Naked Data - All the data you can eat

Naked Data

All the data you can eat

Don't Miss, My Corona

Have 19 out of 20 Covid cases gone undetected?

Official stats record just over 650 000 confirmed cases of Covid-19 in South Africa, but the question epidemiologists around the world are struggling to answer is how many cases have there been that we don't know about? Discovery Health boss Ryan Noach has crunched some numbers and come up with a...

a week ago

Bring back the 8-track

One story doing the rounds this week has been the news that sales of vinyl records have outperformed CDs for the first time since the 1980s. I was quite surprised to hear it being being covered on the local radio news here in SA. Surprised for a few reasons because a) this isn't a new story, b) i...

a week ago

How big are the West Coast wildfires?

Pictures of red skies over San Francisco are one thing, but The Guardian rams home the scale of the devastation caused by the current wildfires along the West Cost of the US with a simple square. By overlaying the size of the fires on maps of other regions, it shows that if the epicentre of the f...

a week ago

Can you skin a dog with a knife made of frozen poo?

Apparently you cannot, as team of winners at this year's Ig Nobel prizes for research have proved beyond doubt. Also making the list is the paper that suggests many etymologists are afraid of spiders, and that poor people snog more than the rich. Check out the full list here. We repeated the expe...

a week ago

Umbilical Ruminations

Is US mail getting slower?

My mother-in-law hand-made 100 wedding invitations for my my wedding, and mailed them from New Zealand to South Africa. We're still waiting for them, thirteen years later. This is about typical for the South African mail service, which is a classic failed state-owned enterprise. Having moved to E...

Jason Norwood-Young

a week ago

Where the streets have a name

Map nerd Alasdair Rae deconstructs British street maps by their designation, such as Street, Road, Way, etc, and pops them onto beautiful maps that tell the history of a town. "In Milton Keynes, and some other places, you also get streets with no second name, like where they are just called thing...

Jason Norwood-Young

a week ago

From zero to data scientist

So, you wanna be a data scientist? Terence S, with all of two years of data science learning under his belt, takes us through what he'd learn, in what order, if he were to start again. His list of maths, programming and algorithms is a pretty solid start for anyone wanting to jump in. Get learnin...

Jason Norwood-Young

a week ago

Machine learning on the database

Python? We don't need no stinkin' Python! Data guy Dario Radečić (who we featured recently for trying out R) shows us how to run our machine learning where our data lives -- in the actual database. In this case, he relies heavily on Oracle's machine learning tech baked into its hosted solution, s...

Jason Norwood-Young

a week ago

Nadieh’s satellite surge

We've featured Nadieh Bremer's work on Naked Data before, and chances are high that we will again because she just keeps on delivering stunning data visualisations. In her latest piece for Scientific America, she combines a bump chart with a steam graph to produce this unique and information-pack...

Jason Norwood-Young

9 days ago

Umbilical Ruminations

R12 million Lotto funding for a stadium that’s already been built

Like many around the globe who have been stuck at home for the last few months, one half of Naked Data has finally cracked and thrown all the money saved on commuting into some minor renovations this month. So we completely understand the challenge of building budgets that spiral out of control, ...

2 weeks ago

Time for fossil fuels to jump off a cliff

Vox's Ezra Klein takes a look at the US' reliance on fossil fuel, a relationship that is going to have to end immediately if the world is going to hit its target of keeping global warming under 2°C. All that stuff is important if we'd like to keep living on this planet, but the thing I want you t...

Jason Norwood-Young

2 weeks ago

“How we think matters more than what we know”

This fascinating piece by data visualiser Jane Zhang takes us through her process when sinking her teeth into a data project visualising Teken. It's part a how-to; part a peek into her thoughts, fears, hurdles, and growth. For an article on the process of designing a data visualisation, it feels ...

Jason Norwood-Young

2 weeks ago

The data-viz libraries, corralled

We've often featured individual data-viz libraries, but Rashi Desai rounds them up and puts the top nine in one place, along with a summation of what they're good at and why you'd pick one over another. Tl;dr: The top nine are: MatplotlibSeabornPlotlyBokehGeoplotlibD3.jsGgplot2Plotly for RPygal P...

Jason Norwood-Young

2 weeks ago

Don't Miss, Nerds

Stunning height maps with a free tool

Using 3D maps to discover population "towers" has just taken a massive leap forward, thanks to a ray-tracing renderer called Aerialod. This type of visualisation has been with us for some time -- see The Pudding's incredible 2018 Human Terrain project here. But it lacked the visual richness that ...

Jason Norwood-Young

2 weeks ago

Converting the Python faithful

What happens when a self-confessed "heavy Python user" gives R a go for the first time? A plethora of pleasant surprises, that's what.

2 weeks ago

Liven up your next Zoom meeting

Winning the much-coveted award for a tutorial on PowerPoint - PowerPoint f'chrissakes - is Storytelling with Data. It's got a "tactical tip for virtual engagement", and how to keep audiences watching during the interminable hours of virtual meetings.

2 weeks ago

EDA made easy

Over at Towards Data Science, Matt Przybyla takes a look at Pandas Profiling, the Panda-based GUI that makes exploratory data analysis easy. So much so that it almost feels like cheating. Read the paean to Panda here, then check out Panda Profiling itself here.

2 weeks ago

Making the case for legalisation in Nigeria with numbers

Dataphyte digs into the official stats around drug crime in Nigeria and finds the numbers wanting. It calls shenanigans on the seventy-fold increase in the number of crimes in 2019 compared to 2018, and follows up with a second story about the 450-billion naira which could be harvested in revenue...

2 weeks ago

These are not the robot overlords you are looking for

The Guardian mis-stepped slightly this week, with an op-ed purportedly written by GPT-3, an AI which has been the source of many a convincing robot-authored yarn of late. GPT-3 is impressive, but perhaps not as impressive as the Graun's headline led readers to believe. "A robot wrote this entire ...

2 weeks ago

Get Tensorflow to write your Tensorflow code

It's inevitable that machine learning will eventually put data scientists out of work, shortly before The Singularity, after which we'll all be out of a job, and probably a planet. In the meantime, let's embrace our soon-to-be overlord and get it to write its own code. With TF-Coder, you give the...

Jason Norwood-Young

3 weeks ago