Data journalism

Everyone loves a good infographic, right? Especially when it’s based on true data and does some data mining. I’ve thought about getting into more data journalism. A couple articles that have helpful resources:

From journalism.uk: Get with the program: The benefits of coding skills in the newsroom

There’s no shortage of places to learn how to code, with many free tools and apps available to reporters online. McAdams recommended Atom for editing open-source text, GitHub for accessing collections of shared code available for use, JSFiddle to experiment and preview the outcome of your own code, and Stack Overflow to ask questions of experienced coders.

Another good article from journalism uk: Advice from FT and WSJ for getting started with interactive graphics

Beginners could also benefit from keeping an eye on industry updates from Storybench and Source, Knight-Mozilla’s OpenNews community, she added, where journalists and developers share tutorials and insights into how data projects and interactives come to life.

From Quora: What are some software and skills that every data scientist should know?A data scientist answers this question in detail. Here’s his outline about what a data scientist’s daily routine is:

1. Check emails, put important requests to to-do list and reply ‘I will do it’, ignore these ‘Ganglia status is not stable, and hadoop has some dead nodes’ emails. Reply and discuss on some interesting topics.
2. Check to-do list, find out important functions to implement today
3. Start planning and evaluating possible (and smart if possible, but ~50% time not) ways to implement these functions.
4. Start programming.
5. Take a break. Re-think.
6. Back to program.
7. Lunch. Random chat with other team members about many things.
8. After lunch break. Random chat continued.
9. Another team member or the manager suddenly drops by the cube and makes some urgent request for help, usually some statistical reports from 100TB data for her/his next presentation tomorrow.
10. Help that person.
11. Back for implementing these functions which could have been done 2 hours before.
12. Meeting with managers and other team members. Present some cool discoveries/new features/progress for the work from last week. Make sure managers are happy, and then brainstorm some new ideas. Discuss what to do for the next step.
13. Already 6:00 PM. Again? My brain is full of ideas, I need to put some into the notebook and some into my todo list tomorrow.
14. Continue work to 6:30 or 6:45 to avoid the bad traffic in US-101/85/I-280/Lawrence expressway/San Thomas. Think of edge cases and other practical cases which may fail these new functions.
15. Drive home, get stuck in the traffic. Think of some machine learning predictive models to solve traffic problem.

He also gives a list of skills in his Quora answer.

I just wanted to share these few articles.