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Heartbeat Choker

Posted by: admin 9 years, 2 months ago

A long-neglected arduino project using Adafruit's Flora + sewable neopixels, and the Pulse Sensor Amped.  

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2014 elections party results maps

Posted by: admin 10 years, 7 months ago

More fun with IEC elections results data (and maps). The images below show party results (% of votes) by district for a couple of parties. Made using QGIS - I might get a better map up with TileMill soon.

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Voter Turnout in the 2014 South African Elections

Posted by: admin 10 years, 7 months ago

Earlier this year, the IEC released some mobile apps, and an API with full access to election results as they become available. The API has some problems (notably, it requires a username and password which you have to *cough* get from somewhere) but it feels like a step in the right direction. At the moment there isn't any way to get results for all voting districts - rather, they have be requested per district. I used Code4SA's 'IEC API API' and a list of voting districts found in this SQL dump to pull down the results, and I'm sharing the data in case anyone is interested.

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Open Access to ICTD Research

Posted by: admin 11 years ago

This post aimed at authors whose work appears in the proceedings of ICTD 2013 in Cape Town. The proceedings aren't open access, but YOU can break through the paywall!

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Let them eat cellphones?

Posted by: admin 11 years, 1 month ago

On Monday, the New York Times published Ubiquitous Across Globe, Cellphones Have Become Tool for Doing Good. That a technology could be a tool for doing good is a fairly modest claim, and has been made about probably every new communication technology since the printing press. (For more basic claims about new communication technologies and/or a game of ‘seen in the NYT’ bingo see this handy cheat sheet that appeared in the webcomic xkcd on the same day. Certainly, Snapchat et al demonstrate that yes, teens will indeed use <insert new communications technology here> for sex). Technical solutions to problems of poverty and underdevelopment are particularly popular, not least because they require exactly no soul-searching on the part of the West.

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