Reflections on my career and the changes

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Wednesday June 16, I received a mail from Andrew Seaman with the question is the ‘Great Resignation’ here? I was triggered and started reading his message.

In the mail he asks me if I have advice for people making a shift right now – whether it’s landing a new job or making a career pivot?

First, thanks Andrew for selecting me, because of your thought I can add informed perspectives about the ever-changing world of work.

It is a nice moment to put some reflections on paper and share them with LinkedIn members to build them up.

You’re right I have been through changes in my career. Most of my changes have been forced by circumstances beyond my control. The outcomes of the changes have been in my control, and they all worked out fine. It takes effort to make a change work.

My first change was in 2001. I had been working 5 years as a breeding assistant in horticulture. I really loved that job. Being creative and working in a team to get new types of flowers. Whole day working with plants and pollen. Only my body did not like the pollen anymore after 5 years and started to tell me that I needed to change jobs. So, I took a 7-week holiday backpacking through New Zealand and talking to peers, strangers who were also backpacking, about my situation and collecting tips and tracks. I’m still grateful for all the people I met during that time. Contacts are lost, but their tips are still inside me. So, for 20s my advice is to talk to peers even if you don’t know them and collect their insights in your mind and build your decision on all those insights.

My second change started 10 years later, and it took me 6 years to really follow my heart. I was not comfortable with the way things were changing in the company I was working in. On the other side privately, I was just getting in a new stage. Starting a family. So, I did not do anything with my work feelings and that resulted in unhealthy situation and finally in an exit talk with my manager. At that moment, a difficult talk. Now looking back the best move to change my career. So, to 30s, 40s and 50s my advice is listening to your body. That is the most important adviser when it comes down to a healthy work situation.

In 2016 the biggest change in my career started. I had stopped a job after 15 years and the only thing I knew was that I wanted to work in IT and do something with data. So, I started with educating myself in that field, using edX as a starting point. I focussed on LinkedIn, checking out updates and job possibilities. Somebody I knew on LinkedIn invited me for a coffee talk and that ended up in a job in his company. I’m still grateful for the chance he offered me to learn BI on the job inside his company. For 20 months I found myself back and realised yes this is what I like. The company also changed, and BI got outsourced so when my contract was done, I was out on the job market again.

This time I was home for almost 1.5 years before I signed a new contract. Those 1.5 years were filled with study. Mostly online with edX and Microsoft into the data science direction. In November 2019 I had given up finding a job in 2019 and promised myself a break till January 2020, when a LinkedIn contact told me about a vacancy. I went for the talk, did not get the job, but the manager was impressed about what I had been doing over the last 1.5 years and had another opening in his team. I’m now in that job and it is a success, by hard work and learning a lot of new things. Covid-19 gave an extra challenge during the on-boarding because this was happening by skype and teams. Remote working is really nice to find a balance between work and family life. I feel blessed in this position and hope that returning back to the office will go smoothly but also will keep some remote work possibilities.

The biggest thing I learned in all my working years with ups and downs, is listen to your body and create a good balance between work and private life. My biggest advice is keep developing yourself and keep sharing how you are developing. There is always somebody that will notice it and who will help you forward in life and career.

#TheBigShift

Week 02 #WorkoutWednesday Power BI challenge

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We continue with the document that has been made last week.

Read the challenge and solution for this week

How did I build my solution?

  • In the Power Query Editor added a Custom column, using the option in the menu. I like to put commands in the properties to know later what I have been doing and I changed the name of the step.
  • The format of the column needs to change into a Decimal Number.
  • Took the code from the Advance Editor into https://www.powerqueryformatter.com/ to format it into a nice humanly readable code
  • For the dashboard I went for the Frontier Theme of Power BI to soften the colours.
  • I like to work with a background for the header and visualizations, so I started with building that in Power Point, from there saving it as a JPG and put that as a page background. Need to make sure the background colour here is the same as in my Frontier Theme of Power PI, so copied the Hex code. The lettertype also need to fit, the Verdana type
  • Added 3 card visualizations for “total revenue”, “total expanses” and “total profits” and changed the Data Label into the Million units. I gave the Cards the title and removed the Category option.
  • Added 3 line charts visualizations to show the 3 trendlines. Here the titles of the axis have been removed, because the card title can do those jobs.
  • Added 3 bar charts to show the results by conference. I changed the x-axis title into “Total Revenues by conference”, “Total Expenses by conference” and “Total Profits by conference” and made sure the top titles of the cards and the bottom titles are aligned.

The dashboard is published online.

The M-Code

Week 01 #WorkoutWednesday Power BI challenge

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Scrolling in Twitter I came across the posting of Spencer Baucke about a new WorkoutWednesday challenge. They have been making them for Tableau since January 2018. In 2021 they start with Power BI and I’m going to join them.

In week 1 it was a small touch to the wonders in Power Query. Making a connection to the database and doing some filtering.

I made the connection with the dataset in Data.World without downloading it to my computer.

Connection to DataWorld

Thanks to Barrett Studdard for sharing how to do that.

And we needed to set a filter on the fact table. Making sure the conference is not null and not FBS Total and Conference Median is not in the subdivision.

The complete code became as followed.

I have published the file online, the coming weeks we will build onto this dashboard.

You can follow my progress.

Dashboard walking challenge

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This morning I got involved with #100daysofwalking in twitter because of a tweet from my friend Máirín Murray.

The challenge by Dr Ciara Kelly

And suddenly I was using Power BI to analyse my walking data that I have been collecting since August 2015 with my apple watch.

I used the app Health Export to get the data form Apple Health into a CSV.

After importing it in Power BI it needed some transformations:

  • Power BI needed to have the right local settings to make sure the numbers and delimiters where read right.
  • I only want to keep walks longer than 30 minutes and more than 1 km, so I used a filter
  • When I was visualising, I noticed some doubles in the beginning, that was because at that time I would use two apps to track 1 walk to find out which app I wanted to use. So, I extracted the date and the hour out of the starting moments to use Power BI to remove the doubles
  • When I wanted to show the number of steps, it was not giving me the thousands separator so I went back to Power Query Editor to change it from a whole number to a decimal number and I got the right visualisation.

I kept the dashboard basic. Just showing a slicer from my first recorded walk (September 11, 2015) up to the end of 2020. And 3 cards that are showing the number of walks, distance walked and a step count. In the bottom there is a line chart that shows by Date the walked distance.

I published it on my Power Bi side:

Now the next challenge: how to build this in Tableau.

While importing the data I need to change the text file properties. Field separator from the automatic generated space option into a comma and the locale needs to be changed into English. And I need to tell Tableau the field names are in the first row.

The columns that I do not need, need to be removed. I can’t find delete, I do find an option called hide, will that be the same. I notice that in Power BI I removed a column more, also one that the not have values at all, this on is not loaded in Tableau.

The type needs to be filtered on Outdoor Walks,

Filter walks longer than 30 minutes. The column Duration is Date & Time all with the date 30-12-1899, so this needs to be in the filter. The Duration needs to have a minimum that is equal or bigger than 30-12-1899 00:30:00.

Filter walks longer than 1 km

Remove the double entries, noop I have no idea yet how to do this, so I have 36 entries too much and those will effect my visualisation.

Step count is already a number.

Question to me being used to Power BI, how can I recall the steps I took to prepare my data, in Power BI I can read that step by step back in the query editor.

Get 3 cards for number of walks, distance walked and step count

The filter being used is the start date and needs to be used for all using this data source

After I had the sheets, I made a dashboard, was not easy to give me the 3 cards and the filter on top, needed to choose for float.

Overtime I will learn more of Tableau dashboarding and it will become better looking

Go to my public Tableau to have a view of this dashboard.

Tableau

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Some weeks ago, my manager informed me he wants me to be involved with the Tableau project. Since a year or so the department has stared to build management reports in Tableau. Up to than most of them where Excel dashboard and they need to be converted. I was already involved in the 1-hour weekly sessions that we have to discuss about the progress.

Today and yesterday I have had an online training with a group of TU Delft employees and now I can start contributing into the dashboards. Ready to go.

Today and yesterday I have had an online training with a group of TU Delft employees and now I can start contributing into the dashboards. Ready to go.

The training is split into 19 modules. Same subjects are: Working with Dates, Organizing Data, Working with Tooltips, Defining Subsets, Distributions, Making a map, Using multiple measures, Relationship between measures, View specific values, Adding some analytics, Customizing Data, Parameters and finally making a Dashboard.

Now I’m ready to start creating visualisations with work data and I will try some #MakeoverMonday or #WorkoutWednesday challenges to publish on the public places.

Python & GitHub

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During the last months I have been neglecting my Python knowledge and growth. Last week I bumped into a YouTube playlist from Microsoft Developer “Python for Beginners”. So, lets see what this training will bring me as a refreshment and a new knowledge.

Getting into the flow

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I’m now 5 months on my way in my new job and I’m getting into the flow with the new tools Business Objects and BI Publisher. The last weeks I’m have been busy getting letters ready for the first-year students, so that they can be informed about their results and continuation for the next year.

It is really fun to explore the tools and use the knowledge I have been building up during my trainings the last 2 years. I feel myself growing into the new rule.

Categorieën Job

My journey with the #30DQUERY challenge

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The encounter

At May 2, 2020 I bumped into a LinkedIn post from Alex Powers about a #30DQUERY challenge.

On my road to learn more about Power BI and searching for challenges to learn how to use the tool I was like “lets join this challenge”.

My interest in Power BI and my past track

In the first quarter of 2019 I followed the Microsoft Data Science Track and one of the 11 courses was analysing data with Power BI. That is when I fell in love with the program.

I went looking for more information. I got myself into a weekly online challenge to visualise a given dataset, with www.makeovermonday.co.uk. They were fun and I learned a lot. I went into the direction of how to visualise the data in a dashboard in a nice and need way. #StoryTelling with data, I wanted to know more about.

During visualisation I realised I sometimes needed to change the given dataset. So, I learned how to add columns, measurement and I started to learn DAX from www.sqlbi.com.

When I saw this #30DQUERY challenge on LinkedIn I was like, I know what queries are and I want to do a Power BI based challenge. Get to know people who use the tool, learn from them. So lets jump in.

Since March 2020 I have a new job. This employer is using Business Objects and BI Publisher, two new tools for me. So the interest in Power BI is personal.

The first day’s

Import a dataset via the SQL-server, not all columns are needed, new columns need to be made and filters applied. Use the Power Query Editor to shape the dataset in a way that you want it to load.

Not to difficult with the knowledge I have built up with DAX.

The first 14 days I wrote blog posts about my experience, see www.kiwimaori.nl. After that the challenge became more time consuming, more difficult and I needed to check into other submissions to find out how to use the GUI or to write code.

Questions during the first day’s

  • Alex is talking about query folding; I know query and I know what folding is. But what is it when these two words are used a 1 expression?
  • Why is the Power Query Editor giving me code’s I don’t know when I start typing DAX-code?

Time to do a google search to find some answers.

Started with the playlist form Alex called An Introduction to Power Query M

Found a You Tube movie from Pragmatic Work about the Power Query Editor and on May 18 there was a live webinar about Query Folding by Nicky van Vroenhoven and dataMinds. This all helped to find my answers.

  • I found out that query folding means that the selection of the data happens in the DataBase and not in the engine of Power BI. So, it speeds up the loading of data.
  • The Query Editor is not responding to DAX-code, because that language is not used in Power Query. In the back up part of Power BI you need the language M.
    Oh why has that not been told in the Analysing with Power BI training. Because in that training, we also have been told how to import and change date with the GUI of the Power Query Editor.

Question about how to load more entities into 1 Query

I kept seeing in the answers that others loaded more than 1 entity into the same Query, while I had not a clue how to do that. So, halfway the challenge, I asked the question in twitter at the rest of the team. Steven Bitaxi gave my explanations and now I know how to do it. I even went back in time to correct some of the solutions, where I had been using merge and the folding had been broken because of that.

Wrap-up meeting

May 31, 2020, we had an online team Wrap up meeting organised by Alex. A group of us where online and we shared our experience for almost 2 hours. It was great to see each other and to hear the story’s and backgrounds.

Take away

I learned a new language. Power Query #M.

I learned that the more you can do outside Power BI, the faster the engine inside the application stays.

I can use the produced Native Query to build up my SQL skills, that I need during my job.

I met new people who I can talk to whenever I have Power BI questions.

Some extra’s

Because I saw solutions in GitHub, I started to become more interested in GitHub and followed a lab GitHub training to see what is possible for me how to start using GitHub

I decide to blog not only on my own website, but post this as an article in LinkedIn.

Tip for trainers who introduce new people to Power BI

Introduce them to visualisation, DAX and to Power Query M. With visualisation people will fall in love with the tool. But with M they really can turn the magic on.

My next step.

I have not mastered all the challenges yet, so I will go back in time and look at each of them again together with the given answers of the #30DQUERY team mates. Thanks guys it was fun working and learning from you. Stay in contact and stay save.

Live long and prosper.

Day 14 #30DQUERY

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15-05-2020 The Challenge

DAY 14 Database: AdventureWorksDW2017 Entity: DimCustomer Instructions: Select [CustomerKey], [EmailAddress], [EnglishOccupation] and [Yearlylncome] for the customers whose [BirthDate] was not on a weekend (Saturday, Sunday).

Birthday not in the weekend

My route

  • Build the filter on the BirthDate column, I used Date.DayOfWeekName first, but that was not folding, so I fell back to Date.DayOfWeek
  • Needed to find out what number Saturday (1) and Sunday (7) was.
  • Removed other columns
  • Put the columns in the requested order.

My result

Day 13 #30DQUERY

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14-05-2020 The Challenge

DAY 13 Database: AdventureWorksDW2017 Entity: DimEmpIoyee Instructions: Select [EmailAddress], [Gender], [BirthDate] for all employees with a [BirthDate] between 19900101 and 19901231.

Getting in between

My route

This were 3 steps in the Power Query Editor and I was done, so I wondered where the catch was. Looking at earlier solutions I learned the catch was in the notation of the dates. Alex had hope people would start change the datatype of the birthday

  • Load the table
  • Remove the not needed columns
  • Put a filter on the birthdays

My result

Day 12 #30DQUERY

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13-05-2020 The Challenge

DAY 12 Database: WideWorIdImportersDW Entity: Dimension.EmpIoyee , Dimension.Customer Instructions: Union select a [Full Name] column for each unique name in ascending order. The [Full Name] field is an alias for the [Employee] and [Primary Contact] fields.

A union to be careful with

My route

I did not fully understand what Alex was asking us to do, so I used the posting from Steven Bitaxi to read his blog and in his first line I found out what needed to be selected from what Entity. I also read, that Power Query does not have a UNION function, so I was wondering if I needed to skip this Day, like I did with the earlier days, where I did not find a folding query solution. Still I started using the toolbar in Power Query.

  • For both Tables I removed all the columns that I did not need
  • I made sure that both columns in both Tables have the same name, by typing it into one and copying it into the other one.
  • I used the option Append Queries and got one column.
  • Removed the Duplicates and ended up with the same number of rows as Steven Bitaxi
  • Sorted the rows
  • I saw there is one row with the ‘name’ Unknown and decided to remove that row

The Native Query is still folding, so I seceded this challenge by using all the build in Power Query options. The difference is, that I have two query’s and that I need to be aware not to load them both into Power BI when I want to make visualisations.

My result

Day 08 #30DQUERY

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09-05-2020 The Challenge

DAY 8 Database: WideWorldlmportersDW Entity: Fact.Sale Instructions: Select [Sale Key], [Customer Key], [Invoice Date Key], [Total Excluding Tax], [Tax Amount] and [Profit] where the [Invoice Date Key] is equal to the last date of each month.

A leap

My route

  • Remove the not needed columns
  • List the formula for last date of each month
    Date.EndOfMonth(dateTime as any) as any
    Noop that is not right, that is just giving the last date of each month in each row
  • Let’s go for [Invoice Date key] == Date.EndOfMonth
    Yes, I got a filter
    Noop the folding broke
  • I leave it with this, I did 3 challenges this day and it has been enough thinking for 1 day

My result

Day 07 #30DQUERY

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08-05-2020 The Challenge

DAY 7 Database: AdventureWorksDW2017 Entity: DimEmployee Instructions: Dynamically select all the columns that do not contain the text 'Key'.

Future proof

My route

From Owen Auger

From Barrett Studdard

// Find valid columns column_list • each not Text.Contains(_, "Key")),
  • So lets start looking in the documentation for Tekst.contains and List.select
    From what I find I cannot bring that together with the used code by the two people.
    Looking at List.select I now see why those two are in combination with each other; List.Select gives a list and Tekst.Contains gives True or False

My result

Day 06 #30DQUERY

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07-05-2020 The Challenge

DAY 6 Database: WideWorldlmportersDW Entity: Dimension.Stock Item Instructions: Select [Stock Item Key], [Stock Item] and [Color] where the [Stock Item Key] is an even number and the [Color] is not N/A

Getting even

My route

  • Remove not needed columns
  • Filter out the N/A from Colour
  • I wanted to use the function Number.IsEven for the column Stock Item Key, but it kept giving an error, so I took a look in already given answers and show people where using the function Number.mod, so I used that as well

My result

Day 04 #30DQUERY

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05-05-2020 The Challenge

Basic Math

My Route

  • Remove not needed columns
  • Make new column with the Text Length of [Description] (found the formula for this in Microsoft Docs)

I found out that there are 2 different types of formula’s DAX and M and they should be used at different locations in the program. In de Query Editor it is M.

  • Make new column with the Modulo
  • Mmmm, maybe it is nicer to put the formula into one so it is just going to be one column. I put the code for text.length into the formula for modulo
  • Filter the rows so only Modulo 1 is left

My result

Day 03 #30DQUERY

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04-05-2020 The Challenge

DAY 3 Database: AdventureWorksDW2017 Entity: DimProduct , FactReseIIerSaIes Instructions: Select the [ProductKey], [EnglishProductName] and an aggregated [TotalRevenue] column which is the sum of a new computed column [TotalUnitPrice] made up of [OrderQuantity] multiplied by [UnitPrice] where the [TotalRevenue] is above one million.

Watch the order of applied steps!

My Route

  • Import the two Entities
  • Remove not needed columns from Both tables
  • Create [TotalUnitPrice]
  • Remove [OrderQuantity] and [UnitPrice]
  • Give it the Fixed decimal number format => fold broken, so removed again
  • Merge DimProduct into FactResellerSales, Inner Join at ProductKey
  • Took a peek at the solution from Barrett Studdard, because I do not know how to do the aggregation, learned I need first to group at ProducKey. Now the question, where is this option in my Editor. Ah found it, it is in the Transform Tab
    • First try I get the new column, but the name columns disappear
    • So that is why it needs to be the advance option of Group By
  • Last but not least, filter TotalRevenue at one million
  • I would like to see it as a Fixed decimal number, but when I do this the folding breaks.

My result

Day 02 #30DQUERY

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03-05-2020 The Challenge

Filters. Filters. Filters. We’re in for it now.

My Route

  • Import the two Entities
  • Filter the [ResellerName] and the [CountryRegionCode]
  • Join this two Entities using the merge queries
    • DimReseller [GeographyKey] Left Outer join DimGeography [GeographyKey]
  • Remove the not needed columns from DimReseller
  • Show only the needed columns from [DimGeography]
  • No Transformations

My result

Yes today I got a result in the Native Query

It became a table with 241 rows.

Day 01 #30DQUERY in repeat

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This morning when I checked again all the information and some of the other outcomes I realised I had missed the instruction that everything should be done in the Power Query Editor and not to make visualisations.

So, lets go and repeat Day 1

My Route

  • Open Power Query Editor
  • Import via the option SQL Server the Entity <DimEmployee> op my computer
  • Follow the recommended practice
    • Filter the BirthDate at 1974
    • Merge the 3 columns that have name parts into 1 new column [FullName] and here it goes wrong. I use the option Merge Colums in the Power Query Editor and then the option View Native Query greys out.
      I have been looking around on the internet to find a solution, but I cannot find it. So, I stop the challenge of today and wait for an explantion on Day 10 and then will see if I can redo Day 1
  • Remove all the not selected columns so only the 4 needed are left.

My Result

Day 01 #30DQUERY

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The Challenge

A little bit of GUI, a little bit of keyboard. With today’s challenge find the employees with a birthdate in 1974.

My Route

  1. Open the Entity <DimEmployee>
  2. Make the new column by selecting the 3 columns and choose option merge, give the name <FullName>
  3. Close and Apply
  4. Go to Report
  5. Select the visual Table
  6. Select the 4 columns
  7. Don’t summarize the EmployeeKey
  8. Filter the BirthDate-Year at 1974
  9. Sort ascending on BirthDate

My result

Report in progress

The Report is published as it is right now. In the coming day’s it will get more shape. Right now it is a working process. So, what you see is the latest update.

Challenge on LinkedIn

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Wednesday, April 22, 2020, day 41 of the lockdown

Working at home 4 days a week, teaching at home 4.5 days a week I received a challenge from my linkdin contact Ijeoma Irene Agbugba and I have accepted it. It is the following post

The challenge

The result

This is the report I made out of it

The Road

How did I get there.

Python

First, I did a check in Pyton to get an idea about the data, download the file to read my analyse.

2020-04-20-Paschal-Chukwuemeka-Amah-ExerciseDownload

Recap on what I found in Python.

  • The data has 3,229 rows (= messages send) and 13 columns

What the columns headers mean, looking at the data in connection to sending a tweet (in order of the file).

‘created_at’When has the tweet been posted
’text’The text of the tweet
‘in_reply_to_status_id_str’An ID number of another tweet if it is a reply
‘source’What source has been used to post the tweet
‘in_reply_to_screen_name’The screen name of the poster of the replied tweet
‘contributors’Column has al blanks for this dataset
‘quoted_status_id’An ID number of another tweet if it has been quoted
‘quote_count’Column has al blanks for this dataset
‘reply_count’,How many times has there been a reply to this tweet
‘retweet_count’How many times has this tweet been retweeted
‘favorite_count’How many times has the tweet been liked
‘retweeted’Column has al blanks for this dataset
‘followers_count’Column has al blanks for this dataset
  • All tweets are unique in text.
  • The messages have been sent at 3,085 different timestamps
  • 7 different sources have been used
    • 3,097 times Twitter for iPhone
    • 62 times Twitter Web App
    • 61 times Twitter Web Client
    • 4 times Medium
    • 3 times Persiscope
    • 1 time Twitter Media Studio
    • 1 time Facebook
  • There are 65 different screen_names that have been replied to.
    • 943 times there was a reply to atiku, the next in line was bjay75 who got 5 times a reply
  • 310 id’s have been quoted.
    • For 2,913 messages the quoted_status_id was not available.

Power BI

Time to import the data set into Power BI

Let’s create some visuals and answer the set of Questions

  • In total there are 3,229 tweets send.
  • The tweets are send at 3,085 different timestamps. At 1,039 different dates.
  • There are 7 source types used.
  • Top 4 screen_names that has been replied to.
  • 310 ID numbers have been quoted.
  • I made a the top 5 most active days of tweeting.
  • There are 545 tweets retweted, in the original data set, there is no column where to find whose tweet has been retweeted.
  • Most tweets are sent in between 7 AM and 8 PM, and the top 5 is 7:00-8:59; 11:00-11:59, 17:00-17:59 and 19:00-19:59
  • The source twitter for iPhone is mentioned, so that is a device. With the other source I do not know the device.
  • The first tweet is posted at 21-11-2014 and the last one at 19-12-2019.
  • On average over this full-time frame there are 3.11 tweets a day.
  • Most tweets are posted at Sunday, February 3, 2019 and that was 48 tweets.
  • Looking at just the months, then December is the month where the most tweets are posted (390), when splitting in down to the month and years February 2019 has the most tweets with 190.
  • Using the option Word Cloud in PowerBI I looked at the used words. I removed stop words and “https” and “rt”. Then the most used words are Nigeria (420) and atiku (462)
  • I made a Word Cloud for the top 10 hashtags. First, I isolated the hashtags into a new column.

PowerPoint

After I got the visuals, I opened PowerPoint to create a background for the report and to organise the dashboard. To get the end result I got. Because it is about tweets I have inserted the Twitter logo and the blue colour

Working from home, with the Covid-19 lockdown

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After being 3 weeks in the office, I’m now working fulltime from home. Since March 13, 2020 The Netherlands is under an intelligent lockdown, because of Covid-19. This means that everybody with an office job is working home and since March 16 the schoolkids are also home.

Skype is the main why to stay into contact with each other about working issues. Everyday we have a coffee break with the full team. In this way I get to know them.

To those who also started new jobs since March / April, they know it is not easy to learn a new company without being in building.

Getting to know new programs is also a nice challenge. You are much more depending on own knowledge than asking short question at a colleague’s desk.

Categorieën Job

#MakeoverMonday; 2020 wk09; Sleeping hours for kids

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Wednesday afternoon, time to sit down and have a look at the dataset of this week. Earlier this week I did not have the time, because last week I started a new job at TU Delft as reporting specialist. This job is working with Oracle BI Publisher en SAP Business Objects based on my SQL knowledge.

For the data used in this challenge there has been a survey among 1,000 parents in the US to find out what the average time is that their children sleep compared with the recommended hours by the CDC.

The data set has 13 rows and 3 columns. The original visualisation shows a table with this data and an extra column with the deficit in different colours.

When I imported the data, I created an extra column with index numbers to make sure I could sort the information on the right grade order if needed so. For the deficit I created a new measure.

In PowerPoint I have made a template to use a jpg background of all the pages of my PowerBI pages. It shows 3 fields, description of the challenge, the original visualization and my visualization. At the bottom there is a bar with the MakeoverMonday logo, the week number and a link to the challenge.

For these weeks challenge I wanted to use a visualization from the AppSource of PowerBI and found the visual “Line and stacked column chart with table” from Definitive Logic. During designing I have chosen not to use the line. I liked it because it is showing the numbers and a column chart.

The PowerBI file is having a page for every week that I have completed the challenge. There is a first page for the introduction, where there are bookmarks to go to the right week.

2020-03-11 update:

The tweet about this week drew attention and ended up in an article from NodeXL. I became an influencer. Feeling proud. https://nodexlgraphgallery.org/Pages/Graph.aspx?graphID=222716#headerTopHashtags

Started a job

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After being without a payed job since September 1 2018, I found a new job. My new job is at TU Delft and I’m a Reporting Specialist at the Education & Student Affairs department. It will mean learning two new tools Business Objects and BI Publisher. Both tools are based on SQL and for BI Publisher word is used as the editor, with a plugin.

The learning of the new tools will be on the job. I will be in the office 4 day’s a week. Working with two colleagues on the same projects.

Categorieën Job

#MakeoverMonday; 2020 wk08; Australian Homelessness Services Housing

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I restarted working with #MakeOverMonday challenges.
I want to make one #PowerBI file for all of 2020. Each week its own page. On each page there will be a rebuild of the original visualization and how I would like to present it. Each page will also have a link to the dataset.

I started with the challenge for week 8, so it will fit in the VizReview of coming Wednesday. The challenge can be found here: https://data.world/makeovermonday/2020w8.

My first big challenge was an issue with PowerBI, it was giving me an error message when importing the data from week 4, I started googling on the error and found out, I’m not the only PowerBI user that gets an error message when working with files that always have been working. So I skipped importing the data from week 4 and wait till Microsoft will have shorted this issue.

The file that I will make will have a page per week, the first page will be the week that is ready for its weekly review. Page 2 is the Introduction page. On this introduction page I use the function Bookmarks form PowerBI to go to the other pages / visualisations.

Go to PowerBI to see the interactive result

Creating a PowerBI visual from a Whatsapp group

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Saturday February 28 2020, I bumped into a post at LinkedIn from Obinna Iheanachor . It was a second post about how to visualize a whatsapp chat into PowerBI. It looked interesting and I wanted to try it out.

Step 1) extracting whatsapp chat data

That was not that difficult, I took a group with data since April 2018 and with 34 members. All members are family of each other.

Step 2) data cleaning and preparation in Python notebook

I need to have the following in Python: pandas, matplotlib, regex, Dateparser and numpy. Mmm I don’t seem to have Dateparser. Let’s see if I’m able to ad this to my python.
Yes while using the Anaconda prompt I managed to install the missing package.
This is a step that took time, because my data was different than the data in the blogpost. I ran into different errors that I needed to solve. It was nice to look into the reason of the error and changing the code in such way, that it fitted my data. I did more than enough reading into the Python documentary.

But I did it, on Tuesday I had a csv-file ready to import into PowerBI

Step 3) data modeling in PowerBI

I started with following the steps and saw my visualizations and thought, this is not really on how I want it.
I went to PowerPoint to create a nice background with a layout and a logo. The charts fitted into the background and I liked the result. This time I cannot share the presentation online, because it is private information about 34 members. But I would like to share that we never forget a birthday, because the two most words are happy birthday.

Step 4) using other data

My son saw the visualizations and he wanted to know how it would look for a WhatsApp group from him. So, he extracted the data and gave the txt file to me.
There was a difference in his and my text file. The date and time where formatted different and I was using that format in the code. That meant I needed to run line by line to check the result of the code and yes, some code needed to be adjusted.
Also, in PowerBI in needed to adjust some of the code that I used by importing the data. I was funny to see, that this group of kids is talking the most about, who can play?

Star Trek: Inspiring Culture and Technology III, Unit 5: What Does it Mean to Be Human > Humanity and Developing Technology

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Humanity and Developing Technology

What concerns does Star Trek raise about the relationship between humans and technology? How do these concerns relate to current discussions about technology today?

In Star Trek the relationship between human and technology inside Starfleet is good. Human respect technology and technology does not overtake the freedom op humans. On other planets it is sometimes different. There technology has overtaken the freedom of hominids and are controlling them, sometimes even enslaving them.

This last option is a concern of today’s sceptical people.

The discussion of stolen identities and privacy is really big on the moment. But not there in Star Trek, what brings me back to Unit 4 and a topic that still could be addressed in the series.

Star Trek: Inspiring Culture and Technology III, Unit 4: What Does it Mean to Be Human > Humanity and Discovering Life in the Universe / Humanity and Exploring Gender and Sexuality

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Humanity and Discovering Life in the Universe

I this unit the movie starts with the statement “If we can say that there was a separate genesis of life elsewhere in our solar system, I think we can increase our chances of finding intelligent life elsewhere in our universe because it means that we didn’t form life in our solar system just once, we did it twice.” This is stated after the explanation why NASA is interested in finding microbial life on Europa a moon around Jupiter.

I like to learn and find out what the opinion of the training is on this subject, but before I start and you continue reading my opinion let me tell you that I believe that it is not us who did it, but that we have been created by God, so if NASA finds microbial life I believe that God also has created that.

How would you explain who we are as a human race? What objects or pieces of information would you send on a starship that was traveling to other solar systems?

I find it difficult to explain who we are as a human race, so I went to the internet and found a lovely page from Fandom describing all Humans / Terrans in the Star trek series (https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Human).

What would I send? I would send a lot of photos to show our diversity in the way we look, together with some pets we love. A written and a spoken book. Some old fashion toys. Clothing from all over the world.

Humanity and Exploring Gender and Sexuality

Margaret asks, “What comes next?” What social issue should Star Trek take on as the show progresses? What is something that we see today in the world that science fiction through defamiliarization or extrapolation can help us think about in a new way?

The issue about how we treat our environment. The plastic, global warming. Dictatorships, racism anti-Semitism and the way people behave out of religion. There are plenty of social issue’s that still can be addressed. Also, loneliness and addiction to social networking, so show the best side of yourself.

Star Trek: Inspiring Culture and Technology III, Unit 3: The Frontier as a Powerful Symbol > Frontier Inspiring New Technology

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Frontier Inspiring New Technology

Margaret asks, “What new technologies are making us more self-sufficient?” Why is it necessary to be self-sufficient in these areas? How will this help us progress as humans and as explorers?

There are so many new technologies on the moment. I want to highlight “Cultured meat”. I learned about that by the media and went to Wikipedia to learn more about it. If we will be able to grow meat in a test-tube, we do not longer have to kill an animal for a piece of meat. And we can meet to the needs of people who do not want to eat vegetarian products.

Star Trek: Inspiring Culture and Technology III, Unit 2: The Frontier as a Powerful Symbol > Frontier as a Powerful Symbol / Frontier Personified

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Frontier as a Powerful Symbol

As we explore the frontier of space, how can we approach the peoples and environments that we encounter? Can we reconcile our instinct to explore with an awareness of our impact on space, planets, and potentially, other species?

For me as a young European the frontier does not mean the same to me as that Margaret Weitekamp and Scott Mantz are explaining.

If we ever encounter life in space, we should have learned from the human past that forcing our lifestyles upon them works out the wrong way. We should be open to them and respect their way of living. When we approach with the attitude “love the other like you lover yourself” we should be able to life the philosophy of Starfleet. Then it will go better than what happened in human history, while crossing the frontier.

While studying the next part. Captain Picard really say’s it nicely:

“History has proved again and again that whenever mankind interferes with a less developed civilization, no matter how well-intentioned that interference may be, the results are invariably disastrous.”

Frontier Personified

Which captain do we need most in today’s society? Whose approach would best serve to lead us through the challenges we face as a world and universe today? Does Discovery’s take on focusing not on the captain in season 1 change our perception of this lesson?

In this part 4 types of captains are described

  • Captain Kirk is a captain that travels to another world on a weekly base. In the beginning there are no rules to encounter aliens and captain Kirk is no really spending a lot of time caring what the aliens were feeling. He is a captain who is willing to take part in gun-to-gun encounters of violence, if the situation requires it.
  • Captain Picard has a strong commitment to the prime directive and has a deep philosophical view what kinds of interventions are possible. For him the frontier was open for diplomacy.
  • Captain Sisko looks like a small-town sheriff. Because he is on a location where he is next to the wormhole and all kind of species are passing by on the station. Homeworlds that are not trusting each other, but on the station, there need to be peace.
  • Captain Janeway finds herself in the role of caretaker. She needs to get her crew, who feel like family, on a travel through space, back to earth. The crew is untested and of the ethically divided. She struggles with the question what is more important; the greater mission of Starfleet of the safety of the individual crew.

In these times we need Janeway’s to get all people thinking in one direction. The world is untested and ethically divide. When People are on line about a topic we need Picard’s wisdom in following the prime directive, together with Sisko’s skills to keep the peace. And sometimes we need captain Kirk to cut to the case and solve the issue.

Star Trek: Inspiring Culture and Technology II, Unit 7: What does it mean to be part of a culture? > Tech Showcase: How Much Do We Know About Space?

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Tech Showcase: How much do we know about space

During this unit we are being explained what the Smithsonian Institution’s Center for Earth and Planetary Studies at the National Air and Space Museum is studying out there, where no one has boldly gone before.

The question to think about is: Do you think we will find alien life? Is there another Earth or something similar out there? Do you feel studying space brings tangible benefits to us? 

My answer is based on my religion. I believe life on earth has been created by God, like described in The Torah, The Bible, and The Quran. Nowhere in those books is a story about life outside the earth. So, if alien life is found, than it is also a creation by God.

Promotion Ceremony

Congratulations Captain. You’ve completed your mission and the second Star Trek: Inspiring Culture and Technology course. This means that you can put on the rank of Vice Admiral. 

Star Trek: Inspiring Culture and Technology II, Unit 6: What does it mean to be part of a culture? > Navigating Multiple Identities: part 2 / Navigating Difficult Histories

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Navigating multiple identities: Part 2

Write a post in your Starlog answering the question below. 
Margaret asks, “What has been your experience with intersectionality? Has Star Trek influenced how you think about that?” Intersectionality affects everyone. Before you construct your response, make a private list of the multiple identities you inhabit – race, nationality, gender, sexual orientation, religion, etc. Which elements most affect your public life? 

As a child I grew up in a protected surrounding, were there was no intersectionality. As a child I liked watching The Next Generation and Voyager. TNG because of Data and Picard and Voy because of the doctor and Janeway. When taking this course, I realise it opened my mind to prepare me for the life I’m living now. I went from the country side to a city. Got married to a husband from another country. We both have the same religion, but following two different denominations. So, enough multiple identities for us. Right now we are both watching the whole series of Star Trek again, we started at Captain Kirk and are now at Deep Space nine. Looking forward to learn more and evolve in our daily life.

Like Eugene Roddenberry say’s in the course “what a great idea. I would love to live in a future where we no longer fear difference and diversity among us. We crave it. We desire it. We look for it.”

Navigating Difficult Histories

Write a post in your Starlog answering the question below. 
Scott asks, “What do you think is the best Star Trek story ever told?” Is it an episode or film that draws some of its power from allegories of real history? Are stories stronger when evoking events or when the writers are free to invent from their imagination?

That is a very difficult question, because there are so many good stories told. If I need to pick one, then I go for “Half a life” Star Trek: The Next Generation Season 4, episode 22 broadcasted in 1991. It made an impression an impact on me because of the fact that on Kaelon II nobody lives longer than 60 years of “Resolution”. In the country where I life there is a political party that is fighting for the right for older people to end there live when they think the lived to the fullest. I was already against that idea. After watching the episode “Half a life” it became clearer how lunatic that idea is and what effect it can have on people.

Star Trek: Inspiring Culture and Technology II, Unit 5: What does it mean to be part of a culture? > Navigating Between Cultures / Navigating Multiple Identities: Part 1

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With this Unit we move to the next topic. Culture, first we highlight what it means to be part of a culture.

Navigating between cultures

Write a post in your Starlog answering the question below. 
When talking about Star Trek: Deep Space 9 at the end of the video, Scott says that, “while some people argue that the series’ occasionally more conflict-laden relationships went again Gene Roddenberry’s dream of a utopian future, it’s more confrontational nature highlighted the complexities of cross-cultural communication and how it could benefit social and business interactions.” Which side of the argument do you agree with? Why?

Yes, Deep Space 9 sometimes is in conflict with the dream of a utopian future. But it is necessary to have these conflicts to highlight what has to change on earth to get into that utopian future. If you do not learn what the core of the problem is, we humans will not be able to solve these problems. And only if we know and realise what needs to change in our cross-cultural communication, we can undertake action to get better social and business interactions.

Navigating multiple identities: Part 1

Each episode in the watch list features a different character who embraces (or struggles with) their intersectionality. Which character resonates the most with you? In what ways?

  • “Journey to Babel.” Star Trek: The Original Series, broadcasted in 1967.

Spock is the main character in this episode. He struggles with being mixed Vulcan and Human. And he struggles with loyalty towards his dad and towards the Enterprise. Captain Kirk takes a decision, so Spock does not have to choose.

  • “Sins of the father.” Start Trek: The Next Generation, broadcasted in 1990

Worf is the main character in this episode. He is being called back to his home world by his brother, that he did not knew he had. There father is being accused of high treason and the son needs to fight for the honour of the family. Worf chooses to do this and the keep the identity of his brother hidden.
It turns out that the father of the challenger is the one who committed the high treason.
If that gets known, there will be a civil war in the empire. So Worf takes the decision to accept exile. To leave the Klingon world behind him.

  • “Family.” Start Trek: The Next Generation, broadcasted in 1990

Jean-Luc and his brother are not really best friend. Jean-Luc struggles with going back to the enterprise or starting a new project with a friend on earth. Jean-Luc and his brother argue about passed issues and even end up in a fist fight. The fist fight clears the air between them and it breaks Jean-Luc to start accepting what happened with him at the Borg. Jean-Luc realises he belongs on the enterprise.
Worf feels uncomfortable with his adoptive parents on board. The parents are getting into a conversation with Guinan and that learns them more about how the man Worf is right now. The feel free to talk to Worf and tell him, they are behind him.
Wesley gets a movie that his father taped when he was 10 weeks old. He learns more about his dad. And gets at peace with growing up without his dad.

  • “The cost of living.” Start Trek: The Next Generation, broadcasted in 1992

The main characters in this episode are Alexander (son of Worf) and Roxanna Troy (mother of Deanna Troy). They become friends. Roxanna learn Alexander how to deal with the rules of his dead and Alexander learns Roxanna not to give up her values, just because she wants to get married, because she does not want to get old alone.

Star Trek: Inspiring Culture and Technology II, Unit 4: What is Alien? > Language Showcase: Creating Klingon / Klingon at the Smithsonian

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In this unit we dive deeper into the Klingon language, how it is made and how you create a language based on the rules there are in world languages.

Language Showcase: Creating Klingon

How does Klingon compare to other fictional languages? Is it the leading fictional language or have other franchises like Lord of the Rings surpassed it? Would you use Klingon in your everyday life?

To create a fictional language, you need to look at the creators who are going to speak it. So the Klingon is a fighting creature, so the languages needs to sound raw and in fighting mood.
I don’t think another fictional language can surpass the Klingon language. Klingon was the first fictional language so all other ones are spinoffs and can never get to the same number of fans.
I would not use Klingon in everyday life. I did not know there was an official language and a dictionary were you can learn the words and gramma of Klingon. Now I do know, I still would not use it, because I refer it with a fighting creature and that is not in me.

Star Trek: Inspiring Culture and Technology II, Unit 3: What is Alien? > Aliens Sound Different / Aliens behave differently

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In this unit we are looking at the sounds of Aliens and how they behave

Aliens Sound Different

Scott asks if you have any phrases in Klingon you’d like to share. What are the most important phrases to know in another language? How does learning another language provide insight into learning a new culture?

Klingon is a language I do not speak. I found a blogpost about the 12 most important phrases to know in every language. It comes down on introducing yourself and asking how the other is doing. Be polite and asking where you kind find a place or an object.
When you know another language, you can communicate and understand why some things are done. The episode “Darmok.” Star Trek: The Next Generation, broadcasted in 1991 is a good example for that. I wrote about that episode in my previous starlog.

Aliens Behave Differently

Margaret asks:
“What episode of Star Trek makes you step back and rethink your stance on gender, race, or sexuality? Why is that?”

Years ago, when I first started watching Start Trek it got my attention, because of the different characters in The Original Series, Uhuru, Spock and Scotty, later on in The Next Generation Worf and Data and in Voyager, Captain Janeway and Seven of Nine. It was so nice to watch the series that crossed borders in gender and race. In that time I did not realise why it got my attention now with passing the years and following this course I start to realise what it was. Now with watching every episode it shapes my stance on gender and race

Star Trek: Inspiring Culture and Technology II, Unit 2: What is Alien? > What is the Role of the Alien? / Aliens Look Different

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In this unit we are looking at 2 aspects of the Alien

  • The role they play
  • The way they look

What is the Role of the Alien?

Aliens can play all different kinds of roles and with that the writer of the series was able to address all kind of issues in society without being called racist or sexist or any other things.

For the role we need to watch 3 episodes and 2 movies. I did watch the movies; they are not available on Netflix (my favourite streaming platform). We are also asked to rank the episodes into a self-reflecting order for the time it was produced. I have ranked them into order that it made me more self-reflecting.

  • “Darmok.” Star Trek: The Next Generation, broadcasted in 1991.

Aliens: The Children of Tama. (Tamarians)
No history of violence known; language has been ‘incomprehensible’ by humans. The Tamarians speak with persons and locations. Persons and locations of the past, that tell the full story in 1 word. They communicate through narrative imagery, a reference to the individuals and places which appear in their mythohistorical accounts.
Both captains are at the planet (El-Adrel) and Picard is able to start to understand what Dathon (the other captain) is telling him. That a danger shared can bring people together.
When Riker gets Picard of El-Adrel, Picard is able to tell to the Tamarians that Dathon is dead and how he died, in the Tamarian language.

  • “Turnabout Intruder.” Star Trek: The Original Series, broadcasted in 1969.

There is not really an alien in this episode. Only an alien technic which can separate body and mind and then swop the mind into another body. A lady friend of Kirk from the past wants to take over his body to show the difference between male and female and what they can achieve inside Starfleet.
In 1995 there was Star Trek Voyager a series whit a female captain.

  • “The Icarus Factor.” Star Trek: The Next Generation, broadcasted in 1989.

In this episode it is about family relations and how harsh we be to each other.
And about Worf, it is the 10th anniversary of his Klingon age of ascension. It’s a ritual of great significance. A rite of initiation marking the new level of Klingon spiritual attainment. It’s a day of celebration and ritual spent with one’s fellow Klingons. Worf is upset, because there are no Klingon friends on board, to celebrate with him. Wesley, Data and Geordi come up with the idea to create a simulation on the holodeck. To get him out of the social cultural isolation and to share this important part of his life, his being.
So, two opposites. Family and misunderstanding. Friends who can help you to feel good.?

Aliens Look Different.

I have watched the four examples from the Watch List in order of when they were broadcasted and described the (race) issues in our time frame. Looking at the country I life in and to countries around me.

  • “The Trouble with Tribbles.” Star Trek: The Original Series, broadcasted in 1967.

Tribbles are little furry animal looking creatures that purr when they are close to humans or Vulcan’s, but shrieks with getting at a Klingon.
Tribbles are breeding fast, how they breed is unknown.
When I see this aspect of the Tribbles I need to think of the rabbit in Australia. The rabbit has been brought into Australia and it became a plague.
In this episode a shipload of Quadro-triticale (a High-yield grain) needs to be protected against Klingons.
At the end of the episode it turns out that the assistant of the minister, the one who has been trusted the most, is the enemy and it is a Tribble who helps to find out.
Lesson: An Alien can look cute, but can swamp the whole place and become a threat.
Lesson: The obvious enemy does not have to be the real threat
Lesson: A person who is close can be the enemy and we will not see it.

  • “Elaan of Troyius” Star Trek: The Original Series, broadcasted in 1968.

Ambassadeur Petri from Troyius and a Dohlman from Elas (female, looks like Cleopatra.) are on board and the Dohlman seems to be the boss. She needs to get married to the head of Troyius, to stop a war between the two planets.
The secret of the woman on Elas: When the flesh of a man is touched by the tear of a lady his heart is enslaved forever.
The Dohlman puts a spell on the captain by crying and Kirk wipes the tear away. Her main goal is to use the ship to destroy the planet that they are in war with. Kirk is stronger than the spell. His strength comes out of his obligation for the federation and his love for the enterprise.
A member of the crew from the Dohlman wants to shell out the enterprise to the Klingons. The Klingons are not interested in peace between Troyius and Elas, because the planets are having minerals they would like to have. When the Klingon ship is damaged by the enterprise, Kirk let them float and the Dohlman is surprised about it.
In the beginning the Dohlman is a hard lady who is not having manners nor respect to other people. At the end she has turned a little around and respect the fact she needs to get married to get peace.
History: In the past a lot of weddings have been proceeded to keep the peace in between different countries. UK and France for instance.

  • “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield.” Star Trek: The Original Series, broadcasted in 1969.

With the first contact of the Alien Lokai in this episode they see a person who is half white and half black and drew the conclusion, that this is the result of a dramatic conflict in evaluation and he needs to be one of a kind.
When the second Alien, Bele appears it turns out this two men are in conflict with each other. Bele is saying that Lokai is a murderer and Lokai is saying that his people have been oppressed by Bele’s people.
Bele is send by his government to arrest Lokai. This happened 50.000 earth years ago. Now he got him and he wants to take him back to their planet; Cheron. So with mind power he takes over the ship.
Kirk and Spock do not see the reason why these two men are fighting with each other and Bele informs them their difference. Bele is black on the right side, Lokai on the left.
When they end up at Cheron they find out, all the people are dead. They have annihilated each other, totally. There is nobody alive on Cheron because of hate. The cause you fought about no longer exists. Lokai goes to the planet and Bele follows him. They cannot give up the hate each other.
Lesson: For two opposite parties the difference can be clear, a spectator does not really have to see it as a difference.
Lesson: Hate can destroy so much and still hate stay’s within you.

  •  “Far Beyond the Stars.” Start Trek: Deep Space 9, broadcasted in 1998.

In this episode Sisko is having a vision, like he has had before about Bajor. Only this time he goes back in time to earth. The time where black and white people were separated by racists ideas.
Before he gets his visions he tells his father, who is visiting, that he is tired of losing friends in battle and he maybe want to resign.
In his vision he is a writer of a SF magazine and he comes up with a story of Deep Space 9. The editor tells the story can not be published because the captain in the story is black. A colleague comes up with the idea to write it as a dream. Even that will not happen, because the owner of the magazine does not agree with the context.
In his dream Sisko keeps walking into a reverend who keeps talking about the prophets.
At the end he is back on Deep Space 9 and he remembers the whole story. The vision only took a couple of minutes.

This episode is hurting equal rights for all colours

At the end Sisko is even wondering what part is true. That he had a vision in the past, of that Bennie is dreaming about him.
The vision make him decide not to resign but continue the mission.

The pain the writer Bennie felt, when his story was not published was making me cry.
There has been a time, that racism was that clearly visible. It is said that racism is being oppressed, but I’m wondering and hoping for the times that the future of Deep Space 9 is really true. No judgement on the outside of humanoids, but acceptance of all.

Star Trek: Inspiring Culture and Technology, Break out with PowerBI

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In the beginning of November I saw a nice posting on Facebook. A member of the Global Power BI User Group was broadcasting a life video on how to make a dashboard in PowerBI with StarTrek data. He also provided the datasets and the PowerBI file after working into it. If you want to see them, look in the facebookgroup and look for the update.

It was nice to follow his instructions and to learn how to make Fact en Dim tables, how to make Key columns and how to make the relationships. We also did some splitting of columns.

In the second video he showed how to make a great background and how to put the visualisations made in the first video into this background.

It was great to take this break before I will start on Star Trek Inspiring Culture and Technology II

#MakeoverMonday; 2019 wk44; Dashboard with information about different cities

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Based on data from #MakeOverMonday Week 44 2019

Inspiration

This time I got inspired by the dataset ‘World Cities Ranked by Annual Sunshine Hours’ and by the webinar. In the webinar I saw the solution from Jack Hineman and I was like “I want to build something like this and include temperature and maybe other data aswell”.

My Idea

Start

Let’s start with making a visualization with the World map, the Barchart Sunshine and the selection option for the city. This is the information that I can get out of the dataset from #MakeOverMonday.

Data check

First check, are there double or empty rows based on city.

  • Yes there are two city’s that are twice in the database.
  • Kampala in Uganda is a duplicate, so 1 row needs to be removed
  • I did this by creating a new column with city and country name: Text.Combine({[City], ” “, “(“, [Country], “)”})
  • I removed the one duplicate for Kampala (Uganda)
  • La Paz is also a duplicate in the City column, but it turns out to be a city in Mexico and in Boliva, so no longer a duplicate when using the new column. I checked this with information from Google Maps.
  • No empty rows.

Step 1, creating a map

When creating a map in Power BI it only visualises La Paz Boliva and not the city in Mexico when I use the city column. When I use the new column, it does not show anything on the map. So back to the Query editor to change the DAX formula into Text.Combine({[City], ” “, [Country]}) and then it shows both cities at the right spot.
A good size of the map is 1100 by 540, So I have made the canvas 1100 wide as well. The automatic zoom and zoom buttons I have removed.

Step 2, creating a barchart with sunshine hours per month per city

To get a barchart I had to arrange my data in another way. The given data was a column per month. I had to unpivot the month columns. In this way I got a table with the city and a column month and a column value.

I want a stacked column chart, with the months at the x-axis, it shorts in the wrong way, so I add a calendar table to my file. I have an excel file on my computer that I upload. I make a relation between the Month and the right column in my calendar table. Then for the x-axis I use the related column and short it on the month number column. So now when selecting a city on the map, you get the hours of Sunshine for that city. Oh, it only highlights the hours for the selected city and does not show only the bars for that city, like I want. To fix this I have made sure there is an interaction between my map and chart.

I have switched the legend off for this chart.

Every city has got its own colour. In the example I have seen in Tableau the colour did not very by city, but by number of sunshine hours. Right now, I do not know how to fix this in PowerBI, ideas are welcome. So I keep the default colours for the moment.

Step 3, adding a slicer for the city selection

I have added a slicer to choose a city and decided to move it to the top of the file, because it is the first thing to do in this visual.

The result for this moment

Next steps to take

Now I need to look for data files with the temperatures and the other information that I would like to share in this dashboard.

2019-10-25 My first Hackathon FarmHack.nl

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Wednesday, we received the last information about the hackathon. I made a Trello Board, connected with Planyway so I could view the agenda in that way and easily tick off when events where past.

Friday morning 7 AM was the time that I left to travel to Wageningen. The trip went smooth and at 9:00 I walked into the building, we started with coffee and tea.
At 9:30 we were officially welcomed and the four different challenges where presented
At 10.30 and at 11:00 we had the chance to talk to the challengers to find out more about the challenge. At home I had looked and thought that the Hendrix challenge was the coolest. During the presentations I also found the Lely & Rovecom Challenge interesting. At the end I did choose for Hendrix. 5 other people also choose this option and together we made a team.

Here a photo of the team and the challengers in blue.

When the teams were formed it was team for a lunch. After a good lunch we received the data and started exploring the data. Some with Python, some with R, I used Python and I used Power BI to get visual insides.

There was a lot of information in the data

The goal was: predict animal performance in warmer barns. So that is what we were looking for. I cannot tell much about our findings, because we explored the data, but we did not become owners of the data nor of the results.

At 16:00 we went to have a drink and a talk. We got and inspiration talk by Arthur Mol and information about the StartHub form WUR. 18:00 time for dinner and at 19:00 back to the data.

We were working closely to getter in different tools to find solutions and answers to the hypothesis. Just after midnight it was enough for me. I could barely keep my eyes open, lets even think. So, I unrolled my yoga math in another room and crawled into my sleeping bag.
Two other team members had left a little bit earlier to sleep home. 3 continued. 1 fell asleep in the chair while working and 2 fell on their sleeping mattress at 6:30.

At 8:00 it was breakfast time, this was served in the room we were, so at 7:50 the catering switched on the lights and we all were woken up.

After Breakfast time to pitch about the status of the project and back to sprint to the end of the project.

At 12:00 time to hand in all the work and time for lunch.

12:45 pitching time. 6 minutes per group. Whauw there were some stunning results. After the pitched it became thrilling; we had to wait for the jury to come with a result.

There were 3 prices for some terrific results. Unfortunally not for our result. On the other hand, the people form Hendrix were happy we had analysed the data and told them insides on it. They had not checked the data before this challenge.

For me I got what I had wanted to get. The experience of being present at a Hackathon. Seeing how other people deal with this. Working in a team. Meeting new people. Expanding my network with data lovers in the agri sector.

Star Trek: Inspiring Culture and Technology I, Unit 7: What Does It Mean To Be Explorers? > Exploring a New Starship / Tech Showcase Ion Propulsion

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Exploring a New Starship

For this media analysis, we’d like you to think about the role the starship Enterprise has played in the Star Trek television series and films.

In what ways does the U.S.S. Enterprise function as a character, not just a vehicle in Star Trek? Does “she” have a personality? Do the other ships in the Star Trek universe have the same level of character development?

Don’t know what to write down.

Tech Showcase Ion Propulsion

Write a post in your Starlog answering the question below.

Where do you think ion propulsion and future engine technology will take us? What are the dangers? Are there other applications?

Ion propulsion and future engine technology can take us to other place beyond where humans have gone before. So, we can explore what of Star Trek is Science Fiction and what turns into Science Fact.

The dangers of ion propulsion are not known yet. There is the risk that we pollute space without knowing it. There has been a Star Trek episode which was addressing this topic. Where warp drive was creating a rapture in the time continuum and space crafts needed to fly slow at that area.

Promotion to Captain

Yes I’m done with this course and I can call myself Captain.

This was mission 1, two more missions to go in this journey to let myself being inspired by the Culture and Technology of Star Trek.

Star Trek: Inspiring Culture and Technology I, Unit 6: What Does It Mean To Be Explorers? > Exploring a More Diverse Crew / Exploring Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations

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Exploring a More Diverse Crew

In this episode we talk about diversity. First the diversity in the crew and how every crewmember is representing a county / continent and even representing aliens.

It is very important to see this diversity. But even more important is to see persons out of there stereotype world. Like Lieutenant Uhura, an Afro lady in a very important role at the bridge. While in other movies Afro ladies had been maids. In the third series (Deep Space Nine) the Captain was an Afro man and in series four (Voyager) the captain was a woman. Star Trek is breaking with boundaries, not all have been broken down, but a good attempted is made.

I have not seen the new series (Discovery) yet. I’m looking forward to watch it, to find out which boundaries will be broken there.

Exploring Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations

The question about this unit Scott asks if you think we’re getting closer to realizing the Vulcan philosophy of IDIC (Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations) here on Earth. What would it take for that to happen? What would it look like? How might things be different?

To me IDIC is connected with love and peace only than it is possible and then the first thing that pops into my mind is: that is the world how God intended it to be and that is where I as a Christian believe in that the world will turn back into Gods creation and Love be all around us.

Promotion to Lieutenant Commander

#SWDChallenge; 2019 October

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This month I’m participating in the #SWDchallenge. We are given a small table. 5 rows and 5 columns.

Question 1: Review the data in the figure. What observations can you make? Do you have to make any assumptions when interpreting this data? What Questions do you have about the data?

Answer 1: First thing I did was checking if the columns with the percentages where adding up to 100. Both columns did not, so I made new columns and removed the old ones. I assume Tier A+ is an improved version of Tier A. I want to know the price per account.

Question 2: Consider the layout of the table in the figure. Let’s assume you’ve been told this information must be communicated in a table. Are there any changes you would make to the way the data is presented or the overall manner in which the table is designed?

Answer 2: I only moved Tier A+ to the top and kept the rest of the row design the same. I have added the column Price per account ($K) before showing the Revenue ($M). I made all columns the same width and wrapped the text of the top bar.

Question 3: Let’s assume the main comparison you want to make is between how accounts are distributed across the tiers compared to how revenue is distributed and that you have the freedom to make bigger changes (it’s not required to be a table). How would you visualize this data? Create a graph in the tool of your choice.

Answer 3: I will use PowerBI as the tool of my choice and start with loading the original data. I added 3 columns in PowerBI using DAX formulas.

% Revenue =
DIVIDE ( 'EXERCISE 2 1'[Revenue ($M)]; SUM ( 'EXERCISE 2 1'[Revenue ($M)] ) )

% Accounts =
DIVIDE ( 'EXERCISE 2 1'[# of Accounts]; SUM ( 'EXERCISE 2 1'[# of Accounts] ) )

Price per account =
ROUND (
    DIVIDE ( 'EXERCISE 2 1'[Revenue ($M)]; 'EXERCISE 2 1'[# of Accounts] ) * 1000;
    2
)

I have chosen for the default colour theme and then in two colours of blue.

The chart is called a line and column chart. In the column I have put the percentage of accounts and the line is showing the percentage of revenue. With a sort in the highest # of accounts first. In the tooltip you can read how many accounts are in that % of accounts.

This is my visualisation:

Star Trek: Inspiring Culture and Technology I, Unit 5: What Does It Mean To Be Explorers? > Exploring the Space Race / Exploring Diverse Representations

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In this second part of the course it is about exploring.

What is exploring according to the Cambridge dictionary:

  • to search and discover (about something):
  • to think or talk about something in order to find out more about it:

What is exploring according to Wikipedia:

  • Exploration is the act of searching for the purpose of discovery of information or resources.
  • In scientific research, exploration is one of three purposes of empirical research (the other two being description and explanation).

Exploring the Space Race

In this unit we compared the exploration that happened in the 1960’s when the first people started to go to the moon. Russia and the USA both had a program, but because of the cold war they where not communicating to each other about what they were doing.

In the program StarTrek the exploration went beyond the moon. They went even beyond this galaxy. Into other ones. Explored were no one went before. Looking closely at the episodes and filter out the location and species of humanoids you see that they were focussing on real-time problems.

I was impressed by the episode “Half a life”. On Kaelon Two it is normal that people end their life on the day they turn 60. They make a party of it. I was impressed because in the country I life there is a group of people who believe it is okay to end your life when you think yourself your life is completed.

Exploring Diverse Representations

For this starlog we need the following question:

At the end of the video, Margaret says that space exploration was controversial in the 1970s and 1980s. People wondered why the government was spending time and money exploring the solar system when critical problems existed here on Earth. What do you think? Should the government resolve Earthly issues before exploring space? Or is a scientific investigation of distant worlds a fundamentally human endeavor of exploration? Explain your argument.

I agree with Captain Kirk

I agree with Captain Kirk Doctor McCoy is right in pointing out the enormous danger potential in any contact with life and intelligence as fantastically advanced as this. But I must point out that the possibilities, the potential for knowledge and advancement is equally great. Risk, risk is our business. That’s what the Starship is all about. That’s why we’re aboard her.

Yeah sometime you wonder why money is spend on exploring space and not on defeating hunger in the world. On the other hand, what they find out for space travel can be used in the real world and would not have been thought about when there would not have been space travel. Look at Hook-and-loop fasteners and the tab on a soda can. Things do no longer fly in the air, but stay attached.

Promotion to Lieutenant Commander

LinkedIn Analytics in Power BI

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Thanks to Warren Dean for his blog, about how to make a Dashboard for LinkedIn Analytics

I found this blog at the beginning of September and I do want to analyse my LinkedIn information.
So, at September 6 I requested LinkedIn to send me my information. While waiting the 24 hours it takes LinkedIn to make my zip-file I started on exploring the Power BI file.

Warren used elements to create the top of the Dashboard. I used the lesson from a webinar (start at 39:40) and created a background in PowerPoint using Warren’s layout.
My last name is longer than Warren’s, so that gave a challenge to let it fit nicely. In the title I also have included since when I’m a LinkedIn member.

Fitting the slicer is the next challenge, that I defeated, by reshaping the slicer, I removed the title of the slicer. I also gave the slicer a fixed end date, because the data received from LinkedIn is static. When I ask an update from LinkedIn, I need to update this end date.

Waren used the default theme colours. I do not like to use the default so I used the website HTML color codes to find the RGB code for the LinkedIn logo and used that colour.

Top 20 Count of Company

The chart “top 20 count of company” shows in my dashboard more than 20 companies, so I checked the settings of the chart. I learned that it is because if there are more companies with the same count, they are also shown, so I change the title of the chart to “Where do the most of my connections work and what is there position” I made it a top 10.

Count of Share by Hour & Count of Share by Weekday

Here I changed the title and the colours.

LinkedIn Activity => Reactions per day

My linkedIn activity is not as high as Warren, so I decided to skip this cart and to change it into reactions per day.
Since this year we can choose for 5 types of reactions. I have given all 5 types the same colour and put them in a stacked column chart. When hoovering over the cart it is visible.

Article

I did not write article’s so I removed that chart.

The result

Star Trek: Inspiring Culture and Technology I, Unit 4 Why Star Trek? > Imagined Technologies / Artificial Intelligence

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Start Trek and Imagined Technologies

In Star Trek there was a lot of technology that was appealing to the imagination of the viewers in the ’70’s of the 20th century. Some items we have right now have been developed based on the imagination of Star Trek.

I was impressed by the extra material where James Doohan is telling about his interest in science and how he as Scotty inspired to many engineers. And the interview with Patrick Steward where he talks about Neill Armstrong’s inspiration to become an astronaut. Namely the role of Captain Picard. I knew there where fans, but that it influenced people and society so much I had not realised. While in an earlier blog I wrote down, that the role of Data maybe has inspired me to go into Data Science.

For this Starlog we got the questions:

  • “What Star Trek technology is on your list of must-haves?”
  • Could the Star Trek universe exist without this type of technology?
  • How would it be better (or worse) with (or without) this technology?

The technology on my wish list is the big touch screens and the real interactive talking with the computer. We have a start, there are touch screens and the digiboard and schools are getting more and more interactive. Also asking questions to siri, google and windows is starting off.

The Star Trek universe could not have existed without the technology. Then it would not have been SF. Without the technology there would have been something missing in the series. No talking Data, no beaming, no easily communication, no great looking screens.

Tech Showcase: Artificial Intelligence

In this model Mark Teerlink chief business strategist from IBM Watson is talking about AI and how it developed in the present time.

It would be really nice if AI would go into the direction of Data, but it also go into the direction of Lore, so we always have to stay keen on ethics with every small step we take in AI. I don’t think we should fear AI, we should fear the county’s developing AI, as long as they are humanly AI will stay humanly.

Promotion to Lieutenant Junior Grade

Challenge myself to change a set of Excel files into a Power BI report; part 3

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Designing a model

To make a report I need to have information in Power BI. I can just import the Excel files and see what I have. But that is not what I have learned taking the course by Avi Singh. First I need to design a model with Data and Lookup Tables.

So what information is in my Data Table and what in my Lookup Table.

Data Table

A Data Table is the table that contains information. So in those tables I need to load the information about required and returned supplies.

Lookup Table

A Lookup Table is the table with fixed values. So in those tables I need to load the information about the weight of each article, and a calendar table, because I might need the years.

Relationship between Data and Lookup Table

In the original information I have a column with item number so I need to get that in the Data Table and in the Lookup Table with the weights of the supplies. Oeps not every item has an item number so that cannot be the key. Need to work with the English name.

The original information has no date in the worksheet, only in the file name. so I need to create a column with the year so I can make an other relationship

Work in Power BI

First step: Making a table with all the requested items.

There are 4 Excel files for each year that we have logged information. This Excel files have a lot of worksheets. From each file we only need the worksheet with the requested totals. This sheet has rows with the products items and columns with the value per booth.

Per file a made 1 table in Power BI. I used Power Query Editor to

  • Remove top blanc rows;
  • Remove rows in the file that were blanc;
  • Promoted the Headers, automatically the types of the columns were changed and I check and agree with the change;
  • Made sure my columns had the right names (the same names over the four tables);
  • Removed empty columns and columns I do not need the information from;
  • Added 1 column with the date of the event and made the Data Type: Date;
  • I unpivoted column, so that the Booth name became an Attribute column and the values became a Value column.

When I had this 4 Tables I used the Append Queries option to append this Tables into 1 Table and changed the name of the value column into Requested value.

At the start of the day, they booths receive 75% of the value of the items they have requested, so I made a new column for that.

Second step: Making a table with all the returned items.

For 2 years we also log the returns per booth to find out how much do they return at the end of the day. So next year we can advise them what to request.

These 2 files I also have put into 1 table, with the following steps

  • Remove top blanc rows;
  • Promoted the headers, automatically the types of the columns were changed and I check and agree with the change;
  • Remove rows in the file that are empty;
  • Every item is having two rows of values, in Excel Merge cells was used, in Power Query this ends up as a filled and empty row in the item column, so I used filled down as an option;
  • Removed empty columns and columns I do not need the information from;
  • Added 1 column with the date of the event and made the Data Type: Date;
  • I unpivoted column, so that the Booth name became an Attribute column and the values became a Value column.

When I had this 2 Tables I used the Append Queries option to append this Tables into 1 Table and changed the name of the value column into Returned value.

For 2 years we also have on paper what they have requested extra during the day, this is not in a file.

Third step: Making lookup tables

I made 2 lookup tables. Information about the supplies and a Calendar Table. I’m still thinking about making a table with booth information.

Fourth step: Making relationships

  • Made a relation between items required and the items lookup table;
  • Made a relation between items returned and the items lookup table;
  • For both data tables I also made a relation to the Calendar table.

Fifth step: First visualisation

In a column chart I want to show per item what they requested, what they got at start and what they returned at the end of the day. With using a filter for year and a filter for booth.

It is not working

I have been working on the above, but I came to the conclusion, that on the moment, with the knowledge I have of the Power Query Editor, I cannot shape the data into a nice table with working relationships.

The requested and what they got at the start of the day is nicely in the viz, the returns are not responding to the filter of year.

So, I go to create a new excel file which fits the requirements I need for PowerBI. I’m lucky I have access to the original data, so I can do this.

Continue in Excel

To start in Excel, I copied the Power BI table with the requested items and manually I have put in the return and while busy I looked for the paper work about the extra requested during the day. We only had 2018 so I have put those in as well.
There are some od numbers in the returns that do not make any sense. This might be explained by the fact that the counting is done at the end of the evening, by teenagers and it is done fast, because everybody wants to go home.

Back to Power BI

I have imported the new excel file and now I can make a Dashboard based on 1 table.

Star Trek: Inspiring Culture and Technology I, Unit 3: Why Star Trek? > Unique Universe / Power of Fandom

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#StarTrekCourse

Star Trek’s Unique Universe

Question: what are the benefits of adhering to canon?

Answer: The advantage of following a canon is that all episodes are made in the same trent and that fan’s continue to watch. Storyline is easier to follow even if you missed an episode.

Star Trek and the Power of Fandom

Question: Who is your favourite Star Trek character?

This is not an easy question. Each serie does have a favourite to me.
The most important are.

  • Scotty in the original series, his character so Scottish and his accent beautifully.
  • In the Next Generation, it is Data, wonderful to see how he developed during the 7 seasons.
  • In Voyager it is the Doctor, yet another non-human character, he also develops himself into almost human.

Probably Data and The Doctor have spoken to my imagination very early and now, with the emergence of AI and Data Science, it is only clear to me that I want to be able to do more with it.

Promotion Ceremony

Today I got promoted to Lieutenant

#MakeoverMonday; 2019 wk35; Fall is the favourite season for most Americans

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#MakeOverMonday Week 35 2019

This week it is a small dataset that needs to be put in a visualization. (12 rows and 3 columns).
I first have recreated the original visualization, with the same layout.
Then I judged it at the following points

What is the original story:

While weather predictions can be unreliable, it is safe to say that a quarter of Americans are looking forward to the summer months. In a survey of the four seasons, summer rates high as 25% of Americans look forward to the warmer weather. Fall is the favourite season of the nation. They show us per season what is the favourite for each group and they conclude that fall is the favourite season of the nation. They also wrote down the percentage on each bar.

What could be improved

  • Do not use the percentage is the graph, because it does not add up to 100% in total, so the viewer starts to wonder why.
  • Show it in a different way, because it is not visible in one blink that fall has the highest value. From the standard Power BI the following options are possible.
    • Stacked Bar Chart, Stacked Column Chart, Stacked Area Chart, Ribbon Chart, Pie Chart, Donut Chart, Treemap split into the age groups
    • Bar Chart, Line Chart, Area Chart, Pie Chart, Donut Chart, Treemap without splitting into the age groups

I have chosen for the Stacked Column Chart. The Data labels are off and I also wanted to switch the tooltip off. This is to stop the confusion about the percentage. I wanted to keep the tooltip, so I made a new option in data ‘no preference’, I did this because of the fact that I’m missing data and how to fix this. This are 3 rows and it makes the total preference value per age group 100%.

Who is the audience?

It was an article on YouGov. YouGov is a British international Internet-based market research and data analytics firm. The company’s methodology involves obtaining responses from an invited group of Internet users, and then weighting these responses in line with demographic information. Reading this I conclude that they did on online survey and this is the result of the survey. The audience are people who go to this side to read what is there. So the general public.

What is the goal

It is a news article in June 2013 in the Lifestyle section.

Go to the visual

#MakeoverMonday; 2019 wk33; Practice Python analysis with a #MakeOverMonday dataset

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#MakeOverMonday Week 33 2019; A bird’s-eye view of clinical trials

In this blog I have explored and visualized a dataset with Python.

Exploring the data

The dataset A bird’s-eye view of clinical trials is provided as an excel file. It is bigger than other weeks, this file has 13,748 rows and 11 columns.

First I need to know what is in the dataset and I use the .head() comment.

Then I want to know the dtypes.
There are 3 columns with numbers and 7 with text (categorical variables).

For the 3 columns with numbers I can use the function .describe(), for 2 out of 3 that will give a funny result, because it is no use to describe the ‘Start_Year’ and ‘Start_Month. The ‘Enrollment’ is the only one that can give useful answers to this request.
Now I need to get some domain knowledge, what does enrollment means? Ah found it in the text of the original visualization: Enrollment are the numbers of patients enrolled.
Result: The mean is 441 patients with a max of 84496 and a min of 0. The value 365 in the 75% quartile tells me more trails or done with less than the mean

Next up is counting the unique categories of the categorical variable’s.
For this I need to write a definition:

There are 10 different sponsors, 7 Phases, 9 different States. For in total 867 conditions/diseases.
There are no double NCT’numbers so every row is unique. There are 13.434 different titles and 13564 summaries.

Visualizing the data

Bar Charts

First, I will examine the frequency distributions of the categorical variables, ‘’Sponsor’, ‘Phase’ and ‘Status’ with bar charts. Visualizing the others with bar charts is crazy, because of the number of bars you will get.

The ‘Sponsor’ GSK has with almost 2.500 trails the highest amount of trails

Looking at the Phases, most trails have the label Phase 3

And logically the most trails have the ‘Status’ Completed.

Histograms

I made histograms of the numeric variables ‘Start_Year’, ‘Start_Month’ and ‘Enrollment’.

The histogram of ‘Start_Year’ shows that in the beginning there where not much trails and that from 2000 the amount of trails went up with a peak in 2005, 2006 and 2007.

The histogram of ‘Start_Month’ shows a more or less even distribution.

The histogram of the ‘Enrollment’ shows what was already written in the describe function of the column. Most trails have a low amount of participants. So, it is right skewed.

Kernel density estimation

For ‘Start_Year’ and ‘Enrollment’ I would like to know the kde (Kernel density estimation) to find out what the density of occurrence of the trails is.
For ‘Start_Year’ the graph does not give extra insight, for ‘Enrollment’ it does.

This kde shows that there are also some large trails with a bigger group of participants.

Scatter Plot

I have made a Scatter Plot. A Scatter Plot is used to find out if there is a relationship between two variables. I wanted to see what the relationship was between ‘Enrollment’ and ‘Start_Year’. In this Scatter Plot it is visible when the bigger trails have started.

Box Plot

With a Box plot I was able to make visible when what sponsor was doing its trails.

Now I have explored the data and I can start the next step. Telling a story with visualizations in power BI.

#MakeoverMonday; 2019 wk32; Uses of 8 different energy sources to generate electricity in the UK part 2

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#MakeOverMonday Week 32 2019

I have left this challenge for a week and enjoyed summer holiday season with the kids. In the meantime some people have given me suggestions looking at my earlier blog. So lets see what I can do today.

First step I have changed the table in Power BI, I now have a table with a lot more rows and lesser columns. My columns are ID, Timestamp, Attribute and Value.

The relation between the tables is automatically detected at the ID numbers. Doing a check with creating a table shows there is a mistake in this relationship. Digging for the answer is just giving me more questions about the data. So lets stop digging and create a visual with one of the story’s i wrote in my first blog.

The story I pick is the change in use over the years of 3 different types of source: Nuclear, fossil based and renewables.

  • I made two Measures in Power BI to group the sources together.
  • I have made two stacked area charts.
    • One that shows everything over the years
    • One where you can breakdown to a year / month and see the daily use.
  • I did this with the first table I had loaded earlier this week and not with the second table I made today
  • For the colours I have chosen purple for Nuclear, was temped to do red because of radiation risk, but found that to much. Of course fossil became grey, connected to the colour of coal. And green for the renewables.
  • To make sure that the filter is only for the second graph I used the option edit interactions to disconnect the filters from the first graph.
  • Kept the text in neutral grey and only made the names of the 3 groups in the text bold.
  • Both charts got fixed axis. With the automatic Y-axe it did not start at zero with the result that the bottom source was smaller than it should be. The second chart also as a fixed end, in this way the y-axe is the same for every filter that is going to be applied. I found out that February 2012 was the month where the claim of sources was the highest.

New profile photo LinkedIn and Twitter

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Today I spend some time working on a new profile photo for LinkedIn and Twitter and I’m happy with the result.

I started with this two photo’s

This is a photo of the Westduinen, it was the ‘backyard’ I grew up with.

Photo taken by UWV in June 2019

I removed the background of my profile photo and cut out the top half to put it into the photo with the grass. It work out really nice and I got this profile photo

#MakeoverMonday; 2019 wk32; Uses of 8 different energy sources to generate electricity in the UK part 1

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#MakeOverMonday Week 32 2019

For this week we received a bigger dataset, so first of all, lets do some exploring with Python code for the practice.

The dataset has 796,453 rows and 12 columns. Mmm something to be aware of, 11 of the columns have a name that start with a space. So, if I want to refer to them, I need to use that space as well.

The information is from 01-01-2012 to 03-08-2019, so on charts you need to be aware that the sum om 2019 is not comparable with the sums of other years.

There are 8 types of energy sources in this dataset:

  • Biomass: run on imported timber or use sawmill waste.
  • CCGT: Combined Cycle Gas Turbines are gas turbines whose hot exhaust are used to drive a boiler and steam turbine. This two-stage process makes them very efficient in gas usage. They are also quite fast to get online, so they are used to cover peak demand and to balance wind output.
  • Coal
  • Hydro
  • Nuclear
  • Pumped: These are small hydro-electric stations that can use overnight electricity to recharge their reservoirs. Mainly used to meet very short-term peak demands.
  • Solar
  • Wind

The other columns are an ID number, a timestamp, the demand (the total Giga Watt demand of the entire UK) and the frequency (the grid frequency is controlled to be exactly 50Hz on average, but varies slightly)

The Frequency and the Solar columns are decimal numbers the others are whole numbers and the timestamp is an object.

There are no missing values at all. There must be some doubles, looking at the timestamp, because there are 796,401 unique timestamps in the 796,453 rows. But 52 rows on the whole dataset can be negligible. Every row did get an unique ID, because here I see the same row count as rows in the dataset.

I used the Quick Insights option of Power BI and got insights that do not tell me anything. So I started to make some myself.

First I looked at the uses by year (2012-2018) for each source.

  • Coal goas down
  • Nuclear stays around the same level
  • CCGT grew up to 2016 and now flattens out on the downside.
  • Wind is going up since 2016
  • Pumped, goes down since 2016
  • Hydro show some fluctuation, but stay’s around its average
  • Biomass: uses going up
  • Solar is showing an intense growth in 2017 and it stay’s high in 2018 and that growth is so much that when you plot it in a line chart with coal, with had the highest use in 2012 that the coal line goes flat in the bottom of the chart, so I do not consider the information in the solar column of a good quality.

The 3 mean sources in 2012 where Coal, CCGT and Nuclear and in 2018 that is CCGT, Nuclear and Wind.

The demand on GW has gone down over the years with 724,444,951 GW

Found insights, did not yet find a story to tell. Lets take some rest and continue an other day.

Challenge myself to change a set of Excel files into a Power BI report; part 2

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Description of the Excel files

Per year there are two Excel files and every Excel files has several worksheets. From each file I need one worksheet. The worksheet with the requested and additional supplies per booth and the worksheet with the returns per booth and the total stock in the evening.

The worksheet with the returns is first having columns that describe the different supplies, followed by columns that inform the user about how much a standerd amount way’s. Followed by booth name columns. Every article has two rows of information, weight and count. We need the count by article. By adding the forms from 2018 I realised that we had changed some articles and that we do not have the weight. While making the inventory has been done with the weight. We need to come up with a solution of that, even so if we keep the old system up and running, because we need to know the count of the items coming November.

The total required is a worksheet where in columns is written what every booth wants to receive. The evening before the FoodFair the booths are receiving 75% of what they have requested. During the day they can request for additional supplies, since 2018 that is also filled in on forms, that are put in one Excel file.

Both sheets are not complete and are having missing data, lets see how that works out when I import them to the Power BI Query Editor and transform it into the right format.

Challenge myself to change a set of Excel files into a Power BI report; part 1

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Description of the challenge

Every year in November there is the FoodFair of the church we are going to. My husband coordinates the supplies room and he has a set of Excel files (with formulas) to know how much supplies he uses a year, how much is left and how much he needs to buy again.

There are several booths with different food and different needs of supplies

At the end of the day we are left with a bunch of handwritten forms that tell us how many supplies have been given out and returned per booth. This handwritten forms go into the Excel file. And we do have a handwritten form with counted stock at the end of the evening. This form is also copied into a Excel file.

I gave myself the challenge to build a model from the Excel files that can be used on a yearly base and to make a report that shows what supplies are requested for and what is been given back per booth

As a by the way, writing this blog also teaches me more about possibilities in WordPress, because I want more than just a plain black text.

Start of the project

I see this as a real use case, because there is data in Excel in a reader friendly way, so that needs to be converted. The data is in several different files and collected by hand over more than one year.

I have domein knowledge, because I have been helping my husband with inputting data in the files and working with him during the FoodFair day’s.

The data that is there in Excel are two files a year. 1 file has the returns per booth and the stock at the end of the day. The other file has the requested supplies per booth. And there is a lot more information in the files on other sheets.

The forms from 2018 have not been put into Excel yet, so that is what needs to be done first.

My learning path Power BI part 1

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The learning path Power BI started in april 2017 when I did my first Analyzing and Visualizing Data with Power BI online training in edX. At that moment my passion for Power BI was born.

Overtime I have been experimenting with Power BI and during my Data Science Professional Microsoft Track powered by Techionista learned more about Power BI.

In the past weeks I have been busy with exploring Power BI, by just diving into #MakeOverMonday challenges and working with trial and error. This way of working helped me to understand the program, but it also fed my hunger in getting to know more about Power BI.
In my search for video material I came across Avin Singh, he has a nice video series where he starts from the beginning with introducing Power BI. In this blog are my learning notes. I do advise you to watch the video series to understand Power BI better.

Before I started with this series I started with the most basic one “how to install Power PI”.
In this video he talks about the two way’s to install Power BI

  • From the Microsoft website
  • From the Microsoft store

My Power BI was installed from the Microsoft website and the plus point that you do not have to update it every month yourself, made me decide to deinstall that version and to install Power BI from the store. Within an hour I went back to the website version. I wanted to change something in the settings and I could not. I kept giving me a popup error message. I did not want to figure out way and decide that the website version and updating it manually every month work well in the past and I would keep it like that.

In Get Data he explains how to import data and how you can edit it with the query editor and how the query editor helps you with making a documentation so that somebody else (or yourself after some time) knows what has happened. Good documentation is important in Data Science, because in that why you can explain and prove to others what you have done.

In Relationships he tells you how to make a good data model. He explains about data tables and fact tables.

Up to know repeating of the knowledge I got from earlier training and self-exploring of Power BI.

In the section about DAX I get to learn some new facts.
A calculated column is a nice way for the human brain to see in the tables what is happening. It makes the file grow bigger in size.
We want to have a small file, because a Power BI file runs in memory of the computer.
The storage of a big file is not a problem, running a big file in memory can give a problem.
So it is better to use a measure. This does not make the file bigger. To write them you need to have more DAX knowledge. In his video’s he explains the basics.

There are two types of measures “Implicit” and “Explicit”.
Implicit means you take the column from the table and put it in the visualisation.
Explicit measure is a measure you made by using a DAX-formula.
He explains them and tells witch one is better to be used. To make that clear he really gives a nice picture why you are building a Power BI file.

The Data Scientist is the author from an Excel or a Power BI file, that file is being published in the cloud of Power BI and becomes the only file of truth. That file can be made excisable for consumers to use the data with the program they want.
And at that point it becomes very important if you have use implicit or explicit measures. Implicit measure can not be put in a pivot table in Excel, while explicit can.
A lot of users use Excel, so you need to build for their needs.

He tells a lot more about DAX measures and I start to understand it.

At the end he creates a report, that turns out to be a dashboard and online published. I did make the report he made, but did not publish it. I also changed how to put the text and images. I first made a jpg by using PowerPoint and loaded that as the background of the report (tip from Marc Lelijveld during a webinar I followed in July 2019)

Here is the created visual.

#MakeoverMonday; 2019 wk28; Asylum applications in Europa part 4

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#MakeOverMonday Week 28 2019

Go to the power BI viz pag 3

In the facebook group I got feedback on iteration 2

Loads better! I felt part of the conversation and knew immediately what story you were trying to tell!
Fantastic job! Great blog post! I hope others are encouraged to try this after seeing your journey!

Questions

  1. Is there a legend for the first two graphs?
  2. Do they need to be multicolored or could you make them all the same color and then call out the years you want to point out in a highlight color?

My answers

  1. There is no legend for the first two graphs, if I give one it will be a list of 28 countries and that is a lot.
  2. Looking at answer 1 in combination with question 2 I’m going to make a stacked column cart with 3 layers, 26 countries together and the 2 that I’m talking about separated and than I can also make a legend for the two graphs.

How did I do this.
I wanted to make a measure in Power BI, where I calculate the 26 rows and do not calculate the values of Germany and Hungary. I could not get it done with a DAX formula, so I went back to the source, the excel file and made a new row with the right values and imported the file as a new file.

Who can tell me how to do it with a DAX formula?

Suggestion

Another graph that might be interesting is the variance between accepted and denied which you might be able to use a waterfall chart to show in Power BI.

I did not start working on that one yet.

#MakeoverMonday; 2019 wk28; My blog part of Power BI news

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Today I got a message from twitter that there was a post with my name so I went to it. I was wondering how did I contribute to this news. So, I followed up the link and found a great website with a nice collection of Power BI news.

I started reading and at when I was at the topic “Business” I found a my blog about the asylum applications in Europa part 3.

I feel proud about this.

#MakeoverMonday; 2019 wk28; Asylum applications in Europa part 3

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#MakeOverMonday Week 28 2019

Go to the power BI viz pag 1

Today and yesterday I have been working on a second report with the data given by #MakeOverMonday.

My biggest challenge was getting the data in the right format to create a normal line or bar chart, with the years on the x-as and the country’s being the values. I dove into one of the other reports and found out, that the format of the data had been changed. The years where no longer in separated columns, but moved into 1 column and that is what was in my mind also. So first I worked in Excel and created the format needed to make the report I wanted. It takes time to put it in the right format.

Lesson learned: if I feel the data is not in the right format, change it first before putting time in making a report and than need to restart again.

While I was busy in Excel I was like, this most be possible in Power BI with the Power Query Editor. So I went back to Power BI and have been reading carefully and found the option: Unpivot Columns in the Transform menu and it did the trick in a click

After the data was in power BI in the format, I wanted I did some cleaning of the data

  • Removing empty rows
  • Chancing the value “:” into an empty cell. This value was used several times, I did not mean 0 because there where also zero’s in the columns.
  • Changed “Germany (until 1990 former territory of the FRG)” into Germany, because all data was from 2009 and onwards.
  • Filtered out the information about the 28 European countries together
  • Changed “Total positive decisions” into “accepted”, because that fitted nicer in the graph of denied and accepted

This time I have build a 3 visual report

Visual 1 shows the total asylum requests in Europe over the year by country.
I noticed a peak in Hungary in 2015 and dove into news articles to find out when Hungary closed the borders for Middle east refugees with Croatia and read this was end 2015. So this news fact is visible in the graph.

Visual 2 shows how many decisions have been made. In Germany you can see that a request and a decision is not always in the same year.

Visual 3 shows the accepted and denied request. I have chosen for a clustered column chart instead of a stacked column chart. Because here it is easier to see what has been more.

For the 3 visuals I made the Y-ax the same scale.

#MakeoverMonday; 2019 wk28; Asylum applications in Europa part 2

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#MakeOverMonday Week 28 2019

Feedback from #Make Over Monday review

This Wednesday there was the weekly review from the made visualization and here are the points I need to work on and be aware of for a next report

  • Make sure there is a title / header
  • Check the spelling of the tekst
  • When mentioned it is about people you do not have to specify that those are divided into two gender groups
  • The filter on the left hand side is big, better is to make it a dropdown list
  • The tables are not inviting to read them, remove them are use a kind of heatmap or only totals
  • Use a normal bar chart and put the number is full amounts, do not use K, because there are amounts below 1,000

Feedback from members of the facebook group BI Data Storytelling Mastery

  • What is the takeaway?
  • What story should I see?
  • I suggest considering something different than a stacked bar. I can see overall total but understanding difference in composition is hard for human brain.
  • In your blog can you tell why you chose your visuals, colors, fonts?
  • But most importantly the story you want to tell. Better story might be approved vs denied, overall trend. Is there a story in the reasons? Is there a story in the sex or age difference? Why should the viewer care about these numbers? Help us see the story from your point of view, the refugees point of view, the asylum counties pov.
  • Can you make the viewer want to investigate and find out more?

So I’m going back to an empty power BI sheet and rethink about the story that I want to tell with this data.

#MakeoverMonday; 2019 wk28; Asylum applications in Europa part 1

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#MakeOverMonday Week 28 2019

Go to the power BI viz pag 2

This week we are working with data about asylum applications in Europa from 2008 until 2018. The data provided is part of a bigger dashboard. You can find the original at “International protection in the EU+: 2018 overview”. We received two datasets that was used for this two visuals

Looking at the data in Excel, the Age column is only giving total and not a differentiation in minor or adult. The decision column is also giving 4 other descriptions than the 4 used in the original graph. The two columns with totals are not giving the same results so it is not possible to combine the two sets. So not possible to find out how many of the applicant per year got asylum and what type of asylum. This is probably because of the length application.

I decided to make a visualisation where you can filter by country how many people are asking asylum and what the decision are by year. I could not connect the request and decision numbers to each other.

#MakeoverMonday; 2019 wk26; Alcohol Consumption By Country

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#MakeOverMonday Week 26 2019

This week I want to participate in the weekly challenge of #MakeOverMonday lets see if I have enough spare time between jobapplications, family activities and Python for Data Science training. The last two weeks I could not find the time for the challenge.

This week it is a small dataset. It has 25 rows (country’s) and there alcohol consumption by capita. In the article I read that is by capita older than 15 years.
In the original visualization there is a bar chart of this 15 country’s.
On Wednesday I have seen the live webinar and was impressed with visuals other people made. Got a lot of inspiration and challenge to find out what I can do.

In my head grows the idea to at the capita by country, to show how many liters there is drunk by country. I found information about the capita per country for 2017 and have added this to the excel spreadsheet. Now I need to find how much of the population is above 15 years old.
No could not find it, so end of idea.

I just used the data I had a created some graphs showing what is in the data. The information I found about the capita by country in 2017 has been used.

I did submit it to #MakeOverMonday Challenge.

Next training step

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While busy looking for a new employer I also have time to do some more DataScience training. I went back to my trusted platform edX.org and decided to start with a MicroMasters® Program in Data Science at UCSanDiegoX.

The first course is called Python for Data Science and has 8 modules, there will be cases with data on Kaggle.

The first module reviews what data science is and how to conduct data science research. It is a recap of what I have learned in the other models. Nice to get a recap and connect dots.

I’m taking this training because I want to practise more with data modeling and predicting results (Machine Learning)

#MakeoverMonday; 2019 wk23; Data about sleeping hours in America

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#MakeOverMonday Week 23 2019

Introduction

From MakeOverMonday I got data about sleep times per day, age and sex. With the question to work on the graph and remake it. This week I first took the data into Jupyter Notebook to analyse it with Python, after that I went to Power BI for the visualization.

Exploring the data

The data is having 945 rows with 8 columns
There is no missing data
It is information about 15 years (2003-2017)
The people are put in 7 age groups and there is a group with all the information together. They are also divided in 3 sex groups (both, men and women)
There are 2 different types of day’s (“Nonholiday weekdays” and “Weekend days and holidays”) and there is a group were all information has been put together.
In Python I left the data like it was, I did not alter it.

I made several histograms, to see what they were telling me. The histogram of Average hours per day sleeping gave me a nice right skewed distribution (0.4661909713080754)
The mean of this one is 8.069 and the median is 8.81

The correlation between the year and the Average hours per day sleeping is 0.15, this is small

I want to know if there is a relation between ‘Average hours per day sleeping’ and the categorical variables
I found something as can been seen in the two boxplots, it looks like 15 to 24 year old people sleep more hours

During the Weekend days and holidays, people sleep more hours

This is the graph how it was made to remake

https://www.bls.gov/tus/charts/chart16.jpg

Visualize the data in Power BI

I did not find it easy to pick out a topic to visualize, there was not really something that got my attention during explorating the date, beside that I found it a lot of hours that people spend sleeping. I think the title should be, hours spend in bed.

I decided to visualize the average of hours spend in bed by age group over the years, with the possibility to filter on man of women.

Star Trek: Inspiring Culture and Technology I, Unit 2: Why Star Trek? > Star Trek and the Business of Cable Television Starlog

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#StarTrekCourse

For this Unit we have been watching the pilots of all the series. Here is how we rank them and what we think of them.

3“The Cage.”
Star Trek: The Original Series
running: 1966-1969
playing 2265
remark: Shown on Network Television; dominant male episode. Number 1 is female, but not seen as female by Captien Pike, other head players are male, it is that I have seen more StarTrek, because this pilot is not talking to me and I’m not interested to watch a second episode.
2“Where No Man Has Gone Before.”
Star Trek: The Original Series
running: 1966-1969
playing 2265
remark: First episode with Captien Kirk, still mainly male, beter then The Cage.
1“Encounter at Far Point.”
Star Trek: The Next Generation
running: 1987-1994
playing 2365
remark: In this pilot the new enterpice and his crew members are introduced to us and how they knew each other in the past / what the relations are.
We also get introduceted to Q and how the Q think about people, people need to prove otherwise.
6“Emissary.”
Star Trek: Deep Space 9
running 1993-1999
playing: 2365
remark: The beginning of a new job, but first closing old life and grive. Again dealing with an other life form the thinks human is crual.
4“Caretaker.”
Star Trek: Voyager
running 1995-2001
playing 2365
remark: A leap in time and space, we jump 75.000 light years because a caretaker wants to pay for his depts to a planet. The caretaker dies and technology destroyed.
In the mean time the Voyager and there enemy form home have to become friends to travel back home for 75 years. Two people from far away want to leave far away and travel to earth
5“Broken Bow.”
Star Trek: Enterprise
running 2001-2005
playing 2151
remark: Nice to see a serie made in 2001 but is playing before Star Trek the Original Series, you see older machinery but the vesion is newer 😉
“The Vulcan Hello.”
Star Trek: Discovery
running since 2017
playing 2256
We watched 3 episodes, it is adictiev, but not in the line of what was in the old series. Personally I prefer the older series
I did not see that this serie play’s before The next generation, it looks that is play’s. From the Klingons plot I got the idea is was behnd Voyager

#MakeoverMonday; 2019 wk21; iteration 2

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After the review by Eva Murray, Head of BI & Tableau Zen Master at Exasol and Jeff Shaffer, COO & Vice President, Unifund, Tableau Zen Master I made an iteration of my visualisation.

The suggestions where:

  • About the title; not to put information there that is not connected with the dataset
  • To change the bar chart into a column chart
  • To show the month by its abbreviation.
  • To make sure the scale does not change when using a filter (so fixed x and y axis)
    • This was a challenge, but I made it, YES!!
  • Gramma; use the word from instead of in (July)
  • and highlight the most fatal months

The interaction with the charts and the filters was seen as positive thing

#MakeoverMonday; 2019 wk21; Second time Makeover Monday

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After two weeks of the Business Case from Techionista it is time to do a MakeOverMonday challenge again.

Today we are asked to work with data from Ali Sanne, she collected, prepared and distributed the data on data.world. It is data about deadly bear attacks on people. From 1900 till 2018.

Read the original report at fox.

My visualisation in Power BI

Eerste dag Business Case of the Microsoft Azure Academy for Data Science, powered by Techionista.

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Vandaag van start met de Business Case. Vijf bedrijven hebben vijf groepen een opdracht gegeven om mee aan de slag te gaan. Onze groep gaat van start met de aanwezigheid van supporters tijdens de thuis wedstrijden van Ajax in de Johan Cruijf Arena.

#SWDChallenge; 2019 May; First time; part 6; Feedback from Cole Knaflic @storywithdata

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I got homework for May 20, when I’m done with the Techionista training

#SWDChallenge; 2019 May; First time; part 4; Progress

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  • First step: Make a table of the worksheet. Now it has all additional rows that do not contain the right information
  • Load the excel into PowerBI and do some transformations
    • Fill blanks in the “week nr” column
    • Replace the 1 null value in column “onderdeel”
    • In the column “begintijd” and “eindtijd” needs only to be time and no date
    • Recalculate the column “totale tijd”
    • The column “in uren” rounded to 2 decimals
  • Oh the column “totale tijd” is not giving the right values, I want to see the amount of minutes in there, back to Edit Queries, to find out why. Ah Data Type was Any, changed that to Duration en minutes
  • Yes my Data looks good
  • Add the excel file with the advised hours from Microsoft and Techionista
    • Do some transformations
  • Check the relation between the two tables
  • First visualization; a bar chart showing my hours, compared with Microsoft and Techionista

Conclusion hours by subject

The red bars show the hours that where planned by Techionista, black is what Microsoft advised, for 3 topics Techionista scheduled lesser hours than Microsoft advised. Green is what I actually have spend. For 3 subjects and the capstone I have spend more hours than Microsoft had advised.

The second visualization I want to make is a line chart, showing the time spend per day from the beginning to the end.

  • First I added a new table with dates, so I could use the date as the x-axis
  • Than I made a chart, where I visualised the hours per day and than the topic as legend. Only to realise that a line chart is not clear. So I changed it into a bar chart, which gave me the idea I wanted to see.
  • I also made a table to show the description by subject

Conclusion hours by day and subject

The further I got into the study, the more hours I have spend during the day.

#MakeoverMonday; 2019 wk18; Webinar MakeOverMonday

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Vandaag gekeken naar een Webinar van de visualisaties die andere mensen gemaakt hadden met dezelfde data als die ik gebruikt had. Een aantal mooie dingen gezien, weer wat bijgeleerd.

#SWDChallenge; 2019 May; First time; part 2

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The new challenge is here: Challenge May 2019
This month’s #SWDchallenge comes from guest author Mike Cisneros.

The challenge

Go out and collect a dataset of your own, analyze it and create a graph visualizing your findings. (Remember: sometimes the smallest, most specific stories can tell the most universal truths.)

My reaction

Oh I wanted to join because I do not have a dataset of myself, okay will join next month


Data Science Track van Microsoft afgerond

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Yes vandaag de certificering ontvangen als bewijs dat ik alle 11 onderdelen succesvol heb afgrond.


Begonnen op 1 februari 2019, afgerond op 30 april 2019, hieronder een overzicht van het aantal uren dat ik er in gestoken heb. De reistijden zijn niet verwerkt. De training vond 3 dagen per week plaats in de Amsterdam ArenA en de rest was thuis studie. De reistijd naar de Amsterdam ArenA is 3,5 uur per dag.

Het onderstaande rapport is een interactief rapport in PowerBI

De onderdelen die ik nu in theorie beheers zijn: Introduction to Data Science, Power BI, Analytics Storytelling for Impact, Ethics and Law in Data and Analytics, Querying Data with Transact-SQL, Introduction to Python for Data Science, Essential Math for Machine Learning: Python Edition, Data Science Research Methods: Python Edition, Principles of Machine Learning: Python Edition, Developing Big Data Solutions with Azure Machine Learning, Microsoft Professional Capstone : Data Science

#MakeoverMonday; 2019 wk18; My first time at Makeover Monday

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This was the given visualisation

There have been 216 spacewalks at the International Space Station since December 1998.

I downloaded the data (xls-file with 2 worksheets), saved this as two csv’s and pulled it into PowerBI.
There I did some transformation

  • In the table ISS Spacewalks I made sure that the “year” was a Whole Number and of the type Date and Year.
  • Also the “Number op Spacewalks” needed to be a Whole Number.
  • In the table Spacewalks I extracted the Year out of the “Date” column.
  • The ‘Duration (hours)’ is having two values with a -, this needed to be removed before I could transform the column into a Number.
  • I made a relation between the two tables using the year as a many to many relation.

After that my first challenge was to rebuild the given visualisation.

I’m proud of myself that I managed to create this.
I see that more can be done with this given dataset, but not for today. Maybe I will give it an other shot in the upcoming day’s.

Star Trek: Inspiring Culture and Technology I, Unit 2: Why Star Trek? > Star Trek and the Business of Cable Television Homework

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#StarTrekCourse

In Unit 2 “Why Star Trek”, Module 2 “Star Trek and the Business of Cable Television” our assignment is an media analysis. We are asked to whatch the pilot episode of each of the 6 live action Star Trek television serie and how the storyline of each pilot episode related to the world when it was created.
Luckily we have Netflix were we can watch it.
This homework will take some time.

Here is the list of the pilot episodes we have been asked to think about for the Media Analysis. (Both pilots for Star Trek: The Original Series are included.)

  • 1966 “The Cage.” Star Trek: The Original Series
  • 1966 “Where No Man Has Gone Before.” Star Trek: The Original Series
  • 1987 “Encounter at Far Point.” Star Trek: The Next Generation
  • 1993 “Emissary.” Star Trek: Deep Space 9
  • 1995 “Caretaker.” Star Trek: Voyager
  • 2001 “Broken Bow.” Star Trek: Enterprise
  • 2017 “The Vulcan Hello.” Star Trek: Discovery

Question: Which pilot best addresses the contemporary societal issues from when it was produced while taking the most advantage of the television format on which it was shown? Rank the episodes you watch in numerical order where 1 is the episode that best answers the question prompt.

Star Trek: Inspiring Culture and Technology I, Unit 2: Why Star Trek? > Star Trek and The Business of Network Television

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#StarTrekCourse

Star Trek and The Business of Network Television

Question:
To what extent did the business model of network television enable Star Trek: The Original Series to appeal to such a wide range of audiences? In ways did that same model constrain it?

Star Trek: The Original Series had a big appeal to people, because all type of people could
recognize them self in the characters playing in the serie.

– Kirk was daring, bold, emotional, and heroic
– Spock brought rational thought, a level head, and logical thinking to the table
– Bones was practical and compassionate.

Star Trek was being watched by viewers from young to old

Thanks to Sean Patrick Guthrie’s, blogpost juli 20, 2016 and Rabobank for the design of the business model, that I have used to fill

Course Star Trek: Inspiring Culture and Technology via edX

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#StarTrekCourse

Just a break from my Data Science education, a course for fun nevertheless it has a connection with Science.

About this course

Intro voor de training

Why has Star Trek, which began as a failed network series, become so influential? Instead of fading away, the Star Trek universe now encompasses feature films, additional television series, and a universe of fan conventions and memorabilia. 

What about the shows and movies resonate with so many people? The powerful vision of futuristic space exploration drew on real history and contemporary issues to enhance its storytelling. Star Trek inspired audiences to ask fundamental questions about who they are and how they relate to the world around them.

When you enroll in this course, you will examine how Star Trek’s live action television shows and motion pictures affected audiences around the world. With your hosts, Margaret Weitekamp and Scott Mantz, you will discover the connections between Star Trek and history, culture, technology and society. You will hear from experts, watch clips from the shows and films, debate with fellow fans. and explore your own perspectives on and understanding of Star Trek’s lasting impact.

Through critical analysis and object exploration, you will examine how Star Trek tackled controversial topics, such as race, gender, sexuality, and ethics. Then, the mission is yours. Join the community to engage in civil discourse. Use evidence to understand how Star Trek shaped and still influences our technology and society. 

This course is offered under license by CBS Consumer Products.

What you’ll learn

In this course, students will:

  • Learn why we should study Star Trek as a lens for media scholars to analyze the history of television, the impact of science fiction on technology, and the phenomenon of fandom
  • Explore how Star Trek depicted a future where humans were explorers of the universe – serving as an inspiration to individuals and government agencies deeply involved in the race to get human beings into space for the first time
  • Understand how Star Trek‘s diverse crew prompted audiences to reconsider their own perceptions of different races and genders
  • Reflect on how Star Trek depicted various characters working to understand themselves and their place in the universe
  • Recognize how Star Trek inspires reflection on our own humanity and our place in the universe

https://www.edx.org/course/star-trek-inspiring-culture-and-technology

Studie update

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Vandaag Module 4 in de Python training afgerond.

Ik heb nu de theorie doorgelezen van:

  • Lists, subsetting and manipulating lists
  • Functions, Methods & Packages
  • Numpy, 2D Numpy arrays & Basic Statistics with Numpy

Tijd om pauze te houden en het in te laten zakken, morgen weer verder.