Naked Data

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My Corona

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...

an hour 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

2 days ago

Don't Miss, My Corona

SA makers build thousands of face sheilds for health and supermarket workers

If you missed Carte Blanche over the weekend, it had just a small number of the many makers and 3D printer owners who've been churning out filters and face shields for essential workers over the last few weeks. Check out the section below and salute them. And if you want to join them, head here. ...

2 days ago

Coronadashboard – this time for Africa

I know you're sick of Coronoavirus dashboards, but this one focuses on the ticking timebomb of the African continent. Created by Juliet Atellah and Alan Kawamara, the data is updated daily, and features plenty of dashboardy-visualisations care of Flourish. With countries like the Central African ...

Jason Norwood-Young

6 days ago

Don't Miss, My Corona

Covid in Kenya – Daily Nation tracks news over time

The data team over at Kenya's Daily Nation launched its coronavirus dashboard a couple of weeks ago, tracking official stats as they are reported across the country. What makes it slightly unusual is the use of Timeline.js to record important news stories over the period of the crisis. The timeli...

6 days ago

Datum, My Corona

Get yer Merican Corona data here

The US might be bad at universal healthcare, gun control and electing decent presidents (admittedly, the latter seems to be a global problem), but it is very good at data. And The Atlantic's COVID Tracking Project is a true example of the best of America: clever engineering, committed people, tea...

Jason Norwood-Young

a week ago

My Corona, Nerds

Engineering our way out of Covid-19

While it's tempting to spend lockdownd-time binge-watching Netflix, you could spend your time creating cool open source problems to the Coronavirus crisis instead. Helpful Engineering is a new community that has exploded, with 3,400 volunteers working on over 35 projects (at time of writing). The...

Jason Norwood-Young

8 days ago

Covid-19: The podcast

Excuse the slightly misleading headline. There is a Covid-19 podcast, but tbh I'd rather actually catch Covid-19. This podcast, however, is actually about how journalists are going about covering the Coronavirus, as opposed to the disease itself, which is, imho, MUCH more interesting. Find out ab...

Jason Norwood-Young

12 days ago

Every .za website MUST link to SA’s Coronavirus site

Say what? According to legislation published in March 2020's Government Gazette, all websites ending with a .za in their domain name will need to carry a link on their front page to SA's official Coronavirus website. 5.1.4 All internet sites operating within the .zaDNA toplevel domain name must h...

Jason Norwood-Young

13 days ago

Book learnin', My Corona

John Hopkins teaches epidemiology for all

As we are repeatedly at pans to point out, we're not epidemiologists here at Naked Data, but we could be. With time to fill in self- or enforced-isolation over the next three weeks, it makes sense to sign up for this free course offered by coronadata-meisters at John Hopkins University. It's call...

13 days ago

Data journalism in the time of cholera

Some of the most famous infographics -- John Snow's Broad Street Pump (1854) and Florence Nightingale's rose diagram (1858) -- have been born out of the need to save lives in times of disease. Neither of these however could be considered data journalism. Infographic historian Scott Klein has unea...

Jason Norwood-Young

2 weeks ago

Don't Miss, My Corona

Here’s what happened to South Africa’s missing Covid-19 data

There's a potential problem emerging in South Africa's ability to the spread of Covid-19 around the country: poor quality data. Like many of those in South Africa who've been trying to stay on top of government numbers about the spread of the coronavirus, we've been a little confused over the las...

2

2 weeks ago

Don't Miss, My Corona

The only corona predictor you need

We've seen many projections about the potential spread of coronavirus in different countries around Africa over the last couple of weeks, some that look convincing, others that seem patently mad. I'm not going to link to any of them because I'm not qualified enough to know which side of the sanit...

2 weeks ago

My Corona, Nerds

Building a Covid-19 app in R Shiny

As much as I'm an advocate for R for analysis, I inevitably end up building web visualisations in idiot-proof apps like Flourish. My secret shame - I have not yet mastered the art of Shiny, the server for putting R graphics online. Maybe now is the time - Meinhard Ploner has a neat walkthrough ex...

2 weeks ago

Happenings, My Corona

Civic Tech Forum: The show must go on

Kudos to the folks at the Civic Tech Innovation Forum in Johannesburg. The three day event (including the journalism focussed Jamfest) was scheduled for this week (and yours truly was to have been a speaker), but has obviously been cancelled thanks to the corona-clampdown. All is not lost, howeve...

3 weeks ago

Don't Miss, My Corona

As it spread it led

While millions around the world fear for their livelihoods in the wake of the coronavirus clampdowns, Niemen has confirmed what every one with a passing familiarity with the media knows... bad news can be good for business. Just as we saw with the Trump Bump, certain online news audiences in the ...

3 weeks ago

Flatten the TP curve

I made a joke about flattening the curve of the toilet paper panic buying, and realised that it's also an important thing to keep in mind -- stockpiling is bad for everyone.

Jason Norwood-Young

3 weeks ago

Don't Miss, My Corona

Corona-tracking for South Africa

The Media Hack team -- Laura Grant, Alastair Otter and Tanya Pampalone -- has taken the lead on visualising the spread of Covid-19 in South Africa with its Coronavirus ZA Dashboard. The numbers are based on the government's official announcements, so take it from whence it comes, but on the whole...

Jason Norwood-Young

3 weeks ago

Corona through the looking glass

The kind of augmented reality goggles that are so critical to SF classics like Charlie Stross' Halting State may never catch on. Just this week, premier purveyor of such products, Magic Leap, announced it was trying to flog itself off to the lowest bidder. If only they'd seen this video first - i...

3 weeks ago