http://forums.flowingdata.com/ Strength in Numbers en Sat, 11 Feb 2012 20:23:37 +0000 http://forums.flowingdata.com/topic/getting-started-w-yourflowingdata#post-2525 Wed, 08 Feb 2012 17:54:59 +0000 eklypse 2525@http://forums.flowingdata.com/ <p>I'd like to use yfd on a protected account. That is, anyone who wants to follow me must submit a request which I can then approve. I hoped that whatever automated feature that would cause yfd to follow back would thus generate such a request which I could then approve, but as yet, no request has appeared. I started following @yfd a couple hours ago, so I figured the request would appear by now. Is there anything I can do to make this work (short of turning off the privacy on my account)? Thanks in advance! </p> http://forums.flowingdata.com/topic/looking-for-a-starbucks-calculator#post-2468 Wed, 04 Jan 2012 07:25:13 +0000 brcire 2468@http://forums.flowingdata.com/ <p>In search of a Starbucks calculator that shows/graphs how much you spend per week, month, per year(s) and runs a parallel result of how that money would look if you invested it at standard interest rates.</p> <p>I recall one several years ago but cannot find it.</p> <p>Thanks for your help!<br /> Eric </p> http://forums.flowingdata.com/topic/where-to-find-worldwide-sunrise-and-sunset-data-set#post-2460 Fri, 30 Dec 2011 13:36:00 +0000 nathany 2460@http://forums.flowingdata.com/ <p>Weather Underground has that info, but you'll have to do some scraping. </p> http://forums.flowingdata.com/topic/where-to-find-worldwide-sunrise-and-sunset-data-set#post-2459 Thu, 29 Dec 2011 23:22:54 +0000 patrickberkeley 2459@http://forums.flowingdata.com/ <p>Hi, does anyone know where I could find an open data set containing worldwide sunrise and sunset times? Thanks, Patrick </p> http://forums.flowingdata.com/topic/available-crs-health-insurance-coverage-by-state-and-congressional-district#post-2390 Mon, 24 Oct 2011 19:26:26 +0000 prescottrjp 2390@http://forums.flowingdata.com/ <p>Available:<br /> <a href="http://goo.gl/WgKu5" rel="nofollow">http://goo.gl/WgKu5</a><br /> Congressional Research Service, Health Insurance Coverage by State and Congressional District;<br /> <a href="http://goo.gl/WgKu5" rel="nofollow">http://goo.gl/WgKu5</a></p> <p>Summary<br /> The total U.S. civilian non-institutionalized population in 2010 was estimated to be slightly more than 304 million. Roughly 84.5% of the U.S. civilian non-institutionalized population had one or more forms of health insurance, while 15.5%, or roughly 47.2 million, were uninsured. The most common form of insurance was employer provided.<br /> This report employs the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2010 American Community Survey (ACS) to describe health insurance coverage and provide estimates of coverage by type of coverage at the national, state, and congressional district level. The ACS survey has a sample of more than 2 million respondents and solicits health insurance coverage information as of the date of the survey. The sample is large enough to provide accurate estimates of coverage at the congressional district level at a point in time. As this report details, there are considerable differences across states, within states, and across demographic groups in the proportion of insured and their sources of coverage. </p> http://forums.flowingdata.com/topic/creating-matrix-for-heatmap-in-r#post-2388 Fri, 21 Oct 2011 01:17:16 +0000 Dwash 2388@http://forums.flowingdata.com/ <p>I add my datasets to R in txt file in format shown above.</p> <p>name &lt;- read.csv("name.txt", header=TRUE)</p> <p>Is this what are are wanting to know?</p> <p>I then use</p> <p>attach(name)</p> <p>This allows for great ease of columns in datasets. </p> http://forums.flowingdata.com/topic/looking-for-a-readable-management-blog#post-2359 Fri, 30 Sep 2011 00:05:36 +0000 c0nsole 2359@http://forums.flowingdata.com/ <p>In a lot of cases ETL is extracting information from a flat file (in the export step). You might read up on concepts of low-level methods of reading a file character by character. </p> <p>For the transform step, you should read up on datatypes with focus on conversions from character strings to numbers and vice versa. The first chapter of any C or C++ book should prepare you.</p> <p>For the load step, you might take the tutorials at w3schools.org to learn SQL. From there, any book on relational databases will prepare you for what you would see at a fortune 500 company's databases.</p> <p>For management/leadership info, iTunes University has a tremendous amount of leadership podcasts that are free. I download several at a time and listen to them on my commute to work.</p> <p>-c0nsole </p> http://forums.flowingdata.com/topic/looking-for-a-readable-management-blog#post-2358 Mon, 26 Sep 2011 18:12:35 +0000 justin_abraham 2358@http://forums.flowingdata.com/ <p>I am a mid-level manager at a Fortune 500 company with some time on my hands this quarter (don't ask). I am trying to broaden my horizons online, but everything I find is either:</p> <p>a) really interesting analytics/visualization stuff, which is sadly not my job<br /> b) disgruntled developers channeling Dilbert<br /> c) management or IT consultants trying to sell their wares with unreadable recycled jargon</p> <p>Will someone please recommend something as engaging, simple, and thought provoking as this site, but geared towards, say data warehousing or ETL? or even management? or are those topics just inherently boring (to write about)? </p> http://forums.flowingdata.com/topic/creating-matrix-for-heatmap-in-r#post-2342 Tue, 13 Sep 2011 13:31:42 +0000 nathany 2342@http://forums.flowingdata.com/ <p>I do most of my data munging in Python, but I hear the reshape package in R, by Hadley Wickham is pretty good for this. </p> http://forums.flowingdata.com/topic/creating-matrix-for-heatmap-in-r#post-2339 Tue, 13 Sep 2011 04:27:54 +0000 harald 2339@http://forums.flowingdata.com/ <p>I followed the excellent FlowingData tutorial "How to Make a Heatmap – a Quick and Easy Solution": <a href="http://flowingdata.com/2010/01/21/how-to-make-a-heatmap-a-quick-and-easy-solution/" rel="nofollow">http://flowingdata.com/2010/01/21/how-to-make-a-heatmap-a-quick-and-easy-solution/</a></p> <p>In the tutorial, the baseball dataset was already prepared as a matrix with players as rows and columns with various points. What is the easiest way of creating a dataset like the baseball dataset <a href="http://datasets.flowingdata.com/ppg2008.csv" rel="nofollow">http://datasets.flowingdata.com/ppg2008.csv</a> in R if the data has the format: </p> <p>Dwyane Wade, G, 79<br /> Dwyane Wade, MIN, 38.6<br /> Dwyane Wade, PTS, 30.2<br /> Dwyane Wade, FGM, 10.8<br /> Dwyane Wade, FGA, 22<br /> Dwyane Wade, FGP, 0.491<br /> Dwyane Wade, FTM, 7.5<br /> Dwyane Wade, FTA, 9.8<br /> Dwyane Wade, FTP, 0.765<br /> Dwyane Wade, 3PM, 1.1<br /> Dwyane Wade, 3PA, 3.5<br /> Dwyane Wade, 3PP, 0.317<br /> Dwyane Wade, ORB, 1.1<br /> Dwyane Wade, DRB, 3.9<br /> Dwyane Wade, TRB, 5<br /> Dwyane Wade, AST, 7.5<br /> Dwyane Wade, STL, 2.2<br /> Dwyane Wade, BLK, 1.3<br /> Dwyane Wade, TO, 3.4<br /> Dwyane Wade, PF , 2.3<br /> LeBron James, G, 81<br /> LeBron James, MIN, 37.7<br /> LeBron James, PTS, 28.4<br /> LeBron James, FGM, 9.7<br /> LeBron James, FGA, 19.9<br /> LeBron James, FGP, 0.489<br /> LeBron James, FTM, 7.3<br /> LeBron James, FTA, 9.4<br /> LeBron James, FTP, 0.78<br /> LeBron James, 3PM, 1.6<br /> LeBron James, 3PA, 4.7<br /> LeBron James, 3PP, 0.344<br /> LeBron James, ORB, 1.3<br /> LeBron James, DRB, 6.3<br /> LeBron James, TRB, 7.6<br /> LeBron James, AST, 7.2<br /> LeBron James, STL, 1.7<br /> LeBron James, BLK, 1.1<br /> LeBron James, TO, 3<br /> LeBron James, PF, 1.7<br /> ....Kobe Bryant ...cont....<br /> ...cont....</p> <p>Doing such a transformation is straightforward in SQL or even a spreadsheet, but it would be great to know how to get it right in R. </p> http://forums.flowingdata.com/topic/android-app-widget#post-2298 Wed, 10 Aug 2011 05:00:15 +0000 snataas 2298@http://forums.flowingdata.com/ <p>Does anyone know of plans for an Android app, ideally with a widget for simple entry into your.flowingdata.com?<br /> I know there is one on github but it seems not to be available in the market.<br /> Thanks. </p> http://forums.flowingdata.com/topic/developer-contest-with-infochimps-data#post-2250 Tue, 05 Jul 2011 10:38:58 +0000 nathany 2250@http://forums.flowingdata.com/ <p>Build a quick app with Infochimps data and win the Tufte books:</p> <p><a href="http://blog.infochimps.com/2011/07/04/new-developer-contest-twilio-infochimps/" rel="nofollow">http://blog.infochimps.com/2011/07/04/new-developer-contest-twilio-infochimps/</a> </p> http://forums.flowingdata.com/topic/2010-census-data-got-me-down#post-2232 Wed, 15 Jun 2011 10:40:39 +0000 nathany 2232@http://forums.flowingdata.com/ <p>I'm not familiar with Access, but the best place to start looking for Census data is the FactFinder:</p> <p><a href="http://factfinder2.census.gov/faces/nav/jsf/pages/index.xhtml" rel="nofollow">http://factfinder2.census.gov/faces/nav/jsf/pages/index.xhtml</a></p> <p>Start People, and then Age &amp; Sex. Then you can download the data as CSV. </p> http://forums.flowingdata.com/topic/2010-census-data-got-me-down#post-2231 Tue, 14 Jun 2011 23:14:44 +0000 c0nsole 2231@http://forums.flowingdata.com/ <p>The doc at <a href="http://www2.census.gov/census_2010/03-Demographic_Profile/Alabama/0README_DPSF.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www2.census.gov/census_2010/03-Demographic_Profile/Alabama/0README_DPSF.pdf</a> mentions that all numeric fields need to be imported into Access as long integers. Give it a try that way if you haven't already done so. You can get a list of what is considered numeric (labeled as N) in chapter 4 of the doc at <a href="http://www.census.gov/prod/cen2010/doc/dpsf.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www.census.gov/prod/cen2010/doc/dpsf.pdf</a></p> <p>I haven't checked the file sizes of these datasets, but thought it would be good to note that if you append all of the states's data together, keep in the back of your mind there is a 2GB size limitation in Access.</p> <p>As far as other options, you could create a quick pivot table in Excel 2007 if you have less than one million rows. If the dataset is large, writing a quick perl script might be the way to go if you are familiar with the language. Let us know how it turns out. Good luck with your project! </p> http://forums.flowingdata.com/topic/2010-census-data-got-me-down#post-2230 Tue, 14 Jun 2011 12:47:04 +0000 joemurphy 2230@http://forums.flowingdata.com/ <p>All I want is to get average age by zip/tract but I'm lost. I've tried getting the 2010 census demogrphic profiles into access, but was left wanting to throw my computer out the window. </p> <p>Advice?</p> <p><a href="http://2010.census.gov/2010census/data/" rel="nofollow">http://2010.census.gov/2010census/data/</a> </p> http://forums.flowingdata.com/topic/medicare-claims-data-challenge#post-2220 Fri, 03 Jun 2011 01:17:23 +0000 nathany 2220@http://forums.flowingdata.com/ <p>Looks like it might be a good one:</p> <p><a href="http://www.health2challenge.org/2011/06/01/medicare-claims-data/" rel="nofollow">http://www.health2challenge.org/2011/06/01/medicare-claims-data/</a></p> <blockquote><p>IMPAQ International (IMPAQ) and NORC at the University of Chicago wish to promote the development of internet-based applications for users of the newly released Medicare Claims Public Use Files. IMPAQ and NORC, with support from Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), seek to develop web platforms suited for health services researchers, health policy researchers, data entrepreneurs, and/or other potential users who would like to access Medicare claims data. This online event challenges interdisciplinary teams to create a tool for researchers that will present two or more of the new Basic Stand Alone (BSA) Medicare Claims Public Use Files (PFUs) in a way that’s informative, interactive, and user friendly.</p></blockquote> <p>Prize: $7,500 and 2 tickets to Health 2.0 conference. </p> <p>Deadline: August 15 </p> http://forums.flowingdata.com/topic/best-graphvisualization-for-travel-time-reliability#post-2213 Thu, 26 May 2011 17:17:49 +0000 mikev 2213@http://forums.flowingdata.com/ <p>Can you describe the travel time measure a little bit more? I've used excel to show project completion distributions. Basically, I we are graded on completion times for projects relative to their expected completion date at the beginning of the project. It has to be finished within -10% and + 5% of the projects expected completion date. It's rather hard to explain in text, but I'd be happy to send you an email with an example. </p> http://forums.flowingdata.com/topic/gas-prices-to-energy-company-stock-prices#post-2199 Wed, 11 May 2011 01:36:10 +0000 bmdickey17 2199@http://forums.flowingdata.com/ <p>Yes, I agree. I always thought an Integrated Gas Company's stock price would fluctuate based on the cost of Crude Oil, but there doesn't seem as strong of a relationship between Crude Oil Price Per Barrel and Gas Prices at the Pump. It makes me curious since there seems to be a stronger relationship between pump prices and stock prices than pump prices and crude oil. Obviously, they are all correlated, but it is interesting to see where they deviate. I haven't finished yet, but just wanted to gather others thoughts. Thanks. </p> http://forums.flowingdata.com/topic/gas-prices-to-energy-company-stock-prices#post-2196 Tue, 03 May 2011 11:43:06 +0000 nathany 2196@http://forums.flowingdata.com/ <p>Interesting. I have a feeling the two are tightly coupled... like the two are affected by many of the same factors. </p> http://forums.flowingdata.com/topic/best-graphvisualization-for-travel-time-reliability#post-2195 Mon, 02 May 2011 13:07:42 +0000 LisaSmith 2195@http://forums.flowingdata.com/ <p>I've been tasked with creating a "dashboard" for performance measures. In the past we've just used Excel charts. Does anyone have an interesting way to demonstrate reliability using Excel and/or Xcelsius? </p>