Honolulu is, somewhat surprisingly, the 10th largest municipality in the United States. IBM is working with the local government to update its technology—to “build a smarter Honolulu,” as they would say. Here is an interesting video on efforts to provide data to citizens, and the results from those efforts, namely, citizen-created apps. A bus-tracker app …
A new report issued this week titled “Locating Chicago Manufacturing: The Geography of Production in Metropolitan Chicago,” authored by Howard Wial, Executive Director and Associate Research Professor at University of Illinois at Chicago’s Center for Urban Economic Development. The paper seems to subtly advocate that Chicago should be one of the locations for the three …
Our electronic age has decidedly outdated our courts’ go-to analyses for questions about the Fourth Amendment, leaving courts to reach for nondigital analogs for new technology. In my opinion, this reaching has produced some shaky results, leading to unclear guidelines for local police officers. To demonstrate, I present in no particular order three of the most-questionable …
Continue reading ‘The Fourth Amendment and Questionable Analogies’ »
Google released a new promo video for its exciting Glass project, which is essentially augmented-reality glasses. The video focuses on the chat and image-capture features, but there is a shot near the middle of a person diving through a city and getting directions, and another shot near the end of the glasses providing flight information. …
Continue reading ‘Google Glass promo showcases potentials for city life’ »
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’ »
As covered by Government Technology, Chicago has upgraded the ChiTEXT component of its 311 system to allow citizens to complete most 311 tasks via text. Texts will prompt a series of scripted questions to better identify the problem: For a pot hole, for example, you may get asked if it’s near a curb line or …
Continue reading ‘Chicagoans can now complete most 311 tasks by text’ »
Khan Academy has been the education start-up to watch for awhile now, having been featured in Wired Magazine and endorsed and promoted by none other than Bill Gates. A new article by David Hill at SingularityHub gives a great summary of the Academy’s past year, showing why the program remains the hottest thing in education …
Continue reading ‘Great article about exciting new developments at Khan Academy’ »
IBM is working with Zjenjiang, China, to build a “smart” city; here’s an interesting promotional video:
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’ »