The twitter search and follower tools are amongst the most popular on the ScraperWiki platform so we are looking to provide more value in this area. To this end I’ve been reading “Mining the Social Web” by Matthew A. Russell. In the first instance the book looks like a run through the APIs for various […]
I’ve been doing more reading on machine learning, this time in the form of Data Mining: Practical Machine Learning Tools and Techniques by Ian H. Witten, Eibe Frank and Mark A. Hall. This comes by recommendation of my academic colleagues on the Newsreader project, who rely heavily on machine learning techniques to do natural language […]
The UK’s BIG Lottery Fund recently released its grant data since 2004 as a set of lovely CSV files: You can get it yourself here or here. I found it a great opportunity to try out some new tricks with Tableau, and have a bit of a poke around another largish dataset from government. The […]
I bumped into Andy Cotgreave at Strata London a couple of weeks ago. The Tableau booth had a handy place for me to put my coffee whilst I ate my biscuits, and as a regular user of Tableau and twitter I recognised him immediately! Andy is Social Content Manager at Tableau. I was pleased to see […]
Machine learning is commonly used these days. Even if you haven’t directly used it personally, you’ve almost certainly encountered it. From checking your credit card purchases to prevent fraudulent transactions, through to sites like Amazon or IMDB telling you what things you might like, it’s a way of making sense of the large amounts of data that are increasingly accessible. Supervised learning […]
Hold your nerve! Hold your nerve! Stay at 49! I really think it’s over this time. It had been intense all day, an adrenalin rush. Tens of thousands of pounds potentially at stake. Watching carefully in shifts with no more than a minute of distraction. Luckily Aidan held his nerve, the auction did close this […]
The UK Government (via GDS) is gradually rolling out a new performance platform. It’s exciting for lots of reasons, and getting less attention than it deserves. Here are three reasons I’m excited. 1. It makes government services easier to use To me, the most exciting part is that it will make it easier for me, […]
A while back I reviewed Larry Keller’s book The Tableau 8.0 Training Manual, at the same time I ordered George Peck’s book Tableau 8: the official guide. It’s just arrived. The book comes with a DVD containing bonus videos featuring George Peck’s warm, friendly tones and example workbooks. I must admit to being mildly nonplussed at […]
Recently Shelter came to us asking for data on house prices across the UK to help them with some research in support of campaign on housing affordability. This is a challenge we’re well suited to address, in fact a large fraction of the ScraperWiki team have scraped property price data for our own purposes. Usually […]
When you think of humanitarian crises like war, famine, earthquakes, storms and the like you probably don’t think “data”. But data is critical to humanitarian relief efforts, background questions like: What is the country we’re deploying to like in terms of population, geography, infrastructure, economic development, social structures? What resources, financial and human, are available […]
