When we first introduced the project to the principal at Wagner Middle School she was more than happy to let us have the mentor program their and to help us. We choose Wagner Middle School because Amirah’s mom works there. A permission slip was sent home to the girls who were going to attend the program, so that their parents know and are okay with what we were going to be talking about with their daughters and taking pictures for evidence. We had girls in sixth to eighth grade. When the girls first walked in they had food, snacks and drinks waiting for them.

I wanted to do a mentor program because I know that I am a good role model for young girls and can teach them the importance of having morals.

Bibliography:

http://chronus.com/how-to-start-a-mentoring-program

"How to Start a High-Impact Mentoring Program | Chronus." Chronus RSS. N.p., n.d. Web. 18 May 2016.

This is a website that helps people start their mentorship program. It gives them a sense of how to start the program and what they are starting it for. Guidance was needed to start the mentor group so that young girls know the ways of life. We had to make a permission slip for the girls, so that their parents were okay with what we were going to be talking about and if they’re okay with their child being photographed for our project.

http://www.cdc.gov/std/hiv/stdfact-std-hiv.htm

"STDs and HIV – CDC Fact Sheet." Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 14 Oct. 2015. Web. 18 May 2016.

This site gets to the nitty gritty of how serious sexaully trasmitted diseases. It talks about how some stds can turn into HIV. And that’s something you can die from. We had to teach the girls how serious catching sexually transmitted diseases is. It informs about the treatment if something do happen. This information is to not scare the young girls, but to show them how consequences work if they are not practicing safe sex.

http://www.webmd.com/sex-relationships/understanding-stds-basics

"STD Facts, Causes, Types, Transmission, and More." WebMD. WebMD, n.d. Web. 18 May 2016.

This site is informing visitors about sexually transmitted diseases. They inform people about the most common sexually transmitted disease. It show what you can do to not contract an std by wearing condoms and practicing abstinence. It shows people how to contract and sexually transmitted disease. It example the breakthrough of sexually transmitted diseases.

https://www.plannedparenthood.org/

"Planned Parenthood | Official Site." Planned Parenthood | Official Site. Web. 18 May 2016.

This website was used to teach girls on how to handle what they need to handle. By handle I mean if they were to contract and STD. Or to become pregnant. Of course they would have to tell their parents, but this is a place that they should know to go to if they need anything if they don’t want their parents to know.

http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/ree-drummond/grilled-chicken-sliders.html

"Grilled Chicken Sliders : Ree Drummond : Food Network." Grilled Chicken Sliders Recipe : Ree Drummond : Food Network. Web. 18 May 2016.

The young sixth, seventh and eighth graders. Chicken sliders was apart of our lesson plan. The guidelines was giving to inform on how to make the chicken sliders. All of ingredients had to be required and needed to produce what was needed to produce. The girls will accomplish at least learning how to make a food, if there is nothing else to eat. It is a great way to learn something new and it’s fun. The have to learn the ways of being an adult. Their parents is not going to be there for them all the time to make food. It’s also something to can surprise their mom and dad with on Mother’s Day or Father’s Day.

http://www.bettycrocker.com/recipes/easy-beef-tacos/426c261d-b2eb-4e22-9cba-0066f3335591

"Easy Beef Tacos." BettyCrocker.com. Web. 18 May 2016.

Beef tacos was needed because not everybody need or eat pork. Tacos and quesadillas were made to teach the girls on how to cook. Making tacos were a fun and is a fun way to cook. It also give them a new taste. Since most of the girls are African American females it gave them something new to try. Tacos are considered an Latina, cultural type of food. It introduces them to new things.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHwi_l4sg3o

Mreae. "How to Grill Salmon Perfectly." YouTube. YouTube, 2008. Web. 19 May 2016.

One of the ingredients for the tacos or something that were included in the tacos were salmon. Since salmon is an uncooked food and can be very bad if eaten uncooked can be a terrible thing. The girls were shown how to cook a raw fish. It doesn’t have to be burnt but it can be well done. They have the choice of following something that is very helpful for them and give them options of different sauces to put on the salmo. It gives the tacos a certain flavor that they might like. They would be proud of theirself for cooking something so good.

http://www.pbs.org/parents/parenting/raising-girls/body-image-identity/raising-a-powerful-girl/

PBS. PBS. Web. 19 May 2016.

One of the lesson plans that was for the young girls was to talk about parents. As young girls, you and your parent can tend to clash and “bump heads” a lot. Young girls feel like they know it all and that their mom is being mean for telling them what to do. When in all the mom is trying to help them. They don’t understand that. This conversation was to teach them not everything has to be an argument. They need to know that they can have great relationships with their self and their parents.

http://nypost.com/2016/02/21/how-social-media-is-destroying-the-lives-of-teen-girls/

Dawson, Mackenzie. "How Social Media Is Destroying the Lives of Teen Girls."New York Post. 2016. Web. 19 May 2016.

Social Media is a very opinionated place. Not everybody follow the rule “if you don’t have nothing nice to say don’t say it at all”. People are cruel now and days and everyone has a social media account no matter if it’s instagram, twitter, snapchat, kik and periscope. It allows you to put yourself out there but people need to learn the what side of their self to make public. Anybody can go look at your stuff and know who you are or what type of person you are just by your captions and the pictures you put up. Everything needs to be PG-13 because there are older woman out here not setting the right example.

http://www.youngwomenscollegeprep.org/

"Home - Young Womens College Prep." Home - Young Womens College Prep. Web. 19 May 2016.

The mentor group is at Wagner Middle School, although Wagner Middle School is a good school, it can always improve. Students can always benefit from their school becoming better. The girls need to know that getting degrees is very important and needed in life to have a comfortable living. It’s good to see what other schools talk about or do when it comes to their school. We can do the same thing they do and probably do it better.

The process of choosing a capstone was not an easy one for me. I first chose to work with Habitat for Humanity for my capstone and to get a group of students involved in service project through the organization. After a few months of planning, scheduling, and organizing, I learned that my plan was not going to work. With a mere two months left to complete a capstone I was proud of, I talked to John Kamal and Alex Gilliam to come up with a capstone. The idea we came up with consisted of a series of building projects that would benefit the school in some way whether through the classroom environment or simple improvements. 

The results of this project were two table-top lecterns for Ms. Martin, and a shelf that Ms. Giknis can set speakers up on. It is all visible through a website I created to display the work I have done so anyone can see. I had to learn how to better use various tools. From doing this, I learned that I should always have a backup plan, and a backup-backup plan. I have learned that there is a lot of value in asking for help, which I have always struggled with. I also now know there is a lot of work that goes into a project like this and I highly respect the process. I have learned a lot through completing this capstone and although it was a difficult process, I am happy with the result.

`Cohen, G., and K. M. Crawford. "A Problem in Estimating Bus Stop Times." Applied Statistics 27.2 (1978): 139. JSTOR. Web. 3 Feb. 2016.

This journal by The Royal Statistical Society demonstrates a linear regression for the time a bus spends at a stop, as dependent on the amount of passengers boarding and alighting. Other models provide algorithms to determine whether a boarding/alighting event is definite, improbable, or unlikely. The amount of time a bus would spend not actually moving isn’t something usually taken into account when models of tracking based on actual vehicle location are made, however the creation of such a linear regression based on typical SEPTA data, or gathered by users, would highly increase the accuracy of the tracking by adding another layer of adaptation to only getting new data every 3-5 minutes.

Forbes, M. A., J. N. Holt, P. J. Kilby, and A. M. Watts. "BUDI: A Software System for Bus Dispatching." J Oper Res Soc Journal of the Operational Research Society 45.5 (1994): 497-508. JSTOR. Web. 3 Feb. 2016.

A software system known as BUDI is described for the dispatching of buses operated by a public transport organization in Austrailia. Organization of transit terminology is an early focus, defining routes and the difference between a route and a timetabled instance of one, for example. Definitions and rostering of the BCC depots mentioned will provide a theoretical model for database construction of similar data received from the aforecited SEPTA API. While BUDI’s focus is on sorting and dispatching, the concepts behind it’s design, especially in terms of the database it relies on, is universally applicable to any analysis of transit data.

Golshani, Forouzan. "System Regularity and Overtaking Rules in Bus Services." J Oper Res Soc Journal of the Operational Research Society 34.7 (1983): 591-97. JSTOR. Web. 3 Feb. 2016.

To passengers, the most important part of a service is its reliability. The authors of this study analyzed average waiting time and under what circumstances would it be appropriate for one bus to overtake another. A simulation was run to determine the average headways and overtaking during a typical day of bus service. Though the original simulation is unavailable and outdated (written in fortran for a mainframe), the mathematics are available in this research journal. There are many different models used to simulate service, and each will have to be evaluated as to it’s potential accuracy. A theoretical application to Accusepta would be to create a new simulation for every time new data is received, allowing for more accurate estimates of headways over time.

Jansson, Jan Owen. "A Simple Bus Line Model for Optimisation of Service Frequency and Bus Size." Journal of Transport Economics and Policy 14.1 (1980): 53-80. JSTOR. Web. 3 Feb. 2016.

This analysis of Swedish buses in the 1980’s shows a model of total trip time as dependent on the time taken to travel the distance plus the total time spent boarding and alighting. This algorithm was originally used for economical reasons, determining the most profitable optimized frequency of bus travel. However, this model is relevant as it can be used to provide a “larger picture” estimation of total travel time for a run of a SEPTA bus.

Jennings, Norman H., and Justin H. Dickins. "Computer Simulation of Peak Hour Operations in a Bus Terminal." Management Science 5.1 (1958): 106-20. JSTOR. Web. 3 Feb. 2016.

The Monte Carlo method is a statistical simulation built upon the principle of thousands of random estimations within a set of constraints. This method is most often used to replace costly real world trial and error with a computer simulation. In 1958, Port Authority employees built a simulation to build a histogram of the distribution of the bus arrival times to be used when organizing dispatch for the day. This algorithm was used in the original Accusepta design, and is applicable to, say, estimating the probability of making a connection depending on the estimated travel time from the vehicle’s last known location.  

Mcleod, F. "Estimating Bus Passenger Waiting times from Incomplete Bus Arrivals Data." J Oper Res Soc Journal of the Operational Research Society 58.11 (2006): 1518-525. JSTOR. Web. 3 Feb. 2016.

Operations Researchers in Southhampton UK have built a model to determine average waiting time based on bus headways, the time between busses at a stop using an AVL, an automatic vehicle location system akin to that used and provided by SEPTA. The main problem with using an AVL is that missing data is almost a guarantee. SEPTA only provides locations every three to five minutes, for example. A lack of total data coverage creates gaps that have to be worked with. The authors main goal is to contribute to the theory of estimating headway variance, the difference between the frequency of busses, with incomplete data. Various methods are tested on different data sets. Previous research on AVL based models is hard to find, and adapting to the gaps, where the bus could potentially make multiple stops or travel a significant distance, is hard to manage while striving for accuracy.

Pratelli, A., and F. Schoen. "A Mathematical Programming Model for the Bus Deviation Route Problem." J Oper Res Soc Journal of the Operational Research Society 52.5 (2001): 494-502. JSTOR. Web. 3 Feb. 2016.

Researchers at The University of Piza and the University of Firanze in Italy have contributed to the creation of a mathematical model of a deviated bus route. While SEPTA does not operate on a deviated bus route. Such a route supports the main route along a corridor, while collecting and distributing passengers from neighboring blocks. The increased route flexibility causes an increase in both travel time and wait time. Despite the fact that SEPTA does not possess a deviated bus route system, the modeling is applicable in terms of analyzing theoretical inconvenience to passengers as well as tracking busses that do not follow their schedules due to traffic or other factors. Thus, this discrepancy between the schedules and the effects of real life can be equivalent to a deviated stop in terms of analyzing inconvenience to passengers. Pratelli. A, has proposed a mixed integer linear programming problem that highlights “many-to-many”, where it takes into account that passengers alight and board at every stop on the route. Other elements it proposes include the concept of net inconvenience for passengers, based off of travel time, waiting time, and any increases to that, alongside delay.

Pratelli. A and F. Schoen both created analytical models of the feasibility of a transit system based on deviation, and a core notation is the usage of arcs between two points. Arcs are used as an efficient and inclusionary way in Italy to capture most every location the bus could have passed in the interim between the last location signaled to central command, deviated stop or not.

"Public Transport, Walking and Cycling Directions - Citymapper." Citymapper. Web. 04 Feb. 2016. <https://citymapper.com/philadelphia>.

Citymapper is a Web/iOS/Android app that implements transit data from cities all over the world, including Philadelphia and implements the SEPTA API, however does not provide real time tracking. Citymapper does provide a transit focused view that services such as, say, Google Maps, do not provide as clearly. This aggregation of all available transit services provides an interesting perspective on user interface. Citymapper also provides a directions and travel time interface capable of being used in one’s own applications.

"SEPTA API Documentation." SEPTA API. SEPTA DEV. Web. 03 Feb. 2016. <http://www3.septa.org/hackathon/>.

SEPTA provides documentation on their API (Application Programming Interface). SEPTA provides http links with the ability to make specific requests for data depending on route or location. Features include the TransitView API, a specific system to make requests as to the location of either a specific bus or all buses currently active in the SEPTA network. TransitView will be the crux of the ACCUSEPTA model, as it can provide active tracking of every bus on duty, sending data every 3-5 minutes. Other documentation focuses on interfacing with raw schedule data for other SEPTA services. This framework will be used to build custom route objects for every bus in Philadelphia.

"Septadev/SEPTA-Android." GitHub. SEPTA/Github. Web. 03 Feb. 2016. <https://github.com/septadev/SEPTA-Android>.

SEPTA makes all source code for both their iOS and Android apps available online on Github. This allows for a resource as to the implementation of access to the SEPTA database, alongside typical ways it is accessed. The official SEPTA app offers some features that are useful, however the transitview is lackluster and only provides a general location as was last received. Not much analysis is done, as is the goal with Accusepta. However, the base of real time tracking is there for both buses and regional rail, thus providing a theoretical base on which to build up important Accusepta features based on the official SEPTA implementation of their API.