As a volunteer effort, Blinktag Inc has been involved with building the website for myamericanhealthcarestory.org. (read more on our project page) Its a site where Americans can share their personal stories about the American healthcare system in video format. We’ve gotten over 100 video submissions and more are submitted every day.
It was fun working with a great team of volunteers to launch an awesome site on a short timeframe. Its the most video-focused site we’ve worked on to date.
The team recently posted a few funny videos highlighting the serious topic of healthcare reform:
Good Magazine has lots of great posts on transportation, technology and cities. They also have a sweet domain name: http://good.is
Their post on why gallons per mile (as opposed to miles per gallon) is a more effective way to discuss fuel efficiency in automobiles is very interesting. Its basic math, but I never heard this mentioned at all when cash for clunkers was being discussed.
most people assumed that improving a car’s miles per gallon from 25 mpg to 50 mpg would save more gas over 10,000 miles than an improvement from 10 mpg to 20 mpg. But when you do the math, the latter saves more than twice as much
The chart sums it up
This helps us understand that pulling cars out of the teens [in terms of miles per gallon] is so much more valuable than pushing an efficient car even higher. That only becomes clear when you start thinking about gallons per mile. That tiny increase from 10 mpg to 11 mpg saves essentially the same one gallon of gas every 100 miles as does increasing 33 mpg to 50 mpg.
Are there any advantages to using miles per gallon other than its what we’re used to?
I was really excited when I read about Google Chrome Frame yesterday. Its a browser plug-in for Internet Explorer that replaces the internals with that of Google Chrome, a much more modern browser that supports recent web standards and generally just works.
IE is notorious for rendering pages improperly and not supporting new web standards which basically require web developers to apply special hacks or design sites specifically for IE.
Google Chrome Frame is interesting because the user doesn’t need to seek out and install google chrome frame. If these people were interested in seeking out new software they probably wouldn’t be using IE6 in the first place. Instead, website authors can include a few lines of code that prompts users of IE to install the Google Chrome Frame plugin.
I set up a chrome frame test page with the google chome embed and lots of elements that don’t work well in IE6. and had a friend of mine who works for a very large bank where their computers are locked down to only using IE6 try visiting the page. I was hoping that somehow Google Chrome Frame would be allowed to install itself.
BART released a new version of its official map this week. Its a streamlined version: The folks at San Francisco Cityscape have created their own streamlined map that shows all the rail transit in the Bay Area. It makes the system look much more comprehensive and integrated than it really is. It includes BART, MUNI (streetcars & light rail), VTA light rail, ACE trains, Caltrain, & Amtrak. See the full size pdf or gif.
CitySourced launched today at the TechCrunch50. Its a website & iphone, Blackberry & Android app that allows users to submit notes and pictures about issues directly to city government. This could be anything from potholes to graffiti to unsafe pavement conditions on bike routes.
On the city’s end, CitySourced bundles the reports, sorts by type and maps them. Cities pay CitySourced an annual fee for the privilege of receiving the data.
Currently in San Francisco you can call 311 (or twitter them) to report issues to the city or get information, but the cost of staffing a hotline is high. The San Francisco MTA estimated that 41 percent of calls to 311 were for transit information and the average cost per call was $1.96. At the time, this was more than the actual fare for a bus ride.
I’m not sure how much the annual fee for using CitySourced is (San Jose apparently just signed up) but its got to be less than the cost of staffing a call center. As more people get smart phones this type of application will become more useful and will lower the costs of reporting & fixing issues while providing more timely information.
Each year Jed, Brendan and much of the BlinkTag staff take a trip to Black Rock City, NV for Burning Man. As a city planner & transportation person, its interesting to spend a week in a temporary city of 50,000 that gets recreated every year with no cars or commerce.
Shame is definitely not part of the city planning toolkit I learned about, but I’d agree that these things can be useful concepts outside of the Nevada desert.
For a historic look at the layout of Black Rock City and how it developed, this article by BRC planner Rod Garrett is worth a look. The overlay of Black Rock City on central San Francisco is particularly interesting:
The theme for Burning Man 2010 is “Metropolis: The Life of Cities” (Aug 30-Sep 6, 2010) so I’m sure we’ll be hearing more about the lessons that cities can learn from burning man as next year’s event approaches.
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