Tommy Morrison

Tommy Morrison

Research and Data Officer @ NRGI; opening up data and building the tools to use it

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A list of all the posts and pages found on the site. For you robots out there is an XML version available for digesting as well.

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The best thing I ever did with R

1 minute read

Published:

A few years back, I created an RStudio shortcut that has ended up being my most-used function in R, probably by far. What does the shortcut do? It wraps the current line in the RStudio editor (or the console, if the cursor is there) in a View() function, which opens the data.frame in RStudio’s built-in data viewer.

@GreenGridUSA: a green data twitter bot

1 minute read

Published:

I launched a new Twitter account last week: @GreenGridUSA! This is an automated Twitter bot that parses data and posts insights from the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) data portal. The EIA has a ton of in-depth and timely data on the US electric grid, including on power plants, transmission, power demand and power generation, and I wanted to put something together using it.

COVID-19 in U.S. Schools[’ websites]

3 minute read

Published:

Mid-way through the summer, it was looking pretty clear that the pandemic would not be over by the academic year, and school re-opening was uncertain all over the country. I was interested in how many public schools would be having in-person or virtual classes, and whether there would be a shift in schools re-opening or re-closing as the pandemic progressed. I couldn’t find any hard data on this, so decided to curate my own by collecting and analyzing unstrucuted data from school websites.

R to Slack from Scratch

5 minute read

Published:

I was recently automating a number of steps to gather, clean, and process data in a data pipeline at work. These steps are run daily from a Docker container and do things like scrape web pages for new data and check the status of data in our pipeline. Eventually, these automated steps will lead to some needed human intervention, like manually reconciling data values. I used to run these steps myself and see their output, so I would know what needed to be done; now, I’d need some other way to keep up-to-date on the pipeline without checking myself every so often.

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