Sharon Machlis
Executive Editor, Data & Analytics
Sharon Machlis is Director of Editorial Data & Analytics at IDG, where she works on analyzing data (both for IDG Enterprise Web sites and journalism projects) and in-house editor tools in addition to writing and editing. Her tech interests include data visualization and analysis as well as the intersection of journalism and technology. She holds an Extra class amateur radio license and is currently somewhat obsessed with R. Her book Practical R for Mass Communication and Journalism was published in December 2018.
Bonus downloads: How to make color-coded thematic maps in R
These files will help you follow our R language tutorial, "How to create maps with R in 10 (fairly) easy steps."
Beginner's guide to R: Painless data visualization
From no-frills graphics to adding color and labeling your data, here's what you need to know.
Beginner's guide to R: Easy ways to do basic data analysis
From getting subsets of your data to pulling basic stats from your data frame, here's what you need to know.
Beginner's guide to R: Introduction
In part 1 of our hands-on series, we explain why R's a great choice for basic data analysis and visualization work, and how to get started.
Beginner's guide to R: Get your data into R
Whether it's local or from the Web, there are several ways to get data into R for further work.
R Consortium survey seeks input from R users
Have opinions about R? The Consortium wants to hear from you.
22 free tools for data visualization and analysis
Make your data sing. We look at 22 free tools that will help you use visualization and analysis to turn your data into informative, engaging graphics.
U.S. law allows low H-1B wages; just look at Apple
Apple's a great example of how the H-1B system can work, and where the visa goes wrong.
Power BI to add Premium service; private dashboard is free no more
Microsoft on Wednesday unveiled a Premium enterprise service for its Power BI data visualization platform.
How to create an automatically updating Google sheet
Tired of finding, copying and pasting data into spreadsheets? With just a few lines of code, you can set up a self-updating spreadsheet in Google Docs that fetches and stores data for you, as this Facebook example shows. Update: Due...
RStudio makes another high-profile hire
After Jenny Bryan and Max Kuhn joined the company last fall, Hadley Wickham told me he didn't plan to add to his team "in the near future." It looks like the near future has passed.
10 fun tech ads through the years
80 Mbytes of storage for less than $12,000! boasts one ad. In another, a woman in hot pants touts a modem that's "maybe even sexy." These were too much fun not to share.
Quick hands-on: Tableau adds shapefile, KML & GeoJSON imports for custom maps
You can now use your own geospatial files to create custom choropleth maps in Tableau.
Esri to kick off GIS DevSummit with live stream, new resources
The conference is aimed at developers who want to do robust geographical analysis and add geospatial capabilities to their apps.
Mapping in R just got a whole lot easier
Thanks to the R simple features project and packages like tmaps that support it, choropleth maps are now a breeze to create with R. I'll walk you through mapping median U.S. wages for IT managers. And don't miss the last step: A tiny...
Facebook releases 'Prophet' -- its free forecasting tools -- for Python and R
Prophet is aimed specifically at business problems such as computer infrastructure capacity planning.
Create your own Slack bots -- and web APIs -- in R
Make your own API and connect it to a Slack custom slash command -- all in R. This step-by-step tutorial will show you how to find a current stock price, but the basic framework can be used for all sorts of data.
Trump eyes end to an H-1B system that favors largest outsourcers
The companies most hurt by the random H-1B distribution system are those that submit only a few applications. Many are smaller firms.
Trump's ban becomes an H-1B fight
The U.S. technology industry warned President Donald Trump that his immigration order will hurt the U.S. economy by making it more difficult for businesses to attract overseas workers.