Category Archives: works

actual works, projects

NYC Restaurant Health Inspections: The Cleanest Cuisines

At my New York based site, Eye Heart New York, I’ve posted an analysis of the city’s health inspection data for its 26,000 some restaurants. View the post here. It’s just a quick summary of the data. A quick summary of the quick summary: Asian eateries and eateries in Queens had the highest average of [...]
Posted in works | Tagged | Leave a comment

Eye Heart New York

It’s such a nice day out, I think I’ll make yet another blog about New York… I’ve been looking for an area to test out HTML5, some other WP themes, and to shuffle all my New York-centric BS. I don’t know if I’ll ever complete this site about New York but at least I can [...]
Posted in works | Tagged | Leave a comment

Marina Abramović’s Top 50 Time Hogs; (Women sit around a lot)

OK, now it’s time to arrange the participants in the MOMA’s “Marina Abramović: The Artist Is Present” Flickr set by number of minutes each person stared at Abramovic. The Paco dude who went about a dozen times is the only person, apparently, to have stayed the whole day. It’s interesting to read the comments on [...]
Posted in works | Tagged , , , , , | 3 Comments

The Most Viewed Portraits: Marina Abramović: The Artist Is Present, the MOMA

Thought it’d be fun to see the 200 most viewed portraits on the MOMA’s “Marina Abramović: The Artist Is Present” Flickr set. So I wrote a scraper to collect each portrait’s stats, including page views. A number of celebrities participated in the marathon performance art exhibit, including Sharon Stone, Rufus Wainright, and Bjork. Other top [...]
Posted in works | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Marina Abramović Melts Before Your Eyes

Wrote a quick scrape of the Museum of Modern Art’s gallery of Marina Abramović’s “The Artist is Present”. This is Abramovic’s portrait for the last 68 days (I guess the upload isn’t complete yet). (Update, all 72 days are up, I’ll get around to updating this. Number 72 is a doozy) Photos by Marco Anelli. [...]
Posted in works | Tagged , | 1 Comment

Pfizer Data Redux

Updated the code and results to my guide on how to scraper Pfizer’s list of payments to doctors. It now contains a more normalized file that has a line for every doctor and payment. The aggregate totals changed marginally.
Posted in works | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Coding for Journalists 101 : A four-part series

So a little while ago, I set out to write some tutorials that would guide the non-coding-but-computer-savvy journalist through enough programming fundamentals so that he/she could write a web scraper to collect data from public websites. A “little while” turned out to be more than a month-and-a-half. I actually wrote most of it in a [...]
Posted in works | Tagged , , , , , , | 18 Comments

Coding for Journalists 104: Pfizer’s Doctor Payments; Making a Better List

Update (4/28): Replaced the code and result files. Still haven’t written out a thorough explainer of what’s going on here. Update (4/19): After revisiting this script, I see that it fails to capture some of the payments to doctors associated with entities. I’m going to rework this script and post and update soon. So the [...]
Posted in works | Tagged , , , , | 5 Comments

Coding for Journalists 103: Who’s been in jail before: Cross-checking the jail log with the court system; Use Ruby’s mechanize to fill out a form

This is part of a four-part series on web-scraping for journalists. As of Apr. 5, 2010, it was a published a bit incomplete because I wanted to post a timely solution to the recent Pfizer doctor payments list release, but the code at the bottom of each tutorial should execute properly. The code examples are [...]
Posted in works | Tagged , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Coding for Journalists 102: Who’s in Jail Now: Collecting info from a county jail site

This is part 2 of a 4-part series in introductory coding for journalists. Go here for the first lesson. This lesson and code will still be verbose, but will have a lot less hand-holding than the previous one.
Posted in works | Tagged , , , , , | 2 Comments