Last week the Library worked with Wendy Fry at NBC7 to analyze GPS records of street sweeping and parking violations. We haven’t got the data online yet – it’s about 3GB, 11M GPS records – but let us know if you are interested in accessing it. A condensed version of the data is available as a heatmap of blocks where tickets were issued on days the streets were not swept.
On October 3, the Center for Human Dynamics in the Mobile Age will host a Big Data Hackathon at San Diego State University. Contestants will use data analysis and programming to solve civic problems related to water conservation, disaster recovery and crime prevention. Visit the Devpost website for details and to register, or hit Github for the tech details and data.
Finally, our legislators are getting below the surface of the Open Data issue and addressing one of the deeper plains: Open Data is nearly useless when it is delivered in PDF. To address this problem, our very own Brian Maienschein (well, the inland “us” ) has introduced AB 169, which mandates that when agencies publish open data, it is published in a machine readable format. Yea! One prayer answered! If you are in district 77, send Maienschein some love, if not, tell your assembly person to get with the program.
We completed our 2015 Data Contest with final presentations and winners at the awards ceremony on Tuesday. Here are the winners and their presentations:
We also have two Honorable Mentions:
We completed the 2015 SDSU Data Contest on Saturday, with a fantastic collection of excellent submissions. The Judges are reviewing them now, but until you learn the winners at the Awards Ceremony on Tuesday, you can see all of the submissions here. Everyone is welcome at the Awards Ceremony, so follow the link to register.
Here is the schedule for the data contest hangouts this week. The next one is Monday at noon, and will present tips on accessing data from the Ambry databases. We’ll be broadcasting these events via Hangouts on Air. Visit our Google+ Page to attend the event.
The SDSU Data Contest Kickoff is tomorrow! Better register if you haven’t already. Here are all of the last minute details. Time and Location:
Before:
Bring:
Staff Contacts:
Also, Our Twitter hashtag is #sddc15
To get ready for the Data Contest, you’ll want to ensure that your laptop already has installed on it all of the tools you’ll need. There is a set of tools that we use in most of our programs, and it will serve as a good base for your contest toolkit. These tools are:
Additionally, we frequently use Sqlite files for data storage and to sort and search thorough data using SQL. Sqlite is already installed almost everywhere, but you may want to get a Sqlite GUI to make it more like working with a spreadsheet. If you’d like to get a visual introduction to these tools, we’ll be running Google Hangouts to demo the tools. Signup and get contact information for these sessions at our Meetup Page. This same set of tools will serve you well if you come to the full day data conference that the Python Meetup group is hosting, starting at 8:30 on the same day as the Contest. Come early, learn some useful skills, and put them to the test in the afternoon. Visit the Data Science FunConference registration page for details and to get a free ticket.
The SDSU / Data Library Data Contest has teamed up with UCSD, Python User Group and several Data Science User’s groups to now offer a full day event with two morning tutorials (R and Python) a mid-day exhibition with many Data Science projects and software demos, an afternoon Machine Learning challenge and the kick off to the SDSU / Data Library Data Contest. Visit the signup page to join the contest, learn more about data science, and have a chance to win part of the $2,100 in prizes. Visit the Conference Eventbright page to register for the conference.
_The Student Data Contest is in less than two weeks, so it’s time to get your tools ready. If you are a student and want a shot at $2,100 in prizes, signup for the contest. _ One of the best tools available for quickly visualizing data is Tableau, and best of all, if you don’t need to connect to a database, Tableau Public is free. Tableau allows you to quickly produce beautiful charts and tables, and makes it easy to embed those visualizations on the web. Tableau runs on both Mac and Windows, but while it has a very well designed user interface, it does have its biases; you’ll want to spend some time learning how it expects you to build visualizations before the contest. So, download Tableau Public and spend a bit of time learning how to produce basic visualizations. It will really pay off during the contest, and you’ll have a valuable addition to your tool box for future use.