I just got the new Wired magazine in the mail (March 2012), and it has an interesting article called “Cultivating Genius” by Jonah Lehrer. (Sorry, no online link yet.) The article starts by essentially making the same point that Edward Glaeser makes in Triumph of the City about how innovators and creators tend to congregate, …
This past weekend, I visited my hometown of Flint, Michigan, which has notoriously faced tough times in the past few years. I was surprised at how hopeful the mood is there.
I have previously written about my support for Congress authorizing the FCC to hold incentive auctions for underused spectrum and giving the FCC broad discretion in doing so. Today, the New York Times reports that a bill to authorize the auction may be approved this weekend. The Obama administration has said that the auctions could …
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Yesterday, the city of Chicago approved a plan to collect unpaid parking fines from state tax refunds. As the Chicago Tribune pointed out, this “power to dip into tax refunds before they’re sent out comes from a little-noticed state law that took effect two months ago that allows cities and school districts to go to …
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This video is from March 2011. It features Carlo Ratti from the MIT SENSEable City Lab discussing how they track real-time data from cities, particularly cellphone data. I like the video because it moves beyond visualizations to some useful analysis. It also covers some of their cool projects, such as trash_track. The lab is also …
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I thought it would be interesting to look at the different type of criminal cases in the federal Northern District of Illinois versus the Southern District of Illinois. (There is also the Central District of Illinois, which I am not going to discuss.) Obviously, the Northern District includes more than just Chicago, but the city …
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Today I’m spotlighting a few websites that track real-time health information. One neat site is Healthmap.org, a site that scans news reports and gives an hourly update about health concerns worldwide, pinpointing the location on a map. It says it’s a go-to place for disease-surveillance experts, and I can see why: The site does a …
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If a city has a Facebook page, can it remove distasteful comments? profane ones? racist ones? As professor Lyrissa Lidsky explains in her recent article, Public Forum 2.0, the answer to those questions isn’t always easy because the Supreme Court’s public forum and government speech is complex. As she points out, the Supreme Court has …
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