A firehose of knowledge blasted through a garden sprinkler
This year’s NICAR conference will feature lightning talks: a series of rapid-fire presentations given by you on a mix of subjects selected by you. It’s called democracy, folks, and we want you to be part of it.
How does this work? It’s simple: Register an account to vote on the talks you’d like to hear. Or better yet, propose one yourself! It can be on technology or techniques — just about anything, really. There’s just one rule: It can’t be one second longer than 5 minutes.
OK, actually two rules: You must attend NICAR to vote or, obviously, give a talk. But that’s about all there is to it.
If you have questions, or problems with the site, drop an email to aron@nytimes.com.
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Build it Now! Node.js & Express for speedy makery
One of the most valuable things you can do to gather feedback on a proposed project is putting it up on the web and sending it around. In 5 minutes, we'll build a simple Node.js & Express app, AND deploy it on Heroku (assuming cooperative internet).
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VOTES
The PANDA Project Architecture in 5 minutes
Deep in the dirty, mucky innards of how the PANDA Project works. A deep dive into the dark art of building a big data application.
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VOTES
Tabula: extracting tables from PDFs
A demo of Tabula (http://tabula.nerdpower.org), a tool to liberate data tables trapped inside evil PDFs.
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VOTES
Scrape all links from a web page with one click
Here's a simple way to grab all the links from any web page, ignoring all the extra stuff you don't need. All it takes is a click on a simple "Bookmarklet" you save to your Favorites toolbar. It pops open a new window with all the links, one to a line, ready for copy and paste.
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VOTES
Build an army of robots (in the cloud)
Your whistle stop guide to splitting big processing tasks into tiny pieces, running them in parallel and then combining the results. World domination optional.
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VOTES
Silent Lightning/a framework for sanity
Three of the historically most loquacious and opinionated attendees of NICAR must sit silently while the audience peppers them with questions about the technology that will save journalism. (A separate vote to be held that will identify the panelist.)
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VOTES
5 things to love about D3js before you even begin drawing
Think D3js is just about SVG? There's much more to it than just that. A helpful overview of stuff you'll want to use in every interactive.
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VOTES
Sing for me, Data: The rise of the Symphographic
People are getting bored with infographics. Symphographics are the new hot shit. Michael and Brian will show off their data-driven dance music with csv soundsystem and how sound can bring out narratives in data. Featuring the first ever live symphographic mashup.
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VOTES
Finding hidden APIs and Data via Apps
Contrary to many Websites Apps have "unlimited" APIs - no Captcha, no throtteling or access limits. I'll show how to find them -even for beginners.
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VOTES
Showing big datasets on small screens
When presenting huge data stories, make sure your mobile users aren't left out or forced to load massive datasets. Using WaPo's 2012 mobile election results as an example, I'll talk about creating lightweight data-driven web apps and tailoring the experience for mobile.
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VOTES
mitmproxy for journalism — and cats
A brief introduction to mitmproxy — the powerful, versatile, SSL-capable man-in-the-middle proxy. I'll show a few examples of how it's useful for analyzing HTTP(S) traffic, and then demonstrate how to replace every image you see online with photos of cats.
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VOTES
Every State's Elections Are Weird
Practically every state has its own weird quirks in elections, and I saw them all in 2012. If I'm inspired enough (and can speak fast enough), I'll say all 50. One every 10 seconds. This will be hard.
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VOTES
Juking the stats
Crime is down everywhere, right? Maybe not. I'll show you how to dig into your city or county's FBI crime data to see if it's bogus or not.
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VOTES
Fucking designers!
They are always pointing out shit that has nothing to do with function, always up in your grill about some tiny tweak here, some UX improvement there. Who needs them?!? Actually, we do -- badly. Give us five minutes, and we'll show four practical examples of how design thinking has improved our work, and could improve your's too. Also, we'll show cute cats.
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VOTES
Teaching code: what we’ve learned from Code with me
How Romeo and Juliet, cheap index cards, robots and root beer floats can teach students how to code. I’ll share the successes (and failures) from our workshops, and in 5 minutes leave you armed with new teaching tools.
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VOTES
Diff This
This presentation will take a whirlwind tour through your options for "diffing" two similar text files. I'll present the pros, cons, and in-the-wild examples.
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VOTES
Roll your own website change-tracker
You want to keep tabs on changes to a website, but Versionista.com and other out-of-the-box services aren't cutting it. I'll show you how to roll your own quickly using Git's post-receive hooks and your programming language of choice.
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VOTES
Flex your head: Booking your own hackathon
Tired of being the only news nerd in your town? Look to the punk rock scene for inspiration and d.i.y. Go to the local college, borrow some wifi, print up flyers and throw a hackathon. You may be surprised at the like-minded data misfits you'll attract. I'll share the many mistakes I made while organizing the inaugural "Hack Jersey" and offer tips on how you can foster a local counterculture of news innovation.
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VOTES
The soldering iron is the next great CAR tool.
Ever wanted to do a story that needed data that no one kept? What if you could create your own data gathering machines? You can. Cheap. And easy. How hardware hacking is the next data journalism skill.
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VOTES
Digging into local finances
Yo! Census has some datasets that can help you dig into local finances and compare across the country. We'll give a quick overview. Like a boss.
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VOTES
Responsive Design Quiet Time
Heard about responsive design but not sure how it works? Embarrassed at the water cooler when everyone's all "Seriously, could you *believe* that max-width 768 on NPR yesterday? So badass."? I'll build a stupid simple live demo from scratch, you'll leave knowing how CSS can target common screen widths. So basic, no talking required.
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VOTES
You need ILENE
Kindly come learn about the best and most polite language for use in programming activities...ever developed. Thank you. (Featuring The Jeff Larson)
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VOTES
How much bond contractors cash in
Ever wondered how much financial advisers, underwriters, rating agencies, etc. made working on your school district's multi-million dollar bond deal? Well, stop wondering.
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VOTES
Seeing the secret ballots
How did voters for Obama or Romney vote for mayor of your city? How did different demographic groups vote in your area's races? Here's how to use ecological inference to estimate answers.
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VOTES
Making friends with NetCDF files: climate data unleashed
A demo of two simple tools used to wrangle and visualize the data behind http://warmingworld.newscientistapps.com/. They're free, and can unleash other datasets on weather, climate etc
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VOTES
Let's make fun games for news
Want to make a news game with your data? I'll show you the exact 4 requirements on how to make a successful one. [Warning. News games are not gamification. They're real games.]
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VOTES
Django Retrained: Five ways coding like a Web developer can make you a better investigative reporter
It is the news that should fear your hand, not the other way around.
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VOTES
Digging through the rubbish pile
A quick tour through my favorite pieces of code I threw away, and what I learned from it.
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VOTES
Casino Driven Design
Sometimes you want your readers to pop potato chips for hours in a room with no windows but plenty of free drinks. Ditch Mechanical Turk, and embrace Casino Driven Design. We've had readers practice "natural" language processing on up to 25,000 PDFs a head in our casino, and yours can too!
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VOTES
5 algorithms in 5 minutes
Five algorithms from the data science world that will help you kick ass on the data journalism circuit. But wait, there's more! This presentation will be accompanied by a Github repo with working code and examples of journalistic applications.
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VOTES
Z-Scores: How you can compare apples with oranges
A school has 23.8 students per classroom and average SAT score of 2050, and an attendance rate of 93.5 percent. By standardizing disparate values with z-scores, you can more precisely compare variables that are on different scales and build better indexes.
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VOTES
Be Your wn Nate Silver.
I have 5 minutes to show you how to predict elections. And I'll do it.
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VOTES
Dude, who stole my Congressman?
The U.S. House of Representatives is apportioned every 10 years, but population shifts constantly. Find out how to use yearly Census population estimates to find our whether your state is gaining or losing leverage in Washington, how many people you are away from the threshold, what demographic groups are the heroes or goats and what state stole your Congressman (or whose you stole). One Eastern Seaboard state has already gained a seat at the expense of a Midwestern state.
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VOTES
Community organizing for civic data projects
The Supreme Chi-Town Coding Crew, a funky group of volunteer developers who aim to be as diverse as Chicago, has built a scraper and API for inmate data in the nation's largest jail. Learn about the project, the many failures that preceded it, and why this one is succeeding.
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VOTES
Why you should, and shouldn't, fear the drone
Drones are getting a lot of attention lately. But are they Skynet/Big Brother incarnate or a useful tool for everyone from cops, journalists to the local golf course owner? Answers WITH a demonstration!
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