27 Matching Annotations
  1. Jul 2019
    1. The men, women and children of Savannah, Georgia, and Avon Park, Florida, were exposed to hundreds of millions of mosquitoes infected by the U.S, Army with dengue fever and yellow fever.

      This facility wasn't shuttered until 1979,

  2. Jul 2018
    1. "The only way we can make informed decisions as staff and make recommendations to the city council is if we really hear from our citizenry," said Melissa Carter, Savannah Budget Director. 

      Yes. But how?

  3. Dec 2017
    1. brought in as firefighters, not relationship-builder

      Citizen-participation only sought in times of crisis. Analogy of 'brigade' outlived its purpose?

  4. Nov 2017
    1. Civic tech organizations largely need to improve their ability to tell compelling and comprehensible stories about their impact. On a more cosmetic level, organizations can do more to frame their work and outcomes in a way that resonates with beneficiaries and current and potential funders.

      Importance of storytelling.

  5. Jul 2017
    1. Correct Care Solutions

      Subsidiary list from GEO, CCA, MTC needed.

    2. While the emphasis has shifted from building more private prisons, the Geo Group is now focused on expanding its ancillary services — from treatment programs for mentally ill inmates and re-entry facilities for inmates transitioning back to society, to electronic monitoring and community supervision.

      FInd data on profit margins between incarceration and providing ancillary services. Do PP's make more per person through these ancillary services for transitioning than they do off filling prison beds?

    3. The Geo Group contributed $43,000 to the congressional campaign of Rebecca Negron on two separate days in 2015 and 2016, and gave another $50,000 on June 22 to the super PAC that is supporting her, Conservative Congress Now!, according to federal campaign finance reports.

      Need to locate the campaign finance reports from Florida.

    1. toring the results derived from your use of the App and/or Omega Services for the purpose of creating a value-added, web-enabled application or App that you intend to resell, license, or otherwise distribute to third parties without the prior express written permission of O

      Even open-source projects need permission?

    2. Any attempt to manually or systematically harvest, scrape, or accumulate criminal event information and/or data provided by the App and/or Omega Services for any purpose;

      Nope, civic hackers, even though your tax dollars pay for it, you can't scrape our data or we'll sue you.

    3. Use of any criminal event information and/or data displayed within the App and/or Omega Services for commercial use, business purposes, or in any other such manner with the intent of financial or monetary gain or to inhibit, prevent, interfere, or degrade Omega's ability to use the App or Omega Services for its own commercial purposes;

      Whoa, so you don't own the data at all, but you do own the rights to it?!?!

    1. All data is owned and maintained by the agencies subscribe to our site. Information displayed is stored on our encrypted hosting servers and is not available to the public. If you require information on incidents older than what is provided, please contact your local agency on how to obtain the data.

      Boom. Sure, crimemapping.com has the data, but they can't provide it directly in a machine-readable format because it's encrypted... WTF! Who encrypts public data? Oh, that's right, people who profit from it staying exclusively in their control.

    2. The content on CrimeMapping.com is a representation of crime and is not all-inclusive. Each agency has the choice to customize their content from the crime types and crime codes they have displayed on CrimeMapping.com.

      Whoa, this leaves a massive grey area open to interpretation by departments as they may wish. It's almost like a wink, wink. "Want to under-report your crime data? That's okay with us, just call it a 'representation'."

    3. FREE

      Well, it's paid for by their tax dollars, so it's not really FREE.

    1. In the academic world of machine learning, there is little focus on obtaining datasets. Instead, it is even the opposite: in order to compare deep learning techniques with other approaches and ensure that one method outperforms others, the standard procedure is to measure the performance on a standard dataset with the same evaluation procedure.

      Data science 'curriculum' not suited to real-world application.

  6. Jun 2017
    1. “Emotions played a really big part in people’s responses to visualizations. They had emotional responses to all of the things mentioned previously, to the subject matter, the source or location, the visual elements, but the data itself, you know, “I can see from this visualization that knife crime in my area is going up and now I feel scared.”

      Need to personalize, provide drill-down details on demand.

    1. Annotations on LN Community Crime Map application for municipal crime mapping. In use currently by SCMPD.

    2. you will not engage in commercial activities or operate a platform application or Site in connection with the Site.

      Funny that they state this specifically in regards to outside, foreign commercial use, because, by requiring LN's permission for the information to be used domestically in any way, they've kind of already controlled even the domestic flow of Public Data that doesn't belong to them.

    3. The information displayed in this Site is susceptible to some degree of error due to the collection, entry, and geoprocessing of the data. No warranty, representation, or guarantee whatsoever is made or implied regarding the content, accuracy (including, without limitation, geographic accuracy), timeliness, completeness, or sequence of any of the information contained in this Site. Neither you, nor any other person, should rely on the data provided herein for any reason; the owners and operators of this Site as well as all directors, officers, employees, agents, and affiliates of LN shall not be held responsible for any errors or omissions in this Site or produced by any secondary dissemination of this information

      Oh, and by the way, wink, wink, if you want to fudge your crime stats, you can simply blame it on "some degree of error due to the collection, entry and geoprocessing of the data." We are in no way saying to the public this is the complete factual account! Nope! Not us.

    4. All information provided by a law enforcement agency is offered and owned by that law enforcement agency.

      Note that this caveat is mentioned only in a discussion of the liability of inaccurate data or data sharing that violates state laws, and contradicts the statement made in Article 1. So, the content on the site (crime data) is proprietary property of LN, but LN bears no legal liability for its accuracy. That liability falls back on the local agency who reported it. That's convenient, huh?

    5. The content and software on the Site are the proprietary property of LN and/or its suppliers and Partners and are protected by U.S. and international copyright and other intellectual property laws.

      Here's the red flag: "content and software are proprietary property of LN." But that's public data. LN legally cannot claim ownership of it.

    6. Except as expressly permitted hereunder, you agree not to duplicate, publish, modify, or otherwise distribute the material on the Site unless specifically authorized in writing by LN to do so.

      You must seek Lexis Nexis' permission to cite public data or publish or distribute any of the inforrmation on crime.

    7. collect content or information, or otherwise access the Site, using automated means (such as harvesting bots, robots, spiders, or scrapers) or by bypassing the Site’s user interface without our permission;

      TOS prevents the public from accessing raw data that is public data.

    1. “The difference between design and research seems to be a question of new versus good. Design doesn't have to be new, but it has to be good. Research doesn't have to be good, but it has to be new. I think these two paths converge at the top: the best design surpasses its predecessors by using new ideas, and the best research solves problems that are not only new, but worth solving. So ultimately design and research are aiming for the same destination, just approaching it from different directions.”– Paul Graham, Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age.

      Inverse approach of academia and design at same end goal.

    2. “He who loves practice without theory is like the sailor who boards ship without a rudder and compass and never knows where he may cast.”

      Need for practical training and theoretical grounding in data visualization.

    1. “With the passage of time, the psychology of people stays the same, but the tools and objects in the world change.” – Donald A. Norman, The Design of Everyday Things

      Keep in mind that Norman's The Design of Everyday Things was originally entitled The Psychology of Everyday Things.

    2. Technologists are not noted for learning from the errors of the past. They look forward, not behind, so they repeat the same problems over and over again.”

      History of computational thinking.