Naked Data - All the data you can eat

Naked Data

All the data you can eat

The cost of the climate crisis

So it's going a few rands to retool our global grid networks and get carbon emissions down. But even if you don't believe it'll be worth saving trivial things like ice caps and Cape Town from sinking into the sea, the economic cost of not doing anything is staggering. How staggering? Vox Europe h...

2 weeks ago

How to turn an ice cream maker into an epic story

Can you turn a MacDonald's dessert into an incredible piece of longform journalism? Wired can, with this brilliant look at the conflict between the fast food giant and hacky startup Kytch. Kytch started out life as an all-in-one frozen yoghurt machine, but the founders pivoted when they discovere...

2 weeks ago

What gets copied 20 311 993.5 a week?

The answer is "code snippets from Stack Overflow". If you're a regular reader of Naked Data, the stats that have been published by the helpsite hosts may not surprise you (nor will the fact that the |html|css|tag is the most copied from). However, we bet you can't guess what the most copied code ...

2 weeks ago

Will SA’s action plan on gender-based violence work?

When it comes to femicide, gender-based violence and sexual abuse in South Africa, there's two things to know. There's a lot of it - more than anyone can know (see Jason's Rape Convictions page here) - and there's a lot of talk and little effective action at reducing its incidence. The latest gov...

2 weeks ago

Travel the globe, in music

The latest offering from The Pudding is designed to take you out of your geographic musical bubble. It's pretty clever the way it starts by describing musical tastes in your area, and compares it popular songs in nearby areas, but what I learnt most is that I don't share musical taste with neighb...

Jason Norwood-Young

a month ago

How Git works, in Javascript

I've seen some geeky stuff built in Javascript in my time, but this ode to the magic that is Git takes it to a new nerdgasm level. In 600 words plus Javascript code, Mary Rose Cook takes you on the inside tour of Git you didn't know you needed. If that's not enough for you, she's also got a 6,000...

Jason Norwood-Young

a month ago

AI or human? You be the judge

I was very proud that I got barely above average for this test that asks you to identify whether photos, text, music and artworks are produced by a bot or a human. It's really hard, and I found music by far the toughest to distinguish a machine from a real composer. Regarding music, the evil scie...

Jason Norwood-Young

a month ago

Don't Miss, Umbilical Ruminations

Vox knows why SA is still so segregated

Vox's 10-minute history lesson on South Africa's segregated past -- and present -- might be familiar to readers of Naked Data not just for a story we know all too well, but also because the maps look strikingly familiar. Adrian Frith's 2015 Dot Map is one data visualisation I keep going back to, ...

Jason Norwood-Young

a month ago

Who owns Kenya?

Figuring out who owns bits of land isn't as easy as it should be, but is vital for economic rights, addressing inequality and injustice, and meaningful environmental regulations. Which is why an alliance of Omdena, World Resources Institute (WRI), Code for Africa, and Stanford University are tryi...

a month ago

Cash for algorithms

Looking for someone to back your next big machine learning project? The African Center for Technology Studies (ACTS) has a whopping $1.7m dollars of funding for PhD scholarships availabile, and ICTWorks has all the details about who is eligible to apply.

a month ago

Can data help the “meningitis belt”?

Your correspondent learned two things from this story: 1) that meningitis affects a disproportionate across a belt of Africa north of the equator, and 2) that clever algorithms plugged into weather data might be able to reduce its severity. Read about the project to predict meningitis outbreaks, ...

a month ago

Fighting for facts with machine learning

We missed this one a couple of weeks ago, so will mention it now. Noble warriors against the forces of misinformation, Africa Check, has been using AI to bolster its assault on truth warpers throughout the continent. There's a short update on its success here.

a month ago

The bias of beauty products

The Pudding's new data essay on biases baked into the beauty industry's naming of shades, The Naked Truth, is very similar to its 2018 investigation into the diversity of makeup, but it's hardly like the problem has gone away. "A 2020 study investigating the connotations of foundation shade names...

Jason Norwood-Young

a month ago

Space Jam 2021 – just as slow as the original

The 1996 basketball movie Space Jam came with a very 1996 website, famous at the time for its rather ambitious graphics, and famous today for having survived unchanged for most of its 25-year life. However, there's a new Space Jam movie, which means a new Space Jam website. While it's not nearly ...

Jason Norwood-Young

a month ago

The data science cheat sheet

Data science is easy! Data scientists Terence Shin and Nathan Rosidi have managed to put everything you need to know for a data science interview onto one surprisingly concise page. It covers all the basics like linear regression, A/B testing, probability rules, and Bayes Theorem. It's useful for...

Jason Norwood-Young

a month ago

Welcome… to the Bob Ross virtual gallery

I can't use this Bob Ross Virtual Art Gallery without reading the text in a husky, sultry whisper. Bob Ross, for those who haven't turned on the Internet or watched sufficient daytime TV, was the host of The Joy of Painting, an eighties and nineties show where he would knock off impressive landsc...

Jason Norwood-Young

a month ago

Visualising Slack

Don't feel like you've got enough Slack in your life? You're probably in the minority, but you do need more senseless interruptions and a bigger message backlog, there's almost certainly a channel for you and your kindred spirits out there. Finding it just got easier with the new visualisation bo...

a month ago

Nice hobbitses

Russian TV station 5TV has published an adaptation of Lord Of The Rings: The Fellowship Of The Ring to YouTube, and while clocks in at a Jackson-worthy three hours in total (part one, part two) the production values simply have to be seen to be believed.

a month ago

Bad air bitcoins

Inevitably, the conversation at work this week turned to non-fungible tokens, which we're not going to try and explain because life is simply too short. But alarm bells are being sounded once again about the grand-daddy of crypto things, Bitcoin. A report in Nature Communications (précied in New ...

a month ago

Don't Miss, My Corona

The driving paradox

Coronavirus has been highly effective at relieving our roads of congestion, but it hasn't improved our driving much. The Economist reports that in the US traffic volumes dropped around 13% in 2020 compared to 2019, but road-related deaths were up by a massive 24%. Are people driving more reckless...

a month ago