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The Mechanics of Moving — A Guide to Avoiding Injuries and Damaged Possessions

2 February 2011
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How many times have you moved from one house or apartment to another in your lifetime? Do you think you know what it takes to move objects, pets, and people? I’ve moved plenty of times in my lifetime, but I am eager to hear of any information that can help me tame the moving beast. [...]

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Twitter Map of Profanity — Polite Plains & Profane Mountains

28 January 2011
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Have you ever wondered in what locations people swear more or less versus other geographic locations? I can’t say I have, either. Having said that, sometimes too much data can be a wonderful thing — if one has a sense of humor, that is.
Cartographer Daniel Huffman has used “1.5 millon geocoded tweets from last March [...]

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What Does a Librarian Do?

21 January 2011
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Have you ever wanted to be a librarian? Have you ever wondered what a librarian does?
This Vocational Guidance Film from 1947 describes what a librarian does, and what the requirements are to be a librarian. LIbrarianship is about managing, accessing, storing, and retrieving information. That information may be stored in a book, database or other [...]

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The Digital Nativity or Christmas 2.0

4 January 2011
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The video below tells the story of the Nativity using social media. ViralVideosNr1 uses “Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google, Wikipedia, Google Maps, GMail, Foursquare, [and] Amazon” to tell the story of the birth of Jesus.
For example, as Irina Slutsky at AdAge writes, “after Mary gets a text message on her iPhone from the Archangel Gabriel [...]

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Save the Children’s Retrospective of the Year 2010

28 December 2010
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Did any good news come out of the natural and political disasters of 2010? Save the Children thinks so.
The video below is the organization’s take on their work in 2010. I hope it makes you smile.
Good work and positive news often goes unnoticed by the mass media.

Which of the projects stood out [...]

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The Bible Christmas Story

24 December 2010
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Do you like your religion with a dose of humor? What about the Christmas Story — yes, the one about the birth of the baby Jesus.
Adam Hoggatt created this reverent but tongue-in-cheek animation of the Bible’s Christmas Story. I love the part where Mary drops the bucket into the well when Joseph tells her that [...]

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What is Old is New Again: the Antikythera Mechanism Lego Version

16 December 2010
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A long, long time ago (100 BCE) in a civilization far, far away (Ancient Greece), someone built a mechanism that could “predict celestial events and eclipses with unprecedented accuracy” (Engadget). The machine — or, at least one of them — was lost in a shipwreck and lay on the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea until [...]

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What Happens When You Don’t Label Your Axes?

13 December 2010

Have you ever thought that details don’t matter when it comes to data analysis and presentation?
Think again.

Image Source: xkcd
Would you break up with someone over (non-work related) sloppy data presentation?
[Via FlowingData.]

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Shoutout to Taming Data Readers/So You Want a Ph.D….?

30 November 2010
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I’d like to thank the readers of this blog. I am completely amazed each day that anyone finds what I want to natter on about in any way interesting. But I am pleased that you do.
The following video has nothing to do with taming data, but it is funny. (If you are doctoral student or [...]

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“Quantitative Easing” Explained with Cute Bears

17 November 2010
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Did you understand the controversy over “quantitative easing” at the G-20 Summit last week? Were you able to sift through the news to find and understand why the US should not print more money and buy $600 billion in US Treasury Bonds? Did you even know there was a controversy? Or, like me, did your [...]

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