Here are the Hackpad presentation notes from Round 25: Percival’s Pernicious Parsnips.
Jonathan Robinson, @jon_m_rob
Trump! Are you Trolling Me?
Jonathan dared to ask the question, when are we are real selves? It turns out that the answer depends on who is asking the question. Jonathan took data from the Pew Research Center – an organization that calls people to get context for various opinions. He found that there were significant mode effects on America’s new GOP sweetheart, Mr. Trump.
He used the HuffPollster API to show that Trump is liked in non-interviews but not as much when there is a real person on the line. This doesn’t show up for Carson or Fiorina. Why are people afraid to admit they like Trump? Super interesting!
HuffPostPollster Elections Dashboard
@jon_m_rob "Data, Deep Questions, & Donald Trump" #Hack&&Tell @metasemantic pic.twitter.com/C02WmMOW5N
— Dave Miller (@tolchocker) October 13, 2015Matt Ficke, @mattficke
Instagram searching!
Matt’s a new guy with a new diploma from from General Assembly – turns out his class project was particularly amazing! Matt wrote a simple rails app that takes a location on the map, and get images from the location via the Instagram API. You can now subscribe to a location!
Comments:
- Users have to opt-in via Instagram.
- Don’t know why they don’t offer it officially in Instagram.
- Can you search by date? Maybe, not implemented.
- Wanted to find the most photographed barn, from Don DeLillo’s White Noise.
- Super yelp? Maybe, find pictures of food – somebody has strong opinions!
@mattficke Geotagged photo hack @metasemantic #Hack&&Tell pic.twitter.com/ZqTD5hVzpN
— Dave Miller (@tolchocker) October 13, 2015Travis Cline, @traviscline
FEC Gooooooooooooooooo
FEC publishes data on campaign, so Travis C. wrote a Go client package API to access the data from https://api.open.fec.gov/developers. Simple and useful! He showed how easy it was to pull a list of all the POTUS candidates.
Side notes for those interested in Go: Go was released in ‘05 by Google. Designed by former Bell Labs researchers. Writes almost expressively as python but doesn’t turn into mush at the end! Free test framework and coverage (and {cpu,block,heap} profiling).
@traviscline demos openfec hack at #Hack&&Tell @metasemantic pic.twitter.com/p6Ay7qtouG
— Dave Miller (@tolchocker) October 13, 2015David Reed, @xDavidReed
Guerrilla government
What is Guerrilla government? He’s glad you asked! It is action of a government agent outside of supervisors wishes but it must be related to job function. Is it looked at as a problem? Should we fire them or promote them? David thinks this is how real shit gets done.
How to be a better guerrilla?
- Side projects (Hack and Tell, etc)
- Hacks – doing work contrary to official procedures
- Cuff systems – IT that exists outside, examples? Everywhere. Shadow IT.
- Intrapreneurs – does something innovative even when breaking the rules inside the system
How to incorporate it? Facts on the ground. JUST DO IT, and show it’s easier.
Travis Hoppe, @metasemantic
The sassy spelling bot, the orthographic pedant
Travis H. wanted to spell check the internet…or maybe just Github. To do so he wrote a bot, lovingly nicked named Lars. Lars is an orthographic pedant and has sent thousands of pull requests. Almost 3000 in fact, merging into many huge companies like Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Uber, Netflix, AWS, Cloud Foundry, Flipboard, heroku, eBay, and Elastic Search to name a few.
@orthographic-Pedant on github
Unfortunately, Lars died earlier this afternoon when Github shut him down. Long live Lars.
@metasemantic "I'ma spell check the Internet! Meh... Ok, just @github." #Hack&&Tell #OrthographicPedant pic.twitter.com/zM4AaKI89j
— Dave Miller (@tolchocker) October 13, 2015Jouella Fabe, @jmfabe
How are we doing as a nation for registering as an organ donor?
Jouella took the data from a hack she did at a recent Columbia data science event. Do more DMV locations seem to help… nope… it looks like there is no real correlation? Turns out the big changes come from groups that engages the public and public service announcements. Jouella says, “this really needs to be a study… but some organizations don’t have a Facebook account and there aren’t reliable metrics.”
Comments:
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Opt-in, vs opt-out could make a huge difference
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There was a good book about what drives donation rates, called Last Best Gifts
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This American Life looked at this same story too.
@jmfabe "Where are the registered organ donors?" #Hack&&Tell @metasemantic pic.twitter.com/yLIVw7IE73
— Dave Miller (@tolchocker) October 13, 2015Kate Rabinowitz, @DataLensDC
DC expenditures
Kate loves data and loves the district. She looked at how DC spends vs other cities. Bureau of Labor and Stats has a crazy level of detail describing everything we spend – including cereal. Why cereal? Who knows, but somebody thinks it’s important!
She plotted eating in vs average expenditure. DC is on the bottom – we don’t like to spend money eating out, dress, or fashion, but we like books and cars. Given the self-centered nature of DC, it seems plausible that all those books are history books about DC itself.
@DataLensDC "How DC spends its money" #Hack&&Tell @metasemantic pic.twitter.com/66fGHX6kwc
— Dave Miller (@tolchocker) October 13, 2015Thanks to everyone who presented, everyone who attended, @metasemantic for the writeup, @tolchocker for the pictures, and of course thanks to our favorite WeWork for hosting!
Round 26: The Curious Camaraderie of Code is already scheduled, so RSVP and sign up to present!