Naked Data - All the data you can eat

Naked Data

All the data you can eat

RS Archer, the beleaguered British Brexiteers and their idiot son

A Twitter stream about a British family who bought a house in France, planned to retire there, and then voted for Brexit, went absolutely viral. Whether it's true or not is up for debate, but allegedly the account of RS Archer was shut down due to attacks from angry Brexiteers. Since the original...

Jason Norwood-Young

18 hours ago

Equal Access wants dataviz experts

Want to use your dataviz powers for good? Equal Access International is looking for someone to help it out for a few months producing visualisations for its Voices for Peace (V4P) project in the Sahel. It's project based work with some pretty gruelling deadlines in the brief, but can be done enti...

18 hours ago

Where to find first contact

Were you watching the skies last night for signs of intelligent life out there in space (because there's bugger all down here on Earth)? Us neither, for we failed to mark World UFO Day, the anniversary of the claimed UFO crash in Roswell. Turns out that there's surprisingly little in the way of g...

19 hours ago

The world’s breathing lung

Here's a quick hit of happiness for you: Alex Orenstein (or @oren_sa as he's known on the Twitters) knocked up this gorgeous timelapse of a year of vegetation growth in Africa. https://twitter.com/oren_sa/status/1274500538944675847

Jason Norwood-Young

19 hours ago

Wapo is hiring data journalists

In a sign of just how important visual reporting is to newspapers Stateside, the Washington Post has posted a job ad looking for coders and data storytellers to bolster its team. According to GIJN, Wapo is looking to fill 14 new positions with tech literate folks, at a time when other newsrooms a...

19 hours ago

Where have all the flowers gone?

When generations to come ask the question "who cut down all the trees", history teachers of the future will have a powerful tool to help compose a decent reply. The Trase Yearbook is a mighty effort to map global supply chains as they relate to deforestation, with data explorers for major commodi...

19 hours ago

Those who can do, teach

Rebeca Pop, founder of data viz lab Vislogue, interviews some of the data visualisation industry's superstar educators, to find out what they teach, and how. This is a great primer for anyone looking for an education in data viz, or anyone looking to teach it themselves. And just FYI, Alberto Cai...

Jason Norwood-Young

20 hours ago

The decline of the American empire, graphed

Somewhere in the last century, the United States took a massive misstep, unable to equitably share its prosperity between its people. Or, as the New York Times puts it in this fascinating piece on why the US lags behind other rich countries on key metrics, "In nearly every other high-income count...

Jason Norwood-Young

20 hours ago

How I learned to stop worrying and love the machine (with NYC Media Lab)

If you need a crash course on the state of technology and the media (and who doesn't), check out the MACHINES + MEDIA event, a series of five discussions with some very smart people about the state of our industry, where we're going, and what pitfalls and opportunities we have along the way. The ...

Jason Norwood-Young

yesterday at 05:25 pm

Free press versus the law

Dictators, fraudsters, and politicians take note: A great way to fight the free press and stop those annoying journalists from cutting into your profits is to simply sue them. The shocking news that the court case against Rappler's Maria Ressa in the Philippines was found guilty of libel has sent...

Jason Norwood-Young

a week ago

Indian-Chinese clash, from above

We live in a weird new world where we can watch the build-up to national military confrontations via satellite. The limited details of the clash between Chinese and Indian forces at Galwan Valley on 15 June, which left 20 Indians and an unknown number of Chinese soldiers dead, was fought with bat...

Jason Norwood-Young

a week ago

Can I speak to your manager?

Let's take some pressure off the Karens in the world, and spread the memes to similar names, like Kathy, Deborah, and Cheryl. The Pudding finds names that have had that spike that put Karens in a very particular space and time, giving them that memeability. (No accounting for Karen hair, though.)...

Jason Norwood-Young

a week ago

Don't Miss, My Corona

Six ways to classify coronavirus

How are different countries coping with the lifting of lockdown regulations? The Guardian has an interesting take on it, crossreferencing daily infections with restriction rates in the 45 countries with more than 25 000 cases. It's come up with six ways to categorise progress, from Relaxing and R...

a week ago

Fighting fakes on the India/China border

Remember when two nuclear powers led by twitchy ultra-nationalists at the brink of war used to be an epoch defining moment that would dominate world politics for decades? Ah, the good old days before coronavirus we guess. Nevertheless, there's still good call to be nervous about what's happening ...

a week ago

Growing AfricaR communities

In hindsight, February may not have been the best time to launch a network of Meetup groups dedicated to R programming across Southern Africa. Kudos to Forwards, the R Foundation taskforce for underrepresented groups, for doing it anyway. Chair of Forwards Dr Heather Turner has much to say about ...

a week ago

Miniaturised quantum entanglement on a cubesat in space

It's either the title of a next James Bond film or a remarkable piece of physics designed by a group of scientists from Singapore, the UK and Australia. Good news - it's the latter. This paper in Optica describes the process of throwing a tiny 2.5kg cubesat out of the International Space Station,...

a week ago

Attend the CIJ’s summer school online

Here's a great opportunity that's come about as a result of the travel lockdowns - the Centre for Investigative Journalism (CIJ) is hosting its annual summer school online. I was a regularly attendee before I left Blighty for warmer climes, and couldn't hand over my money fast enough for the fest...

2 weeks ago

Umbilical Ruminations

We read more news, and we may be starting to trust it more too

We're still poring over all the details of the annual Reuters Institute Digital News Report, which was released this week. It's a big document - the result of 80 000 interviews in 40 different countries, examining the attitudes and habits of audiences towards news brands. The positive findings ar...

2 weeks ago

Climbing to the heavens

Prepare to be smited, for humanity has learned nothing from the lessons of Nimrod about the foolishness of attempting to ascend to the Gods. According to Visual Capitalist's dataviz, we're building more super-tall skyscrapers than ever (mostly in China and UAE). And while it's unlikely they'll me...

2 weeks ago

Shifting disease detection to the left

The New York Times features an excellent long-read on data being used to fight epidemics, How Data Became One of the Most Powerful Tools to Fight an Epidemic. The article dives into the history of health data in the UK featuring William Farr, a welcome break from John Snow, who influenced him, an...

Jason Norwood-Young

2 weeks ago