One of my tweets featured at 99U

I tossed this one out there because I thought it was a lot of fun at the 2009 North American Paleontological Conference.  They were looking for looking for creative ways to mingle–so props to the student group at NAPC for being creative!

The blog post is just a bunch of tweets, but it’s nice to see mine on the list, you know?

99U | The 1 Question You Can Answer To Help Us Improve The 99U Conference

 

“Share the Road” Meeting

The Greenway & Trail Users Advisory group will be discussing “Share the Road” programs at their October 9 meeting. They meet at 7 PM at the GF Park District, 1210 – 7th avenue south. This meeting is open to residents of GF & EGF and is a place to discuss trails, outdoor recreation, and meet other outdoor enthusiasts. Check www.greenwayggf.com for more info.

From Engage the Forks at  http://www.engagetheforks.com/what-bugs-you/making-roadways-safer-for-drivers-and-cyclists.

Engage the Forks on MindMixer

Schaefs has mentioned MindMixer a time or two before in reference to Fargo.  The idea is that the city of Grand Forks could get suggestions and feedback about what is working and what isn’t, take stock of what seems important to people, and adjust things accordingly.

Now Grand Forks has one: Engage the Forks.  Will it work?  I’m cautiously optimistic.  If the site doesn’t become overrun with people who are negative about every single thing in their lives, and if the people who are supposed to be watching the site are, in fact, watching it, it could bring some great ideas forward.  I’ll be giving it a whirl.

I should note that this idea is nothing new, and even the MindMixer site design is just a rehash of the standard online message board/forum structure: there are message boards delineating the major topic groups (“categories”), sub-boards (“topics”) and the actual posts (“idea submissions”).  Posts are graded according to who agrees and/or comments on them, etc.  It’s interesting how different marketing of the features makes people more likely to use the system, and I wonder that if UND becomes more involved in Engage the Forks, will it become what http://talk.campusdakota.com (or even the defunct VoiceUND) was supposed to be?

Finally. Grand Forks Herald Endorses Mixed-Use Development

One major tenet of the complete streets movement is the promotion of mixed-use development, i.e., avoiding the “suburbia” problem by allowing dense residential and commercial space to be developed in the same area.  Gobal population and economic centers such as New York City, London, and Tokyo are prime examples of this model: build large buildings, put commercial space on the ground floor, and let people live upstairs.  The model is even mentioned in the Broadway show Rent, as Benny attempts to stop Maureen’s protest: “with condos on the top / whose rent keeps open our shops…”

The ubiquity of strip malls was mentioned to me before I moved to Grand Forks, almost seven years ago now.  With downtown gutted by the flood, developers moved to building commercial space wherever they could, as cheaply as possible, which resulted in a number of single-story strip malls built in commercial areas.  When I got here, I was surprised: why build single-story when you could build even higher and include apartments?  Nowhere does this seem sillier to me than north of the Ralph Engelstad Arena, where there are two strip malls taking up what could be some of the most valuable space “owned” by the University of North Dakota.  Dinkytown it ain’t, and even North Dakota State University has denser buildings on the edge of campus.

All of this brings me to this morning.  Just weeks after the announcement and positive review of a second WalMart (in a town of 55,000) by the powers-that-be, the Grand Forks Herald drops a bomb by coming out in favor of mixed-use development–and due to an online comment, no less.  I’ll skip past further expressions of shock.  Although the editorial sees mixed-use zoning as a way to alleviate the housing shortage, the additional implications are also positive for complete streets: reduction in the time/distance to commercial areas = reduction in miles driven (or even driving at all) = less traffic = safer-feeling streets = more people using alternative transportation = more people at “eye level” for businesses* = more economic activity = etc.

Is it possible in Grand Forks?  In Tom Dennis’ own words: “Well, let’s find out. The point is that it’s a fresh idea, one that the city now can set about exploring. And that kind of exploration is exciting because it’s the way problems get solved.”

OUR OPINION: Apartments on 32nd? Why not?
(A copy of the article is available on request.)

Using R to Create a Winner-Takes-All Raster from Point Data

 

I am to the point in my dissertation where I need to summarize a fair amount of data.  The full data structure will be in the final manuscript, but for now suffice it to say that I am storing data as latitude/longitude pairs in a flat-file database (and using Panorama Sheets to query and modify it as needed).  Point data can be exported from this database as a CSV (actually tab-separated) file and converted to a shapefile in QGIS.

For this project, the globe is divided into 1×1 degree cells.  Each cell in my study area contains at least one vector point in my locality shapefile (exported from te database, above).  Many cells contain multiple points, each of which may represent a locality interpreted as representing a different paleoenvironment than the others.  I am using R to summarize these data points into a raster for each time slice I wish to study.

The method below emplys a winner-takes-all method, which is to say that during conversion from point data to raster, the points within each cell are evaluated for the values in the field ‘env_id’ (environment ID number, since we can’t use text in a raster), and the most frequent value of ‘env_id’ “wins” the cell and becomes the value burned into the output raster.

### Converting a point shapefile (with environment in numeric
### field env_id) into a raster
### Winner-takes-all.

# Load libraries for raster, maptools and mode
library(raster);
library(maptools);
library(modeest);

# Read in the locality point shapefile
locs<-readShapePoints("shapefile.shp");

# Make the base raster.
basegrid<-raster(ncols=360, nrows=180);

# Create a subset for the age you are looking at
locs_subset<-subset(locs,locs$time_slice==10);

# Convert the locality shapefile to raster.  Use the most frequent
# value of numeric field 'env_id'.
r<-rasterize(locs_subset, basegrid, field='env_id', fun=function(x, ...){mfv(x)[1]});

# View the plot (centered on SA)
plot(r,xlim=c(-100,-30),ylim=c(-70,52));

# View the plot (all)
# plot(r);

# Write the raster to file
writeRaster(r,"10 Ma.gtiff","GTiff");

 

Output from R looks something like the top image, and can be manipulated as any other raster in QGIS etc.  Scale bar shows the numeric values used to represent different paleoenvironments in the raster; it’s not actually a continuous scale but I didn’t have a need to change the default R output.

Additional notes:

  • In rasterize(), to use a function other than the ones enumerated in the docs, it needs to be defined within the call to rasterize() is used above and here.
  • One example of reading in shapefile data to R is here.
  • I learned about package modeest here.