Naked Data

All the data you can eat

Don’t Miss

A visual hint for anti-vaxxers

If anti-vaxxers were a threat only to themselves we could sit back and let Darwin do his work. Sadly, not only do they put their children at risk of serious disease, they undermine the principle of herd immunity which helps keep us all safe from preventable disease. Here's the visualisation of ju...

a year ago

They knew. They always knew

The Guardian has been leading this week with a series of number crunching stories around carbon emissions, which it uses to show that just 20 firms have been responsible for 35% of greenhouse gas equivalents since 1965. What makes these businesses particularly culpable - moreso than the people wh...

a year ago

ISS drills into SA crime data like SAPS should

When I grow up I want to work for the Institute of Security Studies... This extremely in depth report on crime in Cape Town township Khayelitsha looks at how SAPS could be using data (but aren't) to identify crime hotspots and allocate resources in such a way that would drastically reduce rates. ...

a year ago

The fucked up number of the week: 45 million

An argument can be made that crime numbers and statistics can make victims faceless and make the story less impactful. In this case, the victims -- those of child pornography -- must remain faceless; and the number is so big that it is the story: 45 million photos and videos found by tech compani...

Jason Norwood-Young

a year ago

See how Apartheid wiped communities off the map

Glenn Moncrieff's act of split-viewing today's Google Maps images of Cape Town with aerial photography from before Apartheid's resettlement of "non-whites" creates a powerful art. Reminiscent of Johnny Miller's work, it's a stark reminder of how the forced removals scared our landscape and our ps...

Jason Norwood-Young

a year ago

Now SA can censor the internet (let’s see it try)

The main redeeming feature of South African legislators is that even though they sometimes come up with really bad ideas, very few laws actually ever hit the statute books simply because parliamentary process takes so long the crushing ennui ladens down the President's pen when it comes to signin...

a year ago

India is running out of water

India's booming population needs one thing parts of the country are desperately short of -- water. Due to poor dam development, the country relies heavily on groundwater, and many regions are emptying their aquifers faster than they can fill. Take it from a Capetonian -- you don not want your cit...

Jason Norwood-Young

a year ago

NYT bags visual investigation award

The New York Times and Bellingcat just landed themselves an Emmy for their epic OSINT investigation into the murder of Syrian civillians. Disturbing to watch, but a worthy winner. https://twitter.com/malachybrowne/status/1176754823422709761

a year ago

India is running out of water

India's booming population needs one thing parts of the country are desperately short of -- water. Due to poor dam development, the country relies heavily on groundwater, and many parts of the country are emptying their aquifers faster than they can fill. Take it from a Capetonian -- you don not ...

Jason Norwood-Young

a year ago

#AmINext is not forgotten

There are so many things I really like about News 24's #AmINext microsite, which tells the story of Uyinene Mrwetyana, the young woman whose death sparked protests against gender-based violence around the country. Nene's background and the story of her murder are told with sensitivity and power, ...

a year ago

Mapping justice

One in five South Africans who try to resolve a legal problem give up in the end, and 54% of those who try experience some sort of hardship as a result of trying to get their needs met -- including stress, relationship breakdown or loss of employment. Kenya is very similar, while in the UK it tak...

a year ago

Digging deeper into crime stats

Well blow me down. Not a week ago I was raging that no-one in SA media had taken the rich data in the crime stats and actually dug deep into it to find narratives and patterns that they weren't spoon-fed, and then along comes Mail & Guardian's Jacques Coetzee and completely undermines my argu...

a year ago

Down with RICA!

Edward Snowden himself was taken aback by the implications of the South African High Court's ruling on the Regulation of Interception of Communications and Provision of Communication Related Information Act (RICA). For most of us, RICA is the thing we do when we hand over ID docs to purchase a ne...

a year ago

A day in the life of our noble leader

Civic tech is the weird confluence of technology, government, and society, and the playground of Adi Eyal, noble leader of OpenUp, which (not so) incidentally sponsors Naked Data. But running a civic tech company -- and a non-profit to boot -- is not trivial. Eyal gives us a glimpse behind the sc...

Jason Norwood-Young

a year ago

Bill and Ted’s Bodacious Cryogenian Period

Learning about geology should not be this entertaining. For those who don't know -- or perhaps grew up in a creationist home -- the earth is very old, constantly shifting, and extremely fun to play with in 3D. This model lets you go back up to 750 million years and track where your house would ha...

Jason Norwood-Young

a year ago

Fact-checking on fire

Fires in the Amazon, Arctic and Australia are causing right and proper concern around the world. Fact-checkers at the Beeb, however, have tried to put recent outbreaks into historical context, and thrown up some curious observations. While the scale of devastation in...

a year ago

Charity begins at home (for telemarketers)

An investigation by Tampa Bay Times and the Center for Public Integrity lifts the lid on charitable donations through telemarketers. It discovers that for every dollar seemingly donated to some charities, only 16c ends up in the charities' pockets. Worse, they're not even charities -- they're "po...

Jason Norwood-Young

a year ago

Will social media be Julius’ downfall?

Top data story of the week without doubt goes to Pauli van Wyk and the Daily Maverick, which alleges that Julius Malema was using funds looted from the now-collapsed VBS Mutual Bank to fund his personal expenses. The first half of the story, documenting odd financial flows from VBS to a businesse...

a year ago

Boots-n-cats, boots-n-cats, oohm-ch oohm-ch oohm-ch oohm-ch

Last week, we brought you the Psytrance Guide, to which Limn responded: "I'll see your psytrance guide, and raise you one all electronic genres guide." Ishkur's Guide to Electronic Music is tricky to navigate, full of weird janks (why are the descriptions always scrolled to the bottom?), and yet...

Jason Norwood-Young

a year ago

The scale of silicosis

Silicosis is a nasty disease you get from working in mines, and with South Africa being particularly reliant on mining, it's a massive problem. The mines are meant to compensate mine workers afflicted by diseases contracted on the job, but despite a law was passed in 1996 compelling the mining co...

Jason Norwood-Young

a year ago