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.

Crystalising history to repeat itself

It might sound like one of the more repeatable plotlines from Dr Who, but we couldn't let this one go by without comment. Scientists from a multinational team based in the UK, US and Finland have used supercooled helium to observe - for the first time - the interaction between one of nature's wei...

a month ago

Hooked on the sweet stuff

After the great vitamin C science debacle, in which the citric compound found its way - erroneously - in to the hive mind as a cure for the common cold, you might be sceptical about the latest claim from researchers studying ways to dodge the sniffles. But metastudy from the University of Oxford ...

a month ago

Where migrants really go in Africa

Want to get a really good picture of how people move around the African continent? Don't listen to the xenophobic nonsense on Twitter. Take a look at this interactive map from Ilya Boyandin, based on five years' worth of data between 2005 and 2010, which shows human migration as reported in the j...

a month ago

Umbilical Ruminations

Hunting down the Twitter trolls (again)

In hindsight it seems inevitable that when Covid-19 collapsed the economy and put millions out of work, some of the frustration would find itself vented in an outbreak of nationalist anger. Even though borders are closed, South Africa doesn't have a great track record in this regard, and its been...

a month ago

Umbilical Ruminations

Trying something new

It's easy to be bleak about the state of media, and the last few months haven't been kind to an industry which was already on its knees, financially speaking. South African publishers have seen layoffs and closures, paycuts and pain since the outbreak of Covid-19 especially. So it's good to see p...

a month ago

Maybe it does strike twice?

It's one thing to intellectually know that storms are seasonal things, but the most striking (see what I did?) thing about the realtime lightning tracker from Lightning Maps is seeing how cleanly the world is split when it comes to rain right now. I wouldn't want to be in the middle of the Atlant...

a month ago

Ammonium nitrate through the ages

The devastating explosion in Beirut last week was the result of years of foolish neglect by a weak and corrupt government. But while it may be the biggest accident of its kind on record, as has been documented in many excellent reports it's far from the only one. Visual Capitalist has put togethe...

a month ago

Dodging dung with data

I'm vainly holding out hope that physical copies of Carl Bergstrom and Jevin West's new book, Calling Bullshit: The Art of Skepticism in a Data-Driven World will make it to these southern shores, but will likely give up and order an electronic copy if it takes much longer. It kicks off with the t...

a month ago

A trove of hyperlocal links from Open Data SA

There's plenty been written about the impact of the internet on small news media, and how it impacts coverage of local government. Which is why Open Data SA's rolling updates to its Municipal Minutes and Records spreadsheet is so important. It's far from comprehensive, but it is extensive. Sudden...

a month ago

Umbilical Ruminations

SA crimes against design #CrimeStats2020 special

Crime Stats day is always a busy one for journos in South Africa, as they rush to try and make sense of what's been going on in our notoriously violent and crime prone society. This year it's even more of a challenge since today's count stops in March - so all lockdown-related drops in criminal b...

a month ago

AI Dungeon is turning into a text-based Matrix

Bonkers text adventure game generator AI Dungeon has taken a step closer to sentience, with a new premium version based on OpenAI's too-clever-for-its-own-good GPT-3 personality engine (see ND passim). The good news is that it still seems to be as tripped and surreal as ever, just written by a hu...

a month ago

Don't Miss, My Corona

Cash for graphs

The inestimable Mediahack must have set some kind of record for crowdsourcing in South Africa. Within a day and a half of asking people to support its popular SA Coronavirus Dashboard (views two million and counting), it exceeded its target of R30K to cover some of the costs of this labour of lov...

a month ago

As old as the hills

I was raised to believe Neolithic man regularly hefted boulders the size of buses halfway across the UK, because the five tonne "blue stones" of Stonehenge were mined from a quarry some 250km away. So I'm a little disappointed to find out that this week, scientists have pinpointed where the large...

a month ago

Don't Miss, My Corona

Going nowhere fast

News that Zambia has just opened its borders to travellers who can produce a recent negative Covid-19 test certificate made us want to find more information about which other countries are loosening up international restrictions. And as this updated map from Kayak shows, the answer is "not many"....

a month ago

Still beating the Drum

South Africa's Drum magazine has changed a lot since it was launched 70 years ago, and now it's undergoing its next transformation from celeb gossip mag to online-only publication. Journalism.co.za has a celebration of the early history of the magazine, when it was a ground-breaking, deep thinkin...

2 months ago

Don't Miss, My Corona

Counting Covid

The Covid-19 news from South Africa this week has been bleak: over a quarter of tests now come back positive, and the country has the fourth highest number of daily new infections in the world. The two bright spots of news we're hanging on to is that there are far more tests being carried out her...

2 months ago

Song lyrics are horrible

Jake Scott's analysis of popular song lyrics scraped from modern music box Spotify starts off on a surprising and positive note. The representation of women in top tunes far outweighs the representation of men. And then it gets very dark, very quickly. Male artists sing about men making money, dy...

2 months ago

Nigeria’s national debt is terrifying

There's a cold phrase that gets bandied around in acronym-heavy press-releases from the UN, IMF, G7, et al - HIPC. It stands for Highly Indebted Poor Countries, who were in danger of being swamped by debt before covid-19 crashed the world economy. What does HIPC mean for folk on the ground? Datap...

2 months ago

Facebook builds evil robots

If there's one thing we've learned from social media over the years, it's that when a few billion people gather in one place it's almost impossible to enforce any sort of value-based norms on them. Over the years, Facebook, Twitter et al have tried many different ways to clamp down on misinformat...

2 months ago

Fantastic plastic

What happens to plastic when it gets recycled? Sure, there's the helpful symbols on the back of every crisp packet and carton with a cryptic indication of what it's made of, but what do they mean for the processing plants that turn rubbish in to new fibres for fleeces and so on? Life of Plastic h...

2 months ago