Naked Data - Page 2 of 14 - All the data you can eat

Naked Data

All the data you can eat

Don't Miss, ROTM

Smile! You’re on candid camera!

Coronavirus isn't the only reason to wear a facemask if you're protesting -- an increasing risk of facial recognition could see you targeted by police after the fact, as they did in Baltimore following protests over Freddie Gray's death. According to this article in The Guardian, Clearview AI has...

Jason Norwood-Young

3 weeks ago

The ggplot2 cheat sheet

Tired of having to look up ggplot2's list of theme elements, Isabella Benabaye did the ultimate hacker job of creating a cheat sheet, or what she calls the ggplot2 Theme Elements Reference Sheet.

Jason Norwood-Young

3 weeks ago

Making our visualisations accessible

Alt-text is that HTML element I keep skipping when uploading images, for instance to this site. But I'm leaving my readers that rely on screen readers in the lurch, effectively making large parts of my site invisible to them. And while I'm at least aware of alt-text for images, I hadn't ever cons...

Jason Norwood-Young

3 weeks ago

How the (visualisation) sausage gets made

Andy Kirk takes on a massive Corona-time project, interviewing ten data visualisers in nine episodes of his Explore Explain season. I've watched Maarten Lambrechts' interview about Why Budapest, Warsaw, and Lithuania split themselves in two, published on The Pudding. What I love about this interv...

Jason Norwood-Young

3 weeks ago

Don't Miss, My Corona

Counting Covid

The Covid-19 news from South Africa this week has been bleak: over a quarter of tests now come back positive, and the country has the fourth highest number of daily new infections in the world. The two bright spots of news we're hanging on to is that there are far more tests being carried out her...

3 weeks ago

Song lyrics are horrible

Jake Scott's analysis of popular song lyrics scraped from modern music box Spotify starts off on a surprising and positive note. The representation of women in top tunes far outweighs the representation of men. And then it gets very dark, very quickly. Male artists sing about men making money, dy...

3 weeks ago

Nigeria’s national debt is terrifying

There's a cold phrase that gets bandied around in acronym-heavy press-releases from the UN, IMF, G7, et al - HIPC. It stands for Highly Indebted Poor Countries, who were in danger of being swamped by debt before covid-19 crashed the world economy. What does HIPC mean for folk on the ground? Datap...

3 weeks ago

Facebook builds evil robots

If there's one thing we've learned from social media over the years, it's that when a few billion people gather in one place it's almost impossible to enforce any sort of value-based norms on them. Over the years, Facebook, Twitter et al have tried many different ways to clamp down on misinformat...

3 weeks ago

Chart colours for brand bunnies

No, this is not just another tool or blog post about choosing colours for charts. Amy Cesal deals with the complexities of finding a colour palette that works for a company's corporate identity kit, keeps in-house designers happy, and still doesn't look shit. With any luck, your colour choices wi...

Jason Norwood-Young

4 weeks ago

Fantastic plastic

What happens to plastic when it gets recycled? Sure, there's the helpful symbols on the back of every crisp packet and carton with a cryptic indication of what it's made of, but what do they mean for the processing plants that turn rubbish in to new fibres for fleeces and so on? Life of Plastic h...

4 weeks ago

The return of the interrobang, and other pearls of wisdom from the Temporary AP Stylebook‽

The Twitter hack that threw the internets into disarray this week provided the opportunity for the Temporary AP Stylebook (@TempAPStyle) to emerge, and blast out a new era of style while the real AP Stylebook's verified account status was disabled. And there were some pearlers,,, https://twitter....

Jason Norwood-Young

4 weeks ago

Code for All, 2020

When: 14, 20 and 22 July 2020 Where: The Interwebs If one good thing has come from Covid-19, it's that all the cool conferences are much more accessible online. Code for All is an umbrella organisation for the many "Code For ..." organisations scattered across the globe, with OpenUp (previously C...

Jason Norwood-Young

4 weeks ago

Umbilical Ruminations

Goodbye Malthus

Fred Pearce's Peoplequake was the book that woke me up to the idea that Malthusian fears of overpopulation may not be what they seem, and are generally tinged with anti-poor sentiment. There's always too many of them, never too many of us, right? A research report published in The Lancet has been...

4 weeks ago

If the Romans had built a subway

It's a fitting tribute to the genius of Harry Beck that "Topography x drawn in the style of the London Underground map" is a burgeoning genre of pop-art. While there is much to choose from, Sasha Trubetsky's Roman Roads transit map of Europe in the classical era is still one of the best.

4 weeks ago

Monty, not in Python

Does the Monty Hall Problem make your brain bleed a bit? Is it one of those bits of probability that you have to re-read the explanation every time someone mentions it because it seems too preposterous to be true? Quick recap - The Monty Hall Problem is that you are given a choice of three doors,...

4 weeks ago

The death of the local newspaper, and the birth of something darker

It's not news anymore that local news services are dying in the US, and it's been a long-running concern that there's nothing else that informs an electorate of local political decisions, or acts as a watchdog for your councils' spending. An unpaid blogger is not going to voluntarily sit in gover...

Jason Norwood-Young

4 weeks ago

Fuck cars, we don’t need them

I'm pointing you to Farhad Manjoo's story of a vision of a car-free society (in America of all places) not only because I've been happily car-free for two years, but also to look at the stunning visualisations that the New York Times just casually threw into this down-page piece, weirdly categori...

Jason Norwood-Young

a month ago

A brief history of data science

Richard Farnworth takes us through a short, definitely incomplete, but very entertaining history of data viz. His description of William Playfair is particularly good: [Playfair] ... ran a currency counterfeiting operation to collapse the French currency and took part in the storming of the Basti...

Jason Norwood-Young

a month ago

Want EUR 10 000 funding for your startup?

It's time for my gratuitous annual self-plug. One of my jobs involves giving money and support to startups who are developing innovative, often data-led solutions to access to justice problems. If you're reducing the cost of legal services, preventing financial fraud, helping to reduce crime or r...

a month ago

Data journalists: Queen Elizabeth wants YOU!

There's a pretty cool-sounding job from the UK's Office for National Statistics -- two senior data journalists are needed to play with the biggest government datasets, produce lovely data stories, and even get to play with that greatest of public datasets, the National Census penciled in for 2021...

Jason Norwood-Young

a month ago