Naked Data

All the data you can eat

Month: September 2019

The last Thomas Cook flight

The final flights by collapsing travel agency Thomas Cook are elegantly visualised by Bloomberg, including the very last one from Orlando to Manchester. But the visualisation doesn't tell the story of what happened aboard: A Scottish woman (named as Ashleigh MacLennan on Twitter) did a whip-round...

Jason Norwood-Young

6 months ago

Nerd out on SSL certs

On the scale of one to nerd, examining a data set of 350 million SSL certificates blows right off the chart. And yet even in this seemingly dry dataset you'll find some fascinating data stories: "Over a hundred thousand certs alone expire in 2117, and over a thousand expire in 3017. Perhaps somet...

Jason Norwood-Young

6 months ago

India is running out of water

India's booming population needs one thing parts of the country are desperately short of -- water. Due to poor dam development, the country relies heavily on groundwater, and many regions are emptying their aquifers faster than they can fill. Take it from a Capetonian -- you don not want your cit...

Jason Norwood-Young

6 months ago

CfA looking for a “bullshit detector”

Wanna join the ever expanding Code for Africa and help to seek out and destroy government propaganda wherever it hides? Good news, a position for a digital sleuth doing just that has opened up. CfA calls it a Research Assistant, who will work alongside the famous bot hunters of the Digital Forens...

6 months ago

Moaning about moaners

It's good to know that there's one thing people still trust less than the news: each other. According to the editor of the Barnsley Chronicle, reader comments now garner more complaints on his site than actual articles do. Andrew Harrod, who edits the Barnsley Chronicle, says the highest percenta...

6 months ago

Atlas shrugged, fell to his knees, front flipped, back flipped and did a handstand

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_sBBaNYex3E If you've not seen the video of Boston Dynamic's humanoid Atlas robot doing a passable impression of Jackie Chan acrobatics (Police Story Jackie Chan, not Kung Fu Yoga Jackie Chan, obvs), then you owe it to yourself to watch it now. In other news, the f...

6 months ago

NYT bags visual investigation award

The New York Times and Bellingcat just landed themselves an Emmy for their epic OSINT investigation into the murder of Syrian civillians. Disturbing to watch, but a worthy winner. https://twitter.com/malachybrowne/status/1176754823422709761

6 months ago

India is running out of water

India's booming population needs one thing parts of the country are desperately short of -- water. Due to poor dam development, the country relies heavily on groundwater, and many parts of the country are emptying their aquifers faster than they can fill. Take it from a Capetonian -- you don not ...

Jason Norwood-Young

6 months ago

#AmINext is not forgotten

There are so many things I really like about News 24's #AmINext microsite, which tells the story of Uyinene Mrwetyana, the young woman whose death sparked protests against gender-based violence around the country. Nene's background and the story of her murder are told with sensitivity and power, ...

6 months ago

CfA scoops WAN-IFRA prize

Congratulations to Code for Africa, which has been awarded a gong by WAN-IFRA at the African Digital Media Awards for its work on land ownership across the continent. Land reform is a hugely important topic, but the lack of actual data about land ownership is often missed in the debates on the su...

6 months ago

The African Investigative (Data) Journalism Conference

28 - 30 OctoberWits University, Johannesburg This year's African Investigative Journalism Conference's speaker list is top-notch. Apart from the usual investigative journo crowd, there's plenty of data journalism happening: Al Jazeera's Mohammed El-Haddad heads up AJLabs; Dorothy Otieno is the Da...

Jason Norwood-Young

6 months ago

Data über alles – GIJC 2019

26 - 29 SeptemberHamburg, Germany The Global Investigative Journalism Conference gets going in the land of currywurst and Fritz Cola, and has data journ sprinkled liberally throughout with a whole big data track. SQL, QGIS, R... Most exciting is that some live streaming has been promised, which i...

Jason Norwood-Young

6 months ago

AP Datakit – Setting up data for the win!

The concept is pretty simple: A data project boilerplate designed by AP that's meant to get your R or Python data project set up for success. It uses Cookiecutter for the template, and AWS to store data in the cloud. Your choice of Github or Gitlab.

Jason Norwood-Young

6 months ago

Mapping justice

One in five South Africans who try to resolve a legal problem give up in the end, and 54% of those who try experience some sort of hardship as a result of trying to get their needs met -- including stress, relationship breakdown or loss of employment. Kenya is very similar, while in the UK it tak...

6 months ago

Digging deeper into crime stats

Well blow me down. Not a week ago I was raging that no-one in SA media had taken the rich data in the crime stats and actually dug deep into it to find narratives and patterns that they weren't spoon-fed, and then along comes Mail & Guardian's Jacques Coetzee and completely undermines my argu...

6 months ago

Down with RICA!

Edward Snowden himself was taken aback by the implications of the South African High Court's ruling on the Regulation of Interception of Communications and Provision of Communication Related Information Act (RICA). For most of us, RICA is the thing we do when we hand over ID docs to purchase a ne...

6 months ago

A day in the life of our noble leader

Civic tech is the weird confluence of technology, government, and society, and the playground of Adi Eyal, noble leader of OpenUp, which (not so) incidentally sponsors Naked Data. But running a civic tech company -- and a non-profit to boot -- is not trivial. Eyal gives us a glimpse behind the sc...

Jason Norwood-Young

6 months ago

Turns out Stallman is a creep

In this week's Hero to Zero, Richard Stallman, considered by many as the leader of the free software movement, fell on his sword after allegations of sexism, an indefensible stance on Epstein and pedophilia, and a weird attachment to an abortion joke. The fall-out follows the Jeffrey Epstein outr...

Jason Norwood-Young

6 months ago

Umbilical Ruminations

Dodgy DCMA takes down M&G

Did you miss the Mail and Guardian online the week before (Friday 13 September 2019)? We all did, because the whole site was downed thanks to a crafty censorship attack using America's largely awful Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DCMA). The DMCA was invoked thanks to an article ...

6 months ago

Ig Nobel: Celebrating the best of the worst of science

The annual Ig Nobel Awards has once again celebrated a number of "worthy" discoveries in science, including why left nuts run hotter; the invention of a dish washer for soiled babies; and why wombats make cubed poops. Winners receive a staggering ten-trillion dollar prize (Zim dollars), and the s...

Jason Norwood-Young

6 months ago