Naked Data

All the data you can eat

Adam Oxford

Adam Oxford is a freelance journalist, media consultant and civic tech enthusiast. He also works closely with startups developing solutions to access to justice problems.

What do people eat all day?

Indian datavizzer Rohan Jhunja took the dangerous step of visualising the cooking habits of his close family over the month of December over on Nightingale, and managed to navigate tricky dinner-based relationship issues (like "does grandma eat enough vegetables?") by adding an enormous amount of...

2 months ago

It’s Carousel time

Oh, AI chat engine GPT-3 may well be close to achieving its first Booker Prize, but its bedside manner is somewhat lousy. Researchers testing its ability to act as a reception-bot for a hypothetical medical clinic had this rather disturbing exchange. The patient said “Hey, I feel very bad, I want...

2 months ago

The beer index

Possibly inspired by The Economist's Big Mac Index, Visual Capitalist has published a World Beer Index, tracking the price of a pint near you. According to its metrics, South Africa is the cheapest place on Earth to buy a bottle of brew, at $1.68 compared to Qatar's $11.26 and prices around $5 in...

2 months ago

It’s Open Data Day this weekend

It's that time of the year where we celebrate all things numerical when it comes to online publishing - this Saturday is Open Data Day (6 March) when you get to show your support and meet other geeks at a happening near you. Not sure where to go - try Codebridge's Civic Data Hackathon (hosted onl...

2 months ago

WanaData’s Women’s Day Webinar

No plans yet for celebrating International Women's Day this coming Monday? Then book your place at pan-African data journalism network WanaData's Challenging gender stereotypes event. It's a rare line-up of speakers including Code for Africa's Tolulope Adeyemo, Lisa Macleod (ex-Arena, now Women i...

2 months ago

Corruption made easy

Nigerian open data watchdog BudgIT has taken to Twitter to explain just how corruption in the Niger Delta talks place, with fun infographics in a thread that shows how you too can walk away with a trillion naira or so if you are suitably well connected. Highlights include the contract awarded 55 ...

2 months ago

Clever cops call on copyright

The Other EFF has a fascinating piece explaining how some California cops are preventing people from livestreaming their, um, honest interactions with the thin blue line. It's highlighted a case in which a police officer spotted an activist turning on their camera , and responded with a blast of ...

2 months ago

Learning to crawl

Yes, it's a listicle and yes, the first item in the list may not be terribly useful to all (but it has a hell of a novelty value - want to download the entire internet? Get it from Common Crawl). But forgive us all the same for linking out to KD Nuggets' top tools for web scraping - invaluable fo...

2 months ago

Talking up a rumour

Lie-spotter generals at First Draft have published a guide on how to sift social media for misinformation, focussing on "rumour cues" - those telltale words that beloved of conspiracy theorists - and common combinations that indicate untruths are afoot. Top tip is the use of a Word Tree for filte...

2 months ago

What does the band aid?

Ever seen a plastic ring around a birds foot and wondered how scientists actually use them to collect data? There are - apparently - over 200 billion birds in the world, so what are the chances of ever finding one you've tagged again, right? Wonder no more - instead read this wonderful Scientific...

2 months ago

Robots to the rescue

The Partnership on AI has launched an initiative to see if bots can be used to build constructive online dialogues, instead of simply powering the troll farms. Shout out to pan-continental civic techies Code for Africa for lending its weight to the cause, joining PoAI this month alongside Adobe, ...

2 months ago

Democracy in peril (pt 94)

The ever engaging data team at The Economist has published its Global Democracy Index 2020, looking at the state of civic freedoms worldwide. The article is paywalled, but the map and strap say it all. "An unprecedented rollback of democratic freedoms." Eek.

2 months ago

Counting corruption

Veza is an exciting new tool from Corruption Watch in South Africa: some years in the making, it's an interactive map of police stations throughout the country, with per-station stats on resources, precinct size and reports of corruption. Naturally you can upload your own reports too. Right now, ...

2 months ago

How quaint is The Wire

Remember back in the early 2000s when using cellphone mast data to track people was an exciting storyline in David Simon's The Wire? You got the sense, even then, that technology was running faster than the showrunners could keep up (although apparently they were asked to remove some references t...

3 months ago

A billion goats and counting

If you have a pathological phobia of trolls, you might well want to move to India. According to the latest in PythonMaps' Twitter observations of livestock populations, that's where you'll find the highest density of goats. But wait, what about sheep and chickens? Need to know where they are clus...

3 months ago

LEGO, meet dataviz

What do you get if you mix everyone's favourite plastic brick with a penchant for graphing things? It's Sam Shannon's Life inside the box, or 365 days of lockdown measures in LEGO.

3 months ago

Nightingale goes acoustic

The periodical of the Data Visualisation is going offline... in a good way. It's adding to its portfolio of publications (currently hosted on Medium) with a print edition. It's a smart move, of course, as world class stories about dataviz will make for a truly beautiful magazine, but it needs you...

3 months ago

Some things should’t be internet connected

The science of spam filters prevents us writing out the full title of Vice's report on an internet-connected chastity device gone wrong. Suffice to say it involves using bolt cutters in places bolt cutters shouldn't belong. Avoid the internet of things folks. (If you're an avid Naked Data reader,...

3 months ago

Hypothesis testing and how you’re doing it wrong

It's a fair cop. I generally don't talk about null hypothesis when looking at data at work, because I'm concerned it will just confuse rather than enlighten the folks being talked to. So here's a timely and in-depth reminder of all the important things to remember when constructing an experiment,...

3 months ago

The song that never was

Ever heard the Avril Lavigne song Dolphins? No? Neither has she, apparently - despite being commonly referenced and appearing on many music lyric sites, the song is a 14-year-old prank turned into meme that is on its way to birthing a whole branch of philosophy about the meaning of online existen...

3 months ago