Naked Data - All the data you can eat

Naked Data

All the data you can eat

Umbilical Ruminations

On information asymmetry

There's a comparison to be made between the murder of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police officers in the US last week, which has sparked nationwide protests, and Collins Khosa -- the Johannesburg resident who was allegedly killed by South African National Defense Force soldiers in Ap...

yesterday at 08:51 am

Don't Miss, My Corona

NHS gives its data away to some dodgy orgs

The Coronavirus has given the NHS the excuse to give its data to private firms to play with. One firm that is helping them -- out of the goodness of its black heart -- is Palantir, the CIA-funded group that helped Trump steal an election, used data to sniff out illegal immigrants for ICE, and did...

Jason Norwood-Young

yesterday at 08:14 am

One in ten of the world’s volcanoes are in Japan

There are more than 100 active volcanoes scattered across the islands that make up Japan. Some are very tall, some live entirely beneath the sea. Gotta catch 'em all? David Pire's interactive map charts their every location (although the unwary hunter should bear in mind it doesn't distinguish th...

yesterday at 07:45 am

Ten million dollars for data science!

Data.org is slapping down a very large load of cash -- $10,000,000 to be precise -- in order to help drag the world into a better state with data science. Its "Inclusive Growth and Recovery Challenge" is open to anyone over 18, (almost*) anywhere in the world, who reckons their data science solut...

Jason Norwood-Young

yesterday at 07:31 am

Mapping magnetism on Mars

Current space hype might be all focussed on a certain trip to the international space station made on a rocket developed in the private sector, but there's some stuff NASA will always do better than everyone else. Things like this distracting video based on data from the Maven spacecraft currentl...

2 days ago

Oh expensive gruntbuggly…

There, in the wood, among trees,He sees shadows on the way, hears voices,hears the wind and the rustling of leaves;Through an open gladeHe sees a shape and the shape hears:It waits as he waits,Waits as the shadows wait,As the voices wait;Shadows on the way, voices in the wind. It's not going to f...

2 days ago

Don't Miss, My Corona

A shiny new Covid-19 data portal for Latin America

The new Covid-19 Observatory for the Containment of Covid-19 in the Americas isn't your normal coronavirus dashboard. There's no R values or logarithmic expressions of death rates here. Rather, this project from Miami University is looking at the state of public policy and the movement of people ...

2 days ago

Don't Miss, My Corona

Silver linings

Lockdowns are lifting, but if the long term prognosis for coronavirus-related regulations and restrictions has you feeling down, maybe Happy Data can offer a pick-me-up. It's a project which aims to collect data around positive outcomes of the covid crisis, like an increase in volunteering and a ...

8 days ago

More machine learning for journalists

There's an emerging body of online resources designed specifically to help journalists master AI and algorithms, and its growing at a fair old pace. The latest entry comes from Google News Initiative and the Pols thinktank at the London School of Economics, and apparently is so sophisticated it c...

8 days ago

My Corona, Nerds

Are face masks invisible to algorithms?

The compulsory wearing of facemasks outside your home might be a deeply uncomfortable experience, but at least it's putting a stop to all those insidious facial recognition technologies privacy nuts have been banging on about for years, right? Not so, reckons Karan Bhanot, who's been playing arou...

8 days ago

The number of the beast

You don't have to have experienced the Great Migration up close to know that the annual manoeuvres of wild grazer herds is a thing of both great beauty and complete wanton destruction. To understand the former and limit the latter, Australian scientists are embarking on the "world's largest satel...

8 days ago

OpenUp re-invents, gets its data back

Two things of note from OpenUp: First off, it has asked us to tell you that it has rebranded. (We're not sad to see the back of that egg tbh.) The second is that, in case you wondered where the hell the data portal went, it's back -- this time as a ckan instance so that corporate sponsors who off...

Jason Norwood-Young

8 days ago

Build a website for your favourite charity

This year's Do_Action hackathon moves online, so you can build Wordpress websites for South African charities in nothing but your undies. Teams of six work intensely for a week to deliver a brand-spanking-new Wordpress website for one of ten non-profits.

Jason Norwood-Young

8 days ago

Do Not Draw a Penis

There's really not much to say about this drawing AI without giving away the joy of exploring it yourself, except that, as per the title, you were warned... Don't draw a penis now...

Jason Norwood-Young

9 days ago

The source of Kenya’s Covid-19: Not China

You'll be surprised to discover (or at least I was) that the majority of Kenya's Corona-cases didn't originate in China. Only two in five imported infections came from Asia at all, Odipo Dev reports. The biggest source of imported Coronavirus cases? The United Arab Emirates, accounting for nearly...

Jason Norwood-Young

9 days ago

Scraping soccer

It's fair to say that R isn't the language of choice for heavy duty web scraping. but ACDI/VOCA's Ryo Nakagawara has a neat tutorial for harvesting football stats which proves that it's not just possible, but pretty straightforward to do with the rvest libraries. There's some suggestions about ho...

3 weeks ago

Parks and recreashRon

This deep fake is the bastard child of Being John Malkovich and Parks and Recreation. And now that the opening credits have been created, it's also the spin-off show you never realised you needed to see. Swanson, Swanson, Swanson, Swanson. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4xtgfQR9Ozc

3 weeks ago

Don't Miss, My Corona

Simulating our way out of Covid-19

Of the Coronavirus explorables, this is by far my favourite. On the one hand, it does what many of the other simulators do -- gives you a curved graph that we're all becoming very familiar with. But it takes this so much further, simulating the effects of increased hygiene, social distancing, tra...

Jason Norwood-Young

3 weeks ago

Don't Miss, My Corona

Plandumbic

ProPublica investigative journalist Marshall Allen speaks to both the Plandemic filmmaker Mikki Willis and interviewee Judy Mikovits for their comments, because that's what a journalist does.

Jason Norwood-Young

3 weeks ago

csv,conf, virtually

If there's a positive to the Coronavirus, it's made conference attendance equitable. The most important open data conference on the annual calendar, csv,conf, went virtual this year, and apart from the difficulties in scheduling it at a decent time for everyone, it went pretty damn smoothly. I'm ...

Jason Norwood-Young

3 weeks ago