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Using ServiceConnect for rapidfire Tweeting of data analysis

This may constitute tooting my own horn, but I wanted to let people know what a powerful tool exists with ServiceConnect. I do a lot of work on the Affordable Care Act. Recently, both the government and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation released new data on the insurance markets facilitated by that law. I wanted to be first to analyze much of the data and to publish preliminary results. The following functionality was extremely helpful in this regard.

  • URLExecute to retrieve the data using a variant of SQL
  • Import to retrieve data in a CSV format
  • RLink to convert some data that was in a .dta (Stata) format to a CSV format (Mathematica itself does not seem to be able to read Stata data files)
  • Dataset both to visualize the data and create a data structure on which one can use the power of the Query command
  • Multilevel GroupBy of Dataset objects to perform distributed computation on pieces of the data
  • Traditional Mathematica visualization commands, including the lovely DistributionChart.
  • ServiceConnect to speak to my Twitter account

Basically one ends up with commands like

tw=ServiceConnect["Twitter"];
tw["Tweet","Message"->"This is an interesting finding about the #ACA","Image"->Rasterize[aPlotOrGrid],GeoLocation->$GeoLocationCity]

What I found is that I could produce multiple quality Tweets in a short amount of time. The overhead added by Twitter is minimal; basically if you can do the Mathematica coding, the additional step of posting to Twitter is trivial. If any one wants to see the posts, by the way, the relevant Twitter handle is acaseth (you don't have to agree with my politics or analysis, just appreciate what can be done with the Wolfram Language).

POSTED BY: Seth Chandler
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