Guest post by Dan Thompson In 1979 a Harvard MBA student and former programmer at DEC, invented something that fundamentally change the world of IT and which still affects everyone with a desk job today. What Dan Bricklin had created was the spreadsheet – in its modern form at least. There had been number crunching […]
Summarising Serendipity
5 years ago, a friend and I sat down in a pub in Shrewsbury, drank some beer, and chatted about the web. Every month since, people have been doing that in Shrewsbury (and a few times in Ludlow). It’s called ShropGeek (we’re very savvy in our naming conventions, you see). It was started and organised […]
data-driven london week
Most mornings this week, I awoke in the mystical land of Hackney, and battled hordes of hipster-cyclists to make my way to the Google Campus – a refuge of data-folk. At least, that’s how I like to remember it. As I blogged last week, several ScraperWikians attended and spoke at a range of events, all […]
Two ways you can help guide ScraperWiki’s new platform.
You will have noticed some activity over the past few weeks, as we have begun reaching out about the new ScraperWiki platform. We’ve blogged about some of the new features, and have invited the first ever users outside the office to have a poke around the beta. That initial feedback has been immeasurably helpful, and […]
Big Data Week Events
Next week, a plethora of organisations, hackers and data scientists are celebrating “Big Data Week,” and the ScraperWiki team will be taking part in London. We will be supporting the DoES Liverpool exhibit at the Internet of Things stream of Internet World at Earls Court (#internetworld2013). Francis will also be giving a talk at 1:30 […]
Asking data questions of words
The vast majority of my contributions to the web have been loosely encoded in the varyingly standard-compliant family of languages called English. It’s a powerful language for expressing meaning, but the inference engines needed to parse it are pretty complex, staggeringly ancient, yet cutting edge (i.e. brains). We tend to think about data a lot […]
Data Science Magic
As a business person, if I want insight into my business needs, I can ask a data scientist for answers, so I can make better decisions! Urgh: the sound I make reading that. I am starting to wonder if Data Science is seen as magic, and insight as arcane wisdom distilled from eyes of newts […]
Young Rewired State: 2013 Festival of Code
Guest post by Kaitlin Dunning from Young Rewired State Young Rewired State is a network of software developers and designers aged 18 and under. It is the philanthropic arm of Rewired State and its primary focus is to find and foster the young children and teenagers who are driven to teaching themselves how to code, […]
Careers in Computing
I realise the whole world isn’t inspired by the same things I am, and that’s fair enough. However, on Wednesday, I had the privilege of being invited to share some of my inspiration with a bunch of teenagers at the Liverpool John Moores University career day. I was asked to talk to year-10 students (14-15 […]
Getting SkilledUp
Guest Post by SkilledUp‘s Nick Gidwani. ScraperWiki is a revolutionary tool. Not just because it allows you to collect data, but because it allows anyone – including journalists who now must specialize in data – to organize and draw conclusions from vast data sets. That skill set (organizing what is now called “big data”) was […]