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By Dan Nguyen Reactions to Osama bin Laden's death: Female and non-U.S. residents more ambivalent. Via the NYT Reactions Matrix By Dan Nguyen | Published: May 9, 2011 This (totally not-double-checked) analysis is a riff off of the excellent New York Times visualization (The Death of a Terrorist: A Turning Point?) of how people reacted to Osama bin Laden's death. In the days following the news, the Times asked online readers to not only write their thoughts on bin Laden's killing, but put a mark on a scatterplot graph that best described their reaction. The Times used the data to show the continuum of reactions from everyone who participated. I wanted to see how reactions differed across geographical location and gender. Includes details of his methodology (and a bit on that of the original NYT graphic)

Tom Torok (NYT) writes: After years of looking down my nose at Excel because of its limitations, I have to say that I'm very impressed with Excel 2010 when used with a free Microsoft add-in called PowerPivot. http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/excel/download-powerpivot-HA101959985.aspx In a PowerPivot tutorial (link below), I imported eight tables  from several sources and joined them - yes, you can join relational data. It uses some magical data compression that allows for lightning fast sorts, filters and calculated fields. The largest table in the tutorial has about 2 million rows. A calculated field on that table took seconds. A did a pivot table on the table and the answers appeared as soon as I selected the fields. In one of  the training videos (http://www.powerpivot.com/) an MS guy works with a 101 million-record table on his laptop. It's really amazing. http://powerpivotsdr.codeplex.com/ If you install, be sure to read the prerequisites or you'll be installing and uninstalling both PowerPivot and Excel. I'm running it on a 32-bit XP machine (it won't run on a 64-bit XP but will work on Windows 7 64-bit). The tutorial is for a Windows 7 setup, but there are items in the menu bar that match the reference to the tutorial's ribbon. I noticed that if I call up an xlsx by double clicking on a file in Windows Explorer that PowerPivot is not enabled in the ribbon. If you call up a file from within Excel 2010 everything works as advertised.Regards, TT