Global Mayors and Smart Cities
What are the challenges facing large cities over the next 50 years, how will cities becomes ‘smarter’, what risks do digital technologies introduce, and will a global parliament of mayors help or hinder?
Visualising London Fire Data III
In this post, we take a look at the mobilisation data for each fire station to calculate the time and distances involved in responding to incidents, before looking at the differences in spread of incidents across wards
Visualising London Fire Data II
In the third post looking at the 2014 incident records published by the London Fire Brigade, we explore if there are any temporal patterns
Visualising London Fire Data I
In the second post looking at the 2014 incident records published by the London Fire Brigade, we explore if there are any spatial patterns
Re-thinking the Fire Brigade
In the UK there is a debate about whether it is reasonable to expect fire fighters to continue working until they are 60 before being eligible for a pension. The first port of call should be to analyse the incidents they attend…
What makes a city smart?
Use of the phrase ‘Smart City’ has been dominated by technology companies designing city-wide systems with embedded sensors capturing and adapting to real-time feedback. But what really makes a city smart?
Eliminating unemployment
One of the challenges facing unemployed people dependent on welfare is that the system assumes work is stable and long term. That may have been true in the past… Read More
Video interview about Olympic IT
The British Computer Society/Chartered Institute for IT has posted an interview with the Metropolitan Police’s Director of IT, Stephen Whatson, who’s been tasked with the IT infrastructure for the Olympics this year. Includes some interesting comments about the preparation and decisions made. Video embedded below (Flash player required).
Source: BCS – Video interview: Olympic IT, Apr 2012
Government and the young online
The O’Reilly Radar has a great post written by Alex Howard sharing insights from Danah Boyd – How government can engage young people online. It contains some excellent advice for any politician hoping to create a better dialogue with young voters. Here are some soundbites:
Young people don’t want to be the government’s friend on Facebook. They aren’t likely to welcome an official dropping into an online conversation uninvited. And if you want to communicate with them where they live, you need to be on mobile.
Consider the financial crisis, suggests boyd. “Some of the most screwed-over people are college students or recent graduates with student loans. The press covers it, but where are the politicians? This is a moment to engage students. If we don’t meet them on those terms, technology won’t make it magically happen.”
“Make it easy for the message to be spread between friends. Don’t assume that you’ll be another friend in the buddy list. The goal is to be a part of the information sources they draw upon,” said boyd. “If you focus on making content easy to share wherever they go, you don’t need to track everywhere that they are.”
Highly recommend reading the full article.
The article includes a reference to a recent Pew Internet report – Teens and Mobile Phones (April 2010) – that shows just how big a role mobile phones now play in everyday life for young people:
75% of 12 – 17 year-olds now own cell phones, up form 45% in 2004.
72% of all teens – or 88% of teen cell phone users – are text-messagers (up from 51% in 2006).
More than half of teens (54%) are daily text-messagers (up from 38% in February 2008). Two-thirds of teen texters say they are more likely to use their cell phones to text their friends than talk to them to them by cell phone.
Half of teens send 50 or more text messages a day, or 1,500 texts a month One in three send more than 100 texts a day Boys typically send and receive 30 texts a day; girls typically send and receive 80 messages per day. However, while many teens are avid texters, a substantial minority are not. One-fifth of teen texters (22%) send and receive just 1-10 texts a day
The Summary Findings containing more statistics are available online.
Private Public Sector Clouds
Data Center Knowledge has an excellent summary of the different contenders bidding to win cloud-computing projects within the public sector. Whilst US focused, some of the main players will almost certainly be adopting a similar approach with their service offerings to government agencies in other countries around the world.
It’s interesting to see the different types of international company bidding to run national government and military networks, for example:
- Systems integrators such as HP and CSC
- Software/hardware vendors such as IBM and Microsoft
- Online service providers such as Google and Amazon
Microsoft and Google are both building dedicated government cloud platforms separate to their commercial data center offerings. IBM and HP seem to be building on a client-by-client basis, building private cloud platforms to service the Department of Defense and U.S. Airforce. Others like Amazon and CSC are partnering with niche government specialists to build out their services.
Cloud computing has found a logical fit within education, with the need to annually provision accounts for large numbers of users who are temporary for the duration of their education at a given college or university. I suspect the drive to move longer-term adult and social care services into the cloud, along with the more sensitive concerns surrounding military content and applications, will be a bumpier journey.
Reference:
- Who Are The Contenders for the Federal Cloud? – Data Center Knowledge
Joining Dots 