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 […]
Spreadsheets are great. They’re ubiquitously available, beaten only by the web pages and the word processor documents. Like the word processor, they’re easy to use and give the user a blank page, but they divide the page up into cells to make sure that the columns and rows all line up. And unlike more complicated […]
This is a guest post by Makoto Inoue, one of the organisers of this weekend’s Londinium MMXII hackathon. The Olympics! Only a few days to go until seemingly every news camera on the planet is pointed at the East End of London, for a month of sporting coverage. But for data diggers everywhere, this is […]
On 2 July 2012, the US Government debt to the penny was quoted at $15,888,741,858,820.66. So I wrote this scraper to read the daily US government debt for every day back to 1996. Unfortunately such a large number overflows the double precision floating point notation in the database, and this same number gets expressed as […]
It’s 9:54am in Torquay on a Wednesday morning: One appliance from Torquays fire station was mobilised to reports of a child with a potty seat stuck on its head. On arrival an undistressed two year old female was discovered with a toilet seat stuck on her head. Crews used vaseline and the finger kit to remove the […]
Everybody is talking and trying to do ‘data journalism’ and the first ever International Data Journalism Awards have been established to recognise the huge effort that people are making in this field. It’s a great opportunity to showcase your work. Backed by Google, the prizes are generous at €45,000 (over $55,000) to six winners and […]
It’s difficult to keep up. I’ve just noticed a set of interesting interactive graphs over at the Office of National Statistics (UK). If the world is about people, then the most fundamental dataset of all must be: Where are the people? And: What stage of life are they living through? A Population Pyramid is a […]
We are really pleased to announce that we will be hosting our very first US two day Journalism Data Camp event in conjunction with the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University and supported by the Knight Foundation on February 3rd and 4th 2012. We have been working with Emily Bell @emilybell, Director of […]
My colleague @frabcus captured the main theme of Strata New York #strataconf in his most recent blog post. This was our first official speaking engagement in the USA as a Knight News Challenge 2011 winner. Here is my twopence worth! At first we were a little confused at the way in which the week long […]
Because ScraperWiki has a SQL database and an API with SQL extraction, I can SQL inject (haha!) straight into the API URL and use the JSON output. So what does all that mean? I scraped the CSV files of Special Advisers’ meetings gifts and hospitalities at Number 10. This is being updated as the data […]
