Big Data in the Big Apple: How New York’s first “director of analytics” revolutionized the city’s building inspections. http://goo.gl/vjDgY
Recent Updates Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
-
Ben
-
Ben
Stephen Wolfram does some social network analysis using donated Facebook data
http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2013/04/data-science-of-the-facebook-world/
-
Ben
KDD interview with Rayid Ghani – Obama’s chief campaign scientist
This interview covers insights into how analytics was embedded into the operations of the campaign, how Facebook was used, and the different areas the analysis group contributed to.
-
Ben
Make hand-drawn images with Zwibbler
Here’s one for the doodly-challenged: Zwibbler allows you to create and save digital images in the browser that look like they were hand-drawn. Useful if you want to create diagrams that look like they were sketched out.
-
Ben
Quickly send Gmail ‘notes to self’ with a chrome bookmarklet
If you are one of the many people like me who uses Gmail as a ‘note to self’ repository, you could save a little time by adding a ‘send link’ button to your bookmarks bar in Chrome.
With a little tweak you can get it to enter your own email address for you:
javascript:location.href=’mailto:youraddress@gmail.com?SUBJECT=’+document.title+’&BODY=’+escape(location.href);
This assumes you have made Gmail your default mail application.
-
Ben
http://jsbeautifier.org/ – makes minified JS human readable again!
-
Ben
Another article on the Obama team’s use of data: http://goo.gl/mIPsv . Also, http://www.propublica.org/article/everything-we-know-so-far-about-obamas-big-data-operation
-
Ben
Obama campaign relies heavily on analytics (again)
That was just one of several ways that Mr. Obama’s campaign operations, some unnoticed by Mr. Romney’s aides in Boston, helped save the president’s candidacy. In Chicago, the campaign recruited a team of behavioral scientists to build an extraordinarily sophisticated database packed with names of millions of undecided voters and potential supporters. The ever-expanding list let the campaign find and register new voters who fit the demographic pattern of Obama backers and methodically track their views through thousands of telephone calls every night.
That allowed the Obama campaign not only to alter the very nature of the electorate, making it younger and less white, but also to create a portrait of shifting voter allegiances. The power of this operation stunned Mr. Romney’s aides on election night, as they saw voters they never even knew existed turn out in places like Osceola County, Fla. “It’s one thing to say you are going to do it; it’s another thing to actually get out there and do it,” said Brian Jones, a senior adviser.
From: this NYT article
-
Ben
A Chrome extension to automatically select your home country in web form drop-downs
Inspired by that tweet from @traskjd, and my own (admittedly minor) frustration with the chore of selecting ‘New Zealand’ in many a web form country drop-down, I created a free Select My Country Chrome extension. It does pretty much just what it says on the box. Please read the instructions on the extension page – you need to select a country in the extension settings or it won’t do anything for you!
The extension was tested here, here, here and here.
-
Ben
Convert JS to CoffeeScript, and vice versa: http://js2coffee.org/
