I’ve come to the realization in the past couple of years that teaching computer-assisted reporting requires first teaching how to approach stories with a "data state of mind" — a term that I’ve co-opted from the famous Barlett and Steele phrase, "document state of mind."

This spring, the Minnesota Legislature made it impossible for news organizations here to do the classic "felons with hunting license" story that many newspapers (including mine) have done in the past.

They passed a bill that made private key information from the Department of Natural Resources' license database. This includes everyone who has obtained a license for fishing, hunting, trail use and other activities. The person's name, address, driver's license number and date of birth are now private.

I’ve been on a numeracy crusade lately, particularly in the overuse of decimals — or what I call, getting "decimal happy." I’m not sure what got me on this kick, but I’ve realized that there’s a good reason all of us should be concerned about this.

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.

The fact that statistics can be misleading came front and center in a debate in Minnesota recently about graduated licensing restrictions for teen drivers.

It all started with a story and graphic in the Minneapolis Star Tribune that said, "Minnesota led the nation in the percentage of fatal crashes involving teen drivers from 2004-2006."

From there, it got translated by state legislators and the news media as: "Minnesota has the highest teen driving death rate in the nation."

I’ve spent the past year slowly making the transition from classic Active Server Pages (ASP) programming to ASP.NET. Yes, yes I know this is not Django or any of the other "hot" frameworks out there right now. But we are a Microsoft shop and I have no support for non-Microsoft products; and more importantly, no time or energy to tackle it myself. Learning a new tool is hard enough.
So I thought I’d write a bit about my experience so far.

I think the biggest hurdle for CAR neophytes in learning how to use a database manager is the translation of English into computer-speak.

This point became crystal clear in October while I helped IRE and NICAR co-Training Director Jaimi Dowdell teach a bootcamp in Minneapolis. We had spent the morning introducing them to Microsoft Access and the SQL language (the bootcamps teach SQL rather than the grid view), and by lunchtime we had a room full of people with deer-in-the-headlights expressions on their faces.

An interesting discussion about criminal data has been brewing in Minnesota for several months now, and I suspect it will come up in other parts of the country if it hasn’t already.

At issue is how criminal data — including jail bookings and convictions — are disseminated by so-called "data miners" and then used by the public, often for crucial decisions on job hiring and housing rental.

The 2008 Republican National Convention, which was held four blocks from our office in downtown St. Paul, was the biggest event this newspaper has covered in a good number of years. We knew that organization would be a key to making sure everything went smoothly.

We ended up harnessing some CAR power to make that a bit easier.