Naked Data - Page 2 of 25 - All the data you can eat

Naked Data

All the data you can eat

Better plotting

The ggplot2 package for making pretty graphs in R is exceptionally customisable, and used by newsrooms around the world for outputting clear and well branded graphics. Getting consistency across your visualisations can be tough, though, which is why Abhinav Malasi's guide to creating ggplot2 them...

3 weeks ago

Inside Antikythera

For over a century researchers have been trying to figure out how an ancient corroded clockwork orrery found at the bottom of the Mediterranean was used by classical Greek astronomers to predict events like solar eclipses. Despite many attempts to model and rebuild the unique Antikythera Mechanis...

3 weeks ago

Ships that don’t pass in the night

Like many around the world, Naked Data has been transfixed by the fate of the Ever Given, the megaship currently blocking traffic in the Suez Canal. Right on time it's another annual reminder that no matter how complex and efficient the supply chains are that keen our world running, nature can br...

3 weeks ago

Need a data analyst? Try Fiverr

Fiverr, the site that we've turned to for years when we've wanted a logo but have been too cheap to pay full-price for it can now be the site we turn to when we want data science but are too cheap to pay full-price for it. It's the first new vertical the company has launched in nine years, probab...

Jason Norwood-Young

3 weeks ago

A sparkling new visual data pipeliner

I've recently been playing with Apache's NiFi, which is great for robust data pipelining. Its biggest feature over other options -- including Rolling Your Own, which I have done -- is its visual pipeline design. Because pipeline design is hard, being able to visualise the flow of the data is imme...

Jason Norwood-Young

a month ago

The hard drive in all of us

DNA-based data storage has been on the theoretical radar for years, but researchers at the bleeding edge of data storage are now starting to actually encode digital data in DNA, and get it back again, reports Nature. Members of the "DNA Data Storage Alliance", which includes Microsoft, Twist Bios...

Jason Norwood-Young

a month ago

Don't Miss, Nerds

Visualising ALL of the internet

Barret Lyon has been quietly mapping the entirety of the internet since 2003, after friends bet him $50 he couldn't do it. And he's been quietly plugging away at the Opte project ever since, moving from traceroutes to routing tables in 2010. His visualisations have been displayed at MoMA New York...

Jason Norwood-Young

a month ago

Data dysfunction for bad apples in the big apple

It's two years since the launch of the CAPstat.nyc website, which tracks bad apple cops in the Big Apple, but a Twitter thread by CAPstat lead Julie Ciccolini shows how much hasn't changed: a comparison between CAPstat and NYPD data shows that officers with multiple disciplinary issues that have ...

Jason Norwood-Young

a month ago

Unicorn fish is living history

If a picture of a Narwhal doesn't trigger four of the five Ws - who, what, why, where? - then you are either a marine biologist or have no imagination. Apparently, their improbably tusk can also raise the question "when?". Like tree trunks, a layer of horn is added every year, and as narwhals can...

a month ago

Cheque your head

Culturally, we may have come a long way in the last few decades when it comes to recognising that mental health issues are just as serious as physical health ones. Practically, though, not so much. The European Data Journalism Network has published a very detailed report on access to professional...

a month ago

Don't Miss, My Corona

A year of Covid-19

To mark the anniversary of the start of the coronavirus pandemic, GIJN has rounded up a year's worth of data journalism covering Covid-19, looking at lessons learned in UX, statistics and science reporting in general. It's also featured the rather sadder numbers around deaths of journalists to Co...

a month ago

Popups with Flourish

Here's one that we're looking forward to testing out shortly... Flourish's alliterative popup panels, which turn tooltips into neat little overlay pages and contain more styling than a normal popup. They look fantastic, and enable you to drop another Flourish embed inside the popup panel for laye...

a month ago

Don't Miss, Nerds, ROTM

Time to face up to our facial data

Mozilla Fellow Deborah Raji and TechCongress Legislative Fellow Genevieve Fried have co-authored a paper looking back at the history of facial recognition datasets, and have highlighted a disturbing trend: We've gone from carefully curated datasets collected with the participants' permission, to ...

Jason Norwood-Young

a month ago

Fight back against the AI with pen and paper

OpenAI's new image-recognising neural network, CLIP, blows previous deep learning algorithms out the water, especially when it comes to conceptual representations, like a drawing of a banana versus an actual banana. It works similarly to a human brain, the researchers believe, firing "neurons" th...

Jason Norwood-Young

a month ago

What do people eat all day?

Indian datavizzer Rohan Jhunja took the dangerous step of visualising the cooking habits of his close family over the month of December over on Nightingale, and managed to navigate tricky dinner-based relationship issues (like "does grandma eat enough vegetables?") by adding an enormous amount of...

a month ago

It’s Carousel time

Oh, AI chat engine GPT-3 may well be close to achieving its first Booker Prize, but its bedside manner is somewhat lousy. Researchers testing its ability to act as a reception-bot for a hypothetical medical clinic had this rather disturbing exchange. The patient said “Hey, I feel very bad, I want...

a month ago

The beer index

Possibly inspired by The Economist's Big Mac Index, Visual Capitalist has published a World Beer Index, tracking the price of a pint near you. According to its metrics, South Africa is the cheapest place on Earth to buy a bottle of brew, at $1.68 compared to Qatar's $11.26 and prices around $5 in...

a month ago

It’s Open Data Day this weekend

It's that time of the year where we celebrate all things numerical when it comes to online publishing - this Saturday is Open Data Day (6 March) when you get to show your support and meet other geeks at a happening near you. Not sure where to go - try Codebridge's Civic Data Hackathon (hosted onl...

a month ago

WanaData’s Women’s Day Webinar

No plans yet for celebrating International Women's Day this coming Monday? Then book your place at pan-African data journalism network WanaData's Challenging gender stereotypes event. It's a rare line-up of speakers including Code for Africa's Tolulope Adeyemo, Lisa Macleod (ex-Arena, now Women i...

a month ago

Deepfakes: Making history really come alive

It's not just Tom Cruise getting deep faked -- literally everyone in history is having a GAN algorithm pointed at their faces, creating a disturbing yet fascinating Twitter thread: a Myheritage.com feature allows you to upload old photos (or paintings for that matter) and it will make them seemin...

Jason Norwood-Young

a month ago