A firehose of knowledge blasted through a garden sprinkler
This year’s NICAR conference will feature lightning talks: a series of rapid-fire presentations given by you on a mix of subjects selected by you. It’s called democracy, folks, and we want you to be part of it.
How does this work? It’s simple: Register an account to vote on the talks you’d like to hear. Or better yet, propose one yourself! It can be on technology or techniques — just about anything, really. There’s just one rule: It can’t be one second longer than 5 minutes.
OK, actually two rules: You must attend NICAR to vote or, obviously, give a talk. But that’s about all there is to it.
If you have questions, or problems with the site, drop an email to aron@nytimes.com.
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Realizing CAR's Full Potential: An Outside Perspective
CAR is a great way to enhance a news story, but can it do more? Can it provide insights impossible to understand through traditional reporting? Is there a visualization for the Bernie Madoff story? How about the recent change in breast cancer screening recommendation? Can existing visualizations be supplemented to provide even more information for the news reader? What will CAR look like in 5, 10 or 20 years? And with that vision, what can we do today to make it a reality?
3
VOTES
Augmented reality mobile apps in seconds
If you've got geographical data in a django app, why not hook it into an augmented reality application for iPhones and Android phones, allowing people to walk down the street looking into their camera phone and see the buildings in front of them... with your data on top?
6
VOTES
Interactive charts... effortlessly
A few lines of pasted code--with almost no programming knowledge or time required--can turn an HTML table of data in your article into various forms of dynamic graphs.
5
VOTES
Screen scraping for beginners
Want to convert a Web site with hundreds of pages of information into a structured database--without hours of tedious copying and pasting, and with very little computer coding necessary?
3
VOTES
Organize code snippets with wiki
Want to access your code snippets from anywhere? A wiki might be your answer. (This from a dedicated wiki hater.)
3
VOTES
Play with Linux Safely
You'll learn how to install Sun's Virtualbox and Ubuntu on your PC. Virtualbox is also available for OSX so this won't be just a PC talk. If time permits you'll also learn about Webmin, a web based GUI for management of Apache, MySQL, PostgreSQL and more.
8
VOTES
Student perspective on CAR classes
If people are interested, I can give some student perspective as well as suggestions for journalists teaching CAR classes. Ten weeks last fall took me from never having heard of the field to pursuing a new career path with vigor.
6
VOTES
The hidden power of Javascript
If you know some HTML and CSS, Javascript is a great next step to complete your triangle of web savvy. It'll help bring broadly-compatible interactivity to your news site. I'll show you some tricks with the Google Visualization API -- dynamic graphs even work on the iPhone and some other mobile devices!
10
VOTES
Get on the same page
Use simple wiki tools to organize long-term investigative projects and breaking news resources. Works especially well for newsrooms stressing cross-platform collaboration and editing.
8
VOTES
Shell scripting redux
A handful of simple, but powerful, Linux-based shell commands -- that can run under Windows and Mac -- for joining voluminous text files, doing universal search-and-replacing and scraping URLs.
5
VOTES
Like Snowboard Cross, but With Data
Use ProPublica's new open source tools (to be released at NICAR) TableFu and TableSetter to create full featured data apps using Google Spreadsheets. We'll take a data set, copy and paste it into Google Spreadhseets, and publish it on the actual internets. And somebody will time us.
15
VOTES
Essential Queries for SQL Server
Five SQL queries you may have never tried that will save you time and maybe alter the universe as you know it. With handout.
15
VOTES
File sharing using Google Docs
Share files for projects across newsrooms, bureaus, classrooms, etc. It's a cinch.
4
VOTES
Data-cleaning tricks using Excel
We've seen them on NICAR-L over and over again: Paste Special, text-to-columns, trim and left/right/mid functions.
4
VOTES
Navigating a Form 990
Who files them? Where do you get them? What do they tell you?
3
VOTES
Easy peasy due diligence
Roll through a seven-step process to vet sources, local political candidates, executives and other people of interest.
10
VOTES
Data Manipulation or Graphics with R
I could show how handily R allows you to munge data or do exploratory data graphics -- whichever this audience requests.
16
VOTES
php Caspio alternative
Build an online data lookup in minutes using a template and the DataGrid PHP class
6
VOTES
Quick introduction to Ruby
Pretty simple introduction to the basic concepts of Ruby.
9
VOTES
Hello, Newsroom! Build out a GIS-enabled web app in < five minutes
Fire up a server in Amazon's cloud and deploy http://tinyurl.com/hellonewsroom -- all in less time than it takes to make me a sandwich.
18
VOTES
GRRR (Get Rid of Rascaly dRopdown lists) with jquery
When your dropdown options on database lists get too long, you can use easy jquery AJAX libraries to instead suggest values as the user types. It's fast and foolproof for them, easy for you with a little bit of code.
5
VOTES
Easy interactive charts with Open Flash Charts
Open Flash Charts is an easy way to make interactive Flash charts and it's all free. I'll show you a tool allowing any reporter to make a basic one just by typing in the values, and get an embed link to paste into the CMS system with the story
10
VOTES
Google Charts. Easy, Clear, Indestructable.
They aren't interactive. They don't impress trendy developers. But they make a point. (And they'll work in IE 6). In this talk I'll show you how you can use Django and Google Charts to get your Tufte on.
17
VOTES
Using an API with Excel
Want to use an API to fetch data but don't have much programming experience? You can start with Excel. I'll show you how using the NYT Congress API.
16
VOTES