Brian Chan's blog

Ever worked with messy data? Whenever I get xls or csv files, I won’t be so naive to think that the data is clean. Very often there are trailing spaces or even worse newline characters at the end of certain cells, not to mention typos and stuff. I have to physically go through all data cells to do clean up before getting them into the database.

It’s such a pain, and I probably won’t notice anything until errors occur later on. Chances are I missed a few clean ups and now I would have to re-import the dataset into the database again.

But guess what? That’s when Google Refine comes to the rescue. It visualizes your data and lets you do filtering to see the discrepancies. Then you can correct the same kind of errors in one step. Check out the following videos to see things in action!

Very cute!

ストリートビューのプライバシーについて
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQGrIsYUm4c

Finally, gmail, gcal, gdocs, all those are out of beta, yeah~~~ What’s the big deal? Ah… I don’t know… ^^; Technologically google has always served me well, and so this seems to be more of a marketing move than anything.

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/07/google-apps-is-out-of-beta-yes-really.html

Oh my gosh! For all you programmers out there, you got to check out the google I/O videos where they introduced new apps and stuff. At least, you got to see the Google Wave video. I think that will revolutionize the way we email, blog, and do online communication and collaboration in general.

Google I/O Keynote Day 1

Google I/O Keynote Day 2

Recently, WolframAlpha has been making some noise saying it can perform better searches than google. From what I understand, WolframAlpha claims to understand the words you type into the search bar, thus returning better search results, whereas google will only search your words literally with its PageRank algorithm. Say for example, if you type in “short CEO”, WolframAlpha will give you the info on the short CEO such as his name, his business, and so forth, while google will give you anything related to your search words.

I don’t think WolframAlpha will be anywhere close to being a threat to google. If anything, google can just buy them out.

WolframAlpha will be having their webcast soon on May 15th 7pm CST.

This tool made use of the google searches people around America made to predict if there are any flu outbreaks. The idea behind it is that, there is correlation between people getting sick and people who will do a “flu symptoms” search. However, it is not meant to be an accurate tool because there are people like the elderly who will not go online. Nonetheless, sacrificing accuracy, this tool gives faster flu level “reports” than any traditional tools. CNN has a post on this too. Take a look!

My goodness, google map is going wild… Now we can even use it to look for real estates… I am worried for some of the real estates listing websites…

Just go to google map, then type in the neighborhood address, then click “Show search options”, select “Real Estate”, that’s it. It’s pretty amazing.

http://maps.google.com/