Homelessness Maps

June 4, 2008 in Uncategorized by Tracey | Permalink

I am doing some research at the moment on the topic of Mapping the Risk of Homelessness in Canadian Cities.  To date I have not found many interesting or engaging maps in Canada albeit I did find some thematic static informative PDF maps.  I did however find some interesting maps in the US and one in Dublin.

Los Angeles Homelessness Hotspot Map

The purpose of the downtown Los Angeles Homeless Map is to visually tell the story of downtown’s homeless population. Before a problem can be solved it must be understood. These maps exist to convey the situation on the streets to City leaders, the Police Department and all those who are concerned with homelessness in our city.

There is an animated version of the Map.  Street count data were systematically collected by the LAPD on a bi-weekly basis.  The data were mapped by Cartifact. 

The system geocodes each address to produce coordinates for the address. The plotted points are then placed onto a map of downtown Los Angeles and styled to better convey the information.

San Francisco Chronicles Maps of Homeless Haunts

Layered over the city’s familiar streets and neighborhoods is a separate map seen from the vantage point of the homeless: Market Street is Main Street, the daytime hub; the Mission is a place to buy heroin; Golden Gate Park is the wild frontier – and the area around Pac Bell Park is a campground for people with pets.

This interactive Flash map is part of the San Francisco Chronicles Newspaper 5 part series on Homelessness entitled Shame of the City.

Dublin City Homeless Services Map

CentreCare map of self-referral services for homeless people over 18 in Dublin City.

This is Civic Access – FCM Quality of Life Reporting System

June 4, 2008 in canada, canadian projects, datasets, policy, politics, resources by Tracey | Permalink

I was looking for some cross city comparison data yesterday and recalled the Federation of Canadian Municipalities (FCM) Quality of Life Reporting System (QoLRS).

Conçu par la FCM, le Système de rapports sur la qualité de vie mesure, surveille et fait état de la qualité de vie dans les villes canadiennes en utilisant les données provenant de diverses sources nationales et municipales. / Developed by FCM, the Quality of Life Reporting System (QOLRS) measures, monitors and reports on the quality of life in Canadian urban municipalities using data from a variety of national and municipal sources.

Regroupant initialement 16 municipalités à ses débuts en 1999, le SRQDV compte maintenant 22 municipalités, dont certains des plus grands centres urbains du Canada et beaucoup de municipalités de banlieue qui les entourent. / Starting with 16 municipalities in 1999, the QOLRS has grown to include 22 municipalities, comprising some of Canada’s largest urban centres and many of the suburban municipalities surrounding them.

The FCM’s QoLRS site includes all the documentation, data, metadata and methodologies related to the development of their indicators and the system they have developed.

:: Reports
:: Annexes
:: Indicators

Their data are most impressive.  You can download a spreadsheet of the data for each indicator for 1991, 1996, 2001 and I expect 2006 QoLRS will be coming soon.   Each variable was also adjusted to the current geographies of amalgamated cities which makes cross comparison across time and space possible (see the guide to geographies).  This was not easy to do at the time. Each spreadsheet includes the data source, the variable, and a tab that provides the metadata.  Which means that you can verify what was done, reuse those data or if you had some money & loads of time you could purchase & acquire the data pertaining to your city and add to the indicator system.  Unfortunately the FCM had to purchase these datasets and it cost them many many thousands of dollars.

There are 11 themes and 72 indicators over 3 census periods for 20 cities (Sudbury, Regina, Winnipeg, Niagara, CMQ, Saskatoon, Edmonton, Hamilton, Halifax, Windsor, Toronto, Kingston, London, Ottawa, Vancouver, Waterloo, Halton, Calgary, Peel, York).  Datasets come from:

  • Statistics Canada
  • Canada Housing and Mortgage Corporation
  • Environment Canada
  • the 22 cities themselves
  • Elections Canada
  • Audit Bureau of Circulation
  • Tax Filer Data
  • Human Resources and Development Services Canada,
  • FCM Special Surveys
  • Industry Canada
  • Anielsky Management (Ecological Footprint)
  • Canadian Centre for Justice

Putting something like this together is no small feat, so please go check out what is available, play with the data a little, and if you cannot find data for your city, call up your local councilor and ask them to become a member of the QoLRS team!  Also let the FCM know they are doing a good job, as this is one way for us Canadians to see what is going on in our cities overtime.

gas price map

May 25, 2008 in canada, datasets, dataviz, geo, maps, tools by Hugh | Permalink

From gasbuddy.com:

Now you can see what gas prices are around the country at a glance. Areas are color coded according to their price for the average price for regular unleaded gasoline.

Here is the US map.

[via infoesthetics]

gridrepublic – distributed supercomputing

May 20, 2008 in datasets, infrastructure, openmovement, projects by Hugh | Permalink

Remember hearing about SETI@home? Check out, and download, Gridrepublic.org:

GridRepublic members run a screensaver that allows their computers to work on public-interest research projects when the machines are not otherwise in use. This screensaver does not affect performance of the host computer any more than an ordinary screensaver does.

By aggregating idle resources from users around the world, we create a massive supercomputer.

Gridrepublic is built on the system that started as SETI@home, which was turned into a general distributed computing platform BOINC. Gridrepublic is a central place for all projects using this distributed platform, where you can dowload & install the system and even better, choose which projects your computer’s idle time will be supporting, including:

Einstein@home: you can contribute your computer’s idle time to a search for spinning neutron stars (also called pulsars) using data from the LIGO and GEO gravitational wave detectors.

BBC Climate Change: The same model that the Met Office uses to make daily weather forecasts has been adapted to run on home PCs. The model incorporates many variable parameters, allowing thousands of sets of conditions. Your computer will run one individual set of conditions– in effect your individual version of how the world’s climate works– and then report back to the research team what it calculates. This experiment was described on the BBC television documentary Meltdown (BBC-4, February 20th, 2006). Note: workunits require several months of screensaver time; faster computers recommended.

Rosetta@home: needs your help to determine the 3-dimensional shape of proteins as part of research that may ultimately contribute to cures for major human diseases such as AIDS / HIV, Malaria, Cancer, and Alzheimer’s.
Proteins@Home: investigating the “Inverse Protein Folding Problem”: Whereas “Protein Folding” seeks to determine a protein’s shape from its amino acid sequence, “Inverse Protein Folding” begins with a protein of known shape and seeks to “work backwards” to determine the amino acid sequence from which it is generated.

Quantum Monte Carlo: Reactions between molecules are important for virtually all parts of our lives. The structure and reactivity of molecules can be predicted by Quantum Chemistry, but the solution of the vastly complex equations of Quantum Theory often require huge amounts of computing power. This project seeks to raise the necessary computing time in order to further develop the very promising Quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) method for general use in Quantum Chemistry.

Donate here.

Science in the Open

May 12, 2008 in Blogroll, resources, science by Hugh | Permalink

Science in the open: An openwetware blog on the challenges of open and connected science… about:

This blog contains the thoughts of Cameron Neylon on the technical and social issues involved with ‘Open Science’. Most people would agree Open Science includes freely accesible literature or perhaps making raw data available. Others might think it also involves people working on collaborative documents such as Wikis or the freedom to re-use the published literature or data. At its logical extreme Open Science includes making all the science we do freely available as it happens. Many people find this scarey. Some, perhaps a growing number, find it tremendously exciting.

This blog is a place for me to think through the technical problems and issues involved in electronically recording our work for publication on the web and the other social and logistical issues that are raised by making the science we do more immediately available and more connected to the world outside the laboratory.

Crown Copyright – Who benefits?

May 12, 2008 in canada, federal government, government by Hugh | Permalink

Michael Geist has a new post about crown copyright, including all the good arguments that it should be killed. But this gem really takes the cake:

Beyond the policy reasons for abandoning crown copyright, internal government documents reveal other concerns. Financially, the federal crown copyright system costs taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars. Documents from Public Works and Government Services Canada, which administers the crown copyright system, reveal that in the 2006-7 fiscal year, crown copyright licensing generated less than $7,000 in revenue, yet the system cost over $200,000 to administer.

Not only does crown copyright mean citizens face unnecessary restrictions on use of government data and documents they paid for with their taxes, it ALSO means that they have to pay EXTRA to not have free access to the data & documents. (Though note, both 7k and 200k are drops in the bucket of federal budgets). But still, if it’s a money suck as well as everything else, what’s the point of it? Here’s one answer:

For example, an educational institution request to reproduce a photo of a Snowbird airplane was denied on the grounds that the photo was to be used for an article raising questions about the safety of the program. Similarly, a request to reproduce a screen capture of the NEXUS cross-border program with the U.S. was declined since it was to be used in an article that would not portray the program in a favourable light. Although it seems unlikely that crown copyright authorization was needed to use these images, the government’s decision to deny permission smacks of censorship and misuse of Canadian copyright law.

Does anyone have any compelling arguments in favour of crown copyright?

[thanks Sara!]

feds kill info access registry

May 5, 2008 in canada, federal government, government, policy by Hugh | Permalink

OTTAWA–The federal Conservatives have quietly killed a giant information registry that was used by lawyers, academics, journalists and ordinary citizens to hold government accountable.The registry, created in 1989, is an electronic list of every request filed to all federal departments and agencies under the Access to Information Act.Known as CAIRS, for Co-ordination of Access to Information Requests System, the database allowed ordinary citizens to identify millions of pages of once-secret documents that became public through individual freedom-of-information requests over many years…

Alasdair Roberts, a political scientist at Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University in New York, built a version of the database by requesting the CAIRS electronic records through an Access to Information Act request, and updated the site monthly. CBC journalist David McKie took over the work in 2006 using another publicly accessible website (http://www.onlinedemocracy.ca).

Articles & Posts about this issue:

canada & electric cars

May 3, 2008 in canada, federal government, infrastructure by Hugh | Permalink

From the economist, with the emphasis added:

IN THESE times of high petrol prices and worries about climate change, you might think that any country would be proud to enjoy a lead in manufacturing electric cars. Not Canada, it seems. Two Canadian companies, ZENN Motor Company and Dynasty Electric Car, make small electric cars designed for city use; a third, which will use new battery technology developed by Exxon Mobil, plans to launch a model later this year.

But almost all these “low-speed vehicles” (or LSVs) are exported to the United States because Canada refuses to allow their use on public roads. Transport Canada, the regulatory agency, questions their safety. It doubts they would stand up in a collision with a delivery truck or a sport utility vehicle. Officials say they crash-tested one which didn’t fare well, though they refuse to release the data. The agency wants LSVs confined to “controlled areas”, such as university campuses, military bases, parks and Canada’s few gated communities. Its advice has carried weight with the provinces, which make the rules of the road

[more…]

INDU Submissions – Open access to data and research!

April 23, 2008 in Access, canada, federal government, government, infrastructure, open access, R&D by Tracey | Permalink

I was reading some of the web accessible INDU submissions by Canadian groups and individuals posted on Michael Geist’s Blog, and a common theme is open & free access to data and scientific research! Very Niiiiice!

You can access them and M. Geist’s here: Industry Committee on Canada’s Science and Technology Strategy

Science 2.0 – Sharing Raw Science Data

April 22, 2008 in academia, Access, datasets, open access by Tracey | Permalink

Science 2.0 — Is Open Access Science the Future?
Is posting raw results online, for all to see, a great tool or a great risk?
By M. Mitchell Waldrop, Scientific American

The first generation of World Wide Web capabilities rapidly transformed retailing and information search. More recent attributes such as blogging, tagging and social networking, dubbed Web 2.0, have just as quickly expanded people’s ability not just to consume online information but to publish it, edit it and collaborate about it—forcing such old-line institutions as journalism, marketing and even politicking to adopt whole new ways of thinking and operating.

Science could be next. A small but growing number of researchers (and not just the younger ones) have begun to carry out their work via the wide-open tools of Web 2.0. And although their efforts are still too scattered to be called a movement—yet—their experiences to date suggest that this kind of Web-based “Science 2.0” is not only more collegial than traditional science but considerably more productive…

read the rest of the article…

Via Zzzoot

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