Jon Stewart took on MERS on Tuesday night’s episode of the Daily Show; watch it below. As I’ve noted in earlier posts, there is a good deal of recent ongoing litigation against MERS, and it’s not only in the mortgage-registration business, it also markets tools to local governments for vacant property registration. The Daily Show …
As a follow up to yesterday’s post about the SimCity zoning map of Chicago, I’d like to point out that the map is a collection of interactive apps developed by Open City based largely on information from Chicago’s data portal. A couple of other apps by this project that I think are really interesting are …
Continue reading ‘Interactive Map of Chicago Crime, Ward by Ward’ »
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 …
Continue reading ‘MIT’s SENSEable City Lab’s TED talk – Video Wednesday’ »
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 …
Continue reading ‘Featured Websites: Crowdsourcing disease surveillance’ »
This week’s video is a fun one; it’s a concept video about Urbanflow, a collaboration between a NYC-based design company Urbanscale and Finnish designers Nordkapp. They want touchscreens everywhere in Helsinki, so the public can access maps and transit info, interact with each other, and report municipal concerns like potholes. John Pavlus has raised some concerns about their …
Continue reading ‘Urbanflow’s view of a touchscreen-filled data-driven city – Video Wednesday’ »
Today I want to highlight a great project that showcases the potential for technology to change city life for the better. Random Hacks of Kindness (or RHoK) is as an initiative started in 2009 by Microsoft, Google, Yahoo!, NASA, and the World Bank that hosts app contests aimed at the more social-justice side of open data. (It was originally aimed …
Continue reading ‘Featured Website: Random Hacks of Kindness and Sheltr’ »
Here’s an inspiring video that showcases a teacher in Detroit who is coaching low-income kids from Malcolm X Acadamy competing in a regional Future City competition for city planning. They win the rookie prize. I think that teaching kids this form of civic engagement is vital to our future.
LOVELAND Technologies is a neat project out of Detroit, Michigan, that is selling micro-lots of land in “microhoods” for $1 per square inch that people can track online. They focus on making these microhoods exciting by generating artsy urban-renewal projects. According to their website, they “aim to provide a fun, game-like ownership experience while creating entertainment …
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OpenPlans.org is a nonprofit organization generating open-source software designed to use data to improve city transportation, among other things. It has received quite a bit of media attention recently, including this recent article by Arianna Huffington, spotlighting the organization’s efforts to equip NYC with a real-time-tracking system for city buses. But as the group points …
Today’s Wednesday Video is a promotion video done by Oregon about their open-data website for the 2011 National Association of State Chief Information Officers Technology Innovation Awards. I think that it rightly celebrates the advances they’ve made, highlighting the praise its received from Oregon residents and outside groups (particularly transparency advocates). It also highlights many of the popular datasets available. …