PAI 789 Advanced Policy Analysis

General Information, Textbook and Requirements

General information that you may need at the beginning of the semester.

Course Outline

Preliminary lists of topics that will be covered this semester.

Materials from Class Sessions

Where to find PDFs of notes and other materials from each class.

Course Google Drive Folder

Access to data files that aren't built into the assignment repositories.

Software Packages

Download links for key software packages used throughout the semester.

See Materials from Class Sessions for the day the problem was given.

Downloading Data Files from the Class Google Drive

How to avoid data corruption.

About Scores and Feedback on Assignments

Information about assignment scores and feedback.

Guidelines for Using GitHub

A few tips on how to use GitHub in this course.

Operator Precedence in Python

Table showing the order of precedence from highest to lowest.

Markdown Cheatsheet

A great quick reference guide

Guidelines for Presentations

Please refer to these when preparing your talk at the end of the semester.

Documentation for Geopandas

An extension of Pandas for handling spatial data.

How to Avoid DLL Errors on Windows

How to work around some unusual Anaconda configuration issues in Windows

Matplotlib Colormap Documentation

A guide to the colormaps and palettes available.

Notation for Computational Exercises

A brief explanation of some short instructions you may see in the assignments.

Poster Session Schedule for Spring 2021

Presentation titles and GitHub links

Poster Session Schedule for Spring 2022

Initial allocation of days and times.

Python Documentation at Coedacademy

Quick access to tips on key Python topics.

Python Graph Gallery

An excellent and very broad collection of example graphs, with code.

Seaborn Data Visualization Library

Very powerful Python module for statistical data visualization.

UTM Locator Map

A quick reference map showing which UTM zones correspond to different parts of the world.

xkcd Color Survey

A very large survey of colors and color names. A set of xkcd colors is available in Matplotlib and described here

Census Documentation

Selected information useful in working with Census data

Census Shapefiles

Links to the key download pages a the Census

City of Syracuse Open Data Portal

Includes GIS data.

Data.gov

The federal government's open data access portal.

Federal Election Commission

Data on political contributions.

FEMA Flood Map Service Center

Find flood maps by using the "Search All Products" tool and selecting "NFHL Data-County"

FEMA Open Data

FEMA's open data repository

ICPSR

A long-standing university consortium that provides access to many social science datasets.

International Shapefiles

Links to pages that provide international GIS data.

Life-M

Intergenerational database of 15 M individuals born in Ohio or North Carolina

Massachusetts Property Tax Parcels

Shapefiles and data on tax parcels in the state.

Microsoft Building Footprint Data

Datasets of building footprints by state.

MIT Election Lab

A wide range of datasets on US Federal elections.

New York State

The NYS open data access portal.

New York State GIS Clearinghouse

An extensive repository of NYS GIS data.

New York State Property Tax Data

Data on all tax parcels in New York. Provided by county for parcel centroids.

World Bank Open Data

Open access development data.