Assignments

What to do for class

Summary

I’ll be adding assignments that are due in the current week, as well as upcoming tasks, including readings and “Hey, please sign up for this/configure your system in this way/etc”

The list of guides and tutorials can be found at: /articles

Current

Title Due Date Points
Project: Show Me Where It's At

Our first project: given a user-specified location, traverse a public dataset with geographic information, and deliver the user to a webpage showing the closest records/incidents.

 2016-03-17 [Thursday] 50
Project: Gender Detector on Real Life Data

Using an algorithm to classify a first name as “male” or “female”, estimate the gender breakdown for a public data set in three different ways. Write a short reflection about it.

 2016-03-17 [Thursday] 100
Exercise Set: Building your own Gender Detector
0020-gender-detector

Create a gender-detector program that makes its judgments by wrangling those plaintext baby name records from the Social Security Administration.

 2016-03-08 [Tuesday] 6.5
Todo: Prepare for Gender Detector exercise.

Create a folder in your homework directory named:

0020-gender-detector/

Examine the following code, attempt to run it, see its effects.

https://github.com/compciv/2016.compciv.org/blob/master/data/homework/answers/0020-gender-detector/a.py

Read: UNDER THE HOOD OF THE OPEN GENDER TRACKER

Read: A practical guide to methods and ethics of gender identification

Read: Who Writes for the New York Times?

Read: Personal names around the world

 2016-03-03 [Thursday] NA
Exercise: Watson Visual Recog Preview

Follow the instructions here: https://github.com/compciv/watson-preview

 2016-03-01 [Tuesday] NA
Reading: Fill out your geocoder

In your projects folder, complete the steps needed to have a geocode routine, as described in:

Create a functioning geocoder

 2016-02-25 [Thursday] NA
Exercise Set: Sorting those Baby Names
0013-sorted-names

Read (again) and sort a file of comma-delimited baby name records from the Social Security Administration.

 2016-02-17 [Wednesday] 4.5
Todo: Signup for a Mapzen developer account and get a key

While we can use the Google Maps Geocoding API to do geocoding, the Mapzen Search service gives pretty good results with a lot fewer restrictions.

Here’s the landing page.

The rate limit is very generous:

Search early & search often. With Mapzen Search, you get up to 30,000 geocoding requests per day (and 6 per second) to do with as you wish.

And this is where you sign in:

https://mapzen.com/developers/sign_in

After completing the process, you should find yourself at this page:

https://mapzen.com/developers

With a search key that looks something like:

search-BLAHBLAH
2016-02-12 [Friday] NA
Todo: Read about Earthquake bots and other bots

Readings:

 2016-02-11 [Thursday] NA
Todo: Read about URL query strings

Guide: Creating URL query strings in Python

 2016-02-10 [Wednesday] NA
Reading: Read about functions

Read about functions.

 2016-02-05 [Friday] NA
Todo: Write a README for data in Show-Me-Where-It's-At Project

In your compciv-2016 folder, create the file:

compciv-2016/projects/show-me-where/README.md

See the assignment as described on the the project description page

Visit the some-student repo to see an example of the README.md file and the project folder.

 2016-02-04 [Thursday] 10
Exercise Set: GoT Baby Names (2014 Edition)?
0012-got-babynames-2014

Read and analyze a file of comma-delimited baby name records from the Social Security Administration.

 2016-02-03 [Wednesday] 5.5
Exercise Set: Deserializing the JSON text from the Google Maps and Mapzen geocoding APIs
0010-map-json-responses

Before programmatically using an API, we need to study its response.

 2016-02-02 [Tuesday] 3.5
Todo: Signup for a NYT Developers Account, create an Application

Using the New York Times data APIs simply requires creating an account on the New York Times site (if you’re already a subscriber, you should be good to go):

https://myaccount.nytimes.com/register

After signing in at nytimes.com, register a “New Application”:

http://developer.nytimes.com/apps/register

And just select all the available APIs.

This is the typical workflow for working with any API. It’s so that the service can track (and limit) your usage.

 2016-02-02 [Tuesday] NA
Reading: Read about Python strings, lists, and dictionaries

Read about these Python objects before attempting the homework assignments:

 2016-01-27 [Wednesday] NA
Exercise Set: Reading Through Shakespeare's Text Files
0004-shakefiles

Practicing the ins-and-outs of managing files and reading through them, featuring the works of Shakespeare.

 2016-01-26 [Tuesday] 6.0
Exercise Set: Fizzbuzz Numberwang
0009-fizzbuzz-numberwang

Just a test of your understanding of loops and conditional statements.

 2016-01-21 [Thursday] 1.5
Exercise Set: Getting acquainted with Requests and scraping webpages as text
0003-requests-sotu

This set of exercises is meant to as a hands-on overview to the concept of libraries and objects – and their methods and attributes – while throwing in the basic concept behind scraping webpages for data.

 2016-01-19 [Tuesday] 4.5
Exercise Set: Say "Hello World" and Learn How to Print
0001-hello-world

Simple text printing.

 2016-01-14 [Thursday] 4.0

Draft

The due dates are tentative and may just be placeholders.