19 Recent Photos

Jan 31

lindsayrgwattNYC, Random, Travel Comments Off

Maptastic

Jan 31

lindsayrgwattTechnology , Comments Off

In my opinion, one of the greatest innovations of the past five years is how location has become a part of everyday life.  Google Maps or its equivalent has become a standard tool in many people’s life.  When you’re looking for directions, a place, etc. you simply call it up; no more guessing where you are.

We’ve come a long way in the past five years, but a couple of recent experiences reminded me of just how far there still is to go.

First one: I can walk from NYC to Ottawa in 5 days.

As Wen and I were going home for Christmas, I decided to see what the directions would look like ‘by foot’.   I was impressed that it would only take about five and half days to do that.   That’s about 72 miles a day.

You get a great sense of how Google’s algorithms work here.  The average human can walk about 3 miles per hour.  There are 24 hours in a day.  Ergo, 72 miles per day and 5.5 days to Ottawa.

My second moment came when I stumbled upon this nameless street when trying to find a cafe:

Of course, this street does have a name (Greenwich).  And this example speaks more to the power than limitation of online mapping tools: they’ve become such a part of my life that a part of me almost questions why the street has no name, rather than thinking there’s something wrong with the program.

Competition is a Great Thing

Jan 31

lindsayrgwattBusiness , , , View Comments

I was going through my photos today and found this one:

Now, you might be reasonable asking: “Lindsay, why on earth would you want to take a photo of a photo of the Ottawa airport’s board of directors?”  Because this is a great example of monopolistic excess.

When you arrive in the Ottawa airport domestic terminal, you’re greeted with this ad.  It’s conspicuously placed so that almost everyone has to look at it.  Since Ottawa’s the nation’s capital, a lot of politicians and assorted ‘important’ people must pass through the airport, and I’m sure the board thought this was a great way to get some exposure for themselves.

I, however, am neither important nor interested in the details of the board.  What I’m more interested in, is what does not appear on the ad.  There’s absolutely no way to contact any of these folks.  If you’re like me, and it’s 1:30 am in the morning and you’ve been waiting for 45 minutes for your bags because a) there wasn’t a gate ready for your plane [think about that-that means that the tower assumed your regularly scheduled plane wasn't going to arrive.  Does that mean they were assuming a crash?] and b) there were two other planes in the same boat and therefore no baggage crews, you might want to reach out to these folks to explain a teachable moment.

However, this ad is, instead, a monument to corporate self-gratification.  There’s no way to contact these people and instead they simply gloat over you as you await your bags.  No phone number, no email address, no website.  Nothing  It’s unintentionally the ultimate symbol of monopolistic hubris.

I know there’s not a lot that can be done to stop the monopoly that an airport’s going to have in a (relatively) small town like Ottawa, but some high speed rail would sure go a long way to making life a little more awkward for that board (Ottawa-Montreal and Ottawa-Toronto are the bread and butter of the airport).  And that wouldn’t be a bad thing.

Can Someone Please Explain This To Me?

Jan 22

lindsayrgwattRandom , , Comments Off

I was too young to appreciate the beautifully-lucid-yet-logically-untenable propaganda dreamed up by apparatchiks in the Soviet Union, but, fortunately, China is the new Russia.  Check out some quotes from the China Global Times’ response to the U.S. asking for freedom of info on the web:

The hard fact that Clinton has failed to highlight in her speech is that bulk of the information flowing from the US and other Western countries is loaded with aggressive rhetoric against those countries that do not follow their lead.

In contrast, in the global information order, countries that are disadvantaged could not produce the massive flow of information required, and could never rival the Western countries in terms of information control and dissemination.

I don’t really understand the logic in the above statement, but, hey-let’s see where this goes!

It is not because the people of China do not want free flow of information or unlimited access to Internet, as in the West. It is just because they recognize the situation that their country is forced to face.

Unlike advanced Western countries, Chinese society is still vulnerable to the effect of multifarious information flowing in, especially when it is for creating disorder.

Yikes.  China can create the second biggest economy in the world, send an astronaut into space, become the manufacturer for the world but it still needs its government to protect its people from themselves?  Because apparently despite all their achievements over the past few years they are incapable of determining what is ‘true’ and what is a ‘lie’?  What b.s.  Kudos to Google for threatening to pull out.

What I Hope Will be in the Apple Tablet

Jan 20

lindsayrgwattBusiness, Technology , , , Comments Off

It’s official. Apple’s releasing something next week; maybe the table computer that’s going to revolutionize everything.  Lots of people have speculated as to what’s going to be in it.  A lot of people expect that it might save journalism and media.

Let’s speculate about how it might save journalism (or your industry of choice).  It’s going to have to provide a great experience that’s fundamentally different from how it works today (check out this Sports Illustrated mock for one hypothesis).  However, I think it’s going to have to make it really easy to pay for this content, too.  Ads alone aren’t keeping these folks in business, so a new format alone (which is just more ad inventory) isn’t going to be enough.

So what could this mean?  Well, imagine a monthly subscription to all New York Times content – across your tablet, iPhone and the web – with the first 100 articles or so free.

Similarly, right now it’s tough to do subscriptions for an iPhone app.  You have to put the app in the store and then the subscription occurs within the app (e.g., it sells for $0.99 in the store but then it’s $9.99/month within the app to use it).  I’m hoping that with the tablet, Apple will continue switching the store to allow transparent per month pricing at the time of purchase, with a free trial.

Ideally, two things come out of the tablet:

  1. New ways to convince users to subscribe to content.  Ideally, providing a ubiquitous payment system that works across all digital channels
  2. An improvement to subscription pricing in the iTunes store

These sound totally banal, but if this happens it will suddenly be financially viable for a whole new type of software to be developed for the iPhone.  Apple can build its mobile lead and really revolutionize a lot more than just journalism.

Today’s Moment of Inspiration

Jan 14

lindsayrgwattRandom Comments Off

This quote below precisely encapsulates so much of what I am looking for in life:

When you actually see somebody doing amazing things, there’s no excuses for doing mediocre work. Seeing people who are super passionate about what they do, I think that creates a self-propelling hunger.

Gabriella Gómez-Mont in “More Intelligent Life”

Everything is Better with Lasers

Jan 13

lindsayrgwattNYC, Random Comments Off

If you ever find yourself in Cobble Hill, be sure to check out any movie playing at the Cobble Hill Theater.  They have easily created the best pre-movie house ad of all time.  Watch closely for the chairs with lasers (alas, the chairs don’t really have lasers) at the halfway mark:

And, yes, that really was a request for you to a) not smoke and b) turn off your pager.

An Open Letter to Mayor Bloomberg & the Future Head of the DOITT

Jan 04

lindsayrgwattNYC, Technology , , , Comments Off

I was part of a team that recently submitted an app for the NYC BigApps contest and therefore had the opportunity to play with a lot of the data sets in the NYC Data Mine.  In the spirit of continuous improvement, I wanted to suggest how the city can take a great resource and make it even better.

After combining nine data sets (and being unable to combine many others), we feel that we can talk to some of the challenges in working with the data and the overall opportunity to improve it.  Our main suggestion is that the City should think of itself as a platform that provides standardized data and end users like ourselves add value by bringing together the different data sets and 3rd party services.  We can’t claim to have created the “government as a platform” idea, but we can tell you some of the issues New York City faces if this is the path you (hopefully) take.

With that, here are a few suggestions:

  1. Make all your data machine readable.  Some of your data is incredibly rich, but buried in formats that are hard to parse.  The best example is probably the community district demographic info: there are over 100 spreadsheet pages of rich data there, but it’s incredibly difficult to use in CSV form.  Ideally, this would all simply be XML and it could be reused in seconds.
  2. Open source formats please.  Some of your data is locked in proprietary formats, accessible only to users with multi-thousand dollar software packages (a great example are the gdb files for ArcView shape data).  If you want random citizens like us to mash up your data, please provide the data in exclusively open source formats as our software budget is $0.  (It looks like this is changing – I noticed that some of the gdb files at the Data Mine now include shape files as well.  Kudos)
  3. Add lat/longs (the commercial standard for mapping services) to every address/point.  Some of your address data consists just of addresses without lat/longs.  Some of these (e.g., certain school locations) are improperly formatted, so we can’t use commercial systems like the Yahoo Geocoding API to calculate lat/longs and put them on a map or assign them to a district/neighborhood.  Other files contain lat/longs but they’re in a different coordinate system: this means that developers need to convert them into lat/longs in order to map them – and this process introduces errors and takes unnecessary time.
  4. More documentation.  Some of your files contain lots of data but lack the documentation necessary to make them usable.  The best example are the health info shape files: they’re full of statistical data for different areas, but there’s no way to figure out exactly what each of the statistical values means.  Similarly, the shape files for each community district contains their area – but there’s no unit of measurement (it’s something called ‘internal units squared’).
  5. More data.  You gave us some great data to play with, but there’s still a ton more.  What about Compstat for crime data?  School scores and their trends over time?  The location of different alarm boxes so we can see how response times vary by area?

These suggestions are meant entirely as an opportunity to build off of a great start.  We – the people of New York – want to work with the city to help make it a better place.  However, the value we add is in creating tools and finding hidden relationships in the data – not in standardizing it; that’s where you can make the system work.

If you provide us with well-formed, machine-readable, standardized data, we’ll help build the services that citizens need and free up the city’s resources to focus where they’re needed most.  We’ll also find new relationships in the data that might help you rethink policy initiatives (see how your data suggests an interesting link between ‘education’ and ‘going green’; I’ve no idea if you knew this).

2009 was a great start for a more open NYC.gov.  Can’t wait to see what you do in 2010.