Naked Data

All the data you can eat

Jason Norwood-Young

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

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

a month 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

a month 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

a month 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

a month 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

a month 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

a month 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

a month 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

a month 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

a month 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

a month 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

Journalism’s next new skill: 3D

Journalists have always been expected to have a broad range of skills, from shorthand to spreadsheets. Now it's time to add 3D modelling to your already-impressive CV, with the New York Times Labs demonstrating how 3D can be used for immersive stories. It recreates an artist couple's loft in exqu...

Jason Norwood-Young

a month ago

Truth just about as strange as Orwellian fiction

When an 18-year-old Jessica Johnson won the Orwell Youth Prize last year for her story about a "Band system" for students, meant to promote on merit but in reality offering opportunities only to the rich and down-marking the poor, she didn't know that she would be the victim of such a system just...

Jason Norwood-Young

a month ago

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

2 months ago

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

2 months ago

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

2 months ago

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

2 months ago

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 months ago