This post is about the government Contracts Finder website. This site has been created with a view to helping SMEs win government business by providing a “one-stop-shop” for public sector contracts. Government has been doing some great work transitioning their departments to GOV.UK and giving a range of online services a makeover. We’ve been involved […]
Meet @henry__morris! He’s the inspirational serial entrepreneur that set up PiC and upReach. They’re amazing businesses that focus on social mobility. We interviewed him for PDFTables.com He’s been using it to convert delegate lists that come as PDF into Excel and then into his Apple iphone. It’s his preferred personal Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system, it’s […]
I am finishing up my MSc Data Science placement at ScraperWiki and, by extension, my MSc Data Science (Computing Specialism) programme at Lancaster University. My project was to build a website to enable users to investigate the MOT data. This week the result of that work, the ScraperWiki MOT website, went live. The aim of […]
The Civil Service is one of the UK’s largest employers. Every year it asks every civil servant what it thinks of its employer: UK plc. For Sir Jeremy Heywood the survey matters. In his blog post “Why is the People Survey Important?” he says “The survey is one of the few ways we can objectively […]
Over the past few weeks I have been looking at GP Prescribing data from the Health & Social Care Information Centre, which presents the number of items and cost of all the different medication prescribed and dispensed by GP practices across the UK. The dataset amounts to millions of rows of data each month. I am […]
This is a blog post version of a lunchtime talk I gave at the Open Data Institute. You may prefer to listen to it or use the slides. Stafford Beer Stafford Beer was a British cybernetician. He described four stages that happen when you get a computer. Each stage ends in disappointment. 1. Amazement It’s […]
Do you ever: Need an old bank statement only to find out that the bank has archived it, and want to charge you to get it back? Spot check to make sure there are no fraudulent transactions on your account? Like to summarise all your big ticket items for a period? Need to summarise business expenses? […]
This last week I have been reading Docker Up & Running by Karl Matthias and Sean P. Kane, a newly published book on Docker – a container technology which is designed to simplify the process of application testing and deployment. Docker is a very new product, first announced in March 2013, although it is based […]
I’m back from presenting a talk on DataBaker at the EuSpRIG conference. It’s amazing to see a completely different world of how people use Excel – I’ve been busy tearing the data out of spreadsheets for the Office of National Statistics and using macros to open PDF files in Excel directly using PDFTables. So whilst I’ve […]
Apache Spark is a system for doing data analysis which can be run on a single machine or across a cluster, it is pretty new technology – initial work was in 2009 and Apache adopted it in 2013. There’s a lot of buzz around it, and I have a problem for which it might be […]
