Working with browser Javascript on mobile devices, I found myself needing to report exceptions back to a server. (It’s hard to see the browser console log on a mobile device without connecting it to a desktop machine). Here’s what I did to make a suitable object that can be serialized. To use this you’ll need stacktrace.js loaded in your web… Read more →
Find peak cases
Back in the Database Programming section of this series, we created the view named us_counties_new, showing the daily new case load. Recall that we first computed the seven-day running average of the total case loads in the us_counties_avg7 view, then used those numbers for the daily case loads. Having the daily case loads available lets us do some interesting analysis.… Read more →
Database programming
In the last section, we populated our us_counties table and used it for some queries. Now it’s time to create some views of the data. With views we’ll be able to do more interesting things without retyping huge queries. We can use views as a foundation for more analysis. The first view we need is the one to give us… Read more →
Getting started with the data
The Times’s data is here. https://raw.githubusercontent.com/nytimes/covid-19-data/master/us-counties.csv If you’re using a browser, open the context menu (right-click) on that link and use the Save Link As … operation to put it into a file on your system. We’ll use it later to load the database. Use your database interface program to log in to your database server, and figure out which… Read more →
Explore pandemic data with SQL
The New York Times newspaper publishes, every day, a file showing COVID-19 cases and fatalities for each county in the USA. They put their file on github here for anyone to use. So, let’s use it. Let’s download it and learn a few things about using SQL to explore data as we dig into it. Their file is called us-counties.csv.… Read more →
Donald J. T***** will you please go now!
With credit to Dr. Seuss and newspaper columnist Art Buchwald: The time has come. The time has come. The time is now. Just go. Go. GO! I don’t care how. You can go by foot. You can go by cow. Donald J. T****, will you please go now! You can go on skates. You can go on skis. You can… Read more →
Choropleths: color-coded maps showing data by state or other geography
A Choropleth is a colored map, typically showing information gathered by some kind of census. A well-known example is the New York Times’s COVID-19 map. Let’s say you have some data that’s coded by geographic area. For example, you might have a table showing the number of COVID cases per 100,000 people county by county in Massachusetts. It might look like… Read more →
From around the ‘toobz: articles marking the 50th anniversary of Friedman’s article
Milton Friedman wrote an article called “The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase Its Profits” fifty years ago. It is here. Here are some articles marking that anniversary, for reference. Some of them challenge the status quo Friedman established back then. Andrew Ross Sorkin, New York Times Tom Poldre, B Lab UK Article about the Business Roundtable’s challenge to… Read more →
Half a century of this is enough: Friedman’s piece saying business must be irresponsible
Fifty years ago come this Sunday, on September 13, 1970, Milton Friedman (a professor of economics at The University of Chicago) published a piece in the New York Times called “The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase Its Profits.” Invoking the socialist bogeyman, he argues that businesses should focus only on increasing their profits. Fifty years on, this has… Read more →
Conceived in bigotry and dedicated to the proposition that my tribe is holier than thine
“Conceived in bigotry and dedicated to the proposition that my tribe is holier than thine”. With deep apologies to President Lincoln, I fear this describes the practice of Christianity among White americans in the twenty-first century. It’s really painful to admit this. What is going on? Recently I visited a man wearing a T-shirt that said “Jesus is my savior.… Read more →
