Sometimes its the little victories that remind us minding against tyranny is not a futile concern. In this case, solid data by Ben Wellington of I Quant NY exposed massive incorrect ticketing of parked cars throughout New York. (Full post shown here for context; see http://iquantny.tumblr.com/post/144197004989/the-nypd-was-systematically-ticketing-legally for original source.
New York City is a complex place to drive. And when it comes to parking, there are plenty of rules and regulations to follow. It’s no wonder that sometimes people get confused and end up getting their cars ticketed or towed.
But in all of these rules, there is one thing that very few drivers seem to know. As of late 2008, in NYC you can park in front of a sidewalk pedestrian ramp, as long as it’s not connected to a crosswalk. It’s all written up in the NYC Traffic Rules, and for more detail, take a look at this article. The local legislation making these parking spots legal was proposed by Council Member Gentile, and adopted by the Department of Transportation before it ever made it for a vote. Though few people seem to know about the change.
Is it a problem that drivers don’t realize that there are some extra parking spots they are now allowed to park in? Not so much. But, I’ve got a pedestrian ramp leading to nowhere particular in the middle of my block in Brooklyn, and on occasion I have parked there. Despite the fact that it is legal, I’ve been ticketed for parking there. Though I get the tickets dismissed, it’s a waste of everybody’s time. And that got me wondering- How common is it for the police to give tickets to cars legally parked in front of pedestrian ramps? It couldn’t be just me…
In the past, there was not much you could do to stop something like this. Complaining to your local precinct would at best only solve the problem locally. But thanks to NYC’s Open Data portal, I was able to look at the most common parking spots in the City where cars were ticketed for blocking pedestrian ramps. It’s worth taking a moment upfront here to praise the NYPD for offering this dataset to begin with. Though we are behind on police crime data in the city, we are ahead in other ways and the parking ticket dataset is definitely one of them.
What I found when I dove into the data surprised me. To start, I found the top address where this ticket were given: in front of 575 Ocean Avenue in Brooklyn, where over $48,000 in parking fines were issued in the last 2.5 years.
To my surprise, the spot, (or really spots since there are two ramps), are legal, since they are in the middle of the block, with no crosswalk. $48,000 in tickets at a legally parked spot, and that is just the last 2.5 years. If we had more historical data, I suspect we would see a similar story.
The next top spots on the list had the same story to tell.
1705 Canton Avenue in Brooklyn, 273 Tickets, $45,045: Legal.
270-05 76 Avenue in Queens, 256 Tickets ($42,440) Legal.
Those were of course the most extreme cases that topped the list. I started to skip down the list. This spot in Battery Park, ranked #16 on my list and the top spot in Manhattan, had 116 tickets ($19,140) and turned out to be legal. (Yellow paint has no meaning in NYC traffic enforcement, and the spot has no crosswalk)
I started to skip down the list faster and faster. Take #1000 in my top list, at 1059 Virginia Avenue, where 8 tickets had been given ($1320). It is a classic T intersection, meaning it’s legal.
See the pattern? I did. So I then selected 30 random spots that had received 5 or more tickets over the time period, and based on Google Maps found that all of them appeared to be legal parking spots! (Randomly selecting spots with a single ticket in the database showed some illegal spots as well, so I chose 5 as a conservative cutoff.)
How many spots received 5 or more of these pedestrian ramp tickets in the last 2.5 years? We are talking 1,966 spots that are generating about 1.7 million dollars a year in tickets at parking spots that are mostly legal. Are all 1966 spots legal? Surely not, but the majority sure are and many more that have fewer than five tickets are likely legal too.
To see where the hotspots were for this sort of abuse of drivers, I mapped the top 1000 pedestrian ramps generating parking tickets below, so you can see if you have a spot in your neighborhood that the police have been wrongly ticketing. Clicking on a spot tells you if the tickets are given in front of, or opposite the address, as well as how many tickets have been given.
My challenge to you… click on a spot and then look at pictures of it on Google Maps to determine if its legal. You will most likely find it is.
Other findings in the data:
Brooklyn’s 70th Precinct seems to have the most cars wrongly ticketed, bringing in over $100,000 in fines a year. The 77th, also in Brooklyn, comes in second:
So what is going on here? Well, it seemed from my browsing that many police officers were systematically ignoring the 2009 rule change, all across the city.
But that is not where the story ends. As mentioned, we live in a city progressive enough to release parking ticket data. I’ve repeatedly said that putting data into the hand of citizens will make our city run better and more equitably. So, I reached out to the NYPD via the Mayor’s Office of Data Analytics and Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer’s Office (who is one of NYC’s earliest NYC’s Open Data champions) to tell them about the findings. They helped me get in touch with the appropriate people at the NYPD, and then I waited.
After a couple of weeks, I received the following quote from the NYPD:
“Mr. Wellington’s analysis identified errors the department made in issuing parking summonses. It appears to be a misunderstanding by officers on patrol of a recent, abstruse change in the parking rules. We appreciate Mr. Wellington bringing this anomaly to our attention.
The department’s internal analysis found that patrol officers who are unfamiliar with the change have observed vehicles parked in front of pedestrian ramps and issued a summons in error. When the rule changed in 2009 to allow for certain pedestrian ramps to be blocked by parked vehicles, the department focused training on traffic agents, who write the majority of summonses.
Yet, the majority of summonses written for this code violation were written by police officers. As a result, the department sent a training message to all officers clarifying the rule change and has communicated to commanders of precincts with the highest number of summonses, informing them of the issues within their command.
Thanks to this analysis and the availability of this open data, the department is also taking steps to digitally monitor these types of summonses to ensure that they are being issued correctly.”
I was speechless. THIS is what the future of government could look like one day. THIS is what Open Data is all about. THIS was coming from the NYPD, who is not generally celebrated for its transparency, and yet it’s the most open and honest response I have received from any New York City agency to date. Imagine a city where all agencies embrace this sort of analysis instead of deflect and hide from it.
Democracies provide pathways for government to learn from their citizens. Open data makes those pathways so much more powerful. In this case, the NYPD acknowledged the mistake, is retraining its officers and is putting in monitoring to limit this type of erroneous ticketing from happening in the future. In doing so, they have shown that they are ready and willing to work with the people of the city. And what better gift can we get from Open Data than that.
Full version: http://iquantny.tumblr.com/post/144197004989/the-nypd-was-systematically-ticketing-legally
Something something fourth estate gatekeepers of trust, something something absolute power corrupts absolutely, something something “Let’s all quit using Facebook” again.
According to interviews published by Gizmodo’s Michael Nunez:
Facebook workers routinely suppressed news stories of interest to conservative readers from the social network’s influential “trending” news section, according to a former journalist who worked on the project. This individual says that workers prevented stories about the right-wing CPAC gathering, Mitt Romney, Rand Paul, and other conservative topics from appearing in the highly-influential section, even though they were organically trending among the site’s users.
Several former Facebook “news curators,” as they were known internally, also told Gizmodo that they were instructed to artificially “inject” selected stories into the trending news module, even if they weren’t popular enough to warrant inclusion—or in some cases weren’t trending at all. The former curators, all of whom worked as contractors, also said they were directed not to include news about Facebook itself in the trending module.
Full version: http://gizmodo.com/former-facebook-workers-we-routinely-suppressed-conser-1775461006
From a blog post by Pablo Reyes Arellano, a professor from Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez, touching on cultures that, while evolving, still protect themselves through rejection of other ways of seeing, thinking and acting.
Modernity has accelerated development, expansion, new possibilities and substantially improved the quality of life in many ways. But, are the systems with which we have approached the management of problems in the past enough to deal with the complex environments we find ourselves in today?
The process of cultural evolution occurs through an algorithm. When there is inheritance, variation and selection, it operates via the evolutionary mechanism that allows the new generations (seen from genetics) to be better adapted to the context in which they live.
At the cultural level, change happens in the same way; however, the replication systems are not genes, but cultural transmission units that are inheriting, varying and selecting from person to person (or group to group) depending on the contexts in which they participate. We are imitating what we see and generating complex systems of beliefs, values and paradigms that make us, on one side, to see reality in a certain way, and on the other, to act, teach, and manage according to this conception of reality.
This evolutionary form is increasingly becoming more complex as what we have to face is more complex, so new forms of inheritance, variation and selection are happening as the environment changes, largely as a product of the same results that we foster.
In the process of cultural evolution, these generate an “immune system” that attracts those practices, values and systems that are consistent with the central cultural system, while repelling those that are not in accordance.
Great series starting up in Recode from Tony Haile, founder and CEO of Chartbeat and an adjunct professor of media and technology at Columbia and Stanford Universities.
Digital media companies do five things. They create, host, curate, distribute and monetize content. Facebook now does four of them.
Normally this should not concern media companies more than any other competitor that they must face. However, Facebook’s mass acts as an an intense gravitational force in the industry, warping user behavior and fracturing the economic incentives that defined media companies. It suggests that those media companies that survive will view much of the infrastructure they possess today as just as much of a millstone as they did the printing press.
…
Mobile traffic has surpassed 50 percent of traffic to media companies and is heading towards 60 percent to 70 percent. Mobile traffic is 3-4 times more likely to be from social sources than on desktop and that social traffic is more likely to be Facebook than Twitter by an order of magnitude. On mobile, for media, traffic increasingly = Facebook.
…
The biggest impact of this is that content that has been bundled together within a site is now atomized. Content used to be connected to each other by the strong force of user behavior and the weak force of brand. Users would come to a site, read a piece of content, and then go on to another.
Habit and ease were driving behavior that over time meant absorbing brand attributes and creating a sense of loyalty and self-identification. That connection is being severed.
…
Unfortunately, for many publishers the need for cost-cutting and helter-skelter attempts to compete technologically with the platforms means that they have invested more in what commoditizes them than what differentiates. The guardians of brand voice who were sub-editors were cut in favor of investing in new CMSes for sites that increasingly see their audience interact with their content elsewhere. Those few with strong distinctive brands can be thankful for the work already put in, those whose brands are too often interchangeable or indistinct face a hard road.
…
That doesn’t work on mobile. The argument for writing the uneconomic news piece that attracts the user to the site who will then go on to the lucrative real estate section is now moot. Those trying to make an economic case for the kind of content that is important for democracy but not for advertisers will find themselves on shifting sands.
Native advertising, the overladen vehicle upon which so many of publishers hopes now rest, faces the same challenges in an atomized content world. When working as intended, native advertising is commercial content intended to elicit the same user experience as the editorial content that surrounds it. In an atomized world, no editorial content surrounds it. It exists alone in the stream, adrift from the content it was intended to mimic.
With that unbundling, the only economic purpose for a site that makes its living from native advertising to create content other than native advertising is to maintain its brand. This means that the media company becomes a native advertising creative agency with an absurdly expensive brand marketing department formerly known as the newsroom.
Damn those content producers trying to monetize their business. On the one hand, I can see the publisher justifying the move on the grounds that they are giving access to the content at no monetary cost to the user, but “charging” them for message exposure and time (and who-knows-what personal information tracking). On the other hand, outdated revenue models cannot stop the future; evolve or die time.
(For some reason, this move by /r/technology made me flashback to Jack Valenti’s infamous 1982 testimony to the U.S. House of Representatives: “I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone.”)
From Reddit:
It has come to our attention that many websites such as Forbes and Wired are now requiring users to disable ad blockers to view content. Because Forbes requires users to do this and has then served malware to them we see this as a security risk to you our community. There are also sites such as Wall Street Journal that have implemented pay-walls which we were are also considering banning.
We would like all of your thoughts on whether or not we should allow domains such as Forbes here on /r/technology while they continue to resort to such practices.
PayPal essentially doubled as an underwriter for people backing Kickstarter campaigns. Engadget touches on the online payment giant’s change of heart about carrying the risk for successful fundraisers that simply fail to deliver on their promises.
Kickstarter notes that about 9 percent of its projects never deliver — even though PayPal only handles some of those transactions, that’s a lot of potential refunds. We’ve asked PayPal for its official reasoning, but it might simply be a matter of wanting to keep costs down.
PayPal statement:
“In Australia, Brazil, Canada, Japan, United States and certain other countries, we have excluded payments made to crowdfunding campaigns from our buyer protection programs. This is consistent with the risks and uncertainties involved in contributing to crowdfunding campaigns, which do not guarantee a return for the investment made in these types of campaigns. We work with our crowdfunding platform partners to encourage fundraisers to communicate the risks involved in investing in their campaign to donors.”
“Jill Watson,” one of the nine teaching assistants helping answer online questions from Georgia Tech computer science students, turned out to be IBM’s Watson AI.
One day in January, Eric Wilson dashed off a message to the teaching assistants for an online course at the Georgia Institute of Technology.
“I really feel like I missed the mark in giving the correct amount of feedback,” he wrote, pleading to revise an assignment.
Thirteen minutes later, the TA responded. “Unfortunately, there is not a way to edit submitted feedback,” wrote Jill Watson, one of nine assistants for the 300-plus students.
Last week, Mr. Wilson found out he had been seeking guidance from a computer.
…
[Georgia Tech computer science professor Ashok Goel] estimates that within a year, Ms. Watson will be able to answer 40% of all the students’ questions, freeing the humans to tackle more complex technical or philosophical inquiries such as, “How do you define intelligence?”
Mr. Wilson, who sought homework help in January, never doubted Ms. Watson’s humanity.
“I didn’t see personality in any of the posts,” he recalls. “But it’s what you’d expect from a TA, somewhat serious and all about giving you the answer.”
Some highlights from PSFK’s most recent Future of Advertising report:
* Between 2013 and 2014, there was a 60% increase in spending on digital video advertising. However, there was a 124% increase in people who use adblocking services.
* 59% of online traffic is not from humans, but from query-focused bots.
* 56% of the industry say advertising agencies are less important now.
* 44% of the industry agree that media outlets are less important as well.
At Mobile Clinic, L2 members got an inside look at some of the biggest topics in mobile. Here are a few of the most compelling takeaways:
Consumers are spending more time on mobile, but barely any time with retailers.
Claude de Jocas – Intelligence Group Director, L2
The secret to selling products to sneakerheads: one-click checkout.
Matthew Siegel – Vice President & GM of Global Digital Commerce, NIKE, Inc
“Tech is a product, not a project.”
Bryan Galipeau – Director of Social Media & Display, Nordstrom
“In a mobile-first world, ‘where’ is no longer a destination, it’s a state of motivation.”
David Hewitt – VP, Consumer Experiences and Global Mobile Practice Lead, SapientNitro
