Naked Data

All the data you can eat

My Corona

Don't Miss, My Corona

NHS gives its data away to some dodgy orgs

The Coronavirus has given the NHS the excuse to give its data to private firms to play with. One firm that is helping them -- out of the goodness of its black heart -- is Palantir, the CIA-funded group that helped Trump steal an election, used data to sniff out illegal immigrants for ICE, and did...

Jason Norwood-Young

yesterday at 08:14 am

Don't Miss, My Corona

A shiny new Covid-19 data portal for Latin America

The new Covid-19 Observatory for the Containment of Covid-19 in the Americas isn't your normal coronavirus dashboard. There's no R values or logarithmic expressions of death rates here. Rather, this project from Miami University is looking at the state of public policy and the movement of people ...

2 days ago

Don't Miss, My Corona

Silver linings

Lockdowns are lifting, but if the long term prognosis for coronavirus-related regulations and restrictions has you feeling down, maybe Happy Data can offer a pick-me-up. It's a project which aims to collect data around positive outcomes of the covid crisis, like an increase in volunteering and a ...

8 days ago

My Corona, Nerds

Are face masks invisible to algorithms?

The compulsory wearing of facemasks outside your home might be a deeply uncomfortable experience, but at least it's putting a stop to all those insidious facial recognition technologies privacy nuts have been banging on about for years, right? Not so, reckons Karan Bhanot, who's been playing arou...

8 days ago

The source of Kenya’s Covid-19: Not China

You'll be surprised to discover (or at least I was) that the majority of Kenya's Corona-cases didn't originate in China. Only two in five imported infections came from Asia at all, Odipo Dev reports. The biggest source of imported Coronavirus cases? The United Arab Emirates, accounting for nearly...

Jason Norwood-Young

9 days ago

Don't Miss, My Corona

Simulating our way out of Covid-19

Of the Coronavirus explorables, this is by far my favourite. On the one hand, it does what many of the other simulators do -- gives you a curved graph that we're all becoming very familiar with. But it takes this so much further, simulating the effects of increased hygiene, social distancing, tra...

Jason Norwood-Young

3 weeks ago

Don't Miss, My Corona

Plandumbic

ProPublica investigative journalist Marshall Allen speaks to both the Plandemic filmmaker Mikki Willis and interviewee Judy Mikovits for their comments, because that's what a journalist does.

Jason Norwood-Young

3 weeks ago

Don't Miss, My Corona

It was the salmon mousse. And the canapes. And the sausage rolls

Japanese broadcaster NHK has put together a little visual aid showing why large gatherings are a bad idea when there's coronavirus around: at a mock buffet, one diner has fluorescent paint squirted on his palm. During the meal a blacklight is turned on to show just where that paint has spread... ...

3 weeks ago

Finally, My Corona

130m litres of beer to get rid of? Challenge accepted

There's no let up to the anguish on South African Facebook and WhatsApp as middle-class pantries and wine racks run bare of booze, yet will the government listen to their plight? They will not. Prohibition remains in place, and as a result the brewery formerly known as SAB (now AB Inbev) says it ...

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4 weeks ago

Don't Miss, My Corona

Explaining the Coronavirus chart to your kids (and parents)

You may think your logarithmic Corona-chart that starts at 100 infections makes perfect sense, but go show it to your mom and see how she interprets it. Or, send her this video from Vox. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-3Mlj3MQ_Q

Jason Norwood-Young

4 weeks ago

Don't Miss, My Corona

Deaths from “unnatural causes” in South Africa are a third lower than normal

The Financial Times has a great piece this morning updating its look at the impact of Covid-19 on national death rates. For most countries covered, it's pretty big. Look: But look at South Africa - the chart actually shows a decline in expected mortality rates for this time of year. It's not surp...

4 weeks ago

Don't Miss, My Corona

Run, South Africa, run!

It's Lockdown Lifts day (part one) here in sunny South Africa, where 50% of Naked Data is based. And while the stay-at-home restrictions don't change an awful lot for many people, they do bring the blessed relief of being able to walk or run for leisure in the great outdoors for the first time in...

a month ago

Don't Miss, My Corona

The pain of merging datasets

It sounds so simple: combine various datasets to get a list of healthcare facilities in South Africa. Can't be that hard, right? Afrimapr went down this road, and has suffered so that we don't have to.

Jason Norwood-Young

a month ago

Google’s cyberstalking’s time has come

Yes, it is creepy that Google knows where you are, all the damn time. But measured on a country level, it changes from creepy to useful. Its Covid-19 Mobility Reports for each country is a fascinating look at how effective each country's various lockdown, social distancing or laissez faire approa...

Jason Norwood-Young

a month ago

Don't Miss, My Corona

Covid-19 – The Game

People of the Pandemic is a nifty Coronavirus explorable, but with a clever little twist - you play with (or against, depending on your perspective) 19 other real life people. It's a great way of seeing how the decisions you and those around you make affect the spread of a virus dramatically.

Jason Norwood-Young

a month ago

Don't Miss, My Corona

This ain’t no normal flu – The Economist

I'm still having arguments with people who say that Covid-19 is just a normal flu, and in retrospect we'll see that it caused no more deaths than one of the season's regular strains. And if that were the case, what the hell are trashing the economy for? The Economist's Daily Chart answers this ar...

Jason Norwood-Young

a month ago

My Corona, Nerds

Academic analysis of SA’s covid-data shortcomings

There's a strong feeling that the South African government is doing pretty well at coronavirus: last night, a long press conference was called in which graphs were shown to demonstrate that for now, the swift move to lockdown is working (for now being the operative part). South Africa's infection...

a month ago

Don't Miss, My Corona

NYT shows New York deaths doubled as a result of Covid-19

There's a lot of confusion about the mortality rate of coronavirus and how it compares to baseline numbers. After all, lots of people die every day, and a lot of people who die from Covid-19 would probably have passed anyway, right? Here in South Africa, it's even further confused by the fact tha...

a month ago

Don't Miss, My Corona

South Africa’s Information Regulator weighs in on covid comms

There's a justifiable fear that emergency provisions for using citizen data and geolocating smartphones to track coronavirus patients has dark implications for the future of civil liberties and privacy. University of Johannesburg's Jane Duncan, as ever, outlines the issues and the implications of...

a month ago

My Corona, Nerds

Fixing Coronavirus viz with actionable metrics

We're doing the Coronavirus visualisations all wrong, claims Rémy David. Instead of mapping the changes to the increase or decrease of the virus (which you'd typically get in the now-familiar logarithmic graphs), we should be measuring the rate of change of the change. Before your mind melts, Dav...

Jason Norwood-Young

a month ago