database

USDA data shows how bad food lands on school kids' trays

USA TODAY

Two colleagues approached me last summer with an intriguing pitch: They wanted to trace the meat, poultry and other food served in school cafeterias all the way back to their manufacturers. Parents, they said, were often in the dark about the quality of the food their kids eat at school — much less who supplies it — and they suspected school officials didn't know enough about the foods' sources to act when students fell ill.

Anthony DeBarros is a senior database editor at USA TODAY.

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Award winner: Missing gas-escrow payments uncovered with data matches

Bristol (Va.) Herald Courier

For 20 years, an obscure Virginia regulatory board has forced thousands of landowners to lease their mineral rights to private energy corporations.

Daniel Gilbert is a reporter for the Bristol (Va.) Herald Courier.

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Measuring crime in schools

Tulsa World

Readme: Free text article

I drive by an elementary school on my way to work every day. More than once there’s been a police cruiser idling in the school’s parking lot with lights flashing and the officer standing nearby.

Although those incidents never involved a major crime, on several occasions this year the Tulsa World has chronicled arrests at schools.

Gavin Off is the data editor at the Tulsa World in Oklahoma and a former analyst for the IRE and NICAR Database Library.

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Future Tools: Some thoughts on the future of CAR

I had the privilege of speaking on a panel with Sarah Cohen and Steve Doig last week in Baltimore about the future of computer-assisted reporting. Whoever thought I even belonged in the same room as those two gave me way more credit than I deserved.

But in preparing for that panel, I got to thinking: What skills and software tools are we going to be using in 10 years? What skills should we start learning now if we want to be prepared for the future? Or better yet: What types of problems in newsgathering and investigations could technology best help solve?

Links: Data.gov and credit union health

The federal government launched Data.gov a little less than a month ago with raw databases, data extraction tools and widgets and pledged to bring "unprecedented access to government information." The White House said the site would allow "unfiltered access to government data streams in machine-readable formats."

Flood aid under scrutiny

The (Cedar Rapids, Iowa) Gazette

Readme: Free text articleI was warned prior to IRE and NICAR’s CAR Boot Camp that many attendees leave feeling overwhelmed.

And at the end of the five-day class in Minneapolis in early October, I felt … overwhelmed.

Gregg Hennigan covers local government out of the Iowa City office of The Gazette.

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Toward better political data

Early this past fall, our group of journalists and developers at The New York Times began to assemble the data necessary to produce our election guide, which would not only focus on the presidential race but also include races for the U.S. House and Senate.

10 tips for Access 2007

Last month, I provided some tips for making the switch to Microsoft Excel 2007 spreadsheet. Here are some things you need to know about Access 2007, the updated version of Microsoft’s desktop database manager.
Just like Excel 2007, Access uses Microsoft’s new Tab, Ribbon and Button setup to organize functions that had been stored under menus. (Click images to enlarge for a better detail view.)

Flying with SQL subqueries

In most cases, when you want to match data from one table in a database to another, a common approach is to use a JOIN clause in your query.

For example, if you had a list of candidates in one table, and a list of donations made to candidates (with one field having a candidate ID in it), you'd probably either use JOIN clause or a WHERE clause to match them together:

(pseudo-code)

SELECT * FROM candidates, donations where candidates.candidate_id = donations.candidate_id;

Cutting through the spin on election night

Now that it’s high political season, it’s a perfect time to prepare for reporting on the election. If you take a few steps to get ready, you’ll be able to cut through the spin on election night and the days after and show how the candidates fared in your area. So, here are some tips for laying the foundation now:

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