Dana Bauer danabauer

#Ideas for PhillyRising Applications

A citizen engagement application (or set of applications) that connects people to the City, empowers them to get involved in their community through volunteering and attending City related events including PhillyRising events and meetings, rewards their efforts through technology and socializes their experience.

Applications should be a mobile (web or native) designed to engage citizens in efforts to improve their City. These apps would serve as resources / tools for locating facilities, learning about events occurring throughout the city, encourage participation in civic events, and connect neighbors. The engagement aspect of these applications is critical – they should link neighbors to other neighbors, and also to individuals from outside the community who are interested in engaging across the city.

The first step for any application is to map city facilities and resources, and then use the phone’s GPS to determine which are nearest to the user’s current location. P

Mathematics: What do grad students in math do all day?

by Yasha Berchenko-Kogan

A lot of math grad school is reading books and papers and trying to understand what's going on. The difficulty is that reading math is not like reading a mystery thriller, and it's not even like reading a history book or a New York Times article.

The main issue is that, by the time you get to the frontiers of math, the words to describe the concepts don't really exist yet. Communicating these ideas is a bit like trying to explain a vacuum cleaner to someone who has never seen one, except you're only allowed to use words that are four letters long or shorter.

What can you say?

Extent indicator globe using d3.geo.orthographic and radial gradients.

Slippy map code from:
http://bl.ocks.org/3943330 by tmcw
http://bl.ocks.org/4132797 by mbostock

Map tiles from Stamen

The difference between XYZ and TMS tiles and how to convert between them

Lots of tile-based maps use either the XYZ or TMS scheme. These are the maps that have tiles ending in /0/0/0.png or something. Sometimes if it's a script, it'll look like &z=0&y=0&x=0 instead. Anyway, these are usually maps in Spherical Mercator.

Good examples are OpenStreetMap, Google Maps, MapBox, MapQuest, etc. Lots of maps.

Most of those are in XYZ. The best documentation for that is slippy map tilenames on the OSM Wiki, and Klokan's Tiles a la Google.

redo: Combine Several Fields into One.

A sort of continuation of GIS with Python, Shapely, and Fiona.

Combine several fields into one with Python, Shapely, and Fiona! You'll also want GDAL around.

First, let's start out with data. I'll use Natural Earth Countries 1:50m. Download that file and move it to a directory.

What

Roll your own iPython Notebook server with Amazon Web Services (EC2) using their Free Tier.

What are we using? What do you need?

An active AWS account. First time sign-ups are eligible for the free tier for a year
One Micro Tier EC2 Instance
With AWS we will use the stock Ubuntu Server AMI and customize it.
Anaconda for Python.
Coffee/Beer/Time

	#!/usr/bin/env python
	# -- coding: utf-8 --

	import optparse
	import mapnik
	import sys
	import os

	parser = optparse.OptionParser(usage="""%prog datasource files (like .geojson, .shp, .csv, .sqlite, .osm, .kml)


	int currentIndex;
	boolean hasBB;
	PImage currentImage;

	// we'll have a look in the data folder
	String absolutePath = "path/to/images";
	java.io.File folder = new java.io.File(absolutePath);

	ArrayList<String> bbOutput;

	import gifAnimation.*;

	GifMaker gifExport;
	int frames = 0;
	int totalFrames = 120;

	public void setup() {
	smooth();
	size(400, 400);

	# Editor backup files
	*.bak
	*~