Below are changes made to the IRE Conference schedule as of Wednesday. For the most up-to-date schedule and description information, be sure to visit the conference page or download the conference app.

THURSDAY

Speaker change: Inspect This | 11:20 a.m. in Salon J
James Drew, The Dallas Morning News, replaces Tom Frank, USA TODAY, on this panel

Title and time change:  INN & Public Media changed to INN Training: Maintaining independence: How the new nonprofit newsrooms can thrive in a time of partnerships, mergers and acquisitions
This session is now from 1:30 – 2:30 p.m. in Salon K ...

The deadline is today at 7 p.m. CT to get the early registration rate for the 2013 IRE Conference. Join us from June 20-23 in San Antonio, and you'll find panels full of this year's Pulitzer and IRE award winners, new tools for investigative journalism, tips for investigating on your beat and much more. Early registration ends on June 5. You can also register on site, but the rate goes up.

Dozens of this year's major award winners will speak at the conference, including several Pulitzer Prize winners, duPont winners and IRE Medal winners:

• Reporters from ...

Meet with a book agent at this year's IRE Conference in San Antonio. Learn how to pitch your material and meet with a book agent to share your work during the designated time slot. What else shouldn't you miss at IRE 2013? The list is long. Check it out ...

Make your plans now to join us in San Antonio for the 2013 Investigative Reporters and Editors Conference.

Check out the list of panels and sessions -- this isn't everything, just a sampling of what you'll be able to dig into when we gather from June 20-23.

Keynote speaker Marcela Turati will detail the dangers journalists face in Mexico. We'll showcase sports investigations with help from Deadspin, The Washington Post's Sally Jenkins and more. And in dozens of panels and hands-on sessions, you'll be armed with the tools, tips and strategies you need to ...

If you’re working from a Mac computer or getting into truly large datasets, Access may not be a viable option as a database manager. (It doesn’t work on Macs, and there are row limitations.) A good alternative is MySQL, an open-source database manager, which Alex Richards of the Chicago Tribune taught on Friday.

MySQL essentially installs a server that runs in the background on your computer. But if you don’t really understand what that means, don’t let it scare you. There are a handful of secondary applications that let you interface with MySQL in a way ...

After teaching a full day of data science during NewsCamp on Thursday, Hadley Wickham on Friday morning presented a brief introduction to data science called “Data science for the perplexed. For everyone.”

Wickham is an Assistant Professor at Rice University and working for RStudio. He describes himself as a statistician by training, and tried to offer some insight into the buzzword that is “data science.” 

He first cited the unofficial and often used description: “a blend of red bull-fueled hacking and espresso-inspired statistics." He also referenced this often-used venn diagram.

Data science isn’t just about hacking with big data ...

A CAR conference atendee throws a ball down the lane on Thursday night in Louisville. Photo by Travis Hartman, IRE/NICAR.

Stephanie Peuriere from Strasbourg University bowls at the after hours bowling event on Thursday night in Louisville. Photo by Travis Hartman, IRE/NICAR.

Google Fusion tables has a new look.

You can learn how to use it with Google Fusion Tables tutorials, and get a grip on how to import map data, and style, filter and share your creation with the world.

Learn step-by-step how to formulate “lots of points” maps, heat maps and intensity maps.

Some other cool tools: Fusion Tables Layer wizard to add custom layers, and shpescape to dump shapefile (like what you use in ArcGIS) into a Fusion table.

Geolocation tools help you search for social media activity buzzing in your beat, on your block and even in your building. The following tools help you search by geolocation information embedded in tweets, Facebook updates, youtube videos and more.

“Geolocation is one of the most exciting things for journalists out in the field,” presenter Doug Haddix said.

Some sweet tools:

• Ban.jo lets you see the exact location of updates and tweets – great for scaring your friends at cocktail parties.
• Mappeo is a YouTube geo-search, which allows you to see videos posted in a certain area. Search “Sandy near New ...

I walked into the Tableau Public session with absolutely no experience -- and within about 10 minutes the instructor had us open up some data, sort through a few of the elements, and create a visualization.  Its immediate ease of use is clear. To produce quick, coherent interactive charts seemed pretty easy.  The further we went along though; it became apparent that there was some serious horsepower under the hood.  And with great power comes responsibility.  More on this later.

Our instructor, Mike Klaczynski, started with the proper way to format data for Tableau, and in the ...