Technology
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On Parsing Restaurant Inspection Violations (Subtitled: Goddess and the Grocer on Elston Had a Bad Day Last Week)
This morning I was reviewing a saved view on the City of Chicago data portal for restaurant inspections conducted by the Chicago Department of Public Health based on a suspected food poisoning. I used a feature of Socrata, the software used in the portal, that The Local Inspector Value-Entry Specification (LIVES) is an effort by Yelp, Code for…
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The Time I Called Scott McNealy on the Telephone
Today I am going to a talk at 1871 by Scott McNealy, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems and one of the fathers of the modern computing industry. In early 1993, I saw an article in the New York Times with a picture of McNealy and some of his colleagues looking at video over the internet: Tech…
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The Uneven Distribution of Efficiencies
There is a section of this story in the NYT today (A Part-Time Life, as Hours Shrink and Shift) that struck me another example of how the in-fluidity of data has negative affects on the economy: Technology is speeding this transformation. In the past, part-timers might work the same schedule of four- or five-hour shifts…
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Hidden Personal Data and the Passionate Stories Within
Lately I’ve been collecting and publishing data about myself from disparate places. For instance, the CTA allows you to download the last 90 days of your travel history– here’s a block of mine. I’m working on collecting the last 5 years of every item each of my children has purchased for lunch at school. By…
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Quick Review of Chicago’s Open 311 Implementation
Here are some notes I took while reviewing the various Web resources published in the City’s Open 311 implementation announced on Friday: Service Tracker: http://servicetracker.cityofchicago.org/ The Service Tracker tool is driven by this open source code: It displays a running list of service requests submitted under the following service request types: Some possible improvements: Many of…