Quiz

I am AGAINST this decision that medical marijuana dispensaries may not be within 1000 ft. of places where children congregate. This ordinance is impractical on many different levels. Firstly, it is discriminates against medical marijuana dispensaries. Other substances sold within the state of California, alcohol for example, are also illegal for children to consume but are not regulated like this ordinance will regulate medical marijuana. Also, areas where children congregate is such a broad term, including public areas such as schools, parks, libraries, and even private churches, theaters, and shopping malls. If all of these areas were to be banned, there would hardly be anywhere for medical marijuana dispensaries to operate.

One can see from this map of a small area within downtown Los Angeles that of the 8 dispensaries already in operation in this location, 7 fall within these ‘areas where children congregate’. Throughout the rest of the city of Los Angeles, similar results are found. Many dispensaries would have to close, and few new ones would be able to open.

Lab 4

This assignment was straightforward and a great exercise for learning how to digitize in ArcGIS. By this point, I’ve become much better at using ArcCatalog to create geodatabases and organize my data. Creating the new shapefiles and editing their attributes was not too difficult either. I was surprised at the simplicity of the whole process of digitizing by this method. However, I did face difficulties with the borders polygons and with the features’ labels.

The Cut Polygons Features tool was indispensable, but caused issues occasionally. Sometimes an error message would come up saying it could not distinguish between the right and left side. I am not sure why this happened, or what it meant, but got around the problem each time by adding a few more vertices along the shared border. I could not figure out the point of or how to use the Auto-Complete Polygon tool, but look forward to learning this week.

I didn’t have any issues with the Modify Feature option and it worked wonders in fixing the few minor errors I made initially. It made extending and shortening lines, adding and removing vertices, and modifying polygon shapes easy tasks. Snapping was also an indispensable tool. I set the setting to snap to the edges and end points of the Iraq polygon. 

Lab 3

          For this week’s lab, I used ArcGIS as a tool to help me locate potential future job opportunities. I am majoring in Environmental Science and double minoring in Environmental Systems and Societies and GIS&T. My plan is to graduate UCLA with a better understanding of current environmental issues, a better grasp of the role societies play in creating and solving these issues, and the ability to use the powerful tools of GIS to become a valuable part of the solutions. I would like to start in the field of environmental consulting, using GIS as an indispensable tool for researching and presenting the best ways for companies and consumers to become more sustainable.

          After graduation I would like to work for an environmental consulting agency, preferably in Southern California, but most importantly near either Los Angeles or San Francisco. My task for this week’s lab was to find which environmental consulting agencies in California are closest to these two major cities. To help solve this inquiry, I geocoded the address of 53 different environmental consulting agencies in the state of California. By geocoding each agency’s address, I was able to create a map showing their distribution throughout the state. Most were near Los Angeles, but there were many spread throughout the state as well. To find out exactly which ones were near LA and San Francisco, I created two buffers, one extending 25 miles and one 50 miles from the center of each of these cities.

          Geocoding these addresses allowed me to see exactly where each agency is located within California. Using these geocoded addresses, the two buffers highlight exactly which agencies are located where I would like to work, near San Francisco or Los Angeles.  I created one map of the agencies near San Francisco and an additional map of those near Los Angeles. By using geocoding and buffers, I was able to discover and display the environmental consulting agencies that best fit my criteria. 

Thank you GIS, you saved the day yet again. 

Lab 2

Lab 1