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.

Phone encryption ain’t what it’s cracked up to be

Oh, let's just make it a hat-trick for the techno-dystopia this week. According to a report published by Upturn, police officials in the US are bypassing strong encryption on Android and Apple devices as a matter of course, without a warrant and on the most trivial of grounds. Even though warrant...

a month ago

Umbilical Ruminations

Smart tech cited in 70% of UK domestic abuse cases

Remember how those crazy privacy nuts used to try and warn us that smart devices are the tool of surveillance capital and inviting Alexa or Google Home into your house meant giving up your private space to The Man. Turns out that it's not just The Man abusing this power, it's the lower case one t...

a month ago

Jaws 2 (heads)

A shark with two heads might be the stuff of nightmares for those raised in the ignorant era of the nascent blaockbuster. But this one is, frankly, adorable, and you certainly won't be needing a bigger boat. https://twitter.com/akshay_journo/status/1315620615525556230

a month ago

Oh happy day. Everyday

The Decisive Moment died many years ago, but Adobe's latest will a little rotational velocity to Cartier-Bresson's post-mortal movements. Photoshop's newest AI powered filter is the Smart Portrait emotion editor, which can turn tears into joy (or vice versa) by changing the look on your face. It ...

a month ago

Selling the New Deal

Over at Nightingale, Jason Forrest tells the story of how striking images and dataviz were key to selling the Roosevelt's New Deal to a US population that's always been sceptical of big government. The point is that there's a strong analogy with today, as drastic measures are going to be needed t...

a month ago

Take it with a grain of salt

Or two thirds of a piece of beach sand, three pieces of pollen, ten bits of phlegm or 100 coronavirii. It's Visual Capitalist's guide to The Relative Size of Particles - a close up view of how these things all compare.

a month ago

Fact checking by the numbers

Turns out you don't have to be a paid bullshit-sniffer to recognise a stench when you smell one. A new study by MIT researchers suggests that there's wisdom in the crowds when it comes to fact-checking. By throwing news and misinformation at mechanical turks and comparing their collective opinion...

a month ago

Don't Miss, My Corona

Just when you thought it couldn’t get worse

It's over a decade since Nick Davies pointed out that profitable news media was a short lived historical anomaly in Flat Earth News, but just how much further we had to fall was unclear until the coronavirus pandemic. The Tow Center and ICFJ have released a reported documenting just how bad thing...

a month ago

Datawrapper gets spikey

Online vizzing app Datawrapper already won a place in our heart for making it easy to map esoteric things like district level data for out of the way countries like South Africa (beats having to roll your own shapefiles any day). Over the last couple of weeks its added a load of new features to i...

a month ago

Don't Miss, My Corona

The day the Twitterati turned on Trump?

As Nathan Cunningham puts it, schadenfreude or support? Trump's Tweet that had contracted Covid-19 was his most liked ever. By a long way. https://twitter.com/nathcun/status/1312765224437645316

a month ago

Just popping to the chemist?

It's not the most user-friendly interactive and we'd be pretending if we knew what "Global friction surface enumerating land-based travel speed with access to motorized transport for a nominal year 2019" meant. But the Malaria Atlas Project's latest map layer is eye-opening. While the map is desi...

a month ago

Chile’s got a strong constitution

As someone who has moved from a country without a written constitution to one with the Best In The World (TM), I find these national declarations of values and laws to be fascinating. Yet although they designed as a positioning statement to bind a country together for lifetimes to come, the avera...

a month ago

OGP celebrates 10 years

Open government data appears to be following the classic hype cycle model: much was expected a decade ago when the Open Government Partnership (OGP) was launched, yet by the time 2015 came around folks were so cynical even Zuma-era South Africa got a shot at being chair. Still, things seem to be ...

2 months ago

Sweeping the site for bugs

Data-driven journalism site The Markup has just released a tool for testing the privacy-busting functions of your favourite websites, and it's called Blacklight. Blacklight brings together a bunch of existing tools, like the EFF's Privacy Badger, and tests for scripts that drop cookies, log keyst...

2 months ago

Goodbye, Philosopher AI

The robot-apocalypse has been put back a few years, fortunately, by the untimely closure of the free version Philosopher AI. The GPT-3-powered thinking engine was build to muse over important questions put to it by visitors to the website, such as "What would happen if a badger attacked a baboon"...

2 months ago

Cameroon jails troops tracked down by BBC

In a victory for open source investigative journalism, Cameroonian authorities have sentenced a group of soldiers to 10 years for their parts in the murder of two women and two children in 2015. Initially the government rejected claims of army involvement in the deaths, but a team from the BBC's ...

2 months ago

Zoom in, enhance

Deep fake video ads may be scaring the American electorate (but then what doesn't), but researchers at Microsoft has put image-fiddling AI to a more homely use. They've published a paper all about restoring old photos with algorithms that eliminate tears and give colours an appropriate boost. Rea...

2 months ago

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...

2 months 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...

2 months 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...

2 months ago