Naked Data

All the data you can eat

Jason Norwood-Young

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

India is running out of water

India's booming population needs one thing parts of the country are desperately short of -- water. Due to poor dam development, the country relies heavily on groundwater, and many regions are emptying their aquifers faster than they can fill. Take it from a Capetonian -- you don not want your cit...

Jason Norwood-Young

2 years ago

India is running out of water

India's booming population needs one thing parts of the country are desperately short of -- water. Due to poor dam development, the country relies heavily on groundwater, and many parts of the country are emptying their aquifers faster than they can fill. Take it from a Capetonian -- you don not ...

Jason Norwood-Young

2 years ago

The African Investigative (Data) Journalism Conference

28 - 30 OctoberWits University, Johannesburg This year's African Investigative Journalism Conference's speaker list is top-notch. Apart from the usual investigative journo crowd, there's plenty of data journalism happening: Al Jazeera's Mohammed El-Haddad heads up AJLabs; Dorothy Otieno is the Da...

Jason Norwood-Young

2 years ago

Data über alles – GIJC 2019

26 - 29 SeptemberHamburg, Germany The Global Investigative Journalism Conference gets going in the land of currywurst and Fritz Cola, and has data journ sprinkled liberally throughout with a whole big data track. SQL, QGIS, R... Most exciting is that some live streaming has been promised, which i...

Jason Norwood-Young

2 years ago

AP Datakit – Setting up data for the win!

The concept is pretty simple: A data project boilerplate designed by AP that's meant to get your R or Python data project set up for success. It uses Cookiecutter for the template, and AWS to store data in the cloud. Your choice of Github or Gitlab.

Jason Norwood-Young

2 years ago

A day in the life of our noble leader

Civic tech is the weird confluence of technology, government, and society, and the playground of Adi Eyal, noble leader of OpenUp, which (not so) incidentally sponsors Naked Data. But running a civic tech company -- and a non-profit to boot -- is not trivial. Eyal gives us a glimpse behind the sc...

Jason Norwood-Young

2 years ago

Turns out Stallman is a creep

In this week's Hero to Zero, Richard Stallman, considered by many as the leader of the free software movement, fell on his sword after allegations of sexism, an indefensible stance on Epstein and pedophilia, and a weird attachment to an abortion joke. The fall-out follows the Jeffrey Epstein outr...

Jason Norwood-Young

2 years ago

Ig Nobel: Celebrating the best of the worst of science

The annual Ig Nobel Awards has once again celebrated a number of "worthy" discoveries in science, including why left nuts run hotter; the invention of a dish washer for soiled babies; and why wombats make cubed poops. Winners receive a staggering ten-trillion dollar prize (Zim dollars), and the s...

Jason Norwood-Young

2 years ago

Don’t look now, but there’s a new node on your ggplot

Hey R nerds, there's a whole new ggraph, imaginatively named 2.0.0. Ggraph extends ggplot2 with relational data -- think trees, networks etc. So if you're tracking the relationship between corrupt organisations around the world and need some edge and node action, ggraph for the win.

Jason Norwood-Young

2 years ago

Saving Fusion Tables from the grave

Google kills products and services off with such regularity that there are two websites -- both of which confusingly have "Google Graveyard" in the site title -- just to track what's on the chopping block, and what's already dead and buried. Of particular interest to us data geeks is the imminent...

Jason Norwood-Young

2 years ago

Bill and Ted’s Bodacious Cryogenian Period

Learning about geology should not be this entertaining. For those who don't know -- or perhaps grew up in a creationist home -- the earth is very old, constantly shifting, and extremely fun to play with in 3D. This model lets you go back up to 750 million years and track where your house would ha...

Jason Norwood-Young

2 years ago

Charity begins at home (for telemarketers)

An investigation by Tampa Bay Times and the Center for Public Integrity lifts the lid on charitable donations through telemarketers. It discovers that for every dollar seemingly donated to some charities, only 16c ends up in the charities' pockets. Worse, they're not even charities -- they're "po...

Jason Norwood-Young

2 years ago

Pick a window cause your leaving

You can tell a lot about a Jo'burger by what they call their buddies -- "Cuzzies" from the East, "Chommies" from the South, "Bros" (Central), "Brus" (Foreigner from Slaapstad or Dirtbin), or "Boets" (the North). And finally, the boets are getting some much-needed recognition of their unique cultu...

Jason Norwood-Young

2 years ago

ProPublica’s collab guide

So, your source came through and you got that huge data dump. But you don't have the time, people, or skills to handle it all yourself -- or even within your organisation. It's time to get hold of your co-opetition and do some collabing! ProPublica, which has done a fair bit of this itself, has r...

Jason Norwood-Young

2 years ago

Boots-n-cats, boots-n-cats, oohm-ch oohm-ch oohm-ch oohm-ch

Last week, we brought you the Psytrance Guide, to which Limn responded: "I'll see your psytrance guide, and raise you one all electronic genres guide." Ishkur's Guide to Electronic Music is tricky to navigate, full of weird janks (why are the descriptions always scrolled to the bottom?), and yet...

Jason Norwood-Young

2 years ago

The scale of silicosis

Silicosis is a nasty disease you get from working in mines, and with South Africa being particularly reliant on mining, it's a massive problem. The mines are meant to compensate mine workers afflicted by diseases contracted on the job, but despite a law was passed in 1996 compelling the mining co...

Jason Norwood-Young

2 years ago

Damn fine Dem donor maps

The New York Times' maps just keep getting better, with this fascinating look at where the US democrats get their funding offering surprising insight into the geographic divides -- and alliances -- of the country. It's also amazing to have these data -- in South Africa, political funding is still...

Jason Norwood-Young

2 years ago

Dodgy Lotto tries its luck

The Lotto is a classic con to defraud the poor, but it's always had as its defense the argument that the money gets routed to uplifting the people it's robbing. But, when there are billions involved, there's the inevitable corruption. An ongoing investigation by Raymond Joseph, Anton van Zyl and ...

Jason Norwood-Young

2 years ago

The politics of land

Land is a pretty big deal in South Africa, as it is in the rest of the world where a portion (in SA's case, the majority) were dispossessed of much of it. Code for Africa has produced an unflinchingly political data visualisation tool, HuruMap Land, based on Knight Lab's Census Reporter and OpenU...

Jason Norwood-Young

2 years ago

Umbilical Ruminations

Finally the UK has the leader it deserves…

Johnson as Prime Minister marks, well and truly, the end of Britain’s expansion, and is proof that it now only looks inwards.Jason Norwood-Young When I wrote "Finally the UK has the leader it deserves..." on the Facebooks in response to Boris Johnson's PMship, the responses ranged from "Harhar" t...

Jason Norwood-Young

2 years ago