who saw his tv-show taken off the air) and
@lachesisq
, who wrote on Twitter: "History has seen many Black Thursdays. But today is blacker than the others. #нетвойне
#saynotowar
"
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@james_acton32
(i.e. not PDF - though if you have a PDF with the PDF, that would be welcome too)
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