
Making Sense of Data – Course - blauwbilgorgel
https://datasense.withgoogle.com/
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lalos
Good that Google is offering courses for people with no knowledge of stats,
journalist should be prepared to handle all the open data that is being
released. Reminds me of the case of Irene Choge a journalist who attended a
Google sponsored Bootcamp and later discovered flaws in certain schools in
Kenya. source: [http://blogs.hbr.org/2013/03/open-data-has-little-value-
if/](http://blogs.hbr.org/2013/03/open-data-has-little-value-if/)

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datawander
There already are a pair of data-driven journalists at the WSJ whose day-to-
day sounds more like a data scientist than a typical journalist. They are Tom
McGinty and Rob Barry.

They gave a great talk recently, which I wrote about (shameless plug below),
summarizing how they investigated the Asiana airline crash in SF recently and
what their day looks like. They're brilliant:

[http://datawonder.co/blog/2014/01/15/data-skeptics-wsj-
meetu...](http://datawonder.co/blog/2014/01/15/data-skeptics-wsj-meetup/)

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TrainedMonkey
Google Power searching class is still available and is pretty useful:
[http://www.google.com/insidesearch/landing/powersearching.ht...](http://www.google.com/insidesearch/landing/powersearching.html)

~~~
mark_l_watson
+1 the power searching class was very worthwhile for the relatively little
amount of time to complete it.

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mcintyre1994
This seems pretty cool, I'll definitely give it a go. Great to see Google
offering this, and it looks like a much smaller commitment (10-15hrs) than
many MOOCs.

I'm interested in which data experts created their "What is the primary goal
you hope to achieve by signing up for this course?" radio options on
registration though, they don't seem mutually exclusive. :)

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danso
In the data-cleaning portion of the course, I hope they make use of
OpenRefine, which was formerly Google Refine, when Google bought it as
GridWorks...years later, it's still the best highly-specific, GUI-driven data
tool I've ever used, such that I'll gladly hop out of my normal programmatic-
workflow to scout datasets with:

[http://openrefine.org/](http://openrefine.org/)

I'm interested in the portion teaching Fusion Tables, as the official
documentation is still catching up to the recent redesign and API changes. I
put together a basic guide for a class I taught last fall, but relied on my
vague experience with the older version of FT and was unaware of any new
features they may have added:
[http://www.smalldatajournalism.com/projects/one-
offs/mapping...](http://www.smalldatajournalism.com/projects/one-offs/mapping-
with-fusion-tables/)

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craigching
Think I'll do this while I wait for [1] to start. Might be a good introduction
for the class as well!

[1] --
[https://www.coursera.org/specialization/jhudatascience/1](https://www.coursera.org/specialization/jhudatascience/1)

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code_scrapping
It just looks like an elaborate way to market FusionTables. But it's a popular
move for everybody these days, and even a couple of MOOC's have been used to
spread the word about some professors pet-project/platform.

But putting that aside, I don't see why they didn't support any of the other
free/open platforms (like R). (I'm expecting "but it's too complicated to that
user-segment" argument)

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nsomaru
Could anyone in the know point to an open-source alternative platform (like R,
py) on which these concepts may be applied?

not so keen to tie any datasets to Google anymore.

~~~
danso
The data processing concepts that will be purportedly taught are not tied to
any platform or language. I've used Fusion Tables to teach concepts of data
and it's mostly useful for the built-in mapping capability and the ability to
merge tables via foreign key, and the pivot/summary transformations. It's not
_just_ that beginners lack the tools to do these in SQL/Access/R/etc., it's
that they don't even know what these concepts are, or what the value in them
are.

If you don't know _many_ data concepts, then this course is probably worth
taking. Then apply them to your datasets wherever they may be stored

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shakeel_mohamed
I've been registered for a bit, this is really going to help w/ my independent
study on cyclic pattern discovery next quarter! :)

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mathattack
Great course. Glad to see Google in the MOOC game.

~~~
markdown
One of the top dogs in their research division _did_ start Udacity.

