Font experiments, Part 2

By Ananda | Published: May 20, 2010

My initial excitement about the Google Font Directory is a little bit diminished right now.

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Font experiments

By Ananda | Published: May 20, 2010

Google just launched the Google Font Directory (beta, of course) and the Google Font API which provides web-designers with an easy way to extend the font options that tend to limit many websites. Using the service is pretty simple: go to the font directory, find the font you want to use, and follow the simple instructions under the “Get the code” tab.

The font list seems a bit limited at the moment, but to experiment with the feature, I’ve changed all of the post headings at this site to be displayed in IM Fell English SC and the body text to Molengo. It would be great to see fonts like Gentium and Linux Libertine on there too.

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It’s a choropleth party with R, and everyone’s invited

By Ananda | Published: May 16, 2010

Tamil Nadu Population Density

Map party time. For some reason this happens every once in a while with me. A few years ago, I got to develop a website filled with choropleth maps galore. It was a pretty tedious process. Excel sheets. Photoshop. No good access to free Indian shapefiles. I was even thinking of making my own SVG files of Indian states at one point and thinking of a complex PHP and MySQL website.

Skip forward a few years now, and I’m back with the maps. Only this time, I have some new tools and resources: the software named after a pirate’s favorite letter, some free maps from the Global Administrative Areas website, some data from the 2001 Indian Census (I selected district data, all districts, and total population), and Google Docs (to clean up my CSV files).

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You should run for office

By Ananda | Published: May 8, 2010
Try to not smile

Seriously, people. This is no laughing matter!

At least that’s what one of my former students told me at Tata-Dhan Academy’s third convocation, during which I got to dress up in a very white shirt and a long white dhoti.

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Quickly reshaping data from “wide” to “long” formats in R

By Ananda | Published: April 18, 2010

A lot of the times, students at the Academy enter data in a “wide” format (since it is a very natural way to enter data in a spreadsheet). Let’s say, for example, that they were collecting data for a household, and for each person, they were collecting information on three variables. Assume also that they were only collecting information about five household members. They might end up with a first row of column names something like “HouseholdID” | “member.01″ | “member.02″ | “member.03″ | “member.04″ | “member.05″ | “variable1.01″ | “variable1.02″ | “variable1.03″ | “variable1.04″ | “variable1.05″ | “variable2.01″ | “variable2.02″ … and so on. Sometimes, however, we may find it more useful to have our data in a “long” format. This post tells you how to quickly do that using R.

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The ODF Campaign

By Ananda | Published: February 13, 2010

Recently, there’s been a lot of talk about poop in my “community”. Amy had given me a book to read called “The Big Necessity” and I found it really interesting and applicable to what the students at the Tata-Dhan Academy have been studying. I, in turn, lent the book to one of my colleagues, who also seemed to love it. We (faculty and students) have even had mock “role plays” (during lunch, of all times) where we pretended to be villagers who like to poop in the field and students who are trying to convince them to change their behavior. We brainstorm on trying to find different ways to communicate the message of creating an “open defecation free” India.

I was feeling a little bored, so I decided to use the zimmertwins site to give an example of the kinds of charming lunchtime discussions we occasionally have.

The text moves by a bit too quickly, and I couldn’t get better sound. Maybe I’ll get around to uploading a different version with some rockin’ DWAB background music.

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Democracy, aristocracy, plutocracy, meritocracy, and bratty students

By Ananda | Published: January 19, 2010

I started the day today [note: as with "And when the numbers go against what you have always said....,” this was written around a week ago] with my dictionary. I was trying to remember more precise definitions of things like democracy, aristocracy, plutocracy, and meritocracy because our topic of discussion for the day was “deepening grassroots democracy”.

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And when the numbers go against what you have always said….

By Ananda | Published: January 19, 2010

Today [note: this was actually written about a week ago, but I just got around to finishing typing it], around 400 DHANites got together to talk about poverty and our motivation to work with the poor. Our “reference” materials were a chapter from a book titled Moving Out of Poverty (one of the authors of this book was Amy’s teacher, by the way), some 35 questions from Vasi, the Executive Director of DHAN Foundation, and, of course, our experiences. One of the points of focus for discussion was a pair of pie-charts. The first was a set of factors which contribute to the poor “moving” out of poverty, and the second was on the factors which cause people to “fall” into poverty.

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The (unbutchered) retreat report

By Ananda | Published: January 13, 2010

I just came back from my first DHAN Foundation retreat (which I plan to write about later) and I also got two books filled with “retreat reports” from other DHANites. The retreat reports range from extremely dull to pretty fun to almost instructional. By design, they are meant to highlight the best and worst parts of your year, share what’s on your mind about work, introduce yourself to other DHANites, and be something personal. At least that was my understanding.

Some of you may have remembered my retreat report from last year in which I interviewed myself. This year, I decided to (predictably) do something different. And here’s what it was:

Here’s a PDF too….

So, why the title of this post? Well, the people in charge of compiling the retreat report books decided to take away all the pretty pictures, retype the text, and delete at least one important line from my report. I understand that it is not “standard format” but I did keep that in mind when I consciously decided to make it fit nicely onto a single sheet of A4 paper–I figured they could just print it out and insert it at the end of the rest of the reports or something, but I guess that would be asking too much.

Grrrr….

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Slug: Swingers, EPs, and more

By Ananda | Published: December 22, 2009
Slug - Swingers, EPs, and more

Slug: Swingers, EPs, and more

I don’t actually remember how I got to know about Slug, but I liked their, um, sluggish loud music. I think it had something to do with them using lots of bass guitars, and because “Swingers” was a 10″, and I really liked to collect 10″ records….

Here’s the “Swingers” 10″, a few 7″ singles, and a truly sluggish track called “Crawl” for your enjoyment.

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