The easiest solution was to use Vim with the following search and replace:

s/[\x80-\xFF]//g

iTunes wont allow you to copy pictures on your iPad onto a machine (only the pictures that you atually take with the iPad). This is because, these pictures *should*  be on the machine with which you synced your iPad in the first place.

However, this was not true in my case anymore. Now you could either invest some money and purchase an app that allows you to copy your picture albums from the iPad onto a Windows machine.

There is e.g. CopyTrans Suite, which is a bit costly and in the version I tried, did not copy the full resolution of the pictures (which is a rip-off!).

So I was looking into a cheap and quick solution to get the original full resolution pictures down from my iPad.

Setting things up: installing free app “WiFi Photo”
This app basically makes your photo albums available on a local webserver. Once you start the app on the iPad, it tells you an URL to brows to on your local machine. There you can see all the pictures that are on your iPad.

You could now use this app to manually download the pictures, however, it is limited to 100 pictures at once and you will not get the full resolution pictures if you do a batch download.

If you browse through the app, you will notice that the URL to the full resolution pictures has the following form:

http://192.168.1.6:15555/0/fr_564.jpg

where the “0″ stands for the album ID. If you have, say 2 albums on the iPad, this would take values “0″ or “1″. Images are stored as consecutive numbers in each album, so the following link would go to picture number 564 in full resolution in album 0. So we will exploit this structure to do an automated batch download.

Doing an automated batch download

First, in order for this to work you need to get a a local PHP installation up and running. If you are really lazy, you could just install XAMPP. However, you can implement the code in any other coding language, e.g. in R as well.

To download all the pictures, you need to adjust and run the following script

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for($k=0;$k<=3;$k++) {
 
for($i=1;$i<=1000;$i++) {
 
//adjust this
$url = "http://192.168.1.9:15555/".$k."/fr_".$i.".jpg";
 
//adjust this
$fn = "C:/Dokumente und Einstellungen/Thiemo/Desktop/Kolumbien/".$k."-".$i.".jpg";
 
//to make sure you dont redownload a file already downloaded if you want
//to run the script several times
if(!file_exists($fn)) {
if($content = file_get_contents($url)) {
$fp = fopen($fn,"a+");
fwrite($fp, $content);
fclose($fp);
}
}
}

However, in hospital I rather wanted to use my iPad and my iPhone to read papers and so on. As both are from the UK and I have not unlocked them, I wanted to indirectly use the internet on these devices through my netbook. I was amazed by how quick and easy it was setting things up….

Step 1: Setting up an ad-hoc network

1. From the Windows XP desktop, click Start, click Control Panel, click Network and Internet Connections, and then click Network Connections.
2. Right-click the wireless network connection, and then click Properties.
3. Click the Wireless Networks tab. In the wireless network adapter properties dialog box, click Add under Preferred networks.
4. On the Association tab, type the name of your ad hoc wireless network in Network name (SSID). I named my network “questad“
5. Select the This is a computer-to-computer (ad hoc) network check box and clear the The key is provided for me automatically check box.
6. In Network Authentication, select Open.
7. In Data encryption, select WEP.
8. In Network key, type the WEP key. The WEP key should be a random sequence of hexadecimal digits or numbers, letters, and punctuation.

10.In Confirm network key, retype the WEP key.

11.Click OK to save changes to the wireless network.

12.Click OK to save changes to the wireless network adapter.

Step 2: Enable Internet Connection Sharing

1.From the Windows XP desktop, click Start, click Control Panel, click Network and Internet Connections, and then click Network Connections.

2.Right-click the Mobile internet dialup connection that is used to access the Internet, and then click Properties.

3.On the Advanced tab, select the Allow other network users to connect through this computer’s Internet connection check box and clear the Allow other network users to control or disable this shared Internet connection check box.

Step 3: Connecting the iPhone or iPad to the ad-hoc network

Note that you need to reconnect the mobile internet, as changes will only applyto a newly established connection. Turning on wirless network on the iPhone, you should see the network you created. You can now simply connect to it and you are good to go.

This map displays the intensity of microfinance institution headquarter distribution across India. The data comes from the MIX Market.

The fact that many MFIs are clustered around in the south is highlighted quite strongly. What this graph does not take into account however, is their variable size. This is problematic and I agree that this needs further refinement, i.e. that the intensity takes into account how big an MFI is. However, I would conjecture that this merely makes the contrasts in such a map just stronger.

Microfinance Institutions across India

I dont think anybody has produced such a map before. In fact, I can do this for all institutions reporting data around the world, which may be interesting to see. Also, I already tried to make the size of the dot proportional to e.g. measures of real yield or color-coding the nearest neighborhood (say the neigbhouring districts) by the average loan sizes reported. Lots of things to do. Maybe thats something for the guys at MIX Market or for David Roodman who, I think has finished his open book.

The key difficulty was actually not in plotting the map (though it took some time), but in obtaining geo-data on where the headquarters of the microfinance institutions are located. I managed to obtain this data – though its not perfect – by making calls to the Google MAP API via a PHP script., basically using the following two functions:

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function ResponseToArray($response) {
 
	return json_decode($response,true);
}
 
function findLocation($string) {
 
	$url = "http://maps.google.com/maps/geo?q=".$string."&output=json&sensor=true_or_false&key=your_api_key";
 
	$raw = file_get_contents($url);
 
	$geodata = ResponseToArray($raw);
 
	$point = $geodata["Placemark"][0]["Point"]["coordinates"];
 
return $point;
 
}

The first one transforms the JSON return into an array and the latter, actually does the call. The variable $string should contain the actual paramters, such as the city and the zip code of where the institution is located.

Intercontinental Ballistic Microfinance from Kiva Microfunds on Vimeo.

On another note, I am going to try to do some more work with R on mapping data, trying out several packages:

• http://crantastic.org/packages/RgoogleMaps
• http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/maps/index.html
• http://crantastic.org/packages/RgoogleMaps

I found working with ArcGIS way too clumsy…

As seen on http://i.imgur.com/vRTRP.jpg

The standard cbind() functions require the vectors or matrices to be compatible. The matching is “stupid”, in the sense that it ignores any order or assumes that the elements which are to be joined into a matrix have the same row names. This, of course, need not be the case. A classical merge command would fail here, as we dont really know what to merge by and what to merge on.

Ok… I am not being clear here. Suppose you want to merge two vectors

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A 2
B 4
C 3

and

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G 2
B 1
C 3
E 1

now the resulting matrix should be

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A  2  NA
B  4  1
C  3  3
E NA  1
G NA  2

Now the following Rfunction allows you to do this. It is important however, that you assign rownames to the objects to be merged (the A,B,C,E,G in the example), as it does matching on these.

cbindM <-
function(A, v, repl=NA) {

  dif <- setdiff(union(rownames(A),rownames(v)),intersect(rownames(A),rownames(v)))
#if names is the same, then a simple cbind will do
    if(length(dif)==0) {

      A<- cbind(A,v[match(rownames(A),rownames(v))])

        rownames(A) <- rownames(v)

    }    else if(length(dif)>0) {#sets are not equal, so either matrix is longer / shorter

#this tells us which elements in dif are part of A (and of v) respectively
      for(i in dif)     {

        if(is.element(i,rownames(A))) {
#element is in A but not in v, so add it to v and then a        

          temp<-matrix(data =repl, nrow = 1, ncol = ncol(v), byrow = FALSE, dimnames =list(i))
            v <- rbind(v,temp)

        } else {
# element is in v but not in A, so add it to A

          temp<-matrix(data = repl, nrow = 1, ncol = ncol(A), byrow = FALSE, dimnames =list(i))
            A<-rbind(A,temp)
        }
      }

      A<-cbind(A,v[match(rownames(A),rownames(v))])

    }

  A
}

Note: 09.11.2011: I fixed a bug and added a bit more functionality. You can now tell it, with what you want the missing data to be replaced. Its standard to replace it with NA but you could change it to anything you want.

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Hi All

Due to anticipated rioting in the Tottenham Court Road area this evening, businesses in the area are being advised to close at 5pm. So I would recommend that we go along with this as well and try to finish up as close to 5pm as possible. Last access to and from this building today will be at 7pm.

Of course, London greeted me with a Sunny morning but it would end up hitting me hard with rain later that day. And that was after bad news from our advisors and supervisors that our work ok Kiva is most likely in vain as we would never really get it published in a really good journal.

So we will see, the other projects are still up and running, but I need to get an idea for a joan Market paper sometime soon. I am down for 2013/2014 as the prospective year. Just two more years to go, exciting but a bit scary as well.