Tags : Excel

Atlanta-area banks missing tax payments

With a housing market once dubbed “ground zero” for mortgage fraud, Atlanta is still very much in the midst of the foreclosure crisis.

Even the nicest neighborhoods have been hit hard; the anecdotal evidence is everywhere. In poorer neighborhoods, entire blocks are deserted.

We initially had envisioned a series of reports quantifying the number of abandoned homes in a five-county area and explaining the reasons these houses sit neglected.

We brainstormed about which records would indicate a house had been abandoned.  We requested past due utility bills, code enforcement violations and unpaid property taxes. In Microsoft Excel, we built individual ...

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Data show high cost of air ambulance transfers

I don't remember how the subject came up, but at one point in a conversation with a mover and shaker in Sioux Falls, we started talking about hospital helicopters.

Sioux Falls is home to two hospital systems. Each system has smaller hospitals in South Dakota, as well as other states in the Upper Great Plains. The Mother Ship hospitals in Sioux Falls have medical helicopters, and it's pretty common to see them flying around.

The mover and shaker told me about a meeting he had with executives at one of the systems. During the meeting, a helicopter started ...

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Behind the Story: The big business of 'green' buildings and LEED certification

Can a 50-story Las Vegas hotel be environmentally-friendly?  This is the question USA Today reporter Tom Frank sought to answer when he began reporting on the increase in construction of so-called environmentally friendly buildings.  Through his investigation, Frank found that green commercial construction has increased.  Non-profits are behind the movement, but few have assessed the real impact of their programs.  Often, green building improvements are simply cheap routes to large tax breaks.  Frank’s ongoing Green Inc. series explores the challenges non-profit groups face in helping for-profit businesses “go green.”

His investigation began with an online search of the U ...

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Excel on steroids: NodeXL and PowerPivot

By Hilary Niles
@nilesmedia

Excel has two free, plug-ins for Windows users that can dramatically help reporters: NodeXL and PowerPivot. (Sorry Mac devotees, nothing for us.)

Tom Torok, CAR editor of The New York Times, and Peter AldhousNew Scientist’s San Francisco Bureau Chief demoed the two plugins at the 2012 CAR Conference.

NodeXL is a network analysis tool compatible with Windows 2007 and 2010 that allows you to visualize, quantify and otherwise describe connections between people, organizations, or really anything. Because of its broad applicability, Aldhous chose to not refer to it as “social network analysis,” but you ...

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CAR TOOL: Microsoft SkyDrive

The Seattle Times recently began publishing interactive data online using a free cloud-based tool: Microsoft Office Web Apps on SkyDrive. So far, we have mostly dabbled with Excel spreadsheets, but we hope to use more of the software in the future.

Office Web Apps is in some ways similar to Google Docs and can be used to store files and share documents with small groups of users.

At The Seattle Times, we use it to present interactive data to our readers. SkyDrive allows us to share our documents by generating some iframe code. We can also tweak the code ourselves ...

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Nursing home promises fall short

When the California legislature passed a law to drastically increase funding to nursing homes, it came with a promise that worker wages would rise, staffing would soar and patient care would improve.

The law passed in 2004. When I started working on investigative articles for California Watch in the fall of 2009, it seemed like a good idea to take a close look at whether the promises attached to hundreds of millions of dollars came true.

What we found was noteworthy. State and federal funders poured an additional $880 million into nursing homes over five years, moving the annual funding ...

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"CAR Day" has something for everyone

We've received lots of questions about whether the optional Computer-Assisted Reporting day at the Baltimore conference June 11-14 is suitable for people new to CAR. The answer is "Yes." The day will serve as a good introduction to the tools and tricks of analyzing electronic information. In addition, hands-on classes Friday through Saturday will give you actual experience using spreadsheets and databases. Here are some Thursday panels I think would be suitable for those new to CAR as well as seasoned veterans:
Thursday (6/11/09) Panel(s)
9:00 - 10:00 a.m. CAR's greatest hits: 2008-2009 ...
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The magic of IF

Excel has more tools and functions than you might imagine at first glance. However, there’s one that I turn to again and again: the IF function. The versatility of this thing is impressive, and it seems to fit well with a lot of the tasks we need to do to manipulate and rearrange data we get from others. The statement that "data are always dirty" is so true, but we should add that data are almost always set up in a way that isn’t ready for the analysis we need to do. Some examples: --Election data will often ... Read more ...

Use sampling to deal with paper records

“That’s not on computer.” We’ve all heard that from officials reluctant to release data. But sometimes it really isn’t on computer, and in such cases, creating a database can be torture. Stealing techniques from social scientists may save you some work. Pulling a random sample of records for your database will allow you to calculate trends in the larger data set. When The Dallas Morning News analyzed jury selection, reporters pulled a sample of trials for which they obtained juror cards. Steve Doig, the Knight Chair in Journalism at Arizona State University, might chime in here and ... Read more ...

Poorest players win less in NY lottery

We already suspected a disproportionate number of Western New York’s lottery players live in Buffalo's poor neighborhoods. The lure of a $1 and a dream is strong where poverty rates run high. But our simple question had not been answered: Are they as likely to win as players from wealthier areas? Our mapping analysis found that, not only are the poor more likely to buy lottery tickets, they are more likely to lose as well. That's not because poor people are any more or less lucky at the lottery than wealthier people.

Instead, as we documented in ...

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