Crowd sourcing has been growing substantially in popularity. More and more businesses and individuals are interested in gathering data from the general public for real-time data analysis and visualization. The concept is being adopted in several fields, including journalism, public health and safety, and business development. During this election year, for example, a journalist might be interested in learning what candidate his or her readers support, and the reasons why they support this candidate.

Google Forms, Fusion Tables, and Apps Script make both data collection and analysis super simple! Using Google Forms, a journalist can quickly create an HTML form for readers to submit their opinions and feedback. Fusion Tables make data analysis easy with several cool data visualization options. Apps Script acts as the glue between Google Forms and Fusion Tables, enabling the Form to send data directly to Fusion Tables.

Let’s take a look at how our journalist friend would use all these tools to collect her reader’s candidate preferences.

Google Forms

Google Forms provides a simple UI tool to develop forms perfect for collecting data from readers. Here’s an example of a simple form the journalist can create to get information from her readers:

Once the form has been created, it can be embedded directly into the journalist’s website or blog using the embeddable HTML code provided by Google Forms.

Google Fusion Tables

Google Fusion Tables makes data analysis simple with its visualization capabilities. Using Fusion Tables, the journalist can create maps and charts of the collected data with just a few clicks of the mouse!

Using some fake data as an example, here’s a pie chart that can be created using Fusion Tables to show the the results of the survey:

With Fusion Tables, it’s also easy to filter data and create a pie chart visualization showing why people like Mitt Romney:

These visualizations can also be embedded in the journalist’s website or blog, as Fusion Tables provides embeddable HTML code for all its visualizations. Now, any time someone visits the webpage with the embedded visualization, they will see the current poll result!

Apps Script

Finally, Apps Script acts as the glue between the Google Form and the Fusion Table, since there is currently no direct way to send Google Form submissions to a Fusion Table. During a hack event last year, I took some time to write an Apps Script script that submits the form data to Fusion Tables. The script uses the onFormSubmit Apps Script functionality as described in this blog post. The Fusion Tables code is based on the code described in this blog post.

To learn how to set up your own Google Form to collect data and save that data in a Fusion Table, please see these instructions.

Kathryn Hurley profile Kathryn is a Developer Programs Engineer for Fusion Tables at Google. In this role, she helps spread the word about Fusion Tables by presenting at conferences and developer events. Kathryn received an MS in Web Science from the University of San Francisco. Prior work experience includes database management, web production, and research in mobile and peer-to-peer computing.

On Tuesday we launched the Google Apps Marketplace at Campfire One and were joined by over 50 developers who built some great applications which are now available to the 2 million businesses and 25 million users that use Google Apps. Were just getting started and cant wait to see what other amazing apps are out there.

If you already have a great web app or even just an idea for one and would like to learn more about integration with Google Apps, join us for a webinar next Wednesday. Well review the Marketplace and Google Apps APIs and answer technical and policy questions from attendees.

Integrate with Google Apps and the Google Apps Marketplace
Wednesday, March 17, 2010
9:00 a.m. PDT

This webinar will include a question and answer session. Post and vote for questions ahead of time and register for the webinar here. We hope youll join us for this informative online event.

UPDATE @ 5:30pm PST: Weve corrected the registration link.

We recently added a new feature to Apps Script: the ability to interact with your Google Docs List. With this new integration, scripts can create, rename, or move files and folders in your Google Docs. In addition, scripts can now create, modify, and clear plain-text files and search through your documents for a specified query string.

For instance, take a company whose website is hosted on Google Sites. They have a Specials page where they want to list seasonal sales depending on upcoming holidays. They store the details about the seasonal sales in plain-text files that are saved in their Google Docs List. By using the Google Docs List and and Sites services within Apps Script along with time-based triggers to run the script once per day, they can keep their Specials page updated automatically. Here’s a code snippet that demonstrates how to update the Specials page:

//The Mother’s Day sale runs from May 1 - May 7, 2011
var MOTHERS_DAY_START = new Date("May 1, 2011");
var MOTHERS_DAY_END = new Date("May 7, 2011");
//The Valentine’s Day sale runs from Feb 6 - Feb 13, 2011
var VALENTINES_DAY_START = new Date("February 6, 2011");
var VALENTINES_DAY_END = new Date("February 13, 2011");

function updateSpecials() {
  var today = new Date();
  var site = SitesApp.getSite("example.com", "giftshop");
  // Get all the web pages in the Site
  var pages = site.getWebPages();
  // Loop through the web pages to find the specials page
  for (var i = 0; i < pages.length; i++) {
    if (pages[i].getPageName() == "specials") {
      var page = pages[i]; 
    }  
  }
  // Set up the default wording for the specials page
  var pageText = "There are no specials at this time.";

  // If today’s date is within the Mother’s Day sale range
  if (today >= MOTHERS_DAY_START && today <= MOTHERS_DAY_END) {
    // Find the sale text that’s stored in the file mom.txt
    pageText = DocsList.find("mom.txt")[0].getContentAsString();
  }
  // If today’s date is within the Valentine’s Day sale range
  else if (today >= VALENTINES_START && today <= VALENTINES_END ) {
    // Find the sale text that’s stored in the file valentines.txt
    var pageText = DocsList.find("valentines.txt")[0].getContentAsString()   
  }
  // Set the content of the specials page
  page.setContent(pageText);  
}​

If this script is then set up to run using a trigger that calls it at the same time each day, then the Specials page will be kept automatically up-to-date.

To help you learn more, weve created a tutorial that demonstrates how to search and display information about files, create files, and read content from files.

Note that certain features of the DocsList service, such as creating files, are only available to Google Apps accounts. For complete information on interacting with your Google Docs List using Apps Script, see the DocsList Service documentation.

We look forward to seeing how you use this integration. If youd like to learn more about Apps Script and meet the Apps Script team in person, join us at the upcoming Apps Script hackathon in New York City on June 24.

Posted by Jan Kleinert, Google Developer Relations

My students always LOVE reading all of the No, David books by David Shannon, and I came up with a really fun activity for them to go along with the books... a puppet!  Its the perfect activity to introduce classroom management at the beginning of the school year!


I included 10 different writing options... perfect for all of the elementary grades:

1. David’s Body – without any text
2. David’s Body – with Name/Date on arms and room for an illustration
3. David’s Body – with large primary writing lines and room for a picture
4. David’s Body – with medium primary writing lines and room for a picture
5. David’s Body – with small primary writing lines and room for a picture
6. David’s Body – with writing lines and room for a picture
7. David’s Body – with large primary writing lines, no room for a picture
8. David’s Body – with medium primary writing lines, no room for a picture
9. David’s Body – with small primary writing lines, no room for a picture
10. David’s Body – with writing lines, no room for a picture

You can pick the writing paper that works best for your students, or pick multiple papers to differentiate!

There are also additional writing pages available for each of the levels so that your students can attach multiple pages on their puppet! 

It also has two options in terms of the thickness of lines... As far as the line thickness, I like to use thicker lines with my Kindergarten students so that they can color in the lines easier, and in the past I’ve used thinner lines with older students so that they don’t assume you’re giving them a “baby” coloring page!


Check it out at TPT by clicking the picture above!  Its $4, but theres a big sale coming up at TPT, so you can get it at a discount very soon!  Click the picture below to see my store!

Info:
Acoolsoft PPT to Video Pro is a professional PowerPoint to video converter which empowers you to easily convert PowerPoint to video in popular formats such as MPEG, AVI, MP4, WMV, 3GP, FLV and MOV. With only a few mouse clicks, you can convert your PowerPoint presentations to dynamic video with all transitions, animations, sounds, and movie clips retained.

System requirements:
Windows XP/2003/Vista/7 and 8

Screen Shots: Click on the image to vow large screen

I need to read NSIDC sea ice concentration charts from Nimbus-7 SMMR and DMSP SSM/I-SSMIS Passive Microwave Data into a raster file. These files are according to the documentation "scaled, unsigned flat binary with one byte per pixel, and therefore have no byte order, or endianness. Data are stored as one-byte integers representing scaled sea ice concentration values.[...] The file format consists of a 300-byte descriptive header followed by a two-dimensional array of one-byte values containing the data."

The blog entry, which helped med finding out how to do this is this one but it had to be modified for my files.


Part One uses the Python struct command to unpack he binary file into a tuple

import struct, numpy, gdal

#Dimensions from https://nsidc.org/data/docs/daac/nsidc0051_gsfc_seaice.gd.html
height = 448
width = 304

#for this code, inspiration found at https://stevendkay.wordpress.com/category/python/
icefile = open(r"U:SSMI
t_20120101_f17_v01_n.bin", "rb")
contents = icefile.read()
icefile.close()

# unpack binary data into a flat tuple z
s="%dB" % (int(width*height),)
z=struct.unpack_from(s, contents, offset = 300)

nsidc = numpy.array(z).reshape((448,304))
nsidc = numpy.rot90(nsidc, 1)

The "unpack_from" considers the offset of the header bytes and the tuple "z" contains now all the values in one long row of values -- this one-dimensional string of values is converted into an array and the reshaped according to the dimensions of the raster. Now I have my values in a two-dimensional array, the next part of the code writes it into a GeoTIFF file:

#write the data to a Geotiff
driver = gdal.GetDriverByName("GTiff")
outraster = driver.Create(C:UsersmaxDesktop\test4.tif, height, width, 1, gdal.GDT_Int16 )
raster = numpy.zeros((width, height), numpy.float) 
outraster.GetRasterBand(1).WriteArray( raster )

outband = outraster.GetRasterBand(1)

#Write to file     
outband.WriteArray(nsidc)
outband.FlushCache()

#Clear arrays and close files
outband = None
iceraster = None
outraster = None
outarray = None

This then is the resulting and imported image:

Screen Shots :