One of the most prominent topics of recent political debate has been how best to return the US economy back to full employment.  Some argue that fiscal austerity is key in fostering recovery.  Others argue that increased government spending will spur growth in the private sector.  So which is it?  Should the government be cutting back or increasing its spending?

Poster By Caroline Pugh

During my stint with Sonoma State University's Economic program I have received invaluable training. My peers and I have reached captivating inferences with data – from dissecting effects the movie Sideways appeared to have on merlot and pinot wine sales, to analyzing lift due to promotion of brands given competitor promotional activity. We have also had the opportunity to work with massive datasets from US Census data to the "coveted" Nielsen data.

During these past few months of reviewing jobs and internships, I have noticed more than a few positions looking for analysts who are familiar with SQL. Analysts are now often expected to be able to get to the data in order to perform the analyses they are trained for. While this may not seem challenging, SQL is not a skill most Econ, Math, Stats, Finance and Marketing students learn before entering the workforce.

More after the jump.

In my soon to be Part 1 of this series I walk through the basics of SQL and even venture a bit into intermediate territory.  However this discussion is geared specifically at ACCESSING data AKA the R of our CRUD actions.  This is fine for those who are primarily focused on retrieving data from a database to be used for some purpose (e.g Economics, Stats, Math, Marketing and Finance denizens).  While this subset of SQL skills is well suited for this target audience it makes it difficult to "play on your own" – writing SQL queries and reviewing the results.  This experimentation is super important for gaining experience and comfort with SQL so I'm taking some time here to show this group a way to get started writing SQL queries.

More after the jump.

Like many folks I have been stuck using Microsoft's Communicator client to IM around the office.  I have been trying to move entirely to osx at work and Communicator has been the last hold out.  Jump past the break to see how ditched Communicator.

I was thinking about my important ssh keys and how annoying it would be if they were lost.  I thought it might be a good idea / kinda fun to solve this with QR Codes. 

I wanted take a second to share a little shortcut I just started using recently with several of my rails projects.  I added a little function to my .bash_profile a while ago and it has been super useful.