Naked Data

All the data you can eat

Jason Norwood-Young

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

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 week 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 week 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 week ago

Machine learning on the database

Python? We don't need no stinkin' Python! Data guy Dario Radečić (who we featured recently for trying out R) shows us how to run our machine learning where our data lives -- in the actual database. In this case, he relies heavily on Oracle's machine learning tech baked into its hosted solution, s...

Jason Norwood-Young

a week ago

Nadieh’s satellite surge

We've featured Nadieh Bremer's work on Naked Data before, and chances are high that we will again because she just keeps on delivering stunning data visualisations. In her latest piece for Scientific America, she combines a bump chart with a steam graph to produce this unique and information-pack...

Jason Norwood-Young

9 days ago

Time for fossil fuels to jump off a cliff

Vox's Ezra Klein takes a look at the US' reliance on fossil fuel, a relationship that is going to have to end immediately if the world is going to hit its target of keeping global warming under 2°C. All that stuff is important if we'd like to keep living on this planet, but the thing I want you t...

Jason Norwood-Young

2 weeks ago

“How we think matters more than what we know”

This fascinating piece by data visualiser Jane Zhang takes us through her process when sinking her teeth into a data project visualising Teken. It's part a how-to; part a peek into her thoughts, fears, hurdles, and growth. For an article on the process of designing a data visualisation, it feels ...

Jason Norwood-Young

2 weeks ago

The data-viz libraries, corralled

We've often featured individual data-viz libraries, but Rashi Desai rounds them up and puts the top nine in one place, along with a summation of what they're good at and why you'd pick one over another. Tl;dr: The top nine are: MatplotlibSeabornPlotlyBokehGeoplotlibD3.jsGgplot2Plotly for RPygal P...

Jason Norwood-Young

2 weeks ago

Don't Miss, Nerds

Stunning height maps with a free tool

Using 3D maps to discover population "towers" has just taken a massive leap forward, thanks to a ray-tracing renderer called Aerialod. This type of visualisation has been with us for some time -- see The Pudding's incredible 2018 Human Terrain project here. But it lacked the visual richness that ...

Jason Norwood-Young

2 weeks ago

Get Tensorflow to write your Tensorflow code

It's inevitable that machine learning will eventually put data scientists out of work, shortly before The Singularity, after which we'll all be out of a job, and probably a planet. In the meantime, let's embrace our soon-to-be overlord and get it to write its own code. With TF-Coder, you give the...

Jason Norwood-Young

3 weeks ago

Digital museums lean heavily on data viz

Self-confessed museum junky Maxene Graze over at Nightingale takes us through the various stages of museums getting their collections online, from the less-than-satisfactory search to immersive storytelling. The most successful implement the best of data visualisation, and some experiments take d...

Jason Norwood-Young

3 weeks ago

You can judge a burb by its colour

The New York Times data viz team takes a different look at predicting which way US voters will swing -- the colour of their environment. Green areas (denoting farmland and rural areas) voted Trump, while grey areas (generally urban) voted (unsuccessfully) for Clinton. I'm not sure whether this in...

Jason Norwood-Young

3 weeks ago

Map bug reveals notorious Xinjiang camps

Investigators discovered a bug in China's Baidu maps when looking at Xinjiang internment camps, effectively highlighting the very thing they were meant to hide.

Jason Norwood-Young

3 weeks ago

A chilling warning from FiveThirtyEight: Don’t count Trump out

Having been caught out by the last US Presidential Election, FiveThirtyEight's Nate Silver is going to great pains to try and explain that polls are both fallible and routinely misread: "... the FiveThirtyEight presidential election forecast, which we launched today, still has Trump with a 29 per...

Jason Norwood-Young

4 weeks ago

Could Microsoft Flight Simulator be your next investigative journalism tool?

Bellingcat's Giancarlo Fiorella tries out the incredibly realistic Microsoft Flight Simulator as a potential tool to identify the location of social media posts, video and photographic evidence.

Jason Norwood-Young

4 weeks ago

How big was the Beirut blast?

Reuters Graphics regularly produces stunning work, but this comparison of blast sizes using rectangles is a stand-out. While massive (the equivalent of 200 to 300 tons of explosives), Beirut turns out to not have been the largest accidental explosion of all time, with a 1921 blast in Germany (1,0...

Jason Norwood-Young

4 weeks ago

Don't Miss, Umbilical Ruminations

The media is a tool of the political elite, and other folk tales

A new report speaks to the people who have eschewed the media, believing it to be biased, commercialised, captured, or often just depressing.

Jason Norwood-Young

4 weeks ago

Don't Miss, Happenings

Bellingcat, the movie

The South African International Documentary Festival is in full-swing, with tons of great local and international films to feast on. Although it's all online, the organisers are trying to mimic the worst of a real cinema experience (apart from the guy spilling popcorn down the back of your shirt)...

Jason Norwood-Young

a month ago

AI’s coming for my job

Let's face it, most day-to-day coding is copying-and-pasting from StackOverflow into VSCode. Microsoft's new supercomputer skips out the middle bit -- the meaty bit doing the clicking -- and just writes code based on the very many previous examples for whatever you're hoping to achieve. Software ...

Jason Norwood-Young

a month ago

Get offroad with Google Maps

While you probably use Google Maps to check if your local supermarket is still open when you have a craving for cookies at 9:45pm (yes, it's open for another 15 minutes, hurry!), you can also use it to burn off those cookies by getting out into the wild for a walk or ride. The new Google Maps ove...

Jason Norwood-Young

a month ago