Naked Data

All the data you can eat

Don’t Miss

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

5 days 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

5 days ago

Corruption made easy

Nigerian open data watchdog BudgIT has taken to Twitter to explain just how corruption in the Niger Delta talks place, with fun infographics in a thread that shows how you too can walk away with a trillion naira or so if you are suitably well connected. Highlights include the contract awarded 55 ...

5 days ago

Clever cops call on copyright

The Other EFF has a fascinating piece explaining how some California cops are preventing people from livestreaming their, um, honest interactions with the thin blue line. It's highlighted a case in which a police officer spotted an activist turning on their camera , and responded with a blast of ...

5 days ago

Talking up a rumour

Lie-spotter generals at First Draft have published a guide on how to sift social media for misinformation, focussing on "rumour cues" - those telltale words that beloved of conspiracy theorists - and common combinations that indicate untruths are afoot. Top tip is the use of a Word Tree for filte...

5 days 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

5 days 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

12 days 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

12 days ago

What does the band aid?

Ever seen a plastic ring around a birds foot and wondered how scientists actually use them to collect data? There are - apparently - over 200 billion birds in the world, so what are the chances of ever finding one you've tagged again, right? Wonder no more - instead read this wonderful Scientific...

12 days ago

Democracy in peril (pt 94)

The ever engaging data team at The Economist has published its Global Democracy Index 2020, looking at the state of civic freedoms worldwide. The article is paywalled, but the map and strap say it all. "An unprecedented rollback of democratic freedoms." Eek.

12 days ago

Counting corruption

Veza is an exciting new tool from Corruption Watch in South Africa: some years in the making, it's an interactive map of police stations throughout the country, with per-station stats on resources, precinct size and reports of corruption. Naturally you can upload your own reports too. Right now, ...

12 days ago

How quaint is The Wire

Remember back in the early 2000s when using cellphone mast data to track people was an exciting storyline in David Simon's The Wire? You got the sense, even then, that technology was running faster than the showrunners could keep up (although apparently they were asked to remove some references t...

2 weeks ago

Nightingale goes acoustic

The periodical of the Data Visualisation is going offline... in a good way. It's adding to its portfolio of publications (currently hosted on Medium) with a print edition. It's a smart move, of course, as world class stories about dataviz will make for a truly beautiful magazine, but it needs you...

2 weeks 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 weeks 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 weeks 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 weeks 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 weeks ago

Don't Miss, Umbilical Ruminations

Who’s who in the coup?

GIJN has a nice article detailing some of the research techniques used by Bellingcat et al to identify participants in the riots at the US Capitol two weeks ago. It includes links to useful OSINT tools like Hunch.ly and The Wayback Machine, and some that may not be familiar like facial recognitio...

a month ago

Where did all the green spaces go?

Good news - one of Joe Biden's first acts as Pres of the USA was to rejoin the Paris Accord and commit to environmental goals. Bad news, the planet is in a really rough shape. But all is not lost. Vizzuality's Where The Wild Things Aren't tracks wilderness loss over the 300 years to the millenniu...

a month ago