Naked Data

All the data you can eat

Jason Norwood-Young

Journalist, developer, community builder, newsletter creator and international man of mystery, Jason was one of the first South Africans to really grasp the importance of data in the newsroom and has remained one step ahead of the trends in the field all the way. Even Naked Data was conceived before email newsletters were cool again. But what does that tell you about the measure of the man? Nothing, that's what. He hides the superman CV behind a truly mild-mannered and overly modest persona and is best described as "one of the nicest guys in the business". When he's angry, it is righteously so, and his anger always wears velvet mittens. The true signs of his genius include the ability to create multilingual puns on demand (witness the alternative Naked Data strap "Putting the heita in to data") and the fact that he offered me a job. (AO)

Don't Miss, My Corona

NHS gives its data away to some dodgy orgs

The Coronavirus has given the NHS the excuse to give its data to private firms to play with. One firm that is helping them -- out of the goodness of its black heart -- is Palantir, the CIA-funded group that helped Trump steal an election, used data to sniff out illegal immigrants for ICE, and did...

Jason Norwood-Young

yesterday at 08:14 am

Ten million dollars for data science!

Data.org is slapping down a very large load of cash -- $10,000,000 to be precise -- in order to help drag the world into a better state with data science. Its "Inclusive Growth and Recovery Challenge" is open to anyone over 18, (almost*) anywhere in the world, who reckons their data science solut...

Jason Norwood-Young

yesterday at 07:31 am

OpenUp re-invents, gets its data back

Two things of note from OpenUp: First off, it has asked us to tell you that it has rebranded. (We're not sad to see the back of that egg tbh.) The second is that, in case you wondered where the hell the data portal went, it's back -- this time as a ckan instance so that corporate sponsors who off...

Jason Norwood-Young

8 days ago

Build a website for your favourite charity

This year's Do_Action hackathon moves online, so you can build Wordpress websites for South African charities in nothing but your undies. Teams of six work intensely for a week to deliver a brand-spanking-new Wordpress website for one of ten non-profits.

Jason Norwood-Young

8 days ago

Do Not Draw a Penis

There's really not much to say about this drawing AI without giving away the joy of exploring it yourself, except that, as per the title, you were warned... Don't draw a penis now...

Jason Norwood-Young

9 days ago

The source of Kenya’s Covid-19: Not China

You'll be surprised to discover (or at least I was) that the majority of Kenya's Corona-cases didn't originate in China. Only two in five imported infections came from Asia at all, Odipo Dev reports. The biggest source of imported Coronavirus cases? The United Arab Emirates, accounting for nearly...

Jason Norwood-Young

9 days ago

Don't Miss, My Corona

Simulating our way out of Covid-19

Of the Coronavirus explorables, this is by far my favourite. On the one hand, it does what many of the other simulators do -- gives you a curved graph that we're all becoming very familiar with. But it takes this so much further, simulating the effects of increased hygiene, social distancing, tra...

Jason Norwood-Young

3 weeks ago

Don't Miss, My Corona

Plandumbic

ProPublica investigative journalist Marshall Allen speaks to both the Plandemic filmmaker Mikki Willis and interviewee Judy Mikovits for their comments, because that's what a journalist does.

Jason Norwood-Young

3 weeks ago

csv,conf, virtually

If there's a positive to the Coronavirus, it's made conference attendance equitable. The most important open data conference on the annual calendar, csv,conf, went virtual this year, and apart from the difficulties in scheduling it at a decent time for everyone, it went pretty damn smoothly. I'm ...

Jason Norwood-Young

3 weeks ago

Don't Miss, My Corona

Explaining the Coronavirus chart to your kids (and parents)

You may think your logarithmic Corona-chart that starts at 100 infections makes perfect sense, but go show it to your mom and see how she interprets it. Or, send her this video from Vox. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-3Mlj3MQ_Q

Jason Norwood-Young

4 weeks ago

Don't Miss, Finally

When map fiction becomes on-the-ground fact

When cartographers aren't sneaking hidden pics into maps, they're making up fake place names in order to trap other cartographers who may plagiarise their work -- known as "paper towns". But in the case of one US paper town, Agloe, the little bit of cartographic crypto turned into a real place wh...

Jason Norwood-Young

4 weeks ago

Eat the rich

Enjoy scrolling? Enjoy feeling outraged? Enjoy solving the world's problems? Warm up that mousewheel and head on over to 1-pixel-wealth, which lets you scroll through Jeff Bezos' unimaginable wealth, with each 10 pixels worth $5 million. And once you've gotten through Bezos' $139 billion, you can...

Jason Norwood-Young

a month ago

Book learnin', Don't Miss

Don’t be fooled: The journalist’s guide to foiling fake news

Craig Silverman has wrangled some of the industry's top fact-checkers and myth-busters to produce the latest version of the Verification Handbook For Disinformation and Media Manipulation, a veritable trove of methodologies, practices and examples to help the journalist separate fact from crap.

Jason Norwood-Young

a month ago

Don't Miss, My Corona

The pain of merging datasets

It sounds so simple: combine various datasets to get a list of healthcare facilities in South Africa. Can't be that hard, right? Afrimapr went down this road, and has suffered so that we don't have to.

Jason Norwood-Young

a month ago

Google’s cyberstalking’s time has come

Yes, it is creepy that Google knows where you are, all the damn time. But measured on a country level, it changes from creepy to useful. Its Covid-19 Mobility Reports for each country is a fascinating look at how effective each country's various lockdown, social distancing or laissez faire approa...

Jason Norwood-Young

a month ago

Don't Miss, Umbilical Ruminations

Microsoft’s open data play

Whether Microsoft's open data play is an honest attempt to reduce digital divides or a Trojan horse for its AI and Power BI remains to be seen.

Jason Norwood-Young

a month ago

Don't Miss, My Corona

Covid-19 – The Game

People of the Pandemic is a nifty Coronavirus explorable, but with a clever little twist - you play with (or against, depending on your perspective) 19 other real life people. It's a great way of seeing how the decisions you and those around you make affect the spread of a virus dramatically.

Jason Norwood-Young

a month ago

Hacking at Coronavirus

I'm unconvinced that hackathons will be quite the same without beer and pizza, but they continue through our various quarantines virtually nonetheless. Canadian hackers went on a marathon three-day marathon hackathon on 17, 18 and 19 April, Together vs Virus, and some emerged with impressive resu...

Jason Norwood-Young

a month ago

Don't Miss, My Corona

This ain’t no normal flu – The Economist

I'm still having arguments with people who say that Covid-19 is just a normal flu, and in retrospect we'll see that it caused no more deaths than one of the season's regular strains. And if that were the case, what the hell are trashing the economy for? The Economist's Daily Chart answers this ar...

Jason Norwood-Young

a month ago

My Corona, Nerds

Fixing Coronavirus viz with actionable metrics

We're doing the Coronavirus visualisations all wrong, claims Rémy David. Instead of mapping the changes to the increase or decrease of the virus (which you'd typically get in the now-familiar logarithmic graphs), we should be measuring the rate of change of the change. Before your mind melts, Dav...

Jason Norwood-Young

a month ago