It’s been snowing for over 24 hours now in NYC, so I thought I’d post some photos. If I had cross-country skis, I could have probably skied to work today.
Here are some shots of snowy Carroll Gardens:
This is the intersection of Union and Clinton; it would normally be awash in taxis, school buses and delivery trucks:
Absolutely no one is to be seen at 8th and 15th:
And, of course, someone seems to have panicked and thinks we’re having an emergency. This guy is wearing his “Red Cross Emergency Worker” outfit. Please; it’s just a snowstorm:
And finally, a shot of what it looks like from work. That awkward looking grey phalange is the Empire State Building…
The other night I was in the 2nd Ave subway station and a busker was playing the saxophone. It’s a total New York cliche – the echo eventually drowned out by the roar of a train – but it still sounds great. Here’s a snippet:
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.
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:
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.
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)
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.
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’).
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.
Yesterday was the year’s last installment of the New Amsterdam Market. It’s New York’s most charming farmer’s market and is held in one of it’s most charmless locations (underneath the FDR by the old Fulton fish market). The market is a celebration of the passion and craft of local and regional food artisans. Whether you’re looking for bread, meat, cheese, chocolate, coffee or olive oil, the common thread is an insatiable passion in the topic by whoever is selling to you.
This leads to some outlandishly enjoyable situations: below is a photo of the folks from Prime Meats selling duck confit hot pockets. Unbelievably delicious and yet ridiculous at the same time.
The other great find at the market was Sarah Obratis’ & Hugue Dufour’s meat pies. Technically, the weren’t actually at the market, which meant that you had to literally buy a pie out of the trunk of their Corolla (it all felt very surreptitious). The tourtiere’s have a mouth-watering mix of meat – brisket, pork and turkey – and come with their own Cranberry-based tomato sauce. Ours lasted two days (really, more like 28 hours).
Today I went to an exhibition at the Met called Art of the Samurai: Japanese Arms and Armor, 1156-1868. It has given me a new appreciation for how absolutely insane Japanese culture is. First, let’s take a look at some of the different helmets that Samurai might wear into battle:
If you were to ask “Lindsay, isn’t one of those helmets done up to look like a swallow’s tail? And is the other one a set of crabs claws?” you’d be absolutely correct. Apparently the Samurai helmet was the early equivalent of taking your shoe off and banging it on your desk at the UN – an attempt to intimidate your enemy by convincing them that you were crazier than they were.
Their armor certainly suggests that. Granted, to a jaded 21st century dweller, it looks like the sort of costume a psychopathic midget who worships the Village People might wear (the armor dates back to the Middle Ages and the Japanese were quite short back then), but I can only imagine how exceptionally nutty it would look when combined with a very sharp sword.
If you look closely at the images below you’ll notice a few things. First, everyone’s wearing a mask to look a little crazier – although the mustaches undermine it. Second, the guy with brown hair actually does have hair coming out of his helmet-there’s some sort of animal pelt there; a different set of armor (not shown) actually had long, flow, dyed red hair attached to it. Finally, the red outfit suggests where Darth Vader comes from.
If you follow this blog, you’ll know that we launchedUncoverYourCity to help people better understand New York. Here’s another example of interesting things we can learn about the city by playing with the data.
Let’s say you wanted to see the relationship between people renting and their household income. A few things emerge here: if you’re, on average, poor, you rent. If you’re rich, you buy. The poorest Districts of New York are in the southern Bronx and a shocking 92% of people rent; just up the Harlem River, 94% of people in Morris Heights rent. The average family income here is around $17-22K per year.
However, if you look at the plot of household income vs. rental rates you’ll notice a bunch of outliers in the upper right corner:
These are a couple of districts towards the tip of Manhattan (districts 1, 2, and 4-8) plus district 6 in Brooklyn (Cobble Hill, Carroll Gardens, Park Slope).
What’s going on here? Well, if you asked me to pick the areas in New York where people who are passing through (i.e., getting experience before they move to a different city or start a family in the suburbs) live, I would pick these neighborhoods. These are places where younger professionals move to get experience yet maintain a high quality of life (yes, there are lots of people there who are neither young nor professional, but we’re talking ‘on average’ here) and this may be why we see this litter cluster of outliers.
What’s interesting is what’s not in the set of outliers: Williamsburg (Brooklyn District 1) and the Lower East Side (Manhattan District 3). My bet is that these neighborhoods are both subsumed by the averages of their districts and their more bohemian younger residents may have a lower average family income.
This data doesn’t tell the whole story, but it does help us understand the city a bit better. More fun examples in future posts.
So last week, Wendy, Jill and I unveiled UncoverYourCity. This is a site that we put together as part of the NYC Big Apps competition (you can vote for us here; you’ll need to create an account). We want to share a bit of background on what the project is and why we did it.
Why?
There’s a nascent movement called Government 2.0 which seeks to apply the principles of the web to government and make it more open and efficient. One of the first steps in governments becoming open is making their data available online for any citizens who want to use it. The government has some of the most interesting data out there – everything from demographic info to build permit locations to school scores – and they’ve got more information than just about anyone else.
This movement has gained a lot of traction at the municipal level and San Francisco, Vancouver, Toronto and New York are some early cities to start putting municipal data online. New York has gone a step further by creating the Big Apps competition to get people to showcase what could be done with the data. We decided that we wanted to create an app to support the the city and also learn what could be done with the data.
So What Is It?
We wanted to create an app that would compare the quality of life in different New York neighborhoods and help people find the neighborhood that was perfect for them. If you know this city, you know that there are 8 million people that exhibit remarkable diversity. It’s what makes the city magical but also makes it hard to grasp. We wanted a tool to help people grasp it.
However, we quickly realized that this was way too hard to do (more on that in a future post) and that we weren’t comfortable placing a “quality of life” ranking on different areas. Instead, we decided that the right thing to create was an app that would let people learn more about the neighborhoods they live in and compare them with others.
This isn’t a gimmick, rather, we believe it’s got the potential to help you see the challenges facing the city in a new way. Take the Mayor’s plan for making the city greener. I’ve no idea how the city is thinking of making the city greener, but one hypothesis might be that if we increase population density we might be able to increase recycling rates (if you live in condos, etc. they usually have recycling designed into the building). However, our stats suggest that there’s no relationship between recycling and population density:
The tool can also show us outliers that may represent opportunities to learn new approaches to apply elsewhere in city. One of my favorites is the relationship between Median Household Income and Family Poverty. There’s a big outlier in the bottom left of the graph: Brooklyn Community 13 – if it was like other districts, based on its income it should have a poverty rate of about 28% but instead its holding out at 18%.
Is this due to the housing projects of Coney Island working as planned? Maybe it’s the tight Russian community of Brighton Beach taking care of their own and making sure that everyone’s doing okay. Or maybe Sea Gate’s population is so affluent that it skews the poverty level down. I don’t know, but if I were trying to reduce poverty in the city I’d try to find out.
So give the app a try. It’s not perfect – the site’s a bit slow (we’re not great programmers) and the navigation can be awkward (we ran out of time to get it polished) – but there’s something there for everyone. If you want to learn more about how we built it and why the Gov 2.0 movement is important, stay tuned to this blog (we’re also open sourcing all the code; stay tuned for links to code and data). And, when you’ve got a moment free, vote for us.
Last week Google added subway lines to the list of items that it shows in Google Maps for NYC. What’s neat about this is that we can now plot where the subway lines are in the real world vs. where they appear on the MTA subway map:
A couple of themes emerge:
Manhattan is ridiculously oversized in the MTA version. Note how much smaller it should be
If you live in East Brooklyn or the entire borough of Queens you’re pretty much out of luck when it comes to subway transport
It is ridiculous how far the subway lines are from both JFK and LaGuardia
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