Crime in Chicago

chicagocrime.org

A freely browsable database of crimes reported in Chicago linked up with Google maps. A classic MashUp.

So if you're looking to move to Chicago, check out the neighbourhoods. And when you have an address in mind, plug it in. See what sort of crimes happen there.

While having an Animal Hospital in your neighbourhood seems safe enough, I recommend not taking a stroll in the alleys.

And I love the difference in numbers between Robberies and Attempted Robberies.

Should you be worried?

Hurtt Prize

"Harold Hurtt has suggested that surveillance cameras be placed 'in apartment complexes, downtown streets, shopping malls and even private homes', according to this story in the Seattle Post Intelligencer. In response, I hereby found....

The Hurtt Prize

The Hurtt Prize is a $1060 (and growing) reward for the first person who can provide definitive videotaped evidence of Houston police chief Harold Hurtt committing a crime, any crime. This evidence will posted here and forward to the Huston Police Department along with a demand that action be taken.

I am putting up $1000 of my own money for this prize, but if you think this is a good idea, and wish to pledge some of your own money for the potential winner of the Hurtt Prize, send an email to bounty@HurttPrize.org with your Name and Location (city and state). Your name, location and the amount you are pledging will be posted here."

Total prize is growing. It's almost impossible not to break a law.

Green Roofs with Balloons

My councilor, Paula Fletcher (Toronto Danforth) has been inundating me with emails about the evil natural gas generator Dalton MacGinty wants to build at the foot of Leslie Street, where the old Hearn generating station stands. While I am somewhat sympathetic to her fears - CO2 pollution, unsightly big boxy building on the waterfront, high cost etc. I have to say it will be preferably to the 4 sisters at the edge of Mississauga, where I swear they burn cheap brown coal at night. Their (that is the anti-generator coterie) suggestions for an alternate - green roofs, more use of lake water for cooling buildings, conservation through replacing old inefficient equipment, wind, etc makes sense, I am forced to ask "Why not do both?"
If we can save the equivalent of 750 MW through their conservation measures, why not build the ugly generator and save energy? Not enough money you say? But if the energy savings are real (hey, my refrigerator is at least 25 years old - its Almond coloured - Mr. Landlord?) they should payback almost immediately by reducing our COST OF ELECTRICITY. Oops, does that mean the gas fired generator is no longer cost effective?
There are alternates to the ol' lets give money to Alberta solution, and aside from my hobbyhorse, the SLOWPOKE 3 (2 to 10 MW - build one every 20 blocks, eliminate powerline losses) there are some really interesting schemes. My current favourite is from Magenn Power and I can see these flying from green roofs all over Toronto, or even better, flying in a line from the Toronto Portlands and the west end of the island. That'd take care of jets at the island airport!

Green roofs

City of Toronto

City Council approved a Green Roofs strategy [PDF] promoting the use of city rooftops to grow gardens and other vegetation. The strategy includes a commitment to install green roofs on new and existing buildings owned by the City whenever practical. Council also endorsed initiatives to provide financial incentives for the creation of green roofs. Follow the Green Roof strategy's progression from consultation to adoption.

Benefits of a green roof - Study Findings

• reducing stormwater runoff that affects water for drinking and swimming, as well as habitat in local rivers and lakes
• reducing energy consumption
• reduces the urban heat island effect by lowering the City's temperature and reduce cooling costs
• beautifying the City
• creating more natural green spaces in urban areas
• providing more opportunity for food production
• Reduction in stormwater flow of 12 million m3 per year
• Infrastructure savings worth $79 million
• Erosion control measures savings worth $25 million
• Pollution control cost avoidance worth $13 million
• 3 additional "beach open" days per year worth $700,000
• Citywide (Toronto) savings from reduced energy for cooling is $22 million, equivalent to 4.15KWh/m2 per year
• Cost avoided due to reduced demand at peak times is $68 million
• Widespread greening of Toronto's roof would reduce local ambient temperature from 0.5 to 2 degrees Celsius
• Citywide savings from reduced energy for cooling of $12 million, equivalent to 2.37 kWh/m2 per year
• Cost avoided due to reduced demand at peak times of $80 million
• Reduction in levels of CO, NO2, O3, PM10, SO2
• Reduction in CO2emissions
• Potential for local food production
• Habitat for birds and invertebrates
• Energy savings from better solar reflectivity, evapotranspiration and insulation
• Green roofs last up to twice as long as regular roofs
• Green roofs can beautify and add value to Toronto's buildings by providing scenic views and recreational areas in dense urban areas

Rat Brains on Ecstacy

New Scientist is reporting that rats on ecstacy suffer deteriorating brain function that lasts longer when they are exposed to loud noise. The intension of course is to imply that humans are equally damaged, so guys and girls don't go to the dance club and drop mdma. Aside from the paucity of mdma in what is sold as ecstasy, I find the concept of this experiment questionable, let alone the design itself. To equate rat hearing function with human hearing is laughable. Yes they are both mammals, and yes the same kind of function occurs in interpreting sound, but the rat devotes more (and different) brain to sound interpretation than the human does - not to mention that the rat can hear further into the high frequency than humans. So would you perhaps expect a difference in reaction if you play maximum club level white noise to a more sensitive creature? I think this is science as politics, and its a shame to see New Scientist buy into it.

Cell Customer Intelligence

Idiro

Anyone see this product as invading our private lives a little?

Idiro Customer Intelligence uses your call data records to deconstruct your customer base into social communities, and assigns a role to each person in their community. Idiro allows you to see the centres of influence in your subscriber network and use that information for highly targeted marketing and churn management.

Lexicon: an RPG

The 20' By 20' Room

by Neel Krishnaswami

Here's a little roleplaying game that I've been toying with. I call it the Lexicon rpg, in honor of its inspiration, Milorad Pavic's Dictionary of the Khazars.

The basic idea is that each player takes on the role of a scholar, from before scholarly pursuits became professionalized (or possibly after they ceased to be). You are cranky, opinionated, prejudiced and eccentric. You are also collaborating with a number of your peers -- the other players -- on the construction of an encyclopedia describing some historical period (possibly of a fantastic world).

The game is played in 26 turns, one for each letter of the alphabet.

1. On the first turn, each player writes an entry for the letter 'A'. You come up with the name of the entry, and you write 100-200 words on the subject. At the end of the article, you sign your name, and make two citations to other entries in the encyclopedia. These citations will be phantoms -- their names exist, but their content will get filled in only on the appropriate turn. No letter can have more entries than the number of players, either, so all citations made on the first turn have to start with non-A letters. 2. On the second and subsequent turns, you continue to write entries for B, C, D and so on. However, you need to make three citations. One must be a reference to an already-written entry, and two must be to unwritten entries. (On the 25th and 26th turns, you only need to cite one and zero phantom entries, respectively, because there won't be enough phantom entries, otherwise.)
   
2. It's an academic sin to cite yourself, you can never cite an entry you've written. (OOC, this forces the players to intertwingle their entries, so that everybody depends on everyone else's facts.) Incidentally, once you run out of empty slots, obviously you can only cite the phantom slots.
   
3. Despite the fact that your peers are self-important, narrow-minded dunderheads, they are honest scholars. No matter how strained their interpretations are, their facts are accurate as historical research can make them. So if you cite an entry, you have to treat its factual content as true! (Though you can argue vociferously with the interpretation and introduce new facts that shade the interpretation.)
   
4. This little game will probably play best on a wiki, and it should take a month or so to play to completion. At the end of it, you'll have a highly-hyperlinked document that details a nice little piece of collaborative world-building.
   

[...]

Turning Limitations into Innovation

I had lunch with Rohan. We talked about work and people, and I mentioned that I'd once been wild and unsocialized. He asked how I'd changed that in myself, after all nowadays I'm a compliance and security specialist, and an entrepreneur, very disciplined and non-chaotic professions.

Back in the early '90's, I decided that I wanted and needed to address the problem. I established a mantra for myself, one that lasted for a decade. "In structure, there is freedom." I learned structure, one beauracrat at a time. I rewarded myself with a plant each time I filled out a form fully. I learned about being programmatic, and studied method and logic in school. I learned about game theoretic approaches and constrasted them with chaos. I even wrote my dissertation outline around the subject. And as my inspirational underpinning, looked to "The Glass Bead Game", by Hermann Hesse.

And indeed, I've found the florishing freedom that arises from within a structure and in understanding it's boundaries and how to wander out of them, through them.

And now, I find this article with the same message...

BusinessWeek

By Marissa Ann Mayer

Creativity is often misunderstood. People often think of it in terms of artistic work -- unbridled, unguided effort that leads to beautiful effect. If you look deeper, however, you'll find that some of the most inspiring art forms -- haikus, sonatas, religious paintings -- are fraught with constraints. They're beautiful because creativity triumphed over the rules. Constraints shape and focus problems, and provide clear challenges to overcome as well as inspiration. Creativity, in fact, thrives best when constrained.

Yet constraints must be balanced with a healthy disregard for the impossible. Disregarding the bounds of what we know or what we accept gives rise to ideas that are nonobvious, unconventional, or simply unexplored. The creativity realized in this balance between constraint and disregard for the impossible are fueled by passion and result in revolutionary change.

CLOCKING IN. A few years ago, I met Paul Beckett, a talented designer who makes sculptural clocks. When I asked him why not just do sculptures sans clocks, he said he liked the challenge of making something artistically beautiful that also had to perform as a clock. Framing the problem that way really freed his creative force.

Paul reflected that he also found it easier to paint on a canvas that had a mark on it than to start with a canvas that was entirely clean and white. This resonated with me. It's often easier to direct your energy when you start with constrained challenges (a sculpture that must be a clock) or constrained possibilities (a canvas that is marked). These constraints fuel passion and imagination. They generate creativity.

In product development, constraints come in many forms. They can be terms on which the problem must be solved. At Google, the products and services that we deliver have to work well in varied and confined user environments.

SETTING LIMITS. Consider, for example, our recent release of the new Google Toolbar Beta. When we develop a new version of the toolbar, we can't simply contemplate what would be useful or which features users ask for most. We also need to think about how to create a toolbar that works for all users regardless of whether their screen resolutions can fit five buttons across or 35.

We need to make sure that it's fast to download even over a dial-up connection. The new toolbar has a lot of new functionality, but it's also constrained in download size to just 625K, and it lets the users customize how many and which buttons should be included.

Constraints can give you speed and momentum. In shaping the process used to design a product, constraints can actually speed up development. For example, we can often get a quick sense of just how good a new concept is if we prototype for only one day or for one week. Or, we'll keep team size to three people or less. By limiting how long we work on something or how many people work on it, we limit our investment.

FAILING FASTER. In the case of the Toolbar Beta, several of the key features (custom buttons, shared bookmarks) were prototyped in less than a week. In fact, during the brainstorming phase, we tried out about five times as many key features -- many of which we discarded after a week of prototyping. Since only 1 in every 5 to 10 ideas work out, the strategy of constraining how quickly ideas must be proven allows us try out more ideas faster, increasing our odds of success.

Speed also lets you fail faster. Have you ever wondered how a product so lame got to market, a movie so bad actually got released, a government policy so misguided got passed?

In cases like these, the people working on it have spent so much time and are so personally invested that it's too painful to walk away. They often know the project is misguided, yet they see the effort through to the painful, unsuccessful end. That's why it's important to discover failure fast and abandon it quickly. A limited investment makes it easier to walk away and move on to something else that has a better chance of success.

CHANGING THE WORLD. But constraints alone can stifle and kill creativity. They can lead to pessimism and despair. So while we need constraints in order to fuel passion and insight, we also need a sense of hopefulness that keeps us engaged and unwaveringly in search of the right idea. It is from the interaction between constraint and the disregard for the impossible that unexpected insights, cleverness, and imagination are borne.

Henry Ford once said, "If I'd listened to customers, I'd have given them a faster horse." True creativity makes the impossible possible. It can revolutionize a product, a business, the economy, and the world around us.

Bait Car

IMPACT and The Bait Car Program | BaitCar.com

This is fascinating, though probably not new in concept. Except for the online video coverage...

This website is operated by the Integrated Municipal Provincal Auto Crime Team (IMPACT) which is based in Surrey, British Columbia, Canada. Our team consists of twenty-two specialized police auto theft investigators from seven police forces in the Greater Vancouver Area. The mandate of IMPACT is to develop innovative strategies to reduce auto crime in British Columbia - this website is just one of those strategies. IMPACT is currently operating four major initatives: the Bait Car program, Automated Licence Plate Recognition, the stolen vehicle Enforcement Team and public awareness.

A bait car is a vehicle owned by the police and is intended to be stolen. After a bait car is stolen, the location, speed, and direction of travel of the vehicle is monitored by police dispatchers at E-Comm through GPS tracking. Everything that takes place inside the bait car is caught on audio and video. The dispatcher will coordinate a police response and once officers are in position behind the bait car, the engine will be disabled at the click of a mouse button which allows for the quick arrest of the car thieves. "

I wonder though about intention. If the intention of the police is to have the vehicle stolen, can the thief breaf a law by taking it?

The Story Doesn't Care: An Interview with Sean Stewart

ENCYCLOPEDIA HANASIANA

Sean Stewart on writing for ARGs..

[...]

What people do on the web is they look for things and they gossip. We found a way of storytelling that has a lot to do with looking for things and gossiping about them.

[...]

We could call it patio space or—if you’re in the South—front porch space. It’s clearly inside in some ways, but it’s public in other ways.

The world of the blog clearly exists in patio space, in porch space, in that “I’m going to invite you into a level of intimacy not usually accorded to strangers, and yet you’re still a stranger. I’m going to write a blog, and you and I will communicate with one another, sometimes with startling candor, and yet in this mixed, hybrid place.”

The campaigns [I’ve worked on]—“The Beast”, “I Love Bees”, and “Last Call Poker”—one of the things that makes them interesting, artistically, to me is that they are part of a very small set of works of art that I can think of that deliberately exist in porch space. They have audiences that are literally collective and talking and engaged, both with the project and with each other. If you and I go and watch a movie, you have a unique experience and I have a unique experience, we just happen to be sitting in the same room.

The audiences that we built for those campaigns are having a different experience. They’re having a collective experience in which they literally bring different pieces, one to the next, swap them back and forth, gossip about them. They have an element of cocreation and a collaborative nature that doesn’t really have an analog that I’ve been able to think of in the arts, although it does in another place.

What is the other place?

This behavior—this sort of creative, collaborative, enthusiastic scavengering behavior—is something that we call by another name when we direct it, not to entertainment, but to the physical world. We call it science, as it’s been constructed since Newton and the Royal Society, and that’s worked out pretty well for us as a species.

Where do you think it’s going? Is this form of storytelling going to be as popular as novels?

Something will be. What will happen is, twenty years from now, someone will be using the web for a storytelling platform, and here are some of the components that I am nearly positive will be part of that art form.

One of the things that we do that I think will continue at some level is platform independent stories. They might be in print, they might be in film, they might be on the web, they might be a cellphone message. The story doesn’t care. A kid who’s 15 now, in 10 years—when they’re 25—their cellphone will be their TV, their computer, their phone, their whatever. It will be pointless to say, “I only do the kind of storytelling that happens between a printed page.”

Well, it won’t be pointless. There will still be books. God, I hope so, because I have a stake in that. But I think that the art form we will look back on as being the dominant art form of the 21st century—as we look back on film for the 20th—is one that will take advantage of the web’s basic nature, which is that it’s all ones and zeroes. It can be digitized and delivered through any kind of platform. The story doesn’t care. I think that’s going to be part of it.

Another part of that art form that I think is going to really stay with people is that sense of the collective or collaborative audience—that it exists in what we were talking about as porch space or blog space: A connected group of people who are interested in talking to one another about things and are even willing to be moved by those things. And it will be a little bit interactive, I think. This is where my crystal ball gets murky, because obviously you look at really passive forms of entertainment like TV and say, “Wow, that’s a model that works.”

It is the nature of the web that you get to click on things. I think, at some level, the art forms that evolve to use that platform will need to let people click on things. In some way or another, people want to push a little on something that happens on the web in a way they do not expect to push on their television sets. [...]

Why this blog's name is appropriate

In 1994, I heard from some coworkers that they were now on the Internet. This was a surprise to me, since public access to the Internet hadn't traditionally been available. So I signed up too, with Toronto's first ISP, Internex Online (IO.org).

Side note: in late 1994 (I think it was) IO announced that its users could now create, for free, a personal home page. My reaction was "why?". I'd seen personal home pages and they were mere vanity pages ("my hobbies are ..."). Furthermore, I knew I'd be very unlikely to go back to a page that was probably still the same as when I'd seen it last. Then in January 1995 an IO user named Carolyn Burke (the creator of this blog) used the new feature to create Carolyn's Diary, which as far as I know was the world's first blog. Yet another IO user, Robert Everett-Green, arts reporter at The Globe and Mail newspaper, saw it and (very smart guy that he is) realized that this was an important innovation. He wrote a story. And that's why although both Carolyn and I were on IO (though I didn't know her at the time), she became famous and I didn't.

Now it's 2006. Over 1 billion people around the world are on the Internet. Apparently the Internet was opened to private business (including ISPs) in 1993, and it's been only 13 years since then.

From almost 0 to over 1 billion in just 13 years. Fuck decaf indeed.

What really grinds my gears

And now, our guest reporter Peter Griffin with "What really grinds my gears".

What really grinds my gears is responsibility. Yeah, you know, responsibility. That thing where you, um, gotta do something cause, it's like, the responsible thing, uh. ....to... uh... do.

How come responsibility is always such a bummer? Like, yesterday when I was checking if my big new umbrella was a good parachute, and I jumped off the roof to see if it worked, and it didn't and now I'm here in traction with two broken legs and a tube up my nose, and I called my lawyer to sue the umbrella company for making such a lousy umbrella and the gardener for making the flower beds too hard, and my wife, who is supposed to be on MY SIDE, asks if I shouldn't be taking a little responsibility!!

Like how come you can only TAKE responsibility and you can never give it away? Or sell it?
I would be happy to SELL my responsibility to Gnurps umbrellas for only, say, 10 million dollars!

But noooooo, they don't want it. But hey, I'm a victim here! Just like those muslim guys in Syria who got their religion made fun of by people from another religion in another country ten thousand miles away -- they're victims too. It's not their fault if they have to burn down a few buildings to show that they're pissed off -- they're just victims. All they want is an apology. Yeah ok they got one but they want somebody fired too. Well yeah ok they got that too. But they're still victims! My wife thinks they should take some "responsibility" for their "actions", but she's just trying to be annoying. She doesn't even think I should be suing the gardener.

Bound to the skies - On Responsibility and Inspiration

Many people read horoscopes, trying somehow to believe that the airy guidance they receive is causally related to their lives by outside forces.

I don't believe this. No surprise.

I do however believe that one makes ones own present and future, and lives within the resulting causal sphere or better, light cone, of much that one has chosen in the past while of course influenced by outside forces.

So along with whatever forces do enter into my world, I choose to add some myself.

Hence VIPThink List. Each morning before 7am, I receive a selected famous quote of the day from their bank of thousands. I read it with an open heart each morning, and let the gist of inspiration filter down inside. I allow it to effect my choices. I open up to whatever comes towards me that day that might relate.

It becomes my day's mantra.

Right now, my sailing friends are boarding their respective flights to the Caribbean via various US stopovers. Flying the skies. This afternoon, they'll meet up at a ferry to cross over to the marina where the boat is harboured. And sail away tomorrow morning, provisioned and smiling. Nervous and excited. Having fun. I was supposed be there. Tickets readied, backpacked packed. But chose yesterday to take the more responsible path when a client ran into problems. A two week trip in paradise cancelled without recourse. Unless I find that in my heart.

My mantra for today is a quote from Charles Lindbergh, Aviator. "I owned the world that hour as I rode over it. free of the earth, free of the mountains, free of the clouds, but how inseparably I was bound to them." [Reference]

I will try to find my own flight today, and though I remain bound to the ground, I also fly with them.

Damn but this is a challenging mantra. I'd sorta been hoping for something about taking pride in taking the responsible path.

LOL

Carolyn

Can You be Replaced by Amateurs?

Lately I've been devouring lots of writings about the so-called Web 2.0. (If you don't know what I mean by Web 2.0, don't worry: nobody else does either, since I have my own definition, and I haven't told anyone what it is.) Big things, no, huge things, are happening in the world. Back in the mid-1980s the authors of Blood in the Streets: Investment Profits in a World Gone Mad predicted that the advent of the microchip would result in the end of Communism -- and whether or not you think that Communism's death was inflicted by the microchip, this is an example of how technological change might have less-than-obvious consequences in the socio-politico-economic realm.

Newspapers are in big trouble now: circulations are falling. Anyone can get the news online, where it's more up to date and it's free. What else do newspapers have? Columns. That's why The Globe and Mail's website makes lots of its print content freely available online to all -- but not the columns.

But guess what: there are lots of columns available for free online; they're called blogs. And some of them are very good.

Now the blogs may not precisely replicate John Barber's or John Ibbitson's excellent political-analysis columns in the Globe, but some of them may come close enough, particularly as a group, that not too many people will be tempted to pay to read columns.

I'm glad that I don't make my living as a columnist.

I'm also glad that I don't work for the Encyclopedia Brittanica. Instead I work for Wikipedia, for free, together with a ton of other people. According to a recent investigation in the respected science journal Nature, when it comes to science articles we're almost as accurate as the Britannica staff.

Just about anything is a hobby -- for a whole bunch of people around the world.

Would the work that you do for a living be done by amateurs at no charge?