Although not necessarily the best way of publishing data, data tables in PDF documents can often be extracted quite easily, particularly if the tables are regular and the cell contents reasonably space. For example, official timing sheets for F1 races are published by the FIA as event and timing information ...

In a course team accessibility briefing last week, Richard Walker briefly mentioned a tool for automatically generating text descriptions of Statistics Canada charts to support accessibility. On further probing, the tool, created by Leo Ferres, turned out to be called iGraph-Lite: … an extensible system that generates natural language descriptions of ...

In Getting Started With the Neo4j Graph Database – Linking Neo4j and Jupyter SciPy Docker Containers Using Docker Compose I posted a recipe demonstrating how to link a Jupyter notebook container with a neo4j container to provide a quick way to get up an running with neo4j ...

With the new F1 season upon us, I’ve started tinkering with bits of code from the Wrangling F1 Data With R book and looking at the data in some new ways. For example, I started wondering whether we might be able to learn something interesting about the race strategies ...

In much the same way that the IBM DataScientist Workbench seeks to provide some level of integration between analysis tools such as Jupyter notebooks and data access and storage, Azure Machine Learning studio also provides a suite of tools for accessing and working with data in one location. Microsoft’s ...

The news today was lead in part by a story broken by the BBC and BuzzFeed News – The Tennis Racket – about match fixing in Grand Slam tennis tournaments. (The BBC contribution seems to have been done under the ever listenable File on Four: Tennis: Game, Set and Fix?) One interesting ...

One of the many things on my “to do” list is to put together a blogged script that wires together RStudio, Jupyter notebook server, Shiny server, OpenRefine, PostgreSQL and MongDB containers, and perhaps data extraction services like Apache Tika or Tabula and a few OpenRefine style reconciliation services, along with ...

So have you been looking for something like RStudio, but for Python? It’s been out for some time, but a recently updated release of Rodeo gives an increasingly workable RStudio-like environment for Python users. The layout resembles the RStudio layout – file editor top left, interactive console bottom left, variable ...

Via RBloggers, I spotted this post on Deploying Your Very Own Shiny Server. I’ve been toying with the idea of running some of my own Shiny apps, so that post provided a useful prompt, though way too involved for me;-) So here’s what seems to me to ...

Prompted by a joint coursemodule team to look at options surrounding a “virtual computing lab” to support a couple of new level 1 (first year equivalent) IT and computing courses (they should know better?!;-), I had another scout around and came across SageMathCloud, which looks at first glance to be ...

Doodling with some Gapminder data on child mortality and GDP per capita in PPP$, I wondered whether a 3d plot of the data over the time would show different trajectories over time for different countries, perhaps showing different development pathways over time. Here are a couple of quick sketches, generated ...

Via RBloggers I noticed a tutorial today on Setting Rstudio server using Amazon Web Services (AWS). In the post Getting Started With Personal App Containers in the Cloud I described how I linked my tutum account to a Digital Ocean hosting account and then launched a Digital Ocean server. (How ...

Over the last couple of races, I’ve started trying to review a variety of battlemaps for various drivers in each race. Prompted by an email request for more info around the battlemaps, I generated a new sketch charting the on track gaps between each driver and the lap leader ...

One of the foundational principles of the web, though I suspect ever fewer people know it, is that you can “View Source” on a web page to see what bits of HTML, Javascript and CSS are used to create it. In the WordPress editor I’m currently writing in, I’...

One of the reasons I started working on the Wrangling F1 Data With R book was to see what the Rmd (RMarkdown) workflow was like. Rmd allows you to combine markdown and R code in the same document, as well as executing the code blocks and then displaying the results ...

In a previous post (Charts are for Reading), I noted how it was difficult to keep track of which times in an F1 qualifying session had made the cutoff time as a qualifying session evolved. The problem can be stated as follows: in the first session, with 20 drivers competing, the 15 ...