The power of Excel

Ever since I took an Excel class in high school, I've known it's a program capable of much more than I'd ever be able to use it for. At the time, we learned some of the simple formulas, and then moved on to more specific/complex ones. At one point, we displayed a detailed mortgage plan for a home. What surprised me this time around, however, is how quickly it was able to sort through data.

The ACLED dataset we are using is quite long - over 99,000 rows. This is because each row represents a political violence event in some country, on some particular date. When I wanted to summarize this data to show fatalities by year in each country, I started with the SUMIF statement. This worked but required a bit of manual manipulation. Searching for a way to nest the SUMIF statement, I found out about SUMIFS and how to set multiple conditions. This allowed me to check two whole columns (all >99,000 rows) for matching terms - the country name, year, and to sum up the number of fatalities. Once an entire row was written out, it could be copied and pasted to the row below, then the replace function used to change the country name to search for. This ended up being a great time saver.


-David

Heatmap Outlook Looking Good!

Upon looking into the heatmap.js example link (included in the annotated bibliography) and after some navigating, I found snippets of code that will allow of modifications of any given variable that one one would imagine from a heat map (from opacity, to radius coverage, to coloring, and more).  Looking further, I eventually found a Googlemaps Heatmap Plugin Example (shown and linked to below) that seems to provide the following:

1.  A means for one to set a start latitude coordinate, a start longitude coordinate, and a start zoom value (which, as shown above, are set for North America and will have to be shifted to Africa's coordinates and zoomed out a little more in order to show all of Africa).
2. A pre-made map of Africa (we will just have to use the longitude and latitude coordinate system).
3. A means of setting a defined min and max value for heatmaps (thus providing for more reliable contrasts between various plotted values).
4. A system in which it can pull in data values and only needs four things:
1. A name (for distinguishing different data fields)
2. A longitude for the data value
3. A latitude for the data value
4. A value for which is being expressed

 Lastly, I found one of the links led to the code on GitHub and downloaded a .zip file of the project.  That being said, I have five major objectives that I wish to strive for and complete by this Friday:

1. Log in to a computer in the Linux lab in Hodson, log onto the Pluto server, and host the downloaded project files.
2. Once the files are on the Pluto server, experiment and figure out how to get a map (like that above) using the downloaded material.  Then tamper and get Africa to be shown by default (rather than North America).  This will require briefly researching Africa's latitude and longitude values... thus, I will have to add the source that I get these from to the Annotated Bibliography.  Lastly, customize the zoom to best work towards this new default layout of showing Africa.
3. Using the example values (like those provided above), experiment with the coloring feature of the heatmap.js to better express the future use of our variables and also experiment with overlapping points and how best to deal with this possibility and maximizing clarity.
4. Communicate with my other group members in finding out from where the data values are coming from and figure out how to pull in these values and utilize them into this hosted project.
5. Get the heatmap animated!!  Implement a time system (because up until this point the values will be constant)... make a group decision on whether to implement a sliding scale, a start on load and repeat on finish, or other type of implementation.  Also code will need to be modified to allow for the expression of different variables and the implementation of time.  Depending on how much system memory is used to run this, simplifications may have to take place.  We have a map that has 'x' places in which 'y' independent variable occurs in year 'a' out of 'b' years and 'c' places in which 'z' dependent variable (let alone the other dependent variables) occurs in year 'a' out of 'b' years... along with code that will handle what to do when two different variables have overlapping areas (let alone once three or four start overlapping).  I can easily see the computer lagging out handling all of this... but on top of all of that (because we are the CS students that we are), it would not do to have the program animate with a great deal of lag, but rather we wish it to do all of that mentioned prior and animate in a very smooth and non-laggy way.  Thus, why I can foresee some simplifications possibly being necessary.

IMF

In a research article by Kristina et al. (2011), the free market fundamentalism of the IMF and the World Bank had a disastrous impact on the development of the African countries. This impact was in contrast to the stated aims of the Structural Adjustment Program (SAP) as per which the development perspective can be understood in terms of structural changes, economic growth, and poverty eradication. The authors make a claim that the policies advocated by these institutions rarely analyze the consequences on human rights of the people of recipient countries. For example, the policies imposed by IMF and World Bank requires privatization of the industry in the recipient country and thus the cocoa industry in Cote d’Ivoire was privatized for complying with this policy. Now, in order to repay the loan taken from IMF, farmers are under increased pressure to produce more cocoa which has further increased the illegal exploitation of children. The African government itself has lowered the legal age of children for agricultural work to twelve. This further proves that the African political system is a major contributor towards the poverty and lack of development of African inhabitants. The monumental failures of the internal African public policies; the ways in which African states have been created; and the complicity of African governments has largely resulted into the underdevelopment of Africa. It is also affirmed that the vagaries of the external environment controlled by the industrialized countries are responsible for Africa’s economic woes.
          Fawzya

Google Maps API

After we covered papers that discuss using the Google Maps API to showcase data on the map, all in all the results indicate that Google Maps provide a highly responsive, elegant, and an intuitive interface coupled with detailed street and aerial imagery data. In addition, map controls can be embedded in the product to give users full control over map navigation and the display of street and imagery data. The easy and relatively simple customization of the Google Map’s API to meet (specific) application needs has led to its rapid acceptance. Thus, it is clear that the use of Google Street View for classifying roof materials has truly made this VGI application unique.

Fawzya

Next steps

Now that our literature review is complete, we'll be able to move onto statistical analysis of our datasets. We all read papers on Africa and its history of political violence. Additionally, we covered papers that discuss using the Google Maps API to showcase data on the map. 

The paper that I annotated on this subject dealt with American Foulbrood Disease (AFB). This is a disease that has the ability to wreak havoc on honeybee colonies. Honeybees play a vital ecological (and economic) role in their pollination of plants. The authors were able to use the Google Maps API to help visualize AFB outbreaks and to better monitor it.

 
-David

Introduction

Team - Fawzya Alghamdi, David Ford, Tyler Martin
   
Our project is exploratory in nature. The goal is to uncover any correlations between armed political violence/aggression in African countries and WHO data for African countries. The WHO data includes various quality of life factors, mortality rates, etc. The results will be visualized through Google Maps via the Google Maps API. 

Wrapping up

• Annotated bibliography

Partial completion, to be completed

In between shoveling snow and consumption of hot liquids, the following will be completed over the weekend and on Monday before class this coming Tuesday - 

• Literature review
• Project proposal (based partially on lit. review)
• Deliverables schedule