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ITA Software is proud to introduce Needlebase™, a revolutionary platform for acquiring, integrating, cleansing, analyzing and publishing data on the web.  Using Needlebase through a web browser, without programmers or DBAs, your data team can easily: acquire data from multiple sources:  A simple tagging process quickly imports structured data from complex websites, XML feeds, and spreadsheets into a unified database of your design. merge, deduplicate and cleanse: Needlebase uses intelligent semantics to help you find and merge variant forms of the same record.  Your merges, edits and deletions persist even after the original data is refreshed from its source. build and publish custom data views: Use Needlebase's visual UI and powerful query language to configure exactly your desired view of the data, whether as a list, table, grid, or map.  Then, with one click, publish the data for others to see, or export a feed of the clean data to your own local database. Needlebase dramatically reduces the time, cost, and expertise needed to build and maintain comprehensive databases of practically anything. Read on to learn more about Needlebase's capabilities and our early adopters' success stories, or watch our tutorial videos. Then sign up to get started!

The Dirty Energy Money tool provides an illustration of the network of funding relationships between Dirty Energy companies and politicians. You can use the interactive network map to explore our database campaign contribution relationships. Politicians and companies are positioned by their relationships, those that are close together tend to have similar patterns of giving and receiving.

Written by Elizabeth Wolf, Fundación Ciudadano Inteligente The recent months of 2011 have marked the manifestation of student frustration with the Chilean education system. Hundreds of thousands of university and secondary students have flooded the streets of Santiago and other cities across Chile, in a series of protests demanding: lower tuition, more opportunities to access public universities, better quality education, and increased government spending on education, including more scholarships for lower class students.

 The Chilean government spends less on education than most developed countries: 4.4% of its GDP, compared to the average 7%, which means a good portion of Chilean students pay for their own university education. With the combination of being one of the most socially stratified countries in the world, (40% of the country’s wealth is concentrated in 10% of the population), and the high costs of education, many students do not have the ability to attend a quality university. The Piñera administration and the leading group of Chilean students, along with their supporters have been at odds with each other for the last few months, struggling on the debate of education policy reform. Unable to agree upon a solution, the result has been the eruption of student protests across the country.



<< previous blog | recent blogs | next blog >> #bbcsms: BBC processes for verifying social media content Alex Murray | Wednesday 18 May 2011, 10:40 From Tunisia, via Egypt, to Libya and Syria, verifying and acquiring eyewitness/citizen journalist/user-generated content has become increasingly complicated as the material has become more sophisticated. At the UGC (user-generated content) Hub in the BBC Newsroom in London, our process has become much more forensic in nature and includes: - Referencing locations against maps and existing images from, in particular, geo-located ones. - Working with our colleagues in BBC Arabic and BBC Monitoring to ascertain that accents and language are correct for the location. - Searching for the original source of the upload/sequences as an indicator of date. - Examining weather reports and shadows to confirm that the conditions shown fit with the claimed date and time. - Maintaining lists of previously verified material to act as reference for colleagues covering the stories. - Checking weaponry, vehicles and licence plates against those known for the given country. That's not an exhaustive list, but those are some of the most common things we do in BBC News.

Shape to Fusion Hi. This website lets you import a shapefile to Google Fusion Tables. This blog post has some details on how it was built. To continue, you will need to authorize this site to access your Fusion Tables data on your behalf. Site by Josh Livni. Source code available at http://code.google.com/p/shpescape/