Naked Data - Page 2 of 8 - All the data you can eat

Naked Data

All the data you can eat

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...

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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

Umbilical Ruminations

The week that really was

There's nothing like a good pandemic to bring the armchair experts out of the woodwork, and it's good to see our community standing up to try and keep things practical, factual and (relatively) non-sensationalist. Locally, we've seen several groups building dashboards to help keep track of the la...

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

The most Trumpish of charts

Alberto Cairo's takedown of the signed chart that Donald Trump sent to his followers last weekend is masterful. Trump's chart apparently showed a bounce in share prices following a press conference he gave reassuring the nation about covid-19 - Cairo points out that as the graph only shows a day'...

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

Marked for life

The parental wisdom that "you'll regret it when you're older" has saved many a young teen from an ill-advised tattoo, and probably pushed millions more to the needle, but it turns out your mum and dad may have been right. The other EFF has released an update on its investigation into the use of a...

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

Don't Miss, Umbilical Ruminations

We need a flattened curve hero

Disease and plague stalk the land. Panic and fear grips our hearts and makes us buy all the toilet paper. What we need is a hero, and one has emerged: the Flatten the Curve infographic. In two simple lines, a single image says: "This is why we need to take it seriously, but don't freak out either."

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

So how does disease spread anyway?

The Washington Post's scrollystory on epidemics (Warning: Paywall ahead) explains how diseases spread in a group of people, and shows how to stop an epidemic -- something we wished we all knew a month ago, when this story first came out. But it's still a great explanation of concepts like the bas...

Jason Norwood-Young

3 weeks ago

Can you fix it? Yes EU can!

Remember the days when you could swap a phone battery without prying open a glass case with a hair drier and guitar pick? Young readers may be astonished to learn that once upon a time, people actually fixed their washing machines when they started squeaking rather than throwing them away. Today'...

3 weeks ago

Dragons sitting on their grains of rice

It's extremely hard for us humans to get an accurate sense of very large numbers. The difference between 100,000 and 1,000,000 is hard to comprehend. (Tim Urban's brilliant 1 to 1,000,000 should help you with that). TikTokker Humphrey Yang uses grains of rice to picture Jeff Bezos' $122 BILLION w...

Jason Norwood-Young

3 weeks ago

Trainers wanted! Apply within

Can you teach the fine art of data-driven storytelling to journalists and folks from government? The Human Sciences Resource Council (HSRC) in South Africa is looking for up to three part-timers to deliver workshops over the course of a year. Applications open for a short period now.

4 weeks ago

Corona at the data conference

The old adage that you should never become the story is a vain hope for attendees at last week's NICAR conference in New Orleans. NICAR is arguably the big annual event for datajournalists in the calendar. Many delegates will have been looking to sharpen their data interrogation skills to improve...

4 weeks ago

Life is good

Coronavirus and economic collapse got you down? If it seems like the end times are upon us, don't worry - life really is getting better. Or at least it is for members of the OECD, which The Economist regularly refers to as "a club of rich nations". It's just released its How's Life 2020 report, w...

4 weeks ago