Like most people who possess a pulse and an internet connection, I think kittens are absurdly cute and quite possibly the vehicle in which humanity will usher in an era of world peace. I mean, who doesn’t? They’re adorable. I was genuinely curious as to what country has the cutest kittens. I therefore decided to […]
Your questions about the new ScraperWiki answered
You may have noticed we launched a completely new version of ScraperWiki last week. Here’s a suitably meta screengrab of last week’s #scraperwiki twitter activity, collected by the new “Search for tweets” tool and visualised by the “Summarise this data” tool, both running on our new platform. These changes have been a long time coming, […]
Publish from ScraperWiki to CKAN
ScraperWiki is looking for open data activists to try out our new “Open your data” tool. Since its first launch ScraperWiki has worked closely with the Open Data community. Today we’re building on this commitment by pre-announcing the release of the first in a series of tools that will enable open data activists to publish […]
Data analysis using the Query with SQL tool
Ferdinand Magellan, the Renaissance’s most prodigious explorer. He almost certainly knew lingua franca – but did he know SQL?It’s Summer 1513. Rome is the centre of the Renaissance world, and Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese merchant ships criss-cross the oceans, ferrying textiles from the North, spices from the East, and precious metals from the newly-discovered Americas. […]
Announcing the new ScraperWiki.com
Today is a big day for ScraperWiki – Our new platform is coming out of beta. Sign up and give it a go! We think you’ll like it. ScraperWiki is about liberating data from silos and empowering you to do what you want with it. You can either write your own code, or use our […]
Testing, testing…
Data science is a distinct profession from software engineering. Data scientists may write a lot of computer code but the aim of their code is to answer questions about data. Sometimes they might want to expose the analysis software they have written to others in order they can answer questions for themselves, and this is […]
Book review: Natural Language Processing with Python by Steven Bird, Ewan Klein & Edward Loper
I bought Natural Language Processing in Python by Steven Bird, Ewan Klein & Edward Loper for a couple of reasons. Firstly, ScraperWiki are part of the EU Newsreader Project which seeks to make a “history recorder” using natural language processing to convert large streams of news articles into a more structured form. ScraperWiki’s role in […]
npm install urchin
Urchin, the shell testing framework for extreme hipster superheroes (I’m not including myself in that group I should add), is now available as an npm package. That means you can install it using npm: sudo npm install -g urchin If you’re not hipster enough to use npm then you can still wget it from github: […]
Data Science London 12th June – a speaker speaks
Data Science London run an approximately monthly programme of evening events comprising short talks, beer and pizza. Last week I was invited to give a talk on Scraping and Parsing PDF using Python. The venue for these events is the Westminster Hub in central London – we were diverted in our approach by the premier […]
What’s a CTO actually do? (and a job advert)
It can be hard to tell what somebody else’s job actually is. If you’ve never done it, you don’t know what really matters. Job adverts with bulleted lists of skills give some indication, yet somehow don’t get to the heart of it. The language really matters, writing it clearly, describing tasks in a concrete way. […]