66 | "I Quant NY" Finding Surprising Stories in NYC Open Data with Ben Wellington

Happy New Year everyone, we are back!

In this episode we talk with Ben Wellington about his blog I Quant NY, where he writes about surprising facts he finds analyzing NYC open data.

Some of his stories include how he discovered that “… Software in Half of NYC Cabs Generates $5.2 Million a Year in Extra Tips,” ideas on “How to Fix NYC’s No-Cabs-At-4PM Problem” and “How NYC Open Data and Reddit Saved New Yorkers Over $55,000 a Year” by detecting fire hydrants that generate too many parking tickets.

On the show Ben talks about how he generates new ideas, how he finds and analyzes the data, and how he turns this into amazing stories for his blog. We also talk about the impact his work had on New York City and the interesting reactions some of his blog posts have generated.

Enjoy Ben and his amazing NYC data stories, and read a transcript of our interview here!

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This episode of Data Stories is sponsored by Quadrigram, a web based application designed to bring data stories to life. With Quadrigram you can create and share interactive data stories without the need of any coding skills.

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LINKS

Moritz’s project on place names – http://truth-and-beauty.net/experiments/ach-ingen-zell/

Our Guest Ben Wellington – https://about.me/benwellington

I Quant NY – http://iquantny.tumblr.com

Some favorite I Quant NY posts:

• “You’ll Never Guess the Cleanest Fast Food Joint in NYC”
• “Half of Manhattan is Within 4 Blocks of a Starbucks”
• “How Software in Half of NYC Cabs Generates $5.2 Million a Year in Extra Tips”
• “How to Fix NYC’s No-Cabs-At-4PM Problem”
• “Success: How NYC Open Data and Reddit Saved New Yorkers Over $55,000 a Year”

Tools Ben uses for I Quant NY:

• iPython:  http://ipython.org/
• iPython Notebook Pandas: http://pandas.pydata.org/pandas-docs/stable/tutorials.html
• QGIS: http://www.qgis.org/en/site/
• CartoDB: https://cartodb.com/