As construction of the Chrysalis amphitheater begins, I look again at the structure and its architect.

tl;dr: My blog is moving to civilityandtruth.com. Update your bookmarks and news readers! After a fair amount of fiddling about I’m renaming my personal blog and moving to a new domain. From now on you can access the blog at https://civilityandtruth.com (note the “https” rather than “http”). You can read more about the changes in my first post at the new blog. Briefly, I wanted to separate the blog from my personal domain frankhecker.com and have more control over the technology behind the blog, including eliminating the user tracking done by WordPress.com and providing better support for posts that include programming code and mathematical notation. ...

Update 2021/06/19: This post is now obsolete.

tl;dr: Howard County government ups its game in providing data with a new web site opendata.howardcountymd.gov. Next stop, HoCoStat? I’ve previously written about Howard County’s initial foray into publishing government data, the data.howardcountymd.gov web site created by the Howard County GIS division. As announced by the county and reported by Amanda Yeager at the Baltimore Sun, Howard County has launched a new site opendata.howardcountymd.gov to provide access to government data. This new site, also known as the OpenHoward portal,1 can be considered as a concrete implementation of open data practices mandated by the Howard County Council (see Council Bill 32-2014) and as a down payment on County Executive Allan Kittleman’s campaign promise to create an automated system (“HoCoStat”) to “help government increase responsiveness, improve efficiency and heighten accountability.” ...

The Crescent development in downtown Columbia is going to be a (very) big deal.

Howard County, Maryland precinct cartogram. Precinct area is proportional to the number of registered voters as of the 2014 general election. Click for higher-resolution version. tl;dr: The map of Howard County looks very different if you’re looking for votes. Cartograms help you see like a politician. There are 118 election precincts in Howard County, Maryland, varying both in geographic area and in the number of voters they contain. Precincts in western Howard County tend to be larger, because the population density in western Howard is lower. Precincts in more densely populated areas of the county (including Columbia) tend to be smaller. If we’re interested in how voters behave across the county a conventional map can be misleading because the larger area of western Howard precincts causes us to overrate the importance and impact of those precincts. (This is similar to the US electoral map being visually dominated by large states like Montana, Wyoming, and the Dakotas that have fewer voters than small states like Connecticut and Rhode Island.) ...

tl;dr: I release two useful Howard County election datasets in preparation for future posts. In the coming days and weeks I’ll be posting some analyses of Howard County election results. Unfortunately the data released by the Howard County Board of Elections and the Maryland State Board of Elections is not always in the most useful form for analysis. In particular I was looking for per-precinct turnout statistics for the 2014 general election in Howard County, along with some way to match up precincts with the county council district of which they’re a part. That data is available in the 2014 general election results per precinct/district published by the Howard County Board of Elections, but unfortunately that document is a PDF document. ...

tl;dr: I have fun creating graphs and maps with building permit data from data.howardcountymd.gov. I’ve written previously about the cornucopia of interesting data sets that Howard County government has made available at the data.howardcountymd.gov site. I had some spare time over a long weekend and decided to try analyzing some of that data, including making use of the various map files on the site (under the “Spacial Data (GIS)” tab). ...

tl;dr: As we wait to hear more about Allan Kittleman’s HoCoStat proposal, you don’t have to wait to download lots of useful county-related data at data.howardcountymd.gov. During his (ultimately successful) campaign for Howard County Executive, one of Allan Kittleman’s key proposals was to establish HoCoStat, a program to (in Kittleman’s words), “measure . . . response and process times for various government functions” to help “increase responsiveness, improve efficiency and heighten accountability.” Kittleman’s administration is in its early days, and nothing much has been heard yet about how and when HoCoStat might be implemented. (Even the original HoCoStat proposal has disappeared from Kittleman’s web site as it’s being redesigned, although the Internet archive has a copy.) ...

tl;dr: Don’t expect many blog posts from me in 2015. Those I do post will be on micro-local issues like Merriweather Park, with a smattering of other stuff of interest mainly to me. Most everybody else on the HoCo blogging scene has done an “end of 2014/beginning of 2015” post, and I’ll be no different. The automatically-generated report on my 2014 blogging is not that informative, so here’s my personal take on what I did in 2014, blogging-related or otherwise, and what I hope to do in 2015: ...