Lab 5

This lab was by far the hardest and most confusing yet. I had to move my data that I found on the internet into open office and make it into a .DBF file, something that i have never done before or even heard of.  So that was kind of difficult for me to do. The next thing that i had the most difficult was where i had to actually join the two tables together. I kept on getting “NULL” every time I tried it

• .DBF / Dbase file – it is a database file, used in a spread sheet way
• Select by Attributes – you can select certain things that only you want about the certain file.
• Query – you can select and remove certain thing you dont want about the attribute
• Fields (in a Table) – is the column
• Records (in a Table) – is the row
• Attributes – information about the certain feature
• Relational Database – a database that has data that is common attributes
• Join function – allows you to join two sets of information together
• Monitor Fire – a large database that can be used with windows
• Calculate / Field Calculator – allows you to make calculations in you attribute table and add them to it as well.

Lab 4

This exercise was an easy one for me because I have worked with “ArcView” before. It was a while ago and I only worked with ArcView 3.2, and this ArcView is 9.3, which is, in my opinion, a lot easier and more organized then the 3.2.

It was very easy following Dr. Krygiers instructions to get the map I wanted and needed. All of the things we done in this lab, I have done back in high school, so it was not too hard doing these things and using the attribute table to get quickly. The only thing I never have done before was the export feature. And this feature was a very quick step in order just to get the map out of the “world map” projection in ESRI.

Here is my map I made for step 11:

This one is the amount of population per square kilometre in each county of the world.

Lab 3

Going through Lab 3 was not hard at all. The hardest thing I think that I actually did was the actual downloading of the new software called open office. That took the most time and really was not difficult at all.

I am really enjoying this class because I am learning a lot about computers. I am not the most computer literate person in the world but with this class I am feeling that I can work with computer and actually know what I am doing with them. I believe this is a good skill to have because this world is already so computer dependent. Also for the future many jobs and careers will be working computers and this knowledge I am learning is very valuable.

So overall this exercise is good because it teaches us how to transfer files to other types of files and how to extract and edit data in a spreadsheet. I believe that everybody should have some knowledge of this because as Dr. Krygier put it, with all this new software files need to be exact for other software to read it.

Lab 2 Blog

In my opinion this Lab has taught me a lot about computers. I think it is very cool to have my own internet page that I can say I created myself. It was very confusing at first but as I went through the Lab it became more and more easy.

The only thing I had trouble on was putting my 15 points into my map mash-up. I tried and tried again but I just couldn’t find out what was the matter. Finally after asking, we found out that I did not put the right saved copy onto the “owu” server. Little things like that I learned, can be the biggest pain in the …..

After picking the 15 intersting points in Michigan, I was thinking that there is some interesting points but I thought to myself that there are probably more interesting points in New York that I know more about that I could do a better job on.

Lab 1 Blog

Lab Log

Lab 1

Part 3

The data that I needed to find was very difficult to find. I spent at least one hour of work trying to find the population differences for every ten years in a county in a state. I seemed to keep finding the same two things. I seemed to always come to the a population  data set that came up in three years not every ten years as I wanted.  It was until I finally realized that I had to click on the decennial tab and from there I could finally go into the population counts for every ten years in each of the counties in Michigan. All in all, I believe that for type of data, it was very hard in finding it on the US Census WWW site.

I believe that the keyword search is very useful in finding the information I needed to find. I first typed in the United States census and the census site was the first one to pop up. I liked this better then the directory search in yahoo it was much faster I believe, and in today’s world it is all about the speed.  After already trying to find the data from the United States census home page I went back to Google and typed in historical population data and the second tab form the top I clicked on because it’s from the census website and it came up to where I exactly needed to be. I much rather search up the information like this. It literally only took two minutes compared to an hour.