Hope you had a great week. I certainly had an entertaining week. A lot of stuff has happened.

What’s new with me

I started my diving lessons to get my Open Water Diver certificate, so I can dive with my wife on our next family vacation. That should be fun. What fun vacation are you planning next? Just reply and let me know. I’m curious, especially if you plan a diving trip. I want to know about it :)

I also started my journey on submitting an entry to the VizRisk challenge from GFDRR, mapbox, and the Data Visualization society. I will write about my progress on my blog. The first entry was published last week.

I will try to participate in the MakeoverMonday challenge. This weeks challenge was about a chart from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics about Sleep Patterns of Americans. I added an entry and wrote a short post about it as well. Here is the makeover as a gif, to see the difference:

Civic Tech News

Have you seen the article on StateScoop about the NYPD using a combination of machine learning models, called Patternizr, to spot patterns in crime and solve cases? Though these tools have the potential to improve the safety of our communities, they need to be used with caution. Algorithms can have biases and need to be adequately trained to produce accurate findings. This is a good start to machine-learning based crime analysis, but there is still work to be done to increase the effectiveness of these tools. What do you think about it?

Have you seen or used the Civic Tech Field Guide? It is a valuable resource for staying in the loop and learning more about active civictech projects and tools used around the world.

Photo of the week