Publications by George Mount
Recording Weather.gov History using R and the Windows Task Scheduler
One of my most popular posts is on retrieving real-time weather into Excel. A common question here is how to get recorded weather updates; that is, keep a log of the weather updates for a specific place. For that I will write an R script to parse weather.gov’s XML feed for a location and then use the task scheduler to automate going to the si...
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Downloading 24-Hour Weather Updates in R
This post serves as a follow-up on a previous post about scheduled collection of Weather.gov’s XML feed in R, which itself was a follow-up to retrieving real-time data from Weather.gov in Excel. Reflecting on the best way to accomplishing this automation, I noticed something back on Weather.gov’s update page: an option for a 2-day weather hi...
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Writing Code to Read Quotes About Writing Code
A recent project of mine has been setting up a Twitter bot on innovation quotes. I enjoy this project because in addition to curating a great set of content and growing an audience around it, I have also learned a lot about coding. From web scraping to regular expressions to social media automation, I’ve learned a lot collecting a list of over...
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Review: Excel TV’s Data Science with Power BI and R
I have had a long history with Excel TV and, like Excel TV (and Excel itself) the channel has changed over the years. Gone are their regular live-streaming interviews with leading Excel authorities. Excel TV’s main product is now online courses. These are pre-recorded classes taught by the same caliber of talent as that of the interviews. Excel...
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My DataCamp course is live: “Survey and Measure Development in R”
Very happy to share that my DataCamp course “Survey and Measure Development in R” is now available. Check it out here — the first chapter is free. From the course description: How can we measure something like “brand loyalty?” It’s an obvious measure of interest to marketers, but we can’t quite take a ruler to it. Instead, we can d...
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Take your RStudio Hotkeys Online with a Text Expander
As a blogger and curriculum developer, I am often writing about R from a text editor instead of RStudio. I feared that working outside RStudio meant saying goodbye to fantastic hotkeys it provides. Isn’t there a way, I wondered, to set up a keyboard shortcut on my computer so that, for example, Alt + - would always return <- ? I put out the ...
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My upcoming O’Reilly business analytics online training courses
Next week is my first installment of live training offered through O’Reilly Media’s online platform. I’m so excited to partner with this outstanding organization to deliver workshops on business analytics. My first two courses will offer a unique perspective on SQL and R. For each, I will start with a data concept as demonstrated in Excel,...
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Meetup Recap: Survey and Measure Development in R
Have you ever taken a survey at the doctor or for a job interview and wondered what exactly that data was used for? There is a long-standing series of methodologies, many coming from psychology, on how to reliably measure “latent” traits, such as depression or loyalty, from self-report survey data. While measurement is a common method in ...
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Renaming all files in a folder in R
I hate the way files are run in a camera. While it was cool to learn for this post that DSCN stands for “Digital Still Capture – Nikon,” it means nothing to me! For this post, I will be renaming the files that I took from Worden Ledges into a more “human-readable” name. Ready to “automate the boring stuff with R?” Check out my cour...
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Practice R and Python on the Cloud for Free
R and Python, the “dynamic duo” of data science, are both free, open-source programming languages. That means that there’s no “vendor” in the sense that, say, Microsoft owns Excel. This can make getting started with these programs a little trickier: there are several ways to install them, often multi-step, confusing, and resource-intens...
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