Web Scraping for Education Data

I spent some time today and yesterday doing some data wrangling. I wondered where AP Calculus AB is offered throughout the state of Minnesota. I first went to the College Board site and found this database. There were 9 pages of results that I downloaded and then used readLines and regex to extract the zip codes for each school. There were 164 schools and only 142 unique zip codes. I used the maptools package to create the map and colored it based on the data.

First Post(Zeroth Post?)

Since I can't currently produce results, I'm going to substitute results by writing about my ambitious plans for the next few months on this blog. My plans are to 

• train a neural network to predict when a particular stock will split and then use Javascript to update stock prices daily and predict the split.
• train a neural network to predict numbers and letters and then use an HTML5 Canvas to gather data to predict on.
• put out a cool animation or graphic with Octave or R once a week.

Longer range when (if?) I figure out audio capture via HTML or Javascript it would be neat to train a neural network to detect accents.