Control totals of a data.frame

When you are conducting a business analysis project with a data extract from the company's internal system, professional risk management suggests you make sure you are not missing any records or double counting any records. But you certainly don't want to look at every record. Yikes!

Auditors solve this predicament with control totals. When the sums of key fields and the numbers of records match known values, usually from some well-established "production report," it can be assumed your data "reconciles." *

What does it mean to calculate "control totals" of a general data.frame?

Google's New Search Algorithm Introduces Bias

Larry Magid has a technology "article" on the local radio station. I always turn up the volume when Magid comes on. Today's spot tells how Google Search going forward may be biased for you personally based on your Google-stored relationships. This might be handy sometimes. For example, when looking for a restaurant you may want results skewed toward your friends' favorites. Google calls these "private results." For other searches, "private results" could hide or demote the actual results you'd hoped to find. On his website Magid shows how to turn off the privatizing feature after each search, as well as how to remove it for all searches via your Google settings.

Magid mentions a third option: "Incognito" mode. In Incognito mode, it's as if you're not logged in to Google, in which case your bias-influencing relationships are (presumably!) not available. You can open a new Incognito window in Chrome via Ctrl-Shift-N. Here is the link to Google's instructions on how to browse Incognito-ly on various devices.

A horizontal scrolling code box in blogger

To display code in a blog I like to use a "code box" because I think it presents a more "professional" look. But it's not that easy with blogger.

By "code box" I mean a "window" with a monospaced font and vertical and horizontal scrolling bars as necessary. The internet search solutions I found almost worked, but not quite with blogger because the horizontal scroll bar wouldn't show up as expected. The vertical bar was there, but not the horizontal bar. Go figure.

But if you are comfortable hitting the HTML button next to Compose, that's easily fixed.