Freelancer or equivalent freelance coder experience anyone?
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Sure, a script that would take as input a list of cities/towns. It would create a grid (well, CSV file) that would contain the driving distance between each unique pairing of cities.
e.g. input of:
"New York, NY, Chicago, IL, Los Angeles CA"Would produce the following table:
0, 789, 2794
789, 0, 2020
2794,2020,0But in practice there would be ~5-600 inputs.
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You might be curious why this is useful to the foundation.
We maintain a network of certified care centers, physicians known to us who are knowledgable in our rare disease. Historically, we've expanded the program passively, we've waited for physicians to apply for inclusion in our program.
THis, as you might image, has led to huge geographic disparities in the availability of care. You can look at a map and see where our gaps are, but to really see the impact of gaps, you need a population weighting.
The US census defines Metropolitan and Micropolitan Statistical Areas that, combined, account for about 96% of the US population. They track of the population in each of these areas.
With the grid I described above, using the 5-600 areas defined, we could start measuring the percentage of the country that lives within X miles of a care center. That information would allow us to proactively expand our network by recruiting physicians, in the most impactful way possible. Also, having this grid as a CSV file would allow me to import it into an excel sheet, so that when we do add a new center it would automatically compute the distances from that center to every other statistical area, and we could automatically re-calculate the percentage of the population living within X miles from a center. In other words, getting this in Excel allows existing foundation staff to maintain this in an ingoing fashion.
It's also part of an initiative we've kicked off trying to measure the impact of our various programs. It's easy to say "We have 85 care centers" but that measures inputs not impact. If we can say, for example, "65% of the country lives within 100 miles of a care center and 80% live within 200" that tells us the impact the program is having. It would also allow us to figure out where to recruit to get that number as high as possible.
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@Horace said in Freelancer or equivalent experience anyone?:
Jon I bet you can do this yourself.
I could and I considered it. I played with python 6-8 years ago. But I finally decided I'd rather have it more quickly than that, and that there's other things I could do for the foundation with that time that would be more impactful.
I also thought there are people who could do this in minutes. It would take me days. (though I admit it would be a fun learning process)
"You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from."
-Cormac McCarthy -
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@Horace said in Freelancer or equivalent experience anyone?:
Jon I bet you can do this yourself.
I could and I considered it. I played with python 6-8 years ago. But I finally decided I'd rather have it more quickly than that, and that there's other things I could do for the foundation with that time that would be more impactful.
I also thought there are people who could do this in minutes. It would take me days. (though I admit it would be a fun learning process)
