Naked Data

All the data you can eat

Jason Norwood-Young

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

Don't Miss, My Corona

Republicans not so conservative with Corona

Dan Goodspeed has made one of those racing-bar-charts, this time showing Coronavirus infections per 100,000 by US state, and coloured by their voting partisanship. You can tell where this is going, but seeing the swathe of red still comes as a bit of a shock - of the 25 worst-affected states curr...

Jason Norwood-Young

4 days ago

Au revoir D3, hello Svelte

D3 is incredibly powerful, but not always the easiest to use. Data journalist for the French publication Les Echos, Tom Fevrier, takes us through another option: responsive data viz with Javascript library Svelte. No more forgetting to "exit()". The video is in French, but it's pretty easy to fol...

Jason Norwood-Young

4 days ago

Teaching an old map new tricks

A very cool project by the University of Utrecht has geo-mapped over 1,000 old maps from the Ackersdijck Collection (a 19th Century Professor of Economics whose widow donated his map collection to the University) onto their modern lat-longs. You can view the maps through the online tool Georefere...

Jason Norwood-Young

4 days ago

But is it art?

How much would you pay for a one-off, original artwork, framed and shipped? If you answered "As much as $119", then I've got some good news for you: The AI Gallery will ship you an original 22x22" framed canvas artwork of your choice, simply by removing the cost of those pesky artists and replaci...

Jason Norwood-Young

4 days ago

Umbilical Ruminations

Biden snaking his way to victory

Of all the election graphs, and there are many, this is my favourite: FiveThirtyEight's "snake path". In one graph, you can see who's going to win (I think we can safely say Joe Biden, despite his son's antics), and more importantly, why. Until I saw this graph, I didn't understand the US Preside...

Jason Norwood-Young

11 days ago

Alt.internet: Usenet rises again

Listen here you whippersnappers! Back when I was a young lad, the internet wasn't Facebook or Google or 4Chan. Hell, it wasn't even HTML. It certainly wasn't just port 80. It was a time of great variety and exciting frontiers. We had IRC. We had FTP. We had Gopher, goddamit. And, rising above the...

Jason Norwood-Young

11 days ago

Sub-editors: learn to stop worrying and love the machine

Shane Creevy, head of editorial at journalism/AI company Kinzen, believes that the always-tenuous sub-editor role could be in for a revival, as they are perfectly positioned to act as the gatekeeper for the burgeoning machine learning in journalism sector. "The sub-editor is the sapien in the mac...

Jason Norwood-Young

11 days ago

Mapping the world of academic papers with Connected Papers

If your job is writing (or reading) academic papers, my condolences. But here's a sparkly new tool that'll certainly help you in your work: Connected Papers. Built by Israelis Alex Tarnavsky, Eitan Eddie Smolyansky, and Itay Knaan Harpaz, this tool they made for themselves proved so popular that ...

Jason Norwood-Young

11 days ago

Bot-attack! GPT-3 sneaks onto Reddit, talks about suicide

"A GPT-3-powered bot has been caught posing as a human on Reddit after more than a week of rampant posting on one of the site’s most popular subreddits," reports The Next Web, churning out a post a minute on /r/AskReddit. Posting as thegentlemetre, it answered the question: "Elevator-maintenance ...

Jason Norwood-Young

2 weeks ago

Tracking the Uyghur tragedy with data

The human rights abuses in the Chinese Xinjiang region has led to multiple data projects, as digital activists do what they can from outside (and sometimes, at great risk, inside) China to record and expose the atrocities. The Xinjiang Data Project is an Australian effort to highlight the issue, ...

Jason Norwood-Young

2 weeks ago

Lies, damn lies, and election results

With the world obsessing on the US elections, it's time to (once again) go through the problems of visualising election results. The biggest issue, as Cairo Alberto has eloquently pointed out: "But acres don't vote. People do." The big areas on the map tend to be ironically the least-populated, a...

Jason Norwood-Young

2 weeks ago

Block your cock block from hackers

Just because you could connect a male chastity device to the internet, doesn't mean you should. The CellMate Chastity Cage goes on your willy, and gives control of unlocking it to your dom via an app, without any other way of unlocking it. But, according to Pen Test Partners, "Multiple API flaws ...

Jason Norwood-Young

2 weeks ago

Umbilical Ruminations

One BILLION Dollars from Google for news publishers

Yup, Google is going to splash the very large, round Dollar-based figure of one billion on the news industry in another attempt to quell the ire of newspapers going out of business and governments whose democracies are crumbling without the support of the fourth estate. That sounds like a lot of ...

Jason Norwood-Young

3 weeks ago

South Africa’s Coronavirus: the data story

Laura Grant and Alastair Otter's sterling work on the Coronavirus data dashboard for South Africa means they have a serious corpus of data, along with a lot of experience to call on. Teaming up with health journalism outfit Bhekisisa, they've created a brilliant scrollytelling timeline of the vir...

Jason Norwood-Young

3 weeks ago

Gregor’s climate change chart

Here's something I just learnt about data viz guru Gregor Aisch: he's an avid gardener. That means he's particularly interested in rainfall, and how it's changing due to climate change. So the DataWrapper.de developer used a thermo-pluvio diagram as a scatterplot, which tracks changes into quadra...

Jason Norwood-Young

3 weeks ago

A different type of Corona-dashboard: It’s the economy, stupid

Let's make a Coronavirus dashboard, but for the economy! All it would require is the private economic data held by secretive credit card, payroll and retail companies, which they could mash up into a massive dataset and then make public. Easy peasy lemon squeezy.

Jason Norwood-Young

3 weeks ago

Book learnin', Nerds

Your last bookmark for R

Good news, neRds. Long-time Naked Data supporter and fellow Netherzaffer Oscar Bauffa has wrangled the most epic list of R learning material into his Big Book of R. It's beautifully arranged into topics too, from starting out to ML nerdiness, which is just as well since there are over 100 resourc...

Jason Norwood-Young

3 weeks ago

Umbilical Ruminations

Is US mail getting slower?

My mother-in-law hand-made 100 wedding invitations for my my wedding, and mailed them from New Zealand to South Africa. We're still waiting for them, thirteen years later. This is about typical for the South African mail service, which is a classic failed state-owned enterprise. Having moved to E...

Jason Norwood-Young

a month ago

Where the streets have a name

Map nerd Alasdair Rae deconstructs British street maps by their designation, such as Street, Road, Way, etc, and pops them onto beautiful maps that tell the history of a town. "In Milton Keynes, and some other places, you also get streets with no second name, like where they are just called thing...

Jason Norwood-Young

a month ago

From zero to data scientist

So, you wanna be a data scientist? Terence S, with all of two years of data science learning under his belt, takes us through what he'd learn, in what order, if he were to start again. His list of maths, programming and algorithms is a pretty solid start for anyone wanting to jump in. Get learnin...

Jason Norwood-Young

a month ago