Data migration can be incredibly daunting. Finding a home for every field, pixel, and document in a new system is like moving between libraries that have completely different classification systems. Or like helping an elderly relative move out of their decades-long home and downsize into a new apartment. Often it feels like being caught up... Continue Reading →
Bletchley Park: The Birthplace of Artificial Intelligence
We started Datagami because we wanted to highlight positive uses of data. This month I was thrilled to be able to visit Bletchley Park – one of the most impressive and positive uses of data I know of. The town of Bletchley is just about an hour’s train ride north of London and Bletchley Park... Continue Reading →
How does your vote count in the Electoral College based on where you live?
This article is a collaboration with my daughter, Meghan Bailey. Each state gets an allotment of electoral college votes based on their population. States with a higher population get more electoral votes such as Texas' 38 (based on July 2019 estimated population of just under 29 million). Those states with a smaller population are allotted... Continue Reading →
Data Literacy and Covid-19
This has been a year like no other, the effects of Covid-19 have impacted us all on personal and professional levels. In the first part of the year, I was looking at booking behaviors and worrying about the impacts to travel in Asia. By the end of March, I found myself obsessively checking Covid-19 statistics... Continue Reading →
Catfishing Data
The above graph was on the Georgia Department of Public Health site and it shows the top 5 counties with the greatest number of confirmed COVID-19 cases. At first glance, it appears that their case counts have been on the decline. That's great news! Except that it's not quite correct. Look closely and you'll see... Continue Reading →
A Literal Pie Chart
I'm so excited! 314 Pie just delivered my dinner and it's baking as I write this. I ordered several different pies and was wondering how I was going to tell them apart. Then I noticed some shapes on the top of the crust - diamonds, rectangle and a triangle. Their cooking instructions showed the legend:... Continue Reading →
Is it me or a toxic teammate?
Yesterday wasn't a good day. I work on a small "team". We don't really interact as a team ought to. We end up working in silos because that is the path of least resistance. We lack any cross training, change control process, and basic communication. One developer deployed code into production without informing anyone. It... Continue Reading →
Connecting Snowflake to Esri’s ArcGIS
I'm transitioning our data warehouse from on-premise SQL Server to Snowflake. I have a GIS team that uses Esri products and we needed to be able to ensure that ArcGIS could connect to Snowflake. So this is just a quick little How To. Within your Snowflake instance, you'll need to go the Help menu and... Continue Reading →
Morning People vs Night People
I'm that annoying morning person who pops out of bed, ready to take on the day. My husband needs to hit the snooze button over and over again until I literally pull him out of bed. I'm happy, he's groggy. The day becomes night and we reverse. I need to go to bed early while... Continue Reading →
Tableau join with calculated field
I recently ran into a problem with a join: I had two tables with "customer class" IDs in them, but I needed the description - which was only available for the customer subclass. In a rush, I joined the tables on customer class and filtered the subclass descriptions to one description per customer class. I... Continue Reading →