Government
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Random Selection and Food Safety
I love the phrases “randomly selected” in this statement from Jeni’s Ice Cream about their recall of ice cream after listeria was discovered: The impression is that perhaps if that pint hadn’t been picked on by a worker from the Nebraska Department of Agriculture (according to the FDA notice here) that everything woulda been just…
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Bulk Downloads of FCC Comments on FCC Filing 14-28, Protecting and Promoting the Open Internet
tl; dr: below is a bulk download of all Net Neutrality comments published to the FCC’s Electronic Comment Filing System as single file, along with the complete text of those comments. There are 475,280 comments available as of August 4, 2014. More comments are being published and will be available here as time goes by.
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On Parsing Restaurant Inspection Violations (Subtitled: Goddess and the Grocer on Elston Had a Bad Day Last Week)
This morning I was reviewing a saved view on the City of Chicago data portal for restaurant inspections conducted by the Chicago Department of Public Health based on a suspected food poisoning. I used a feature of Socrata, the software used in the portal, that The Local Inspector Value-Entry Specification (LIVES) is an effort by Yelp, Code for…
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The Chicago Board of Health
Here’s an entity that I did not know existed: The Chicago Board of Health. Here’s info from the City website: The Chicago Board of Health formulates health policies and advises the Mayor and the Public Health Commissioner on all health issues. The Board promulgates all health regulations, including emergency regulations. * It shall be the duty…
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Quick Review of Chicago’s Open 311 Implementation
Here are some notes I took while reviewing the various Web resources published in the City’s Open 311 implementation announced on Friday: Service Tracker: http://servicetracker.cityofchicago.org/ The Service Tracker tool is driven by this open source code: It displays a running list of service requests submitted under the following service request types: Some possible improvements: Many of…