I’ve used my Boris Bikes API which serves live data about bike and docking station availability and Google Earth to create a 3D visualisation that shows the current bike availability across London.
Movie by Andrew Hudson-Smith, Digital Urban/UCL CASA
Following on from my appearance on BBC Radio 4 PM I appeared live on BBC Radio Berkshire on 16 August talking to Henry Kelly about Armchair Auditor, my public spending software and website.
At present the site has the Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead’s spending data so it was of particular interest to this local radio station.
Twifakes is a spam website created by Cairo Noleto @caironoleto and Cleiton Francisco @cleitonfco. I’m sure they’ll be happy to answer any questions you may have about it.
You may have seen the website at http://twifakes.heroku.com/ which promises to tell you how many “fake” Twitter followers you have.
Do not authorise this website. It tweets without your permission and there’s no telling whether it may do other damage to your account.
Transport for London are proposing to review and possibly remove 145 traffic lights and pedestrian crossings across London.
Here’s a map I’ve made of the five crossings in the London Borough of Sutton that are under review.
Download the map data as KML for Google Earth etc.
Councillor Lester Holloway is campaigning to retain the crossing at Collingwood Road / Bushey Road as has been reported in the Sutton Guardian and on his blog.
In the BBC radio car
Today, Eric Pickles and the Department for Communities and Local Government (CLG) released their spending data for April 2009-March 2010. (My easy-to-download zip file is here.) I was interviewed by Eddie Mair on Radio 4′s PM programme about my Armchair Auditor website and software which helps people to understand how their councils and the government spends their money. Scrub forward to 17:30 for the start of the story. Thankfully I didn’t get the Paxman vs. Howard treatment.
If you’ve ever wanted to whistle up a pair of wheels while walking around London, now you can. Friday’s launch of the Barclays Cycle Hire scheme puts 6000 short-hire bikes at 300 docking stations within a few hundred metres of any point in the centre of the city. No matter where you are, you shouldn’t be more than a few minutes’ walk from a hire bike.
Full Fact is a website that aims to find the true facts behind the spin and obfuscation of public debate. According to them:
Full Fact is an independent fact-checking organisation. We remove the spin from political statements and make it easier to see the facts and context behind the claims made by the key players in British political debate.
Our main work is to:
- Analyse, challenge and expose misleading claims
- Enable people to verify or rebut claims and campaign for improved standards
So I was interested to see how they’d tackle the controversy over Chris Taggart’s criticism of the way in which Spikes Cavell are publishing council spending data on their SpotlightOnSpend website.
This was originally posted as a comment to an article in UX Magazine about the iPad human interface guidelines. I was reminded by it today by this blogpost by Ben.geek.nz about the forthcoming Windows Phone 7 UI design. While I haven’t seen a WP7 in the flesh it looks as if it may come closer to the spirit of innovative digital design I invoke below. It remains to be seen and as always, god is in the details.
This conversation would be funny if it weren’t so depressing.
So here we have what is supposedly one of the world’s leading technology companies launching what it calls a “magical and revolutionary” product. And what does it do? It goes and encourages developers to build twee simulacra of physical objects. How unmagical. How unrevolutionary. How dull. Apple have seriously employed top-flight designers and developers to build digital representations of address books and books and goodness knows what else that computers are designed to get rid of. And by “get rid of” I mean “eliminate as a concept” not “replace with a digital lookalike”. Now they want everyone else to do the same. No thanks. This is 2010 not 1910.
I have just received an email from Philippa Stroud confirming the following statement from her in response to this story in the Observer:
“I make no apology for being a committed Christian. However, it is categorically untrue that I believe homosexuality to be an illness and I am deeply offended that The Observer has suggested otherwise. I have spent 20 years working with disturbed people who society have turned their back on and are not often supported by state agencies; drug addicts, alcoholics, the mentally ill and the homeless that I and my charitable friends in the public sector have tried to help over the years. The idea that I am prejudiced against gay people is both false and insulting.”
I do not speak for Mrs Stroud or the Conservative Party and I have no other information on this matter than what I have posted here.
Hat tip to Cardiff Blogger (@cardiff_blogger) for posting this first.
When he hasn’t been dressing his party workers up as nurses, the Lib Dem candidate in Cardiff North, John Dixon, has been making a rather unusual case to the local voters based on the supposed weakness of the local Labour vote. Check out these quotations from a recent election leaflet of his:
“With Labour and Plaid out of the race locally, only John Dixon and the Lib Dems can be trusted to stand up for people in our area!”
“With Labour now a spent force both locally and nationally, I believe I am the clear alternative here to Cameron’s Conservatives.”
“Remember, with Labour and Plaid out of the race here, only the Lib Dems can keep the Tories out!”
“Don’t forget. In our area, only the Liberal Democrats can stop Cameron’s Conservatives. Labour are a spent force — they don’t even have any councillors in Cardiff North!”
“The race to be Cardiff North’s next MP is set to be a close-run contest. Local Lib Dem campaigner, John Dixon, is providing a strong challenge to the Tories.”
