Naked Data

All the data you can eat

Jason Norwood-Young

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

The A-Z of A to Z

Climate scientist Neil Kaye seems to produce a prodigious number of data visualisations over on the Twitters, but this "Frequency of letters in English words and where they occur in the word" really caught my eye. Brilliant. (And very useful for crossword puzzles.)

Jason Norwood-Young

2 months ago

Google’s war against ethics in AI continues

Ater sacking the prominent AI ethicist Timnit Gebru for doing her job, Google decided that it's still not free enough from pesky ethics and responsibility for its actions. It's now fired another ethics researcher, Margaret Mitchell, claiming that she send electronic documents outside of the compa...

Jason Norwood-Young

2 months ago

A rare misstep from NYT’s visualisation team – too many dots

The New York Times wanted to mark the terrible toll of half-a-million American deaths to Covid-19 with a strong graphic. Its previous cover at the 100,000-mark, a cover with 1,000 names on the cover. At the time of the 100,000 death-mark, Simone Landon, assistant editor of the New York Times Grap...

Jason Norwood-Young

2 months ago

Independent Media, where one plus one equals whatever you need it to

I know it's hard to fault The Great Doctor Iqbal Survé, Personal Physician to Nelson Mandela, Saviour of South Africa's Media, Owner of Independent Media, Master of Shipping Fleets, Leader of Technology, Maven of the Bourse, and All-Round-Good-Guy. I know how awesome he is because his own publica...

Jason Norwood-Young

2 months ago

Book learnin', Don't Miss

Sitting at the feet of Zen Master Bostock

"This isn’t intended to be too comprehensive or serious — just a handful of observations as I look ahead to the next ten years," opines Mike Bostock, the creator of unarguably the most important data visualisation graphics library on the occasion of its tenth birthday. He then proceeds to elucida...

Jason Norwood-Young

2 months ago

Hot NYTimes map of US cold storm

Most of the middle of the United States got to re-enact The Day After Tomorrow as a polar vortex stormed through the country, probably sparked by climate change. (This is literally the script of said disaster movie, one of my wife's favourites.) As a South African who just survived a week of sub-...

Jason Norwood-Young

2 months ago

Don't Miss, ROTM

People of Europe, rise up! Reclaim your face!

If the thought of secret government and private agencies using our bodies to track and trace us for commercial, criminal and political targeting sounds a little ominous, that's probably because it very much is. A new petition initiative, Reclaim your Face, is trying to garner enough signatures to...

Jason Norwood-Young

2 months ago

Become an RStudio zen master

From how to change multiple lines at once, through to how to run jobs in parallel, this fairly comprehensive list of tips and ticks will take your RStudio fu to a new level. Even better, it features a screen recording of just about every trick, which is how all how-tos should be built. Use Up key...

Jason Norwood-Young

2 months ago

What did Covid teach us (about charts)?

What a difference a year makes. It's worth remembering that exactly one year ago, the US had 14 confirmed Coronavirus cases. The UK, 9. And the first song about Coronavirus was released on 12 February 2020. Twelve months and a shit-ton of data visualisations later, Tableau's Andy Cotgreave looks ...

Jason Norwood-Young

3 months ago

Book learnin', Nerds

A new age for meta

Tech to gather, crunch and machine-learn the hell out of data has been racing ahead for the past decade, but one facet of the data infrastructure has been lagging, argues Prukalpa Sankar: our data about the data. It's time to get our metadata to the level of the rest of our tools, with what she c...

Jason Norwood-Young

3 months ago

Parler p4wn gets text

Two heroes have emerged from the attack by a mob on the US Capitol in January: Eugene Goodman, the police officer who led attackers away from senators and is up for a Congressional Gold Medal; and @donk_enby, now going by Hackers-inspired "crash override", who isn't up for any medals, but who's w...

Jason Norwood-Young

3 months ago

Don't Miss, ROTM

DALL·E is GPT-3 for images, and it’s terrifying

Sorry artists and photographers, you'll be joining town cryers, journalists, and people who tore up phonebooks on the Useless Skills pile. DALL-E applies GPT-3 to image generation, letting you use language to describe what you want, and the AI goes ahead and draws it for you. Need a harp snail? A...

Jason Norwood-Young

3 months ago

SA’s spies reigned in by amaB

The ruling by South Africa's Constitutional Court that the state's security apparatus cannot be used to spy on journalists is a massive victory for free media in the country. The case, brought by investigative outfit amaBhunghane, which itself was under surveillance, stops the free-for-all spying...

Jason Norwood-Young

3 months ago

Another US election map? Why not

Yes, yes, yet another US election map, but this one from NYT's Upshot focuses on detail over completeness, in some cases going down to the level of just a few blocks. It's only 64% complete, but incredible nonetheless. Certainly useful if you're planning on moving in the US.

Jason Norwood-Young

3 months ago

Analysis of Capitol rioters reveals grumpy old men

The Chicago Project on Security and Threats' data analysis of the terrorists that raided the US Capitol buildings on 6 January, in an attempt to topple democratic rule in the country and stage a coup on behalf of ousted strongman dictator Donald Trump, has revealed that the rioters don't fit the ...

Jason Norwood-Young

3 months ago

Happy Birthday D3!

17 Feb 2021, 5pm, online It's been 10 years of incredible visualisations, and also 10 years of banging our heads against our screens because we forgot to .exit(). Mike Bostock's incredible data visualisation library, D3.js, single-handedly underpinned the birth of the online infographic. While th...

Jason Norwood-Young

3 months ago

Ding Dong, The Wicked Witch of Twitter is Dead

Ah, remember when Trump used to be President, and on Twitter. He always had such nice things to say about everybody. The New York Times has compiled a list of all those nice things, The Complete List of Trump’s Twitter Insults (2015-2021). We'll sure miss his sunshine and rainbows on the social m...

Jason Norwood-Young

3 months ago

The state of Javascript, 2020

My favourite nerd report is out, The State of Javascript - an annual deep dive into the current state of the ever-growing Javascript world. Unsurprisingly but disappointingly, it's still dominated by white, English-speaking men from Europe and North America. Fortunately wealth of Javascript tools...

Jason Norwood-Young

3 months ago

Accessible data visualisation – beyond colour blindness

It's pretty low-hanging fruit to ensure your data visualisation uses colourblind-friendly colours - most colour pickers will give you a colourblind-safe palette. But moving beyond that isn't just a matter of laziness, argues data viz guy Frank Elavsky over on Twitter: there's also systemic racism...

Jason Norwood-Young

3 months ago