Naked Data

All the data you can eat

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The best place to get the latest South African demographics: Twitter

Big props to Stats SA for brining the stats to the people, taking to Twitter to spool a thread of the latest South African demographics, and how the life expectancy has been knocked from 65.5 to 62, thanks to Covid. There's lots more in this info-packed thread (which includes some very good-looki...

Jason Norwood-Young

4 months ago

South Africa has a 4IR disaster slowly brewing … its maths and science matrics

Before I even tell you about this rather depressing investigation into South Africa's maths and science matriculation numbers, some good news: The Media Hack Collective (led by Alastair Otter and Laura Grant) have launched a new data stories publication called The Outlier. (A bit like The Pudding...

Jason Norwood-Young

4 months ago

70 years of running

Where do they come from, where do they go? We missed this back on World Refugee Day, but Al-Jazeera has some excellent visualisations showing the movement of displaced people over the last seven decades, and the flow of 30m people who have fled their homes today. It's pretty well established now ...

4 months ago

Anti-misinformation laws aren’t working in Africa

There's been much concern raised over the last few years about laws governing internet use which have been passed by some of the more draconian regimes on the African continent. Proponents often point to the scourge of "fake news" and say that "something must be done" (to ban other people's fake ...

4 months ago

How to pay 1% (or less) in tax

No-one enjoys paying tax, even if we do enjoy the benefits such tax brings -- roads, schools, parks, vaccinations, politicians... maybe not the last one. Still, if you're paying your fair share, it irks when you find out someone else isn't. It hurts even more when you discover the people paying 1...

Jason Norwood-Young

5 months ago

The 13 emotions of music

Researchers at UC Berkley have visualised a fascinating map of how people emotionally respond to different music, identifying 13 distinct emotions that music can elicit. And they are (drum roll): Amusement, joy, eroticism, beauty, relaxation, sadness, dreaminess, triumph, anxiety, scariness, anno...

Jason Norwood-Young

5 months ago

Tooled up

Many words have been written about the various military capabilities of Israel and Palestine and how the imbalance of power in the Middle East has been reinforced by those much distant from the ongoing bloodshed. But as ever, a picture tells a thousand words and Al Jazeera nails it with a series ...

5 months ago

The ‘gale is back in town

Look who's got a new home: it's The Nightingale, the official publication of the worldwide Data Visualisation Society. Finally weaning itself off of the Medium teat, it means more stories are accessible to everyone without a subscription. There's some cracking stories too, including this Data Vis...

5 months ago

Visualising bias

Bias of the algorithmic kind is a problem, which usually takes a lot of words to explain and doesn't often leave you feeling like you knew more about the problem than when you started. Which is why we really like The Economist's recent take on the subject, which shows you exactly where the biases...

5 months ago

Don't Miss, Stack

OpenUp Needs You!

Are you a visionary leader capable of inspiring a team of passionate, talented individuals? Do you want the work you do to make a difference every day? Do you want to empower society with the tools and knowledge to better their lives? Founder Adi Eyal has moved on to follow his passion of using t...

Jason Norwood-Young

5 months ago

Don't Miss, ROTM

Not Tom Cruise is back

Should the real Tom Cruise die in a tragic accident while filming one of his own stunts, or even just finally age, deep faker Chris Ume is standing in the wings, ready to take his place. We've reported on this deep fakes account before, but at that point the account had been taken private due to ...

Jason Norwood-Young

5 months ago

Just feed them to the lions

When the rewards are so great and the risks of getting caught relatively low, it shouldn't come as any surprise to find that the threat of longer sentencing for wildlife trafficking in Hong Kong courts isn't really having much of an effect on the scale of the crime. Enviro-investigators Oxpeckers...

6 months ago

Visualising African (and Asian and South American) data

Nightingale has posted an excellent round-up of a recent Data Visualisation Society discussion about the quality and potential of datviz in the Global South, and it's well worth a read. You have to get past the impersonal NGO-y acronym LMICs (lower and middle income countries), but once you do th...

6 months ago

Not all places are equal in the youth unemployment crisis

An investigation by OpenUp finds that while unemployment in South Africa is generally bad, it's shocking for the youth, and worse for women than for men. Thanks to census delays, we don't have an up-to-date picture of the unemployment figures, but working on 2011 stats, OpenUp discovers that the ...

Jason Norwood-Young

6 months ago

Finding female voices for the media

Quote This Woman+ is a South African media NGO that publishes a fortnightly list of expert female media sources. They’ve just sent their latest edition, which focuses on vaccine experts, but previous topics include everything from blockchain to trans womens' rights. You'll need to subscribe to se...

Jason Norwood-Young

6 months ago

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...

6 months 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...

6 months 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

7 months 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

7 months ago