Credit where credit is due

It’s been heartening to see far more people giving credit on LinkedIn for their inspiration for their visuals, dashboards, techniques etc over the past few months.  Such a great thing to do!

The data community on LinkedIn is more interconnected than many realise. Instances of individuals misrepresenting or plagiarising others' work and content are depressingly common.

Recreating someone else's work as a method of learning is a fantastic way of enhancing your skills, but don’t then ruin it by trying to pass it off as your own.  It will not do your reputation any favours. Oooof, I've gotten onto my soapbox a bit early, oh well.

Top Crimes/Daft Crimes on LinkedIn

• Posting a very distinctive, well-known dashboard as your own.   Good call!
• Passing off Excel Cheat Sheets as your own with the original creator’s picture and name on the bottom.  Top work!
• Scraping someone else’s post word for word and reposting.  Vibe posting, nice!
• Posting a digital copy of a book and breaching copyright, this is just the worst, awful.

Unfortunately, LinkedIn don’t really seem to be bothered by this, so it is left to the community to police itself for now.  So big up to those who try and make a difference.

If you take inspiration from someone’s work, tag them

• People love to hear that their work or posts are appreciated.
• Others can benefit from you highlighting someone they weren’t aware of.
• You may start to build a bit of a relationship the tagged person, awesome!
• It’s the decent thing to do and you will likely connect with others who appreciate the content creator and your integrity.

The irony that I created the “I created this” image through ChatGPT is not lost on me, although OpenAI complaining that Deep Seek breached its intellectual property is more ironic surely.

Nothing is original

“The writer Jonathan Lethem has said that when people call something “original,” nine times out of ten times they just don’t know the references, or the original sources involved.”

That’s a quote from a wonderful book called Steal Like an Artist and we move onto some book recommendations

Books, Books, Books

The aforementioned Steal Like an Artist by Austin Kleon’s is a 144-page powerhouse for unlocking your creativity.  Great quotes abound, beautifully illustrated and fun.  One more quote for you

“The only art I’ll ever study is stuff that I can steal from.” – David Bowie

Another great book in this space is Chart Spark by Alli Torban.

Careless People: A story of where I used to work by Sarah Wynn-Williams

A book that has been getting a fair bit of buzz and attention is this memoir of how a young diplomat from New Zealand persuaded Facebook to create a job for her that she said they needed.  Charting the growth of Facebook alongside the personal and political fallouts of the behemoth. I’m a couple of chapters in, funny and absurd at times, by all accounts a wild ride.  The book has received criticism that some encounters have been embellished, but praised for accurately portraying how Facebook operated.

Time to show Excel some love again......

Do you have what it takes to win The Microsoft Excel World Championship UK 2025?

If you do, you then you go onto the World Champs in Las Vegas, December 2025.  Wowsers!

The UK Chapter of the Financial Modelling World Cup kick the UK Competition off on the 5th of April. 

If you want to check it out there are “insanely fun” free cases on the website and the season pass for 2025 is only 15 English pounds.  The season pass allows you to compete in the 3 virtual battle rounds that take place this year with the potential to attend and compete in the London in-person finals come September

Run by a great group of people Jaq Kennedy Elliott Paterson Harry G. Jonny Kennedy Harry Watson MMath AMIMA Myles Arnott Giles Male

I'm tempted to give it a shot but my Excel skills have atrophied so badly I'd prop up the table by being first loser!

Check it out below

ChatGPT releases a new image generation model

Brian Julius is doing a great job keeping us up to date with new LLM model updates, his recent post got me checking out the new ChatGPT image generation model which is a vast improvement on its previous iteration.

His post also includes a great LinkedIn carousel post by Tianyu Xu on this new engine and how to use it.

Decided to give it a shot myself and from the pictures below you can probably guess what movies and fiction books I tend to favour!

Other things I’ve liked this week 

The data behind gender gaps in the workplace 💼 by Flourish

Think Different – O’Reilly  Another great blog by Tim O’Reilly arguing that AI provides abundant expertise, it lacks true creative intelligence.

The Intelligent Worker newsletter consistently covers an amazing amount of AI tools, news and use cases.

The Signal newsletter is also superb in the AI space. Sunday’s edition also highlighted a great talk from the CEO of Coca-Cola on the criticism they faced from their Christmas advert being 100% AI-Generated. Starts at 24:00 if video doesn't start there automatically.

There's more

Datawrapper and Who decided British place names should be this confusing? by Jack Goodall

Shout out to Aurélien Vautier who is putting out consistently great dashboard design content on the Dataviz Clarity newsletter.  Check it out Linky Link

Another week and I highlight a post from John Amaechi OBE, this time a post on the 'crisis of masculinity'. This conversation was sparked by the Netflix show Adolescence. John was guest on the Moral Maze show which can be found in the LinkedIn comments.

On a lighter note, my attempts to discover other LinkedIn dance music fans continues so I'll share a mix I've been listening to all week. Lee Burridge's fantastic Monkey Project: Sunset Sessions mix on SoundCloud.

See you next week

DJ