Mom who Maps

My reading list on GIS has been a bit full so I tried to catch up over the weekend.  On my plate are OSM data and political boundaries of Ph. I wonder what to map next, I want something close to my heart so I chose coffee. I mapped all the hot and cold spots of cafe in the Philippines and clipped in a city-level polygon boundary. I then used Anselin Moran's I statistic to identify outliers in the clusters of cafe all over the country. Points below shows high negative z-values which means there are significantly high number of cafe in the following cities while it's neighborhood has significantly low number of cafe.  That interests me. Gives me more reason to look forward visiting those cities next. Of the 5 clusters, I have only been to Baguio and I must attest that cafe in that city has set the bar. I love the coffee that complements the cold weather. Now I wonder how the other outlier locations were also an output of the analysis. I must discover it myself...

It's only recently that I get to use hot spot analyses beyond usual work. I just realized I never really used mapping for leisure or just about anything that I find interesting. Now I plan to create more maps beyond my usual office stuff. Here are some maps that I find interesting and might need further analyses. SCHOOLS: I generated a hot spot map of all the schools in the Philippines using the recent Open Street Map data. Basically a hot spot counts the number of instances there is a school within the bounding polygon set for analysis. In this case, the bounding polygon I used are cities/municipalities. I then generated an optimized hot spot analysis that basically checks which cities has neighboring cities with higher values or lower values as themselves. It uses the Getis Ord-Gi* statistic to generate probability or p-values to quantify clustering. These clusters of high values then generates a hot spot and cluster of low values generate a cold spot.  The

Last December 2018, we got our Korean Visa approved. We are a family of five with our three kids aged 12, 11 and 5. It's our 3rd country together. We have travelled to Hong Kong and Taiwan before our application for Korean Visa. I have a US Visa, I've been to 11 countries and husband has been to 8 countries before our application. Our frequent traveller status must have contributed to our easy approval. I have read lots of horror stories on Korean Visa application so I made sure all the requirements are done. Korean Visa has more tedious requirements than Japan Visa. Bank Certificate  - should be with Average Daily Balance aside from current balance. Based on my previous researches, ADB should be atleast 30,000 pesos per person but no, our total ADB is just around 60,000 pesos for all of us 5.  Bank Statement - should be atleast 10,000 per person per day of travel. So for our family of 5 staying for 4 days in Korea, the sum of deposit in our bank accounts should be

Got our Single Entry Japan Visa and I am so happy that everything went well. Thought I might share how we got our JAPAN VISA for our family with 3 kids and only me as the guarantor. I applied March 29,  2019. So we decided to go to Japan for our next travel destination with the kids. We've been to Hong Kong, Taiwan and Korea before this. Here's our case, we are a family of five (5) with me and my husband as full-time employed and our kids are aged 12, 11 and 5 years old at the time of application. We sent our application through Reli Tours. Reason is because most of my friends have tried it and all of them got approved. Some even tried Friendship Tours at Dusit Thani and they also got approved. I think primary reason why it's best to apply at Reli because of the price and proximity to us. Reli is just 950 pesos each while other agencies can go as high as 1600+ pesos. Anyway, I made sure I submitted all required documents and added some supporting documents