I just gave this a spin using the City of Santa Fe 2015 budget, a 150-pager.  Seemed to be very fast in the conversion and quite accurate.  Unless you need the text, it is even faster if you edit out text pages and just run those pages containing the desired tables.  The result is that each page becomes a separate Excel page, then they can be sliced-and-diced as necessary.

Kudos to the ScraperWiki folks.

Accurately extract tables from PDFs
No more time consuming and error prone copying and pasting
https://pdftables.com/

-tj

So cool: The @washingtonpost Talent Network. Like Uber or Task Rabbit, but to hire freelance reporters.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=A4ORGOYRMjE Retweet from Mariam Rom

Maplight, a 501(c)(3) foundation, recently announced its “extensive mapping project examining the geographic origin of contributions to legislators by state; contributions from companies to legislators by state; and roll call votes by state and district on key bills in Congress.”

Today’s news peg points to “Who in Your State Has Contributed Money to Majority Leader Candidate Kevin McCarthy (R-CA)?”

MapLight looks to be a good edition to our GIS toolbox.

He has posted some handouts at dicar.org/global2005 or http://www.dicar.org/global2005/exercise_macroscraper2.htm

.
It's not yet clear to us if this is more efficient than writing PERL
or PHP scripts, but it's still an elegant hack.

We've been using a variety of web-based bookmarking tools for the past four or five years, tools like the now-departed Blink and Backflip.  They were all OK (so long as they remained financially viable), but never quite seemed to meet all our needs.  Recently, though, we learned about Furl (www.furl.net) and we like what we see.  Furl is in beta, so we don't know what the ultimate price will be, but journalists will like the ease with which we can pull URLs off a web page, markup those savings with keywords, copy-and-paste webpage annotations and then save the citation in a folder of your making.  Oh yeah, you can also save and e-mail the link(s) to anyone.  In fact, we like Furl so much, we will be demo-ing it next week at the IRE conference in Denver.

Here
at the IAJ we believe one of the reasons people come to newspapers or
broadcast stations is to get the data which, upon analysis, they can
turn into information that helps them make decisions.  Ergo, the
more meaningful data a journalistic institution can provide, the
greater value that institution has for a community.



A good example arrived today thanks to Tara Calishain, creator of ResearchBuzz.  She writes:

** Getcher Cheap Gas Prices on Google Maps

<http://www.researchbuzz.org/getcher_cheap_gas_prices_on_google_maps.shtml>



“Remember
when I was saying that I would love a Gasbuddy / Google Maps mashups
that showed cheap gas prices along a trip route?   Turns out
somebody has already done it —  well, sorta. You can specify a
state, city  (only selected cities are available) and 
whether you're looking for regular or diesel  fuel. Check it out
at  http://www.ahding.com/cheapgas/ “

Would readers appreciate this sort of data?  We think so,
especially if there was an online sign-up and the news provider would
deliver the changing price info via e-mail or IM much like Travelocity
tells us when airline ticket prices change by TK dollars.

A
talented band of coders in St. Petersburg, Russia has put together a
nifty simulation modeling application written in Java.  Anylogic™ “supports virtually all existing
approaches to discrete event and continuous modeling, such as process
flow diagrams, system dynamics, agent-based modeling, state charts,
equation systems, etc. With this incredibly rich toolset you are not
limited with the technology anymore – analyze the problem, identify the
best approach, and find the solution!”

The
package is relatively affordable, especially if one can qualify for the
educational discount.  It could make for a handy tool to model
and/or illustrate a variety of dynamic aspects in an urban setting —
ambulance response time, crowd movement during an anti-war
demonstration.



Today, too, the roll-out of the LA Times re-designed web site includes an intuitive interactive map of freeway traffic flow
— real time — of the greater LA basin.  Perhaps some
enterprising news organization will figure out a way to tie these maps
from SigAlert into the dashboard-mounted GPS navigation devices.  Or will SigAlert itself deliver those goods?

Gary Price's Resource Shelf
indirectly pointed us to a new resource that can provide journalists
with a quick and not-so-dirty GIS tool for their community or any other
in the U.S.  GeoLib is the Public
Library Geographic Database (PLGDB) Mapping site.  But its mapping
engine delivers far more than just push-pining public libraries. 
The GIS server can  display a variety of physical, demographic and
political boundaries and data that can be turned on and off in
traditional GIS layers.  The resulting maps could be easily copied
with a tool like Snag-It and dropped into a document or web page.

“Florida State University's GeoLib Program ( www.geolib.org )
is developing the National Public Library Geographic Database. The
database includes the locations of 16,000 public libraries, data sets
from the US Census, and library use statistics from the National Center
for Educational Statistics. The goal of this database is to provide
consolidated information on public libraries nationwide, easily
accessible over the Internet. The project is sponsored by the Institute
of Museum and Library Services ( www.imls.gov )

A
key ingredient to the long term success of the PLGDB is the ongoing
incorporation of other relevant data. We need your feedback as to what
data you would like to have in the future. We hope the database will
offer public librarians access to data that can shape local, regional
and national library policies. For more information about GeoLib and
its programs and to find out about the latest status and data releases
of the National Public Library Geographic Database check back on this
website regularly.”