Author: Geoffrey Hing

Illinois in the ICE Age

Illinois in the ICE Age Screenshot

 

Illinois in the ICE Age is a data visualization project that I made along with Jimmie Glover, Ruth Lopez and @taratc for Chicago MigraHack. The visualization is based on a data set provided by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse that describes the trajectory of 915 migrants detained in Illinois from the time they were taken into custody until they left ICE custody in November and December 2012.

We used Google Spreadsheets’ pivot tables feature to explore the data and develop questions and insights. This also provided a good way to double check programatically computed statistics.  The map animation is built using D3. I sucked the data set into a local SQLite database using the Peewee ORM and wrote some Python scripts to transform the data and export it as JSON to make it easier to visualize (especially the day-by-day updates).

The project won the “Best data visualization team project” and “Audience Favorite” awards.

Replacing hinge in plastic-framed glasses

Broken glasses hinge

I’ve broken numerous pairs of sunglasses at the hinge where the temples connect to the rest of the frame.  As frustrating as it was to just toss the otherwise useful glasses, it just seemed like too much hassle and expense to try to fix them.  The surfaces seemed too rough and small to solder the broken hinge pieces back together, and how could you replace the entire hinge when it’s embedded in plastic? A friend really liked the look of a cheap pair of sunglasses, so she had them converted to eyeglasses by an optician, an operation that was cheaper than normal frames, but expensive enough to warrant trying a little harder to break the broken hinges.

It turns out it was relatively painless to replace the broken hinge with one from an inexpensive pair of sunglasses.

What you’ll need

  • A broken or cheap pair of sunglasses from a thrift store, gas station, or a broken pair you have lying around.  Make sure that the way the hinges mount match the glasses you want to repair and that the size of the hinge matches the connector on temple piece.
  • Soldering iron machine
  • Metal tweezers
  • Small screwdriver

Step 1: Remove the temples from the donor glasses

Using the small screwdriver, remove the temple pieces from each side of the donor sunglasses. This will make it easier remove the hinges.  When doing this, try sliding the temple piece of the glasses you’re going to fix onto the hinge of the donor glasses, to make sure they’re compatible.

Step 2: Remove hinges from the donor glasses

We’ll repeat this process to remove the broken hinge from the glasses we want to fix, so this is a good chance to practice being steady with the soldering iron, applying the right amount of heat, and removing the hinge with minimum damage to the frame, before working with our good frames.  Hold the tip of the soldering iron to the hinge piece, being careful not to touch the plastic. With your other hand, grip the hinge with tweezers.  As the plastic around the hinge melts from the heat transfer, gently pull the hinge up and out of the frame, trying to pull as straight as possible.  I didn’t have to heat the hinge very long to melt the plastic enough to extract the hinge.

Removing the hinge from the donor glasses

Repeat this process with the other hinge to practice your technique and to have an extra part in case you drop and lose one hinge.

Step 3: Remove the hinge from the glasses you’re repairing

Remove the broken hinge from the glasses you’re repairing, using the same process that you used to remove the hinge from the donor glasses.

 

Removing hinge from glasses to be repaired

Broken glasses with hinge removed

Step 4: Replace the broken hinge

Grip one of the hinges from the donor glasses with the tweezers and position it in the hole left where the broken hinge was removed.  Try to hold it as straight and flush with the rest of the frame as possible.

Inserting the replacement hinge

With your other hand, touch the hinge with the tip of the soldering iron until the plastic of the frame melts around the replacement hinge.  Be careful not to melt the plastic too much or push the hinge too deep into the frame. If needed, use the tweezers or the soldering iron tip to adjust the position of the hinge.

Positioning the replacement hinge

Step 5: Reattach the temple pieces

Using the small screwdriver, replace the temple piece. You’re done! You’ve just saved your favorite pair of glasses from the landfill.

Secret performances

In a thread about recent shutdowns of houses doing DIY shows in Chicago and the best way to balance keeping things on the downlow and still accessible, someone shared this awesome piece of history from The Missoula Oblongata:

At the time, Missoula’s punk and DIY community was undergoing a crackdown by the fire marshal, who had systematically shut down almost every local venue that wasn’t a bar. This meant there was no affordable and accessible place for young people to organize concerts, art shows, or events. When people responded to this by organizing shows in their own houses, the fire marshal found the houses, shut down the shows, and threatened arrests.

In response to this strange and grave situation, The Missoula Oblongata’s first production was a performance of Macbeth, which we held in secret in the basement that we’d been renting out for rehearsing. The space was only accessible through an unmarked door hidden in an alley. There was no public advertising for the performance. The performers (local artists and friends who had never been in a play before) each handed out sealed invitations to people they knew (not including the fire marshal, with whom we were all now well acquainted). The invitations instructed them to meet at The Oxford (a local dive) on April 6th at 8pm wearing a red carnation. Sure enough, on that day, at 8pm, an usher dressed like a skeleton arrived and escorted the entire carnation-wearing horde from The Oxford to the alley and the unmarked door, and then down into the basement to watch the play.

I remember this place

Where it begins, and where you leave it,
that is a question
that’s more than coordinate systems can say

Oh brittle amalgam, oh unhappy mongrel,
how I long to hold you
in your contradiction and your size.

These are overwhelming times and territories that aren’t on the map
Visions of horizon lines get lost in the creases that fall in our laps
But I remember this place

Seersucker shorts, Cincinnati, Ohio
Coney Island in Southwest
and a diner off US-15

A seat at the counter
for those who stood up at Woolworths
I strain to hear those whispers in the same place

Where you stand

They never told you there’d be days like this
From the moment you wake up, until your head hits the pillow
There’s an aching in your gut because you know that things aren’t right

And it feels like you’re failing
And it feels like we’re lost
And it feels like it’s never enough, and it feels like it comes at a cost

Oh I’m still surprised
And I feel betrayed
That the stories of those who came before bring not strength but anxiety

Does it cut you like a knife?
Because it chills me to the bone,
to feel the world’s so big and we are all alone.
We all do the best we can,
and I hope a little more,
and believe we’ll meet it where we stand.
Where you stand.

I never thought I could be something more.

And I know that it’s complicated.
And you’re left with more questions than at the start.
Please believe there’s a break in this breaking.
And know you’ll meet it where you stand.

Big words

Last weekend we lamented the loss of words.
How they were stolen and multiplied and proliferated until they lost their meaning
and power
by those who didn’t understand what they meant
but did
perceive that they had meaning
and power.

I lament these words
stretched beyond their elasticity now floppy and loose
because it feels so hard to find meaning in the first place:
Like the arguments I had as a kid, in defense of big words
,that I can only win in retrospect,
where I would have said,
“the point isn’t to bludgeon you with their size*”
* though I’d be a liar if I said it wasn’t that, a little
,”but that it’s amazing to find that one word,
that captures, that encompasses, that makes true
all the contradictions and nuance and confusion of an idea or an experience.”

That lets you escape the feeling that it hasn’t happened until you can name it.
Which I think was what I needed more than profanity*
* the words that didn’t need defended around that time.

And the lost words were like that,
powerful
essential to trying to understand something, to figure it out
but fuzzy. Foundational
even though we couldn’t quite pin down what they meant.
They could be two things at once, in two places at once.
Uncertain
but always aware of their presence.
And now their absence.

“A/B testing” the impact of school closures using crime data

This weekend, the Knight Lab is sponsoring a hack day focusing on Chicago Crime Data as made available by the Tribune’s crime data portal and API.

I’m a little wary of crime data first because crime data does not equal a resident’s experience of safety.  It’s easy to think of situations where crimes go unreported, or where increased community cohesiveness might lead to an increase in crime reports.  Second, the way crime stats are framed and parsed by Chicago residents often seems to be alarmist and often further stresses racial and economic tensions in gentrifying communities rather than offering a space for increased community collaboration or developing progressive solutions to neighborhood safety.

Are there uses of crime data that contribute to a different civic discourse? One idea that came to me is based on this current moment where Chicago Public Schools (CPS) is slated to close a number of schools.  One issue raised by critics is the safety of students who may have to cross gang boundaries to reach their new “welcoming school”.  CPS’ proposal to provide resources for students who must attend a new school after their school has been closed, includes an expansion of the “Safe Passage” program which partners with neighborhood organizations to help increase safety for students on the way to and from school. From my knowledge as a caregiver of CPS students and as a frequent news consumer, I don’t have much sense of how successful this program has been so far.  After the closures happen, how will CPS and city residents know how school closures affected students on their way to and from school?

I hypothesize that we might be able to use crime data as one way to see changes in communities after schools have been closed.  I also think this is a general case of “how does crime change along with some policy event”.  I imagine a web platform where residents can define an “experiment” by looking at a specific geography, types of crime and time period.  Crime data would then be compared before and after the test time period to see how crime changed.

In general, I think it’s important to frame these experiments as “what changed” instead of “did this work” because I think the crime data set probably isn’t enough on its own to determine

Questions:

  • What kind of crimes would be indicators of school commute safety? Or, should we look at crimes from specific time periods before and after school?
  • What methods do sociologists use to do these kinds of comparisons?
  • Which schools/communities currently participate in the “Safe Passage” program

Other use cases:

  • Neighborhood cleanups
  • Proposed city legislation targeting liquor stores
  • “Positive loitering”
  • Negative outcomes for heightened targeting of youth by police

Digital engagement coordinate system

A coordinate system for framing digital civic engagement as presented by Ethan Zuckerman in his #dml2013 opening keynote
A coordinate system for framing digital civic engagement as presented by Ethan Zuckerman in his #dml2013 opening keynote

I thought Ethan Zuckerman’s opening keynote at the 2013 Digital Media and Learning conference offered a really compelling frame for digital civic engagement.  I couldn’t find the slides for this talk, so I made a quick reproduction of the visualization of the idea of the interplay between thick, thin, symbolic and impactful engagement.