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Concepts in taxation
If you ever find yourself in the unfortunate position of listening to a conservative talk radio program, you might here complaints like “10% of Americans pay 80% of the income taxes” or something similar. Check out this National Taxpayers Union page for an example of complaining through data.
Oh no! 50% of Americans pay 97.11% of all federal income tax. Scandalous, right?
Not so fast. Read more…
Typography and data organization in a resume
Typeface
It boils down to this: Do not use Times New Roman, Arial, or anything similar. Srsly.
Try a nice traditional font such as Garamond or Caslon, or else use the (passable) default font pack from Office 2007.
Whitespace
Yes, it’s tough to imagine that some of your resume real estate should be undeveloped, but oftentimes well-proportioned whitespace can direct the reader to what really matters.
Many resumes have poor whitespace management, and it oftentimes is the result of the standard elements of a resume. Much of the information, especially educational information, often arrives in lengthy strings of information bulleted by chronology or importance. Inside of these strings, however, are logical groupings of information which usually answers what, where, and when. Suddenly you can think of this data in a tabular format.
Yes, I am breaking my own rule and suggesting something a tabular data structure. But this is for the sake of design and presentation of data, not for storing data.
A subtle grid
More to come…
Happy St. Patrick’s Day
History of the day, courtesy of South 12th: Archbishop John Ireland.
Archbishop Ireland
It’s hard to overstate how much influence Ireland held over the city of St. Paul during his tenure as Archbishop from 1888 to 1918…
I’d like to know more about this, from the post…
He even gave the go-ahead on the construction of the streetcar lines in the city.
Anybody have background on this? Jesse, maybe?
Converting data into understanding
This TED video, and the Gapminder mashup tool which it uses, both exemplify what is right about technology.
As a student of political science, international relations, and economics, the ability to do mashups to understand our world is very powerful. It is not a replacement for face-to-face interaction on a global scale, and data alone cannot seem to counter the apathy which seems so prevalent, but it is a great tool for understanding our world.
I’d suggest people watch this video, check out Gapminder, and check out the TED website. The first fifteen minutes appeals to the international citizen in me, and the remaining minutes appeal to my geeky XML side.
I’m going to enjoy bringing more mashup technology into my current client, and I can think of a thousand applications for meaningful data mashups inside a large financial services organization.
I’d love to hear people’s thoughts on this. My opinion is that once data is no longer in silos, our experience of data is only limited by our creativity.
The power of XML Schemas
I have recently been doing much more to develop a data model of enterprise metadata for my current client, a Fortune 500 financial services organization.
As someone without previous background in data modeling, development, computer science, or enterprise technology, I have found my niche in developing data governance processes and organizing semantics of an enterprise data warehouse.
The XML Schema using Altova’s XML Spy
Part of my work has been developing tools using the XRX architecture, which allows non-programmers like myself to build really cool web-based job aids which are much more functional then siloed spreadsheets.
oXygen has been my XML development tool of choice at my client, as it allows us to use a native connection to the eXist native XML database. Last week, I finally was able to snag a license for XML Spy, and I am extremely impressed by its ability to generate complex XML Schemas.
My first run at high-level utilization of a XSD schema has been to build a data model which represents the metadata we are capturing as it relates to our data warehouse.
Background: My quest for a XSD data model
My team has consolidated our metadata from multiple different projects into something we call the “Master Metadata Spreadsheet.” It is nasty. 50 columns and 3,000 rows nasty. Yet less nasty than the disperate project deliverables which previously were the “truth” when it came to our enterprise data warehouse metadata.
The need for an interim solution
We used to have different documents, lineage records, data contracts, etc. with dozens of source systems and all categories of enterprise data. It was convenient for the other side (system-specific BAs and IT, and business data stewards) to manage, but impossible to get an enterprise snapshot of our metadata. Worst of all, it was a time consuming task for those of us on the data warehouse team to update one bit of common metadata in dozens of spreadsheets.
Metadata consolidation
Thus, the decision was made to build our Master Metadata Spreadsheet. Now, we have one central repository for our production metadata in a living document. It was a great leap forward, but not good enough for me.
A spreadsheet just isn’t enough
The first downside with using a spreadsheet to capture enterprise data is that our metadata does not conform to a tabular structure. This is a common problem for many enterprise data captures, whether in IT or the business. Spreadsheets are easy to make but difficult to make useful. What happens when we have certain columns which contain common values across rows? What happens when we need to capture information, such as multiple names or valid values, inside one cell?
Secondly, spreadsheets (like all documents) are silos of information. It is very difficult to get information in or out by any means other than through human interaction. Yes, there are ways to parse some metadata from our multiple repositories through a connection to tables in our DB2 database, but it’s still not an amenable solution for comprehensive management of our metadata.
Finally,
State Department Office of the Historian
On a recent visit to Washington, D.C., I had the fortune to meet Joe Wicentowski. He is a historian at the State Department, and he has brought eXist / XRX Architecture to the department to open up historical documents over ReSTful XML.
Check out their new website, http://history.state.gov
Props to Dan McCreary for introducing me to Joe.
The valley is calling…
I’ll be making an appearance in Silicon Valley during the first weekend of March. I look forward to visiting not only friends and family, but hopefully meeting up with some XRX and semantic web proponents.
Anyone have ideas for people I should meet?
