Lately I've been working a couple of projects that involved cellphone use in Mexico. As soon as we started working we identified the clear lack of information about where coverage exists in Mexico and where it doesn't. In particular we wanted to identify locality level information on cellphone coverage and at the end of the day we found out that either you went directly with the carriers or you didn't have acess to easy to use information.

The closest we found was Open Signal which provides an API from a crowdsourced database on signal in different parts of Mexico. It has two problems; 1) its crowdsourced so it might have issues in smaller localities in rural areas (one of our main interests) and, 2) its API limits 5 requests per second and only 2K a month. That means no posibility of actual downloading the DB of Shapefiles which might make the procedure really tiresome. As we were about to lose hope we found that the GSMA , an association that groups together almost all the cellphone providers in the world, has website with a very ugly tool to see the maps. I thought it would be a good idea to get them from there. This is what this post is about, so you can get them pretty easily using some R.

This shouldn't be a very interesting post, it's just about a really quick webtool that explored how certain vehicles did in emissions testing depending on model year. This is part of the results a contest I was kindly invited by Pepe Merino, one of my college professors, in which the Laboratorio para la Ciudad, which heads Mexico City's open data inciative, prereleased local datasets and gave us 24 hours to produce a data journalism project.

My team included two people from the lab for the city, a designer and a computer programmer, we had brilliant starting idea but that got vetoed (ironic right) so did this. Hope you like it.

So I've been thinking for a while what to do for this blog for the day of the dead. As most of you will now the Day of the Dead is quite a large affair here so I thought there could be something I could do with data to have fun for this celebration. What I decided to do was to build and interactive tool in which to inspect what different demographic groups die of here in Mexico. The basic idea is you put your own population characteristics (age, sex, location, education) and the tool will subset and tabulate data and give you the 10 most common causes of death for that group.

NOTE: I had mistakenly added a fixed effects vector on the model description. The results in table 4 show coefficients for a model without fixed effects. Aditionaly I should say that results from a zero-inflated model do not yield significantly different results. Sorry about that :P

Recently I was approached by one of Mexico's most popular sport websites, MedioTiempo.com with a question. Does football increase violence and criminal incidence? One of the things they wanted to know was if first division football ( Liga MX) games in Mexico altered the number of crimes commited in the home city of the playing team. Right away I though this was a really good question and started mindstorming about some possible ways to find out. This post is about one idea I had to test for this and the results I found. Hopefully a cooler and more visual post will come out soon at mediotiempo.com.

Every month (around the 15th) the national public safety system (SNSP) releases information regarding the number of crimes commited in Mexico, this information comes from the local (state) district attorney's office who compile information about the number of crimes commited for something like 10 or so different fellonies and then submit it to the SNSP who publishes the data at the state and national level.