Beast Blog

Crimes in Berkeley? Where?

I'm a long-time devotee of Richard Brenneman of the Berkeley Daily Planet's controversial but always entertaining Police Blotter, and oft quoted Berkeley Police Department Public Information Officer Joe "just the facts" Okies, but I am often curious about exactly where the crimes reported upon took place. The city of Berkeley used to publish great crime maps, but gave up updating them in 2003, for reasons that aren't clear to me. Now all they publish is a daily list of "Police Bulletins", as individual PDF files, the least accessible format imaginable.

To the rescue come Scott Brodsky and Google. In a brilliant mashup, Scott has automated a process for getting the data from the Berkeley police bulletins, and used the Google Maps API to layer the locations of the reported crimes on a Google map of Berkeley on his site, Incidentlog.com.

Check out the screenshot I took. Looks to me like Ashby between 80 and Telegraph has had a bit of a crime problem in the last month. You can even click on a marker, and get details of the crime. RSS feeds to come, writes Scott. Check the site out, fellow police blotter junkies.

Cross-posted from the Berkeley Blog

Digitalia at UC Berkeley

The J-School at Cal is putting on a series of panels dealing with technology, society, and the human experience.

Living With The Genie:
On Technology and the Quest for Human Mastery
Thursday, April 29, 7 pm
With Howard Rheingold, Denise Caruso, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Rhodes, Mark Schapiro and Christina Desser

Revisiting Virtual Communities:
The Internet’s Impact on Society and Politics
Friday, April 30, 9 am
With Craig Newmark, Susan Mernit, Markos Moulitsas Zúniga and Mark Pincus

Disrupting the News Industry:
Media Concentration and Participatory Journalism
Friday, April 30, 10:30 am
With Dan Gillmor, Vin Crosbie, Neil Chase, Ken Sands and Bob Magnuson

Emerging Technologies at UC Berkeley

I spent today at the University of California at Berkeley Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Departments Annual Research Symposium. It was a blast, in many ways the academic equivalent of the O'Reilly Emerging Technologies Conference I went to two weeks ago. Instead of the O'Reilly fare of Robots and Quantum Dots and Programmable Matter and Emergent Democracy Worldwide, they had Smart Dust, Electric Clothes (Transistors made from woven textiles), Circuits printed on Plastic and Technology Research for Developing Regions. While some of the subjects were similar to ETech, the crowd and format were very different. While anyone who stumbled across the website in the last month could register and attend for free, the crowd consisted almost entirely of invited academics and members of the research divisions of large corporations, plus a few Europeans and a very large crowd from Finland. Instead of young hackers giving talks then joining the audience, there were graduate students who gave presentations or demos but then went back to their labs/cubes. The conference appeared to be primarily Berkeley CS and EE showing their stuff to current and potential sponsors and collaborators. Nothing wrong with that, and I was delighted with the chance to attend and see the profs and grad students present their research results.

I was very impressed with the breadth of the research being done, and with the number of labs that are scattered around town, working on things as different as extremely low power self organizing sensors connected by wireless networks to very interesting design methodologies for real-time fault tolerant software. I suspect that the people who tied up Sprint's application to put up 3 cell antennas on a building in Berkeley for 2 years have no idea of all the wacky and creative things that the UC wireless researchers are up to with radio in Berkeley.

I probably won't get a chance to write up my notes, but if I don't and you are interested, I highly recommend the three (1, 2, 3) talks mentioned above, all of which are archived on the Berkeley CSEE web site.

Cross posted at The Berkeley Blog.

Callling Beast Tech Geeks!

Are you an East Bay technology kinda person? Do you know about eBig?

eBig is the "East Bay IT Group". It doesn't seem as boring as that title suggests. They have a bunch of special interest groups covering a range of topics from from XML/Web Services to Java to User Experience.

I'll be going to my first eBig User Experience group meeting next Monday, where the topic is about how to get the most for your user experience dollar, especially when you don't have a lot of money.