organizer notes for data mascara

participation.md

Data Mascara: NYC Python's data themed office hours, Monday evenings 7-9pm

###Speakers:

Chatting about basic skills is useful, or even best practices would be really interesting everyone attending. You can talk about a project you've worked on or pick a theme from the list of themes.

###Volunteers:

It doesn't matter what level of Python you have, we welcome everyone's help. From setting up and cleaning up for events, to finding speakers and interesting topics - more folks help things go smoother. If you would like to share your expertise in Python, stop by to help answer questions!

For more information check these links: Data Mascara NYCPython.org

questions.md

As part of data collection to gauge interest(s) of participates, a list was kept to note questions folks want to learn.

Specific questions folks have asked:

• how do you do data mining? how is scraping websites the only way to get data?
• what is the difference between numpy, pandas, scikit-learn?
• what is nltk? have you used it before?
• what is this code doing? could you explain it to me?
• how do I install pandas/numpy/etc/etc?

themes.md

Interesting themes to explore

• NYC Local government related

  • Data sources: NYC Open Data
  • Citi bikes

• Urban planning

  • Housing projects
  • Public Transportation
  • Real estate zoning

• Python Skills

  • Integrating multiple technologies (i.e. hadoop, d3js)
  • Designing database schemas
  • Data mining, scraping, & munging
  • Building a module or package

• Big Picture

  • What are the current trends in data science world?
  • What are qualifications and skills needed to be employed as a data scientist?

Here's the tip to pull the NY cab fare data from 2013

On Urban Planning, NYU just recently started a Ms. in Urban Informatics, maybe some of those folks would be interesting in dropping by.