Toronto homicides

The Torontoist blog posted some excellent articles on homicide statistics for Toronto, Greater Toronto, downtown Toronto, and Toronto vs. other North American cities. The focus is on studying the stats to determine whether the city is a dangerous place, and whether it is getting worse. You can find the series here.

MyTTC.ca

One of the things that has saved me in my short stint here at Seattle is the fantastic Google Transit service. I don’t have a car, and navigating the bus schedule tables and maps in the unintuitive local transit website is a constant source of frustration.

Now, Google Transit is already available for plenty of cities around the world, including, in Canada, Vancouver, Fredericton, Ottawa, and Montreal. No Toronto, though. According to Oshoma Momoh, the Toronto Transit Commission does not share its raw transit data with the public. Getting the data means manually scrubbing and debugging the plainly awful TTC web pages, which means lots of non-automated hard work, which in turn means Google is staying out of this for now.

Enter MyTTC.ca, an independent website created by Kieran Huggins and Kevin Branigan that was “born out of a desire for free, open access to transit data”. They’ve been doing the hard work, and now they have made their site public and are asking for feedback.

They already have great results to show. They have a good Trip Planner available, which works much better than the TTC’s decontextualized route maps and schedule tables. They’re making their data public and free. But what’s even better is their complete openness and encouragement to have a community built around this purpose:

We are not the TTC, nor are we affiliated, endorsed, or otherwise associated with them. This is a community effort to make using the TTC a better experience for everyone. We hope you’ll join us!
…

Think you can do better?

Awesome! You should check out our developer API. Or, should you want, we’ll give you either a GTFS or SQL dump of our data. Go. Play. Innovate. Mash up. Make transit better!

I haven’t met Kieran or Kevin yet, but I’d love to. A big thank you to both; I’m looking forward to see where this will go.

Angelus Novus

Found at Steven Johnson’s “The Ghost Map”:

“A Klee painting named “Angelus Novus” shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.”

–Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History”

Project awareness mock-ups

Jeremy Handcock, a friend and colleague from the University of Toronto, posted some pretty cool mock-ups of team awareness for software projects recently. I’d love to get to play with a tool like this, and I know I’m not the only one.

PlanetEye launches!

PlanetEye, an online travel website that links geotagged pictures with local expertise, maps, and more standard travel services, is a start-up that I’ve been watching closely for a while — a good friend of mine is heavily involved in it and tipped me to their beta program. Well the service officially launched today, and to good press, it seems! Congratulations and good luck to the team. Go check them out!

Torture in Guanajuato

The Human Rights Commission of Mexico recently declared that the police of my home state of Guanajuato, Mexico, systematically torture people to obtain information and confessions (link in Spanish). Of course I’m not surprised –I don’t think anyone is–, and I’m pretty sure the problem is fully widespread in Mexico, but it’s good that at least the Commission has concrete evidence of abuse in this case, and that it’s making noise about it.

The Commission’s website is a bit hard to navigate, but if you’re interested, its recommendations to the Governor of Guanajuato are here (in Spanish, again).