Building Dataset for Age of Iowa City
May 10, 2016
A shapefile of Iowa City buildings, and those for all of Johnson County, IA is easy to obtain from a public repsository. But, the age/build year of those buildings is not in the data. Originally, I was going to do all of Johnson County, IA but that proved to be very slow to load so I opted to do just Iowa City - which presented a few problems. Read more...
Generating Sets of Random Points Within Different Geographic Boundaries
November 3, 2015
Oftentimes when presented with a set of addresses not all of them geocode properly (or at all). Sometimes, we can simply drop/omit these addresses - eating a 3-5% loss in a dataset from bad address quality is often acceptable. But, what happens when you have a small data set and each datum is linked back to something else you need for analysis (i.e. survey responses)?
One option (other than dropping the addresses) is to simply geocode to the city/state or center of a zip code. However, this can introduce an unwanted spatial bias. ...
Scraping Data to for the Cage Page
April 25, 2015
A year in the Cage is no small feat, and not for the weak willed. Building a web page complete with data on all of Cage's movies seemed like the best approach for tracking progress, while providing an avenue for tracking, reviewing, and recording quotes.
IMDB discourages/prohibits data mining. But, this was a small task that was able to run in a fairly short amount of time. So, looked at the IMDB page structure(s) and scraped the relevant info and wrote it to an html page and CSV ...
Evaluating the New Iowa City Food Truck Ordinance
April 1, 2015.
Iowa City is slated to expand food truck operations through a new city ordinance that will hopefully be adopted (story). But, the question is where can food trucks operate safely given these new guidlines?
First, I found a mostly comprehensive list of restaurants in Iowa City since foodtrucks are prohibited from operating within 150 feet of a restaurant. This list doesn't include KFC, McDonalds, or similar type estblishments....