Special Topics in GIS Lab 6 Blog Post 6

 The higher the scale number is for vector data (1:100000) the less accurate your data is going to be, but you will be able to cover more data that way and load in more data. Similarly for basic resolution for raster data, the lower the number (like one meter) the better the resolution will be.

At the end of this lab we talked about gerrymandering and how to identify it using the Polsby Popper equation. Gerrymandering si the deliberate redrawing of congressional lines in order to get more votes (both democrat and republican congress members do this). They do this in order to suppress a certain group of voters that could be in a high concentration in a certain area so they balance them out by lumping them in with a large district that would vote the opposite of them.

Special Topics in GIS Lab 5 Blog Post 5

 In this weeks lab we learned about interpolation in GIS. We learned about Thiessen, IDW, and Spline (both regularized and tension). We learned that Thiessen can be very accurate but only when there are a lot of sample points, and that Spline can struggle if there is an error in the placement of the points. My personal favorite one that we used was the IDW because it made the changing of value levels look very smooth on the map.

This is my IDW Interpolation Model, you can see how smoothly it changes from value to value for each of the points and the surrounding areas.