Three Hour Tour - End of Year Feast

Last Friday, we set aside laptops, documents, headsets, iPads, and code a little early so we could powder our noses and make our way to the fabled kitchen of Chef Pascal Sauton for an end of year team gathering and feast.  For now more than a year Pascal’s home kitchen has been at his very own Milwaukie Kitchen & Wine just south of Portland.  The place certainly fulfilled its mission to be a “gathering place to celebrate community through food and drink” that night.  Pascal entertained us with stories and culinary instruction while preparing and serving:

MENU

Snack

Denoit Sparkling Brut (FR)Butternut Squash Puree with Crispy Chicken Skin & Pomegranate

First Course:

Green Pea Pancake (Gluten Free) with Smoked Salmon

2006 Clisson Muscadet (FR)  Shaved Fennel, Crème Fraîche, Cilantro

Second Course

Seared Moulard Duck Breast with Port Sauce

Potato Paillasson, Cheesy Spinach

2008 Rioja Lorinon Crianza (SP)

Dessert

Crema Catalana with Pear Hazelnut Compote

and Cocoa Nib Cookie  Boutinet Pineau des Charentes (FR)

Ristretto Roasters Coffee & Decaf

We learned a bunch (Ben and I have since attempted a couple of the Pascal-inspired dishes and techniques), and we had a terrific time, though regretting the absence of a couple people who were felled by the flu or marooned on the beaches of Cambodia.  If anyone out there is looking for an original and fun way to do a company party or to take a three hour tour through culinary goodness, we highly recommend giving Pascal a ring.

Back in School - Geostatistics

 
Yesterday was fun.  I spent part of the morning discussing GIS and geostatistical analysis with students in Professor Paul Gronke’s Intro to Statistics class at Reed College.  Enough time goes by between the occasions when I get to spend time in a classroom that I forget how much the opportunity for learning may be enjoyed by the instructor and student alike.

I got to know Paul when we worked together on a project for the Oregon Secretary of State a couple years ago. The project involved assessing the current practices of local elections officials in Oregon and developing recommendations for how GIS might be used to improve Oregon’s Central Voter Registration System.  I always find that Paul’s expertise and his infectious enthusiasm for elections and electoral behavior provide an interesting focus for discussions about mapping.  Prior to getting together in the Stats class yesterday, we had had some pre-election interaction with Stanford Political Science Professor Jonathan Rodden, who is the director of Standford’s Spatial Social Science Lab.

Jonathan and his team of data sleuths were seeking to gather some of the few and final precinct boundaries they needed to complete a national basemap for their Election Atlas. Rodden’s Atlas is very cool — it (thankfully) takes us beyond the omnipresent and simplistic state-level election maps to reveal meaningful nuances in local election geography; it is a commendable achievement, dovetailing with and supporting the rise of data-driven political analysis, and yesterday, with Paul’s interpretive skill, it provided a great reference for our discussion about geostatistics.

But discussions ranged broadly beyond electoral data… touching on how geostatistical analysis techniques may be applied to questions of social science and equity, local government, conservation, humanitarian affairs, and business intelligence.  I was impressed that the students, in less than two hours, were able to absorb basic concepts of GIS and geostatistics and, by the end of the class, pose sophisticated and interesting questions that held my attention through the afternoon. If you want to look at your work with fresh eyes, I highly recommend spending some time in the classroom trying to teach people about what you do.

This just in...Google Maps for the iPhone

Good news (?) for those of you up iPhone creek without a satisfying map app….apparently Google’s iPhone map app has been distributed to a limited number of field testers.  Speculation is that it will soon be submitted for approval.   Wondering…

• Will there be integration with voice, and how will it be executed?  The voice integration of Apple Maps isn’t without flaws, but it’s none-the-less an impressive advance.  Any chatter about it was largely drowned out amid the din and thunder over the famously flubbed rollout of the undercooked Apple Maps. 
• Likelihood of approval?  Squint and sign.  Prediction = approval.