Due Date

Monday, October 21st, 2013 (2013-10-21) at 11:59pm. On Tuesday Oct 22nd in class we will not have a formal presentation. Instead we will conduct a code review together.

Questions or Problems?

Open an item in the Github issue tracker of this repository:

https://github.com/stat157/recent-quakes/issues

Preliminary Setup Steps

To run this example you'll need to install the following packages inside your virtual machine:

sudo apt-get install libgeos-3.3.3 python-mpltoolkits.basemap python-mpltoolkits.basemap-data python-mpltoolkits.basemap-doc

Then run the notebook from your machine with this command:

ipython notebook --no-browser --ip=0.0.0.0 --script --pylab=inline

Objective

The first objective of this assignment is to improve the data handling of the code by upgrading from the deprecated data source to the new data source which uses a different data format called JSON.

Since we are working with live data we also need to cache the data so that we can reliably re-run the code using the same data (or optionally with the live data).

The second objective is that we would like to be able to see data for earthquakes in states other than Alaska, so the next part of the assignment requires refactoring the code to parameterize the function definition instead of relying on the hard-coded values for latitude and longitude of the bounding box around the region of interest.

This assignment features two main roles: the Data Curator and the Visualizer. All 4 members of your vertical group should work together no matter what individual roles you have assigned.

Your task

1. Data Curation

The USGS eqa7day-M1.txt data url used in this program has been deprecated.

As suggested by the warning message in the data feed:

This USGS data file has been deprecated. To continue receiving
updates for earthquake information you must switch to the new data
format [http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/feed/]. In the
future, data feeds will be updated and deprecated following our
official deprecation policy
[http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/feed/policy.php].

you need to upgrade this program to use the new USGS data feed:

http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/feed/

The new data feed includes a link for Programmatic Access. You should use the pandas JSON parser to read the data instead of the read_csv function in the original code.

You will also need to find a way to cache the data locally so that your runs are exactly reproducible since the live data gets updated in real-time. You should write a program which can use the live data, but also optionally can store data from previous runs so that we can re-run the program in either mode using cached data or live data.

Start simple, keep the data isolated/separate from the source code, and remember that the goal is to make it reproducible by someone else.

The duty of the Data Curator is to write a new version of the code that reproduces the same output as the old version of the code, but using the new data source. Note, it may not be possible to do that exactly if the new data and the old data are substantially different, but hopefully they are exact in content, and differ only in format (CSV vs JSON).

**Variables Src in dataset from CSV is equal to net in dataset from JSON. Eqid in dataset from CSV is equal to code in dataset from JSON. time in dataset from CSV is equal to time in dataset from JSON. Lat in dataset from CSV is equal to longitude in dataset from JSON. Lon in dataset from CSV is equal to longitude in dataset from JSON. Depth in dataset from CSV is equal to depth in dataset from JSON. nst in dataset from CSV is equal to nst in dataset from JSON. region in dataset from CSV is equal to place in dataset from JSON.

2. Visualization

The definition of plot_ak() has a very bad code smell! What if we want to plot the earthquakes in California where I live now instead of in my home state of Alaska? Can you spot the code smell? How can you fix it so that given any arbitrary list of earthquakes you can plot the bounding box around the location (e.g. the whole state) where the quakes occured?

The duty of the Visualizer is to refactor the hard-coded values out of the program and instead parameterize the function so that for any list of earthquakes in a particular region (i.e. California) it will generate a map showing the correct location. Instead of including the lat/lon bounding box values in the body of the program you might consider storing that data in some format on disk and read it back into the program as a dataframe to pass to the function as a parameter.

Also plot the quakes so we can see the magnitude and depth of each dot instead of the way they are plotted now which only shows the location; all the dots are the same color and the same size, but could be varied to represent more information in the same amount of space.