Naked Data - All the data you can eat

Naked Data

All the data you can eat

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

yesterday at 10:34 pm

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

yesterday at 10:28 pm

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

yesterday at 10:21 pm

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

yesterday at 10:03 pm

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...

yesterday at 08:18 pm

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.

yesterday at 08:08 pm

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, ...

yesterday at 07:59 pm

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.

yesterday at 07:52 pm

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

8 days 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

8 days 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

8 days 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

8 days 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...

8 days 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.

8 days 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 ...

8 days 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...

8 days ago

The eternal grocery war

Finally! Someone has answered the question whether it's better to shop at Woolworths or Pick 'n Pay. Retail price tracker Trundler compared the price of a fruit and veg basket of 11 items over time for Woolies and PnP during the Coronavirus pandemic. And at first, Pick 'n Pay looks like it's easi...

Jason Norwood-Young

3 weeks ago

Don't Miss, My Corona

Please stay patient, your vaccine will be ready in 16 years

MediaHack, the org who brought us the South African Coronavirus Dashboard, has released a new tracker that would be depressing if it weren't so amusing. (Or maybe that's the other way around...) The Vaccination in SA calculator estimates how long it will take to inoculate 67% of the population fr...

Jason Norwood-Young

3 weeks ago

Less than half of the New York Times’ front page is news

Tom Cleveland, who's interests clearly overlap a little with my own (data + news), has been quietly scraping the New York Times to answer two questions (so far -- it's an ongoing project): How does the New York Times A/B test its headlines? And how much stuff on the NYT's front page is actually n...

Jason Norwood-Young

3 weeks ago

The robots are coming (again)

Keen to experiment with machine learning for storytelling? JournalismAI is hosting three new Collab Challanges, in which it will match up teams of five (or so) newsrooms and academic institutions to work on experiments in news products. Applications for African organisations close on 5 April...

3 weeks ago