Have mounds of data buried away in Elastic Search where your favorite query tool, Tableau, can’t reach it? Have no fear, MoPal is here!
MoPal is a simple PHP app which allows you to execute Elastic Search queries (if you can call them that) and save the results to comma separate values (.csv) files. I use this at Mozilla to run ad-hoc queries against our Elastic Search cluster an export the results so I may analyze them in Tableau. This ad-hoc analysis is my first step in developing new analysis. It allows me to test if the data I’m asking our engineering team for will in fact be valuable once loaded into our data warehouse (Vertica).
Below are screenshots of the tool, feel free to reach out if you end up giving this a shot with any feedback or questions.
Recently the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (cms.gov) released a report detailing Medicare Provider Charge Data which shows the cost of procedures or DRGs at various hospitals across the US. This really got me thinking about how I could possibly help those in need of one of these procedures and it dawned on me that if I visualized this data, perhaps people could find nearby hospitals that could save them money on the procedures they needed. Here are the basic steps to use the tool below. Please let me know if you find this useful or interesting at all by tweeting me or leaving a comment below.
About the data
Sourced from CMS.gov the data shows “hospital-specific charges for the more than 3,000 U.S. hospitals that receive Medicare Inpatient Prospective Payment System (IPPS) payments for the top 100 most frequently billed discharges, paid under Medicare based on a rate per discharge using the Medicare Severity Diagnosis Related Group (MS-DRG) for Fiscal Year (FY) 2011. These DRGs represent almost 7 million discharges or 60 percent of total Medicare IPPS discharges.”
San Diego | 6 June, 2013 | 4:00 – 10:00PM PDT
Location (map)
750 B Street Suite 1500
San Diego, California 92101
United States
Please join us for the San Diego User Group June 6th
Agenda:
Networking Ben Sullins – Mozilla
Ben will be demonstrating a method to easily integrate Google Analytics into Tableau Server. This Google Analytics data can provide rich information about who is using your site, when, and where.
We’ll also have a discussion about user management and security with Tableau Server so bring your questions, your tips, and your best practices.
For questions about this event, please contact Matt Shoemaker
Recently, a friend and colleague from across the pond, Craig Bloodworth, created a plugin for Google’s Chrome browser that gave you direct access to your Tableau Server. Now I prefer to use a browser that has my back (eg. Firefox) and I wanted to achieve similar functionality as well. So, with that I looked to one of my favorite Firefox plugins InstantFox.
By simply adding a new custom “search engine” pointed at your Tableau Server, you now get an instant search of your Tableau Server views. Here’s how:
I see a lot of presentations. In meetings, webinars, and conferences I am frequently sitting in a room or watching something online trying to receive some sort of message from another individual in the form of a presentation. Nine times out of ten, this other person does what most do and show slides that have a big bold title like “strategy” or “features” and bullet points like “Vision, Mission, or Keys to Success”. During this time not only am I completely ignoring what the person saying as I read ahead, I am also degraded to a 5th grade level where I have someone basically reading each bullet to me as if I can’t do that for myself. This isn’t a presentation, these are presenters notes being displayed and as an impatient consumer of information, before the presenter is done with their rambling about their first bullet, I have consumed it all and am on twitter or facebook looking for something more interesting.
You may say I just need to suck it up and pay attention, to not read ahead, and to put my phone away (ha!). Well, sorry, I’m impatient and refuse to waste my time listening to someone regurgitate for 60 minutes what I could consume in 10 seconds via 140 characters or less. Correction, I am not sorry for this, but I am sorry for those presenters who after it’s over, have people congratulate them for puking useless commentary on otherwise completely predictable and expected talking points.
All that said, I am a humanitarian at heart, and in a selfish effort to avoid having to sit through your boring presentations again, have some basics for you to follow when designing your slides. I didn’t come up with these and I’m no expert. But I have read a few books on the topic and been through the Duarte Slideology 1-day training which is fantastic, and if you have the chance will be the best money you spend all year on training, trust me, I’m an expert.
So, if you’re designing a presentation, for the sake of your breath and your audience’s sanity, please at minimum follow these guidelines. These are closely based on Duarte’s 5 rules of presentation design (link) and Garr Reynolds Presentaiton Zen philosophy (link).
I thank you in advance.
Presentation Design Standards:
Do
- Use large images/screen shots
- Show short videos
- Give live demo’s
- Display diagrams
Don’t
- Use less than a 30pt font on any slide
- Use any amount of bullet points
- Display more than 6 words per slide
- Have more than 1 message per slide
- Use fancy animations (simple animations okay)
