Week 10-Homeland Security

NORAD Buffers and Line of Sight Analysis

This week's lab was somewhat straight forward for me until Deliverables 3 and 4 came into the equation.  Things seem to get a disjointed after creating the viewshed.  It seemed that no matter where I placed my observation points, the entrance tunnel was visible...........even if I put the point 5 miles from the site.  I redid this sequence a number of times and eventually came up with a sight line was at least partially obscured.  Deliverable 4 took me over 10 hours to produce as I couldn't come up with anything that came close to a 3d rendering.  I believe there was something with the orthoimage that wasn't allowing this.  I went back to my last Week 9 drawing and re-exported the file again...........(I actually did around 6-8 combinations before this), and for some unknown reasoning I was able to come up a Deliverable 4 that was 3d ish.  I wasn't able to manipulate it very well without significant distortion.  Fortunately the copy and past of the sight line into the ArcScene went smooth, except it was a grey color and not green/red.  This week took me about a whole day more than I planned but I felt more comfortable with buffers, label and the intersect tool and the exercise as shown seems like some good practical skills to have.

Week 8-Washington D.C. Crime

Analysis of Crime in Washington D.C. for August, 2009


Map Showing Crime for August 2009 in Proximity 
to Police Stations

Map Showing the Density of Stolen Autos within D.C. and the Time of Day of the Theft

I enjoyed this week and appreciated the walk-through on how to do the analysis.  Some of the  difficulties I experienced were with the Geocoding exercise and manipulating the graphs.  I never did get the graphs to display like I wanted and have no idea how to get all of the elements you want on your graph...........especially if it has names on the x axis.  Overall the projected went smoothly as the instructions were stellar.  An enjoyable experience after pure frustration on Week 7.

Week 8-On your own-Boise, ID

Week 8-- Boise, Idaho--Weighted Analysis


This project was to show a basemap of Boise, Idaho, a distance analysis from the State Capital and the airport, then do a weighted analysis of the median home values and based on a certain age group. I started the with assembling the basemap for the area.  There were a few minor projection and clipping problems, but overall I thought it went well.  After the distance analysis, I tried for approximately three days to get sets of data that I could join together.  The census tracts contained approximately 3700 tracts.  The census tables  contained only 50+/-  records.  I could see that I need to truncate or reclassify the 3700 tracts into the 50 records.  I tried everything that I know how to do.  So in the end I wasn't able to do the weighted analysis as I had a roadblock I couldn't pass. In retrospect, I should have chosen a Florida county where the data may have been cleaner.

Basically a real bummer of a week after a great start!

Boise, Idaho Basemap

Distances from the Idaho State Capital and Boise Airport