Catch Up

Ok, been a while... and a lot has happened.

On the Ochs Center's SOCCR front, the Health report has been released and the Economic one is soon to follow.

Tableau Software released version 6 with some nice new features.

I have started playing around with Google Refine. It is a Google release of a previous Freebase app used for cleaning up messy data. To give it a try, I have been using it to clean and prep the NUFORC database that I got from InfoChimps. It is a really nice tool. It works very well for things that would take function writing in Excel or cursors in mySql. It certainly doesn't replace those two, but works very well with and between them.

Oh yes, UFO data. This is the most distracting data I have ever worked with because I want to read every entry. There are over 60,000 entries in the set, I extracted the 870+ ones for Tennessee and further broke it down to the Chattanooga area. I hope to have time to work on extracting the ones for the US, but it is a little messy....that's where Refine is helping. Here is a preview of some info. This graphs the reported shapes, or lack thereof, of the craft. (Note: this is TN only).