Piton Data Lab

“The International Space Apps Challenge is your opportunity to build, create, and invent new solutions to challenges of global importance.”

While Piton’s work to democratize data usually focuses on neighborhoods, the Space Apps Challenge is a useful to remember that we’re all part of a global (and solar system, and galactic, and universal) community.

“Future-Ready Content,” by Sara Wachter-Boettcher, A List Apart

Before Nathan Yau, before visualization software (or much software at all), before Tufte, even, there were these:

Chart Port shares three data visualization books — full of detailed hand-drawn charts, maps and graphs — in PDF form.

From Stanford’s free textbooks and classes to Google Correlate, Knight news Challenge winner Overview picks the best data ideas of 2011.

In the Atlantic/Cities, Levitz writes about the often tricky process of naming and identifying neighborhoods in cities. The article references a report from the Urban Institute studying how residents in 10 Making Connections cities identified their neighborhoods: “Denver ranked highest in place identity, with 58 percent of its residents calling their neighborhood the same title as the official name.”

Occupy George provides downloadable templates for people to print infographics on dollar bills. From the website:

Money talks, but not loud enough for the 99%. By circulating dollar bills stamped with fact-based infographics, Occupy George informs the public of America’s daunting economic disparity one bill at a time. Because money knowledge is power.

This report from the Knight Foundation looks at the business models of startup news organizations like MinnPost, Texas Tribune and Voice of San Diego:

…high-quality reporting alone will not create an organization that can sustain its ability to produce news in the public interest. 

Instead, successful news organizations – even the nonprofit ones  - have to act like digital businesses, making revenue experimentation, entrepreneurship and community engagement important pieces of the mix. Understanding how to create social and economic value and how to adapt and innovate are just as important as good content.

Transit: An Essential Ingredient for Education Equity

Although there are several high-performing schools in the Children’s Corridor, none are within a mile of the planned FasTracks stations.

As Metro Denver expands its FasTracks light rail system, the Mile High Transit Opportunity Collaborative (MHTOC) is working to create equitable housing and economic development. A common question MHTOC hears is, “How does transportation relate to my issue?” This map demonstrates how transportation options are essential ingredients for education equity.

The Piton Foundation is focused on improving children’s health and education in the Children’s Corridor, a 41-square mile stretch of northeast Denver and northwest Aurora. The Eagle P3 East Corridor light rail expansion runs through the Children’s Corridor. To better understand how transit interfaces with education quality, we mapped the light rail alignment, planned station locations and bus lines on top of child demographic disparities and school locations displayed by performance. We found that many of the planned transit-oriented development locations along the East line are not within one mile of planned stations. The stations don’t offer access to the area’s higher performing schools.

Because light rail alone does not address inequitable access to quality education, this map led us to a more promising solution in the Children’s Corridor: coordinating bus and light rail service.

lifeandcode:

I just love, love, love these illuminated class notes from @robinpam. 

robinpam:

Week 3 of programming class. We dived into data structures, learning about arrays and hashes. Brian, the teacher, brought crucial tools to class: rulers, string, tape, post-its, and index cards. 

Here’s what happened:

learning = {“index cards” => ”objects”, “post-its” => “variables”, “rulers” => “arrays”}

(That’s my hash for learning without the computer tools. The string and tape were, I suppose, akin to [] for the array).

We hung index cards with peoples’ names from the ruler, assigned various variable names to the cards, then switched them around, operated methods on them, made new objects, and learned how arrays, variables, and objects all interact, all without touching the computer for about half of the class.

I came out of it with the eureka moment of, “This is why I’m taking a class.” Because it’s so thrilling to learn by listening to and asking questions of a real person, and by working with our hands, even in such a basic way. Brian’s interactive teaching style is really helping me to see the concepts come together much more quickly than if I were reading about them alone, then trying to implement them.

Collaborations such as Piton’s new data and storytelling projects, the Colorado Data Commons and the CitizenAtlas, are essential for sustaining investigative and watchdog journalism, according to an article at Poynter.

[The] Data Commons and CitizenAtlas both address the reality that there are many people who would like to access public information but don’t know how. “People want to dig up information themselves, and they want to know if it’s true or not,” Frank said by phone, noting that some government entities make it especially hard for people to find public data. “We can help them access information that actually gives them the answers to the questions they have.”

Knowledge, from the BBC.

Paul Tough writes about grit and character education at two New York schools.

Chad Skelton of the Vancouver Sun created a series of tract-level maps using Google Fusion Tables and Canada census data from 2006.

Brian Boyer describes Knight News Challenge project PANDA at MediaShift Idea Lab - View the whole post