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Tire Quality App: How Safe Are Your Tires?

Before you get to SF:

1. Install Rails. Unless a critical mass of people are Pythonistas, we'll use Rails. (We'll use all manner of other tools, depending on the Fellows' skills and interests) but, as a baseline, make sure Rails is installed and working on your machine before you show up. (Instructions are below.)
2. Send me a note (almshaw@gmail.com), or comment on this gist about what tools you like to use to build things, whether it be Ruby, Python, R, JavaScript, etc, and we'll adjust our stack to how most people like to do things.
3. Download the UTQGS data: http://cl.ly/0L2c152y2n2j, and take a look at it
4. Develop some questions about the data that you'd want to see in an app. Example questions that come to mind:
   • What are the safety ratings of the country's best-selling tires?
   • How safe are the tires that come standard on the most common cars?
   • Do tire costs correlate with safety?
5. Look for problems in the data, and think of ways to fix (or work around) them. For example, the size column sometimes has an individual size value, such as P205/70R15, and sometimes has values of "All sizes" or 13.
6. Look at some news apps. An good (and simple) one is ER Wait Watcher: http://projects.propublica.org/emergency/. Come with some ideas on how to turn the UTQGS data into an app.

###More Info about UTQGS More info about the Uniform Tire Quality Grading System (UTQGS)

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTQG
• http://www.safercar.gov/Vehicle+Shoppers/Tires/Tires+Rating

Tire market profile:

• http://www.tirereview.com/Content/Site309/ContentBlocks/919902012TireMa_00000056257.pdf

###Installing Rails Install rails with this guide: http://blog.55minutes.com/2013/09/rails-os-x-install-guide/ , but make the following changes

• SKIP this step:

brew install apple-gcc42 autoconf pkg-config git postgresql qt

replace with

brew install git

• To add stuff to your ~/.bash_profile, you can use any text editor (the guide doesn't tell you how). So, for example, if you use TextWrangler, you can type

open ~/.bash_profile -a TextWrangler

to open the bash_profile in TextWrangler, save, close the file and open a new Terminal for the changes to take effect.

• Skip everything in step 6 (Configure PostgreSQL). We'll be using SQLite instead.

• At the very end, the rails new myproject -d postgresql -T command should just be rails new myproject

I generally work in Python, using R for certain things (plotting, in general). Never coded in Ruby but hear it's not a huge leap away from Python?

• Ben

ditto: huge pythonista. i have some r experience but I've switched to numpy/scipy/matplotlib. never did a ruby before; should be an adventure.

I sent an email but saw all of these comments so thought I would echo. Haven't worked with Ruby/Rails before. Yay adventures. Python, yes, R for a few things. ~ Aurelia

I'm hearing that there is a plurality of Pythonistas in the crowd. Do you use Django, too? If most do, we can roll with that instead of Rails (but you'll have to teach me).

Not sure if will help but I found this data of defects and recalls that have some data about tires.

http://www-odi.nhtsa.dot.gov/downloads/flatfiles.cfm

@gabelula interesting.. we should use that stuff!

consumer reports piece: http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/tires/buying-guide.htm

Ideas (and links) we are discussing: https://etherpad.mozilla.org/HIFq7ax1UW