Nerd Alert Issue 19: A New Player Has Entered The Game

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We have a new apprentice!


HOT LINKS

What we're reading this week

  Adam: When choosing icons, remember that clarity is key and sometimes the best icon is no icon at all.

  Ben: Everyone likes a good gif, right? Lena Groeger thinks there's something special about looping images. Here's her talk at OpenVis Conference 2105, and here's the slide deck. It's a treasure trove of gifs, and it's actually pretty interesting. Small multiples, gifs, or both?

  Dani: I'm a huge data-algorithms nerd, and I particularly get excited when these tools are used to solve everyday problems in our communities. While Google Maps may be able to tell you if the route you're about to take has traffic, the Traffic Prediction Project hopes to use data to predict jams an hour in the future.

  Kaeti: This set of CSS icons is fun and flexible. Check out the GitHub repo here.

  Meredith: Audiences fascinate me.   Does it matter if an institution has aglobal audience and zero visitors?

 Nick: Edsger Dijkstra was an ACM Turing award-winning computer scientist who conceived Dijkstra’s Algorithm which finds the shortest distance between two nodes in a graph, a fundamentally important algorithm in these networked times. He wrote a great deal of correspondence with fellow scientists, in English and in Dutch, and it’s extremely readable. The CS department at the University of Texas has an archive of scans of his notes from 1962 to 2002. Some are even funny; try How “They” Try To Corrupt “Us”.

  Ryan: I've always had trouble understanding SQL joins. These two links explain, in simple terms, what each type of SQL join does and how each can help you. Take the time to really own this knowledge so you can have the confidence that your SQL is as efficient and accurate as it can be.

  Will: “You know, the machine challenged me, so I challenged the machine.” An interesting look into how computers affect our lives and shape our characters.

  Bert: Beep peep xkcd beep boop.


This week's guest contributor: Ryan Cavis, Public Media Platform

We live in a world of web comments. And it's a cold, cruel world orbiting an unnormalized and indifferent sun. The "surface web" we spend all day browsing and indexing is a drop in the data-bucket compared with the blog comments, online communities and discussion boards of the "deep web". Estimates have put this non-indexable part of the web at over 400x the size of the indexed web.

Now before you jump out that window from despair - Diffbot recently announced their Discussion API for analyzing just such data. And hey, it's an API - which means normalization and repeatability for developers! The same way you might monitor and interpret Facebook and Twitter comments, you can track pretty much any discussion platform (Javascripty or not) including Disqus, Livefyre, WordPress, Blogger, Hacker News, and apparently pretty much anything I could think to throw at it.

So why not go ahead and read the docs, then take it for a test drive? Go ahead. You've earned it.


Each week we ask someone from outside our team to contribute a link, tool or idea. Are you our next guest star? We think you might be. Send us a note at nerds@inn.org.


SHOUT OUT

Work we admire by our journalism peers

Dallas Morning News' Rolodex is in the news this week. It's a Django-based directory of people and the organizations they belong to. Users in your newsroom can add people, orgs, and relationships to the database, and see the relationships with some network graphs. Here's a Nieman Lab writeup, a live example rolodex, and the project on GitHub.


SOME OTHER STUFF

Gather ye rosebuds

LISTEN: From the New York Times' article about the new THX trailer: Bach's Fugue in B Minor.

COOK: Kimchi Party!

WATCH: The little thruster that tried.

GIF: Popup books are cool.

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