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.

Listed under the Materials from Class entry for the day they were given.

Downloading Data Files from the Class Google Drive

How to avoid data corruption.

How to Stop Safari from Unzipping Files

Turning off unhelpful behavior

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.

Best Practices for Documentation in Python

An excellent guide to writing comments and documentation.

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.

Documentation for Pandas

The official documentation for Pandas.

Google Document Translation Service

Able to translate docx, pdf, pptx, and xlsx files to and from many languages.

How to Avoid DLL Errors on Windows

How to work around some unusual Anaconda configuration issues in Windows

How to Turn Off Automatic Data Conversions in Excel

Recent versions of Excel support this, which is super helpful.

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 Sessions from Previous Semesters

Presentation titles and GitHub links.

Python Documentation at Codeacademy

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.

Type Hints Cheat Sheet

Quick reference for type hints for more complex data types.

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

Census State and Local Government Finance Data

Available annually.

Central New York Real Estate Transactions

From 2020 and updated weekly

City of Syracuse Open Data Portal

Includes GIS data.

Data.gov

The federal government's open data access portal.

EIA US Energy Atlas

Extensive GIS data on the US energy sector.

EM-DAT

International Disaster Database

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.