Naked Data

All the data you can eat

Jason Norwood-Young

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

US poll-predicting guru reckons Trump is going down

Professor of history at the American University, Allan Lichtman, has managed to correctly predict every US presidential election since 1984. He has 13 key questions that he asks, and six or more for either candidate predicts the winner. Even though I've given you the outcome, this New York Times ...

Jason Norwood-Young

yesterday at 07:23 am

South China Morning Post: The undisputed infographic champion

Let's face it: most infographics are shit. Often, as my eyeballs bleed as I look at unrelated clipart stuck next to seemingly random numbers and misleading charts, I wonder whether the entire infographic idea should be relegated to the nearest garbage disposal. But it doesn't have to be like this...

Jason Norwood-Young

yesterday at 07:13 am

Science backs down to the whims of Excel autocorrect

Guess what happens when genetic scientists put the gene name "MARCH1" into Excel: no prizes if you worked out that it changes it to a date, thus destroying data validity and some poor geneticist's groundbreaking paper along with it. The problem is so pervasive that a 2007 study found that one-fif...

Jason Norwood-Young

yesterday at 06:56 am

Fakers waste no time on Beirut explosion

I don't know whether fakers put time and energy into exploiting disasters for likes, lols, or to destabilise world peace for profit, but given any disaster, we can be certain these scum won't be far behind with their second-rate Photoshop techniques. In the case of the earth-shattering Beirut exp...

Jason Norwood-Young

yesterday at 05:48 am

Book learnin', Datum, Nerds

Awesome data!

If you're looking for great datasets to play with, look no further: a massive (and constantly growing) list on Github called Awesome Public Datasets currently features hundreds of datasets. (I considered counting them, but nah...) If you have an awesome dataset you'd like included, send a pull re...

Jason Norwood-Young

2 weeks ago

Python, Pandas and Plotly

If you're a Python/Jupyter Notebooks fan, there's no reason you can't have interactive, fancy-pants graphs right in your notebook. Juan Cruz Martinez shows us how, with step-by-step examples that assume very little starting knowledge, but will have you blasting out some wicked graphs in no time. ...

Jason Norwood-Young

2 weeks ago

Superheroes fighting AI bias

In Better Off Ted, season 1, episode 4 (released in 2009), black workers at the Veridian corporation are left in the dark when the company installs motion sensors to turn off lights when no-one is in the room. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XyXNmiTIupg Apart from being the best episode of anythi...

Jason Norwood-Young

2 weeks ago

The best Corona graph – we can all go home now

I don't know what it is about the Financial Times that I like so much. Perhaps it's the salmon background; perhaps it's its excellent arts section over the weekend, best read in the Utrecht library while sipping a cup of koffie verkeerd. The only thing I don't like is its ridiculous subscription ...

Jason Norwood-Young

2 weeks ago

Chalabi, interviewed

Regular readers will be very familiar with Mona Chalabi's data visualisations -- she's one of my personal favourite visualisers, and at the forefront of merging art and data without losing the impact of either. Artnet has a rare interview with her here, and (like her vizes) help flesh out a compl...

Jason Norwood-Young

3 weeks ago

Don't Miss, ROTM

Smile! You’re on candid camera!

Coronavirus isn't the only reason to wear a facemask if you're protesting -- an increasing risk of facial recognition could see you targeted by police after the fact, as they did in Baltimore following protests over Freddie Gray's death. According to this article in The Guardian, Clearview AI has...

Jason Norwood-Young

3 weeks ago

The ggplot2 cheat sheet

Tired of having to look up ggplot2's list of theme elements, Isabella Benabaye did the ultimate hacker job of creating a cheat sheet, or what she calls the ggplot2 Theme Elements Reference Sheet.

Jason Norwood-Young

3 weeks ago

Making our visualisations accessible

Alt-text is that HTML element I keep skipping when uploading images, for instance to this site. But I'm leaving my readers that rely on screen readers in the lurch, effectively making large parts of my site invisible to them. And while I'm at least aware of alt-text for images, I hadn't ever cons...

Jason Norwood-Young

3 weeks ago

How the (visualisation) sausage gets made

Andy Kirk takes on a massive Corona-time project, interviewing ten data visualisers in nine episodes of his Explore Explain season. I've watched Maarten Lambrechts' interview about Why Budapest, Warsaw, and Lithuania split themselves in two, published on The Pudding. What I love about this interv...

Jason Norwood-Young

3 weeks ago

Chart colours for brand bunnies

No, this is not just another tool or blog post about choosing colours for charts. Amy Cesal deals with the complexities of finding a colour palette that works for a company's corporate identity kit, keeps in-house designers happy, and still doesn't look shit. With any luck, your colour choices wi...

Jason Norwood-Young

4 weeks ago

The return of the interrobang, and other pearls of wisdom from the Temporary AP Stylebook‽

The Twitter hack that threw the internets into disarray this week provided the opportunity for the Temporary AP Stylebook (@TempAPStyle) to emerge, and blast out a new era of style while the real AP Stylebook's verified account status was disabled. And there were some pearlers,,, https://twitter....

Jason Norwood-Young

4 weeks ago

Code for All, 2020

When: 14, 20 and 22 July 2020 Where: The Interwebs If one good thing has come from Covid-19, it's that all the cool conferences are much more accessible online. Code for All is an umbrella organisation for the many "Code For ..." organisations scattered across the globe, with OpenUp (previously C...

Jason Norwood-Young

4 weeks ago

The death of the local newspaper, and the birth of something darker

It's not news anymore that local news services are dying in the US, and it's been a long-running concern that there's nothing else that informs an electorate of local political decisions, or acts as a watchdog for your councils' spending. An unpaid blogger is not going to voluntarily sit in gover...

Jason Norwood-Young

4 weeks ago

Fuck cars, we don’t need them

I'm pointing you to Farhad Manjoo's story of a vision of a car-free society (in America of all places) not only because I've been happily car-free for two years, but also to look at the stunning visualisations that the New York Times just casually threw into this down-page piece, weirdly categori...

Jason Norwood-Young

a month ago

A brief history of data science

Richard Farnworth takes us through a short, definitely incomplete, but very entertaining history of data viz. His description of William Playfair is particularly good: [Playfair] ... ran a currency counterfeiting operation to collapse the French currency and took part in the storming of the Basti...

Jason Norwood-Young

a month ago

Data journalists: Queen Elizabeth wants YOU!

There's a pretty cool-sounding job from the UK's Office for National Statistics -- two senior data journalists are needed to play with the biggest government datasets, produce lovely data stories, and even get to play with that greatest of public datasets, the National Census penciled in for 2021...

Jason Norwood-Young

a month ago