One of Slack's greatest appeals is that it's so extensible. While its main purpose is group collaboration, add-on apps can do everything from answer questions about business analytics to offer project updates from tools like Jira and Trello.Step 3: Host the R API remotelyTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
If you've got an Amazon Echo, Dot, or other Alexa-enabled device, you've probably discovered Flash Briefings. (For those not yet talking to Amazon devices, a Flash Briefing is a customized audio news report.)To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
Microsoft has jumped into the free, self-service data analysis space with Power BI.
Power BI offers basic data wrangling capabilities similar to Excel's Power Query. It also lets you create interactive visualizations, reports and dashboards with a few clicks or drag-and-drops; type natural-language questions about your data on a dashboard; and handle files that are too large for Excel.
It can work with dozens of data types -- not only Excel, Access and CSV files, but also Salesforce, Google Analytics, MailChimp, GitHub, QuickBooks Online and dozens of others. And, it will run R scripts -- meaning that any data you can pull in and massage via R you can import into Power BI.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
If you'd like to follow along with our hands-on Power BI tutorial, you can download the data files below.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
Want to get more out of Excel? At Microsoft's inaugural Data Insights Summit last month, several experts offered a slew of suggestions for getting the most out of Excel 2016. Here are 10 of the best.(Note: Keyboard shortcuts will work for the 2016 versions of Excel, including Mac; those were the versions tested. And many of the query options in Excel 2016's data tab come from the Power Query add-in for Excel 2010 and 2013. So if you've got Power Query on an earlier version of Excel on Windows, a lot of these tips will work for you as well, although they may not work on Excel for Mac.)1. Use a shortcut to create a table. Tables are among the most useful features in Excel for data that is in contiguous columns and rows. Tables make it easier to sort, filter and visualize, as well as add new rows that maintain the same formatting as the rows above them. In addition, if you make charts from your data, using a table means the chart will automatically update if you add new rows.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Analyzing 200,000 records may not seem like a big task. But when those records are security incidents with potentially hundreds of attributes each -- types of bad actors, assets affected, category of organization and more -- it starts getting a little complex for a spreadsheet. So Verizon's annual security report, which was initially done in Excel, is now generated "soup to nuts" in R.In fact, the Verizon Data Breach Report is somewhat of "a love letter to R," Bob Rudis, managing principal and senior data scientist at Verizon Enterprise Solutions, told the EARL (Effective Applications of the R Language) Boston conference earlier today.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
ATLANTA -- A self-described security "amateur" discovered hundreds of Internet-connected devices ranging from cameras to industrial control systems that were connected to the Internet without even basic password protection -- meaning they could be easily turned on and off or otherwise manipulated with a single click of a mouse."You would be amazed [what] you could find," Espen Sandli, a journalist at the Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet, told the Computer Assisted Reporting conference Thursday. "The project was made from people who had no idea about data security at the start."MORE ON NETWORK WORLD: 12 most powerful Internet of Things companies
They began by searching for basic security cameras, such as finding and taking control of a surveillance camera inside a nightclub. After that, they graduated to finding compromised control systems at military installations and railroads. In one case, they found a security company's list of clients and passwords in the clear online. In another, they could have accessed who was allowed to enter or leave a military building. Another device on the open Internet could have allowed them to switch off a railway fire-alarm system.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Sharon Machlis