Naked Data

All the data you can eat

Don’t Miss

The cost of the climate crisis

So it's going a few rands to retool our global grid networks and get carbon emissions down. But even if you don't believe it'll be worth saving trivial things like ice caps and Cape Town from sinking into the sea, the economic cost of not doing anything is staggering. How staggering? Vox Europe h...

2 weeks ago

Will SA’s action plan on gender-based violence work?

When it comes to femicide, gender-based violence and sexual abuse in South Africa, there's two things to know. There's a lot of it - more than anyone can know (see Jason's Rape Convictions page here) - and there's a lot of talk and little effective action at reducing its incidence. The latest gov...

2 weeks ago

Travel the globe, in music

The latest offering from The Pudding is designed to take you out of your geographic musical bubble. It's pretty clever the way it starts by describing musical tastes in your area, and compares it popular songs in nearby areas, but what I learnt most is that I don't share musical taste with neighb...

Jason Norwood-Young

a month ago

Don't Miss, Umbilical Ruminations

Vox knows why SA is still so segregated

Vox's 10-minute history lesson on South Africa's segregated past -- and present -- might be familiar to readers of Naked Data not just for a story we know all too well, but also because the maps look strikingly familiar. Adrian Frith's 2015 Dot Map is one data visualisation I keep going back to, ...

Jason Norwood-Young

a month ago

Who owns Kenya?

Figuring out who owns bits of land isn't as easy as it should be, but is vital for economic rights, addressing inequality and injustice, and meaningful environmental regulations. Which is why an alliance of Omdena, World Resources Institute (WRI), Code for Africa, and Stanford University are tryi...

a month ago

The bias of beauty products

The Pudding's new data essay on biases baked into the beauty industry's naming of shades, The Naked Truth, is very similar to its 2018 investigation into the diversity of makeup, but it's hardly like the problem has gone away. "A 2020 study investigating the connotations of foundation shade names...

Jason Norwood-Young

a month ago

Welcome… to the Bob Ross virtual gallery

I can't use this Bob Ross Virtual Art Gallery without reading the text in a husky, sultry whisper. Bob Ross, for those who haven't turned on the Internet or watched sufficient daytime TV, was the host of The Joy of Painting, an eighties and nineties show where he would knock off impressive landsc...

Jason Norwood-Young

a month ago

Bad air bitcoins

Inevitably, the conversation at work this week turned to non-fungible tokens, which we're not going to try and explain because life is simply too short. But alarm bells are being sounded once again about the grand-daddy of crypto things, Bitcoin. A report in Nature Communications (précied in New ...

a month ago

Don't Miss, My Corona

The driving paradox

Coronavirus has been highly effective at relieving our roads of congestion, but it hasn't improved our driving much. The Economist reports that in the US traffic volumes dropped around 13% in 2020 compared to 2019, but road-related deaths were up by a massive 24%. Are people driving more reckless...

a month ago

The eternal grocery war

Finally! Someone has answered the question whether it's better to shop at Woolworths or Pick 'n Pay. Retail price tracker Trundler compared the price of a fruit and veg basket of 11 items over time for Woolies and PnP during the Coronavirus pandemic. And at first, Pick 'n Pay looks like it's easi...

Jason Norwood-Young

a month ago

Don't Miss, My Corona

Please stay patient, your vaccine will be ready in 16 years

MediaHack, the org who brought us the South African Coronavirus Dashboard, has released a new tracker that would be depressing if it weren't so amusing. (Or maybe that's the other way around...) The Vaccination in SA calculator estimates how long it will take to inoculate 67% of the population fr...

Jason Norwood-Young

a month ago

Less than half of the New York Times’ front page is news

Tom Cleveland, who's interests clearly overlap a little with my own (data + news), has been quietly scraping the New York Times to answer two questions (so far -- it's an ongoing project): How does the New York Times A/B test its headlines? And how much stuff on the NYT's front page is actually n...

Jason Norwood-Young

a month ago

Ships that don’t pass in the night

Like many around the world, Naked Data has been transfixed by the fate of the Ever Given, the megaship currently blocking traffic in the Suez Canal. Right on time it's another annual reminder that no matter how complex and efficient the supply chains are that keen our world running, nature can br...

a month ago

Don't Miss, Nerds

Visualising ALL of the internet

Barret Lyon has been quietly mapping the entirety of the internet since 2003, after friends bet him $50 he couldn't do it. And he's been quietly plugging away at the Opte project ever since, moving from traceroutes to routing tables in 2010. His visualisations have been displayed at MoMA New York...

Jason Norwood-Young

2 months ago

Data dysfunction for bad apples in the big apple

It's two years since the launch of the CAPstat.nyc website, which tracks bad apple cops in the Big Apple, but a Twitter thread by CAPstat lead Julie Ciccolini shows how much hasn't changed: a comparison between CAPstat and NYPD data shows that officers with multiple disciplinary issues that have ...

Jason Norwood-Young

2 months ago

Cheque your head

Culturally, we may have come a long way in the last few decades when it comes to recognising that mental health issues are just as serious as physical health ones. Practically, though, not so much. The European Data Journalism Network has published a very detailed report on access to professional...

2 months ago

Don't Miss, My Corona

A year of Covid-19

To mark the anniversary of the start of the coronavirus pandemic, GIJN has rounded up a year's worth of data journalism covering Covid-19, looking at lessons learned in UX, statistics and science reporting in general. It's also featured the rather sadder numbers around deaths of journalists to Co...

2 months ago

Don't Miss, Nerds, ROTM

Time to face up to our facial data

Mozilla Fellow Deborah Raji and TechCongress Legislative Fellow Genevieve Fried have co-authored a paper looking back at the history of facial recognition datasets, and have highlighted a disturbing trend: We've gone from carefully curated datasets collected with the participants' permission, to ...

Jason Norwood-Young

2 months ago

What do people eat all day?

Indian datavizzer Rohan Jhunja took the dangerous step of visualising the cooking habits of his close family over the month of December over on Nightingale, and managed to navigate tricky dinner-based relationship issues (like "does grandma eat enough vegetables?") by adding an enormous amount of...

2 months ago

The beer index

Possibly inspired by The Economist's Big Mac Index, Visual Capitalist has published a World Beer Index, tracking the price of a pint near you. According to its metrics, South Africa is the cheapest place on Earth to buy a bottle of brew, at $1.68 compared to Qatar's $11.26 and prices around $5 in...

2 months ago