Monthly Archives: April 2014

Boston high schools- by the numbers

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My Quest for Truth

It all started with a simple question: How many high schools are there in Boston?

High-schools.com lists “all public and private high schools located in Boston” and says there are 17. Greatschools.org lists 32 public and private high schools. US News says there are 32 schools just within the Boston Public School District. Wikipedia says 33. The Massachusetts Department of Education lists 42 public and private.

I compiled a list of 56.

Why the discrepancy over a seemingly basic question? Is it because

  • We can’t agree on what “high school” means?
  • We can’t agree on what “in Boston” means?

Charter schools, special education, adult education, vocational training, private schools, religious schools- there are many ways to designate what is and is not a “high school” that could explain the differences cheap air jordan.
Boston public schools, Boston city limits, Greater Boston- the discrepancy may also be caused by varying definitions of what it means for a high school to be “in Boston.”

I aim to create an authoritative central portal that lists all high schools in Boston. I will continue exploring this in future assignments (talk to me if you want to collaborate!).

Cold Calling For Data

To preempt a similar situation arising when trying to figure out how many high school students are there in Boston, this time I chose a bottom-up rather than a top-down approach. I picked up the phone and began cold calling every high school on my list. I asked every school receptionist two questions:

  • How many students go to your school?
  • What makes your school special?

I chose these two questions because I thought they would be a good foundation to explore both quantitative and qualitative data, and the answers could give me potential follow-on questions if I continue focusing on Boston high schools.

Another Course to College- their Annual Report states 220 students; their receptionist told me 224.

Boston Adult Technical Academy- their Annual Report states 257 students; their receptionist told me 300.

Boston Arts Academy- their Annual Report states 420 students; their receptionist told me 400.

Boston International High School- their Annual Report states 359 students; their receptionist told me 500.

… and the list goes on. I could present more data but I’m not sure what story I want it to tell yet. Yes, I could add up all the numbers and create “the authoritative Julia guide to how many high school students there are in Boston.” Yes, I could put together another “a-ha” moment showing the discrepancies in calculating this number across organizations and websites. But I don’t want to present a repeat of other dry, going nowhere data pieces.

Telling a Story

I recently read the book Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die which nailed home for me the importance of telling a compelling story. With the school mapping project I am working on, I have been more focused on organizing and presenting the information and hoping others will find stories to tell, rather than having to tell the story myself. My model has been Wikipedia, which presents information in a way that is useful to the reader. Would you say that Wikipedia tells a story?

My aim has been to build a school mapping platform using data and communication tools that are informative and useful. I thought that would be enough. What I’m struggling with now is how to build a platform that tells a story, and what story do I want it to tell original new balance.

original new balance

Mapping Election discrepancies

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Kenya recently marked one year after the 2013 polls. It is common fact that the election went on peacefully though several questions remain unanswered to date. As per the constitution,  for one to be validly elected, the winner must garner more than 50 percent plus 1 of the total votes cast.

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{Need to figure a way to embed html elements on this blog!!!}

Can be accessed here

One year down the line, I have decided to look at the events before the election. Mainly the voter registration statistics. Compare these statistics against the numbers used on the election day. The 2013 election was one of the most contested on all fronts. From the use of social media, the use of cleaver PR strategies to plain political schemes which may not be easily identifiable on the surface. Take for instance, the push by member of certain areas forcing members of their communities to register.  A simple example was to the lead up to the election, bus conductors would request to see one’s voters card to be eligible to catch the bus(matatu) to their destination. This of course pushed the registration numbers in favor of certain politicians. A counter argument could be made that,  other communities that were as not hands on around voter registration have no right to complain of such tactics. One year down the line, politicians who suffered from this maneuver are asking citizens to forgo family planning in-order to increase their political base in future.  This is indeed shallow as those most likely to be born would not be eligible to vote for the next eighteen years.  Also not forgetting the fast changing political dynamic.

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DATA STORY: Climate Disasters are already happening

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What did I try to do?

I chose the two news stories that I would have been covering these last two weeks if I had been in Madrid and I though of how to communicate them with data visualization. The two stories were:

– WHO’s report  about deaths atributed to air pollution.

– UN’s intergovernmental panel on climate change (IPCC) latest report warming that climate change will be an important threat to security, food and humankind.

My (many) DIFFICULTIES

My first difficulty was acces to data. I got a press release and a longer written report from WHO about its latest findings about air pollution consequences for health, but I didn’t have the data and I couldn’t find it online. I asked for it and they sent me data from 2004!

I tried to find air pollution and deaths information for Europe  and for Spain, and… it was not possible to find anything suitable to put into a spreadsheet.

After having not success on the air pollution I jumped into the climate change story. On a week where there are tons of literature in western media about the natural disasters that are yet to come because of global warming, I wanted to develop a data visualization story showing that we are already suffering an increase of extreme weather events that seems to have something to do with climate change.

Again, I couldn’t find the data for Europe or Spain, though this time I was lucky with the US.

NOAA has a compilation of the largest climate disasters occurred in the US since 1980. Data was on PDF format and although I tried different programs, I couldn’t converted it into an excel spreadsheet… So, I did a spreadsheet by myself with the data from the last 3 years, which took me about 4 hours.

Next step was mapping the data. I tried ArcGIS Online, Google Fusion Tables and Tilemill and I didn’t success with any of them because after many hours I got to the conclusion that the data collected didn’t really match with the idea of visualizacion that I had. I learned that I should have collected and organized the data in a different way to get the result I wanted; and that I should have asked for help to somebody who knows how to code, but when I figured this out it was too late.

Since I wanted to show something for the class tomorrow, I decided to use some of my data with a tool I wanted to learn about: Timeline.

The result

So, here are the main climate disasters occurred in the US in 2013, according to NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center

 

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Finding data on the Syrian conflict

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Finding credible data on the conflict in Syria has been a difficult endeavour for both journalists and policy-makers. One approach many have been finding useful is the use of crowdsourced maps. Syria Tracker and the Women Under Siege Syria chapter are the most noteworthy crowdsourcing initiatives that aim at mapping the conflict in Syria with the help of local volunteers.

Syria Tracker has considerable geospatial data on the number of civilian deaths, recorded by volunteers, and “resulting from the Assad regime” since March 2011. Although this dataset must be taken with a grain of salt, as it only represents the work of activists working again the government, it gives detailed accounts of the causes of deaths (either through air strike, gun shot, bomb or the use of chemical weapons) and the victim’s identity (gender and age).

Women Under Siege monitors acts of sexual violence which are reportedly committed against men and women. Open Street Map is another crowdsourcing initiative, on a global scale, which geospatial experts contribute to for the sake of good mapping. In Syria, Open Street Map offers comprehensive maps on the country’s main roads, natural resources and facilities location (such as hospitals and schools).

By translating this geospatial data into a GIS (geographic information system) software (known as ARC Map), one can visualize if there is a correlation between different aspects of the conflict.

The following map, for example, shows the location of refugee camps surrounding the Syrian borders, the major border crossings into the country and the main IDP (Internally Displaced Persons) camps within the country.  All camps are obviously close to transit points and to major roads.

Refugee Camps and border

The next map shows the location of all of the IDP camps and the location of the main waterways (rivers and lakes) within Syria. This is important because it shows that the livelihoods of the internally displaced is closely linked to access to water (as you can see most camps are situated near a waterway).

IDP Camps and Water.j

In the end, the availability of geospatial data on conflict areas, (and in this case on Syria), is bountiful. However, this type of data is not available to the general public. I was able to acquire all of the data above for free but one must acquire technical skills to be able to make sense of the data. GIS is one way, among many others, to spatially visualize data.

Data story: Internet use in Romania

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The approach I took was to look at data available on Internet use in Romania, compare it to countries in EU28, interrogate it, and come up with potential stories — my initial interests to find something on citizen involvement.

This post is more an account of the process than a finished story; it reflects better the lessons I learned.

My first and most immediate lesson is that tracking good data and making a relevant data set – even when the information is publicly available – is time consuming (especially when you use different sources). The other lesson was even more humbling. Once I gathered the data I needed, I realized that combining it, merging it, and illustrating the new set takes skills that I don’t yet have (both technically & creatively), and the learning curve was to steep to master for this assignment. I will keep trying.

What I used and looked through: data from Eurostat (the EU’s statistical office), ITU (UN’s information technology arm), UNESCO, Net Index etc. What was great, although it took some time to realize, is that ITU and Net Index make some of their data available on Google’s Public Data, which comes with handy visualization tools. Eurostat also creates visualizations, but they are less appealing.

My first step was to rank the percentage of individuals using Internet in EU28 (ITU, 2012), a dataset which has Romania coming in last. (The Eurostat numbers for 2013 shows it has now passed Greece and Bulgaria, so one potential question would be whether the penetration rate is accelerating — it was almost flat in the years when most countries had their boom – 1997-2003). Another interesting question that comes up looking at the data is whether EU accession (Romania and Bulgaria joined in 2007) has sped up Internet penetration. Countries now vying for accession – Turkey, Macedonia, Serbia – have even lower usage.

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I then looked at download speed in EU28 on Net Index, knowing I’ll find the reverse. According to Net Index, Romania has the third fastest download speed in the world. This discrepancy remains staggering and the potential causes/correlations are interesting to investigate: #8 in the world in terms of originating attack traffic (Akamai data),  high level of piracy (BSA data), a strong engineer culture and a budding startup culture, a hacker/cyber crime base.

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Another question I’d explore is whether such low internet use might be explained by the urban/rural divide, still about 50/50 (53/47 to be more precise) in Romania compared to EU28, and, more interestingly, holding steady for the past 15 years – most countries, according to UNESCO data have experienced urban migration

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The speed/penetration difference is even more interesting if you look at other indicators in which Romania continue to be reliably at the bottom: e-commerce and regular use (daily & weekly). This data and the accompanying visualizations were generated from Eurostat data.

Ecommerce

RegularUse

Predictably, Romania also ranks last in e-governance/interaction with public authorities.

PublicAuthorities

PublicAuthoritiesMAP[The gray circle is that country’s level of interaction. The red outline is the EU28 average.]

Looking at the public’s interaction with government, a host of other question and stories spring to mind:

  • what’s with the gigantic outlier in 2012? Is it a question of measurement? Did something happen? Was data misreported (intentionally or not?)
  • does this lack of opportunity appear in any candidate’s discourse/promises (presidential elections are slated for the fall)?
  • what explains these numbers? How does this explain the gigantic recent failure of the e-Romania portal for which the Romanian government spent 8 millions of euro?
  • what does this mean for initiatives such as ReStart Romania, which aim to use technology to further public dialogue and change?

Other directions suggested by the data:

  • there seems to be a digital divide. Does it track along geography (as mentioned above)? What about income? How does it manifest itself in different generations (e.g. 50 percent of people between the ages of 35 and 45 go online every week compared with the EU28 average of 82 percent.)?
  • the computer/internet literacy market (both public and private). Eurostat data shows only 26 percent of Romanians have basic computer skills (the EU28 average is 60 percent). What programs exist? Are they working – why/why not?

Womens T-Shirt – Military-Inspired Green

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This (military-inspired green T-shirt) provides a form fitting look that is both flattering and slimming. The shirt can be worn alone, or paired with jeans or dress slacks. Because of its thin structure, it can work as an additional layer on top of an outfit or even a base layer for a cold weather ensemble. The mesh fabric serves as a breathable layer, making it perfect for warm or cold seasons. No matter how you wear this shirt, the form-fitting material will perfectly accentuate the convex curve of your body. The small round neck of the shirt’s design will compliment and create slender neck and facial lines. Military styled items are very versatile making this shirt an excellent choice for any occasion, including shopping or a date after work. The shirt from (dresshead) comes in 4 sizes (S, M, L, XL). For reference, a M is a 78 cm length and a 73 cm bust.

air max 1