Zach Pousman

The Dunwoody Georgia Police Department completed a recent experiment: They tweeted each and every 911 call that came through their dispatcher from Friday 4/8 6:00 AM until Saturday morning at 6 AM. There were #111 tweets, spanning the gamut of traffic stops, domestic disturbances, robberies, and suspicious (read “gang”) activities. Even a sound complaint or two, which seems quite weird to me, knowing what I know about Dunwoody (which is actually not a lot, so maybe there are some loud Friday night JAMMMMZ up there).

This is a local example of a trend that’s brought transparency and data-driven decision-making to governments large and small. Long before Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya, I noticed that the accepted panels and speeches at SxSW (the barometer of what’s trendy in the tech world) had a strong open government / government 2.0 bent. CityForward is one new site I’ve just joined, but data.gov, the sunlight foundation, and this information visualization contest (co-sponsored by Google and Eyebeam, based on data from whatwepayfor.com) are some interesting places to start exploring what the government’s up to and how they’re doing at it.

A social media consultant transcribed 1000+ television advertisements and made a tag cloud of each of “boys” toys and “girls” toys. The results are clear if unsurprising.

Holstee Feurware Firehose Belt - $45

I am torn about upcycling. The concept of upcycling is about creating “better” products from lesser ones, as opposed to recycling downward, or downcycling, where high-quality things are turned into lesser-quality goods. As a matter of principle, it’s great to see industrious people (and companies such as holstee and terracycle) take things that are destined for landfills and use them in new ways. But is upcycling more effective, or is it effective only because it can assuage western-society-and-global-north guilt (like white guilt, only classist instead of racist)?

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I just finished a 4.22 mi run with a time of 45:05 with Nike+ GPS. #nikeplus

Our lives are spent trying to pixellate a fractal planet.

So true. The move to turn the world into clean, binary, digital representations always shaves off some of the interestingness. (via: sabbatical)

Click image to enlarge.

MILNET: Son of Arpanet (via feltron).

Chi*Atlanta meeting had live demos and in-progress work. Nice to see how the mobile web / mobile app sausage is getting made here in the A.

Genealogy of Science According to Scopus. This graphic needs interactive zooming!

(via: datavis)

Everyone should take a quick look at this chart created by Randall (Mr. XKCD) and Ellen, a friend of his that is a senior reactor operator at the Reed research reactor, in order to get some context about the Fukushima disaster. Radiation is scary. But so far, nearby folks are getting a lot less radiation than flying from NY to LA. The chart zooms from the micro Sieverts (µ) shown above to mSv to the full Sv level (half an Sv starts to be very serious, apparently).

People are really bad at estimating true risks. Today, I’m looking for a graphic I saw a while back about the perception of risk of various things compared to their *actual* risk. I think the chart has the usual suspects of scary and dangerous situations that appear in movies such as shark bites, tornado strikes, terrorist attacks and nuclear disasters which are all exceedingly rare but take up a disproportionate amount of our psychic worry. I think it may also have some common situations that almost nobody worries about but that are orders of magnitude more dangerous, such as driving a car, falling off a ladder, and swimming in pools.

Just saw a demo of treesaver (http://t.co/ekO9Lci), which won’t save forests, but *is* spiffy HTML5 content reflowing awesomeness.

#schoolofhumans BBarr DJ’s to the maxxx at #sxsw http://t.co/xSbsw40

Link: South by Southwest (SxSW) Interactive