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Daily Archives: April 3, 2018

What your 3D calendar can show you about your productivity

Have you ever wondered what your meetings look like in 3D? Well, you need wait no longer. No lie: it’s pretty cool. Laurel Woerner – Work Futurist.

This image displays all of my meetings for 2018, visualized as dots and lines.  Each dot (node) represents a person, and the size is determined by how often you met with them. Lines (edges) appear when two people participated in the same meeting. If you see dots with the same color, that means they’re from the same organization (their emails are the same domain). We’ve been running analyses on our own calendars using data visualization tool Plotly to illustrate the relationship between yourself and all the people you meet with. Some willing Time Lords shared theirs as well.  We noticed a few intriguing trends: Similar roles have similar calendar shapes. If you’re a university professor, the way you work and the types of meetings you have will be pretty similar to other university professors. Whether your 3D calendar looks like an exploding star, a lumpy tomato, or a tinkertoy, your role will be a key factor in determining the shape. Same role tends to mean the same shape. Industry doesn’t matter.  Industry tells us relatively little about the kind of work you’re doing day to day, especially if you are a knowledge worker. A sales rep for a pharmaceutical company has more in common with a sales rep for a SaaS company than they do with a researcher within their same company, focused on lab work. We can use these graphs to help us prioritize.  When you see your time condensed and laid out in a new way, you might notice patterns you hadn’t before. If you scheduled a ton of meetings with a team that just isn’t your priority or met only once with that client who seemed promising, a 3D view of your calendar data might surface those misalignments…”

Congress.gov New, Tip, and Top for April 2018

In Custodia Legis: “Today, we’re bringing you the latest Congress.gov updates just in time for the arrival of spring. Last month, Andrew brought you the latest updates to saved search alert functionality.  For the April release, we have improved the sorting of search results, so that items in the current Congress now appear at the top when sorting by relevancy.… Continue Reading

Trends in Public Transportation Ridership: Implications for Federal Policy

CRS report via FAS: Trends in Public Transportation Ridership: Implications for Federal Policy, William J. Mallett, Specialist in Transportation Policy, March 26, 2018. “Despite significant investments in public transportation at the federal, state, and local levels, transit ridership has fallen in many of the top 50 transit markets. If strong gains in the New York… Continue Reading

Whose Line is it Anyway: Could Congress Give the President a Line – Item Veto?

CRS Legal Sidebar Prepared for Members and Committees of Congress – Whose Line is it Anyway: Could Congress Give the President a Line-Item Veto? March 27, 2018. “In announcing his intention to sign H.R. 1625, the “Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2018,” President Trump, noting his concerns over the fiscal size of the bill, called on Congress… Continue Reading

Removal of Breast Cancer Website, Related Webpages from within HHS’s Office on Women’s Health Website

[April 2, 2018] “the Sunlight Foundation’s Web Integrity Project released a new report, “Removal of Breast Cancer Website and Related Webpages from within HHS’s Office on Women’s Health Website.” We also released a blog post analyzing the wave of removals from the Office on Women’s Health (OWH) website, “Unexplained censorship of women’s health website renews… Continue Reading

Guide to potential regulatory actions in wake of Facebook-Cambridge Analytica debacle

Axios: “For years, people didn’t mind handing their personal information over to social networks so they could chat with friends or take fun quizzes. That’s changing in the wake of Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica scandal. What’s next: There are lots of signals that data privacy rules of some sort are on the way — including congressional… Continue Reading

DOJ authorized Mueller to investigate connection to Russia in 2016 election

Washington Post: “Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III was authorized by a top Justice Department official to investigate whether Paul Manafort, the onetime chairman of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, illegally coordinated with Russia to interfere in the 2016 election, new court filings show. Manafort, who was indicted last year on felony charges related to his… Continue Reading

DHS acknowledges rogue cellphone tower activity in DC

In a break from the Cambridge Analytic saga, this news on expanded use of Stingray cellphone tracking from AP: “…In a March 26 letter to Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden, the Department of Homeland Security acknowledged that last year it identified suspected unauthorized cell-site simulators in the nation’s capital. The agency said it had not determined… Continue Reading

Research and data support dispensary-based marijuana for pain rather than opiods

Statnews: “As more states legalize medical and recreational marijuana, doctors may be replacing opioid prescriptions with suggestions to visit a local marijuana dispensary. Two papers published Monday in JAMA Internal Medicine analyzing more than five years of Medicare Part D and Medicaid prescription data found that after states legalized weed, the number of opioid prescriptions… Continue Reading