Naked Data

All the data you can eat

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Don't Miss, My Corona

Republicans not so conservative with Corona

Dan Goodspeed has made one of those racing-bar-charts, this time showing Coronavirus infections per 100,000 by US state, and coloured by their voting partisanship. You can tell where this is going, but seeing the swathe of red still comes as a bit of a shock - of the 25 worst-affected states curr...

Jason Norwood-Young

4 days ago

Teaching an old map new tricks

A very cool project by the University of Utrecht has geo-mapped over 1,000 old maps from the Ackersdijck Collection (a 19th Century Professor of Economics whose widow donated his map collection to the University) onto their modern lat-longs. You can view the maps through the online tool Georefere...

Jason Norwood-Young

4 days ago

Visualising #EndSars

Nigerian colleagues have been sharing tales of both the energy and trauma of the #EndSars protests against a murderous police unit, which have reached the kind of scale that even international media can no longer ignore them. To help you understand exactly what that scale is, local number crunchi...

4 days ago

Phone encryption ain’t what it’s cracked up to be

Oh, let's just make it a hat-trick for the techno-dystopia this week. According to a report published by Upturn, police officials in the US are bypassing strong encryption on Android and Apple devices as a matter of course, without a warrant and on the most trivial of grounds. Even though warrant...

4 days ago

Fact checking by the numbers

Turns out you don't have to be a paid bullshit-sniffer to recognise a stench when you smell one. A new study by MIT researchers suggests that there's wisdom in the crowds when it comes to fact-checking. By throwing news and misinformation at mechanical turks and comparing their collective opinion...

12 days ago

Don't Miss, My Corona

Just when you thought it couldn’t get worse

It's over a decade since Nick Davies pointed out that profitable news media was a short lived historical anomaly in Flat Earth News, but just how much further we had to fall was unclear until the coronavirus pandemic. The Tow Center and ICFJ have released a reported documenting just how bad thing...

13 days ago

Tracking the Uyghur tragedy with data

The human rights abuses in the Chinese Xinjiang region has led to multiple data projects, as digital activists do what they can from outside (and sometimes, at great risk, inside) China to record and expose the atrocities. The Xinjiang Data Project is an Australian effort to highlight the issue, ...

Jason Norwood-Young

2 weeks ago

Lies, damn lies, and election results

With the world obsessing on the US elections, it's time to (once again) go through the problems of visualising election results. The biggest issue, as Cairo Alberto has eloquently pointed out: "But acres don't vote. People do." The big areas on the map tend to be ironically the least-populated, a...

Jason Norwood-Young

2 weeks ago

Block your cock block from hackers

Just because you could connect a male chastity device to the internet, doesn't mean you should. The CellMate Chastity Cage goes on your willy, and gives control of unlocking it to your dom via an app, without any other way of unlocking it. But, according to Pen Test Partners, "Multiple API flaws ...

Jason Norwood-Young

2 weeks ago

Don't Miss, My Corona

The day the Twitterati turned on Trump?

As Nathan Cunningham puts it, schadenfreude or support? Trump's Tweet that had contracted Covid-19 was his most liked ever. By a long way. https://twitter.com/nathcun/status/1312765224437645316

2 weeks ago

Just popping to the chemist?

It's not the most user-friendly interactive and we'd be pretending if we knew what "Global friction surface enumerating land-based travel speed with access to motorized transport for a nominal year 2019" meant. But the Malaria Atlas Project's latest map layer is eye-opening. While the map is desi...

2 weeks ago

Chile’s got a strong constitution

As someone who has moved from a country without a written constitution to one with the Best In The World (TM), I find these national declarations of values and laws to be fascinating. Yet although they designed as a positioning statement to bind a country together for lifetimes to come, the avera...

2 weeks ago

South Africa’s Coronavirus: the data story

Laura Grant and Alastair Otter's sterling work on the Coronavirus data dashboard for South Africa means they have a serious corpus of data, along with a lot of experience to call on. Teaming up with health journalism outfit Bhekisisa, they've created a brilliant scrollytelling timeline of the vir...

Jason Norwood-Young

3 weeks ago

Gregor’s climate change chart

Here's something I just learnt about data viz guru Gregor Aisch: he's an avid gardener. That means he's particularly interested in rainfall, and how it's changing due to climate change. So the DataWrapper.de developer used a thermo-pluvio diagram as a scatterplot, which tracks changes into quadra...

Jason Norwood-Young

3 weeks ago

A different type of Corona-dashboard: It’s the economy, stupid

Let's make a Coronavirus dashboard, but for the economy! All it would require is the private economic data held by secretive credit card, payroll and retail companies, which they could mash up into a massive dataset and then make public. Easy peasy lemon squeezy.

Jason Norwood-Young

3 weeks ago

OGP celebrates 10 years

Open government data appears to be following the classic hype cycle model: much was expected a decade ago when the Open Government Partnership (OGP) was launched, yet by the time 2015 came around folks were so cynical even Zuma-era South Africa got a shot at being chair. Still, things seem to be ...

3 weeks ago

Cameroon jails troops tracked down by BBC

In a victory for open source investigative journalism, Cameroonian authorities have sentenced a group of soldiers to 10 years for their parts in the murder of two women and two children in 2015. Initially the government rejected claims of army involvement in the deaths, but a team from the BBC's ...

3 weeks ago

Don't Miss, My Corona

Have 19 out of 20 Covid cases gone undetected?

Official stats record just over 650 000 confirmed cases of Covid-19 in South Africa, but the question epidemiologists around the world are struggling to answer is how many cases have there been that we don't know about? Discovery Health boss Ryan Noach has crunched some numbers and come up with a...

a month ago

How big are the West Coast wildfires?

Pictures of red skies over San Francisco are one thing, but The Guardian rams home the scale of the devastation caused by the current wildfires along the West Cost of the US with a simple square. By overlaying the size of the fires on maps of other regions, it shows that if the epicentre of the f...

a month ago

Where the streets have a name

Map nerd Alasdair Rae deconstructs British street maps by their designation, such as Street, Road, Way, etc, and pops them onto beautiful maps that tell the history of a town. "In Milton Keynes, and some other places, you also get streets with no second name, like where they are just called thing...

Jason Norwood-Young

a month ago