Naked Data

All the data you can eat

Jason Norwood-Young

Journalist, developer, community builder, newsletter creator and international man of mystery.

Travel the globe, in music

The latest offering from The Pudding is designed to take you out of your geographic musical bubble. It's pretty clever the way it starts by describing musical tastes in your area, and compares it popular songs in nearby areas, but what I learnt most is that I don't share musical taste with neighb...

Jason Norwood-Young

yesterday at 10:34 pm

How Git works, in Javascript

I've seen some geeky stuff built in Javascript in my time, but this ode to the magic that is Git takes it to a new nerdgasm level. In 600 words plus Javascript code, Mary Rose Cook takes you on the inside tour of Git you didn't know you needed. If that's not enough for you, she's also got a 6,000...

Jason Norwood-Young

yesterday at 10:28 pm

AI or human? You be the judge

I was very proud that I got barely above average for this test that asks you to identify whether photos, text, music and artworks are produced by a bot or a human. It's really hard, and I found music by far the toughest to distinguish a machine from a real composer. Regarding music, the evil scie...

Jason Norwood-Young

yesterday at 10:21 pm

Don't Miss, Umbilical Ruminations

Vox knows why SA is still so segregated

Vox's 10-minute history lesson on South Africa's segregated past -- and present -- might be familiar to readers of Naked Data not just for a story we know all too well, but also because the maps look strikingly familiar. Adrian Frith's 2015 Dot Map is one data visualisation I keep going back to, ...

Jason Norwood-Young

yesterday at 10:03 pm

The bias of beauty products

The Pudding's new data essay on biases baked into the beauty industry's naming of shades, The Naked Truth, is very similar to its 2018 investigation into the diversity of makeup, but it's hardly like the problem has gone away. "A 2020 study investigating the connotations of foundation shade names...

Jason Norwood-Young

8 days ago

Space Jam 2021 – just as slow as the original

The 1996 basketball movie Space Jam came with a very 1996 website, famous at the time for its rather ambitious graphics, and famous today for having survived unchanged for most of its 25-year life. However, there's a new Space Jam movie, which means a new Space Jam website. While it's not nearly ...

Jason Norwood-Young

8 days ago

The data science cheat sheet

Data science is easy! Data scientists Terence Shin and Nathan Rosidi have managed to put everything you need to know for a data science interview onto one surprisingly concise page. It covers all the basics like linear regression, A/B testing, probability rules, and Bayes Theorem. It's useful for...

Jason Norwood-Young

8 days ago

Welcome… to the Bob Ross virtual gallery

I can't use this Bob Ross Virtual Art Gallery without reading the text in a husky, sultry whisper. Bob Ross, for those who haven't turned on the Internet or watched sufficient daytime TV, was the host of The Joy of Painting, an eighties and nineties show where he would knock off impressive landsc...

Jason Norwood-Young

8 days ago

The eternal grocery war

Finally! Someone has answered the question whether it's better to shop at Woolworths or Pick 'n Pay. Retail price tracker Trundler compared the price of a fruit and veg basket of 11 items over time for Woolies and PnP during the Coronavirus pandemic. And at first, Pick 'n Pay looks like it's easi...

Jason Norwood-Young

3 weeks ago

Don't Miss, My Corona

Please stay patient, your vaccine will be ready in 16 years

MediaHack, the org who brought us the South African Coronavirus Dashboard, has released a new tracker that would be depressing if it weren't so amusing. (Or maybe that's the other way around...) The Vaccination in SA calculator estimates how long it will take to inoculate 67% of the population fr...

Jason Norwood-Young

3 weeks ago

Less than half of the New York Times’ front page is news

Tom Cleveland, who's interests clearly overlap a little with my own (data + news), has been quietly scraping the New York Times to answer two questions (so far -- it's an ongoing project): How does the New York Times A/B test its headlines? And how much stuff on the NYT's front page is actually n...

Jason Norwood-Young

3 weeks ago

Need a data analyst? Try Fiverr

Fiverr, the site that we've turned to for years when we've wanted a logo but have been too cheap to pay full-price for it can now be the site we turn to when we want data science but are too cheap to pay full-price for it. It's the first new vertical the company has launched in nine years, probab...

Jason Norwood-Young

3 weeks ago

A sparkling new visual data pipeliner

I've recently been playing with Apache's NiFi, which is great for robust data pipelining. Its biggest feature over other options -- including Rolling Your Own, which I have done -- is its visual pipeline design. Because pipeline design is hard, being able to visualise the flow of the data is imme...

Jason Norwood-Young

a month ago

The hard drive in all of us

DNA-based data storage has been on the theoretical radar for years, but researchers at the bleeding edge of data storage are now starting to actually encode digital data in DNA, and get it back again, reports Nature. Members of the "DNA Data Storage Alliance", which includes Microsoft, Twist Bios...

Jason Norwood-Young

a month ago

Don't Miss, Nerds

Visualising ALL of the internet

Barret Lyon has been quietly mapping the entirety of the internet since 2003, after friends bet him $50 he couldn't do it. And he's been quietly plugging away at the Opte project ever since, moving from traceroutes to routing tables in 2010. His visualisations have been displayed at MoMA New York...

Jason Norwood-Young

a month ago

Data dysfunction for bad apples in the big apple

It's two years since the launch of the CAPstat.nyc website, which tracks bad apple cops in the Big Apple, but a Twitter thread by CAPstat lead Julie Ciccolini shows how much hasn't changed: a comparison between CAPstat and NYPD data shows that officers with multiple disciplinary issues that have ...

Jason Norwood-Young

a month ago

Don't Miss, Nerds, ROTM

Time to face up to our facial data

Mozilla Fellow Deborah Raji and TechCongress Legislative Fellow Genevieve Fried have co-authored a paper looking back at the history of facial recognition datasets, and have highlighted a disturbing trend: We've gone from carefully curated datasets collected with the participants' permission, to ...

Jason Norwood-Young

a month ago

Fight back against the AI with pen and paper

OpenAI's new image-recognising neural network, CLIP, blows previous deep learning algorithms out the water, especially when it comes to conceptual representations, like a drawing of a banana versus an actual banana. It works similarly to a human brain, the researchers believe, firing "neurons" th...

Jason Norwood-Young

a month ago

Deepfakes: Making history really come alive

It's not just Tom Cruise getting deep faked -- literally everyone in history is having a GAN algorithm pointed at their faces, creating a disturbing yet fascinating Twitter thread: a Myheritage.com feature allows you to upload old photos (or paintings for that matter) and it will make them seemin...

Jason Norwood-Young

a month ago

The real fake Tom Cruise

It's unclear whether Tom Cruise's face is just ideally suited to deep fakes, or if we've just taken a leap in deep fakery, but damn, the @deeptomcruise Instagram account dropped some stunning fakes last week that were frighteningly realistic. I won't bother with a link because all the videos have...

Jason Norwood-Young

a month ago