Data, words, code
Not a good sign:
Amid the early April tumult that brought down former President Kurmanbek Bakiyev’s administration, young men in Bishkek and other cities began forming druzhiniki groups to patrol the streets and restore order. These groups were originally envisioned as a temporary solution to security challenges. But in the ongoing unrest that has plagued Kyrgyzstan since April, militia groups have kept on amassing influence. [Eurasianet
I hate hot weather passionately. Or more accurately, lethargically: when the temperature goes above 25, I find myself unable to concentrate on anything.
But now I find myself wondering: what makes people dress down in the heat? Do they choose their clothing based on today’s weather, yesterday’s weather, or some combination of the two?
Fortunately, we have the data and technology to answer this. I’m not going to
implement
it (see: lethargy). But here’s what I would do, if I had the time/energy — and perhaps I will when autumn comes and I start to wake up.
Skin-detection algorithms already exist. This is the only freely-available code I could find for the purpose; I haven’t tested it.
You’d also need a source of images, tagged by date and location. Flickr will probably give you that, if you choose the right tags to narrow it down to full-body portraits of people. You can get weather information from The US National Weather Service, although it’s not clear what historical data is available. Failing that, you could limit photos to a particular group of dates/locations, for which you manually look up the historical weather. Then just assemble the data, and run some regressions.
“For my parents, God and Damien Katz.”
— Noah Slater’s dedicaiton, in the O’Reilly couchdb book
Useful post on git by Yehuda Katz. inter alia, strongly suggests using the
--rebase
flag when merging
We’re in the midst of a data explosion. Then again, we’re
always
in the midst of a daa explosion. It’s been developing, wave by wave, since the first Sumerian scribe pushed his wedge into clay. Maybe it feels different this time; maybe it’s always felt different.
The past two centuries saw the gradual triumph of ordered data collection: the regimented and expensive process of the census, the time-motion study, the economic indicator. The province of powerful behemoths — government, military, corporate or the omnipresent RAND corporation — such projects were rigorously plannedat the top, then executed by a small army of functionaries.
In the last 15 years, something has changed. Quantitative change, initially: more data, faster computers, easier transmission of information. But also a change in quality. Now we’ve moved into the era of data as by-product. Our clicks and our purchases are tracked because watching us is cheap and easy, not as part of a pre-planned technocratic project. Such cheapness brings us into the age of data abundance, and we’re only beginning to appreciate the consequences and the possibilities.
Enter the Open Data movement. Bubbling with geekish idealism, this is a loose grouping of campaigners trying to prize large datasets out of government and corporate hands, bringing them into the agora. Knowledge here may be measured in SQL dumps, linked data and gigabytes of official transcripts, but the idealism fits into the standard pattern: the Truth will set you free.
getting country population data from freebase:
from freebase.api import HTTPMetawebSession, MetawebError
mss = HTTPMetawebSession('www.freebase.com')
list(mss.mqlread([{'name': None, 'type': '/location/country', '/location/country/iso3166
1
alpha2' : None, '/location/statistical_region/population' : [{'number': None}] }]))
I’ve been shamefully ignoring Kyrgyzstan. Well, I’ve been ignoring politics in general, busy on vodo and other techncial work. But it’s particularly hideous to start ignoring an area you care about, just as a great many things (good and bad) start happening. Not reading about what’s happening over there makes me feel complicit in the near-total lack of attention in the Western media.
And Kyrgyzstan really is being overlooked to an incredible extent. Washington Post: nothing worth mentioning. New York Times is doing noticeably better, though — in fact, their coverage is pretty decent considering the distance, and the lack of much domestic political significance within the US.
Kyrgyzstan has a new interior minister. Probably no bad thing, given that the accomplishments of previous acting interior minister Bolot Sher consisted of:
* pursuing Bakiyev’s relatives
* Making the supremely reassuring statement that “I am in command of 80 percent of the Ministry of Interior…The other 20 percent is still waffling.”
On the other hand his replacement, Kubat Baibolov, is coming straight from an oh-so-successful stint running things in Jalal-Abad
Ran into this who’s who of Kyrgyz politics looking up the new Interior Minister, but it seems generally pretty worth paying attention to.