No more free ride on LA Metro

The Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority (CA) will start locking turnstiles at four rail stations as part of its system-wide transition to the Transit Access Pass farecard. Locking the turnstiles will help the agency understand how many customers are using TAP cards and how many are still using paper passes. “This will help usRead… Read more »

On the Go with … MTA

Ray LaHood isn’t the only one who’s On the Go anymore. This week the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (NY) launched its On the Go! Travel Station at the first of five locations. The interactive touch-screen display allows customers to plan their trip, get real-time service alerts (including elevator and escalator status), check out a neighborhood map.Read… Read more »

Social Media for the Security Cleared Job Seeker, Twitter

Social media is now a common means of communicating, doing business and supporting career search and development. But as with everything there is a huge divide between those who adopted technology early and most of the rest of us. I was reminded on a recent family visit that there is still healthy skepticism, suspicion andRead… Read more »

Telling stories

Creating a visualisation of data has the power to tell a story behind the data. This article in Rustwire.com uses indicators of deprivation to create visualisations that illustrate how poverty has spread across Cleveland over the past two decades. This article by Simon Rogers in the Guardian discusses the most deprived areas in the UK,Read… Read more »

Best Practices for Government Libraries Goes Future Ready

Make sure to visit the SLA Future Ready 365 Blog all this week. It’s featuring a whole series of articles from the 2011 edition of Best Practices for Government Libraries. The 2011 Best Practices for Government Libraries: e-Initiatives and e-Efforts: Expanding Our Horizons is available in PDF: 2011 Best Practices for Government Libraries in PDF.Read… Read more »

Summering from Behind

Some time ago, some media sources characterized the U.S. Administration’s military involvement in Libya and Syria as ‘leading from behind.’ I heard this phrase and thought: ”interesting, they’re taking a nuanced and shared approach to a conflict where our national security interests may be threatened but not clear.” Having been honored to spend a goodRead… Read more »

OpenData Race Begins in Philadelphia

Several months ago, with the unveiling of the OpenDataPhilly website, the City of Philadelphia joined the growing fraternity of cities across the country and around the world to release municipal data sets in open, developer friendly formats. But the City of Brotherly Love did things a bit differently than most of it’s contemporaries. The cityRead… Read more »

Small Ecosystems and Security

Anthropologist Robin Dunbar famously observed that most people can only maintain relationships at one time with 150 people. The average on Facebook is 120-230. And of that, only a fraction really matter to us. Penetrating a small circle is usually very difficult, especially if they are members of a network based around a tie thatRead… Read more »

Back office blues

Picture this: Girl sits at a desk. It’s an okay desk, as it happens it’s not the smallest desk she ever had. Actually, she used to have her own office – in a portakabin admittedly – but it was her own space in one of those weird local government twists of fate. Anyway, she’s gotRead… Read more »