The Dept of Homeland Security says we can still use our drivers licenses at airports until 2018:
The shift gives breathing room to Illinois, which had expected its driver's licenses and IDs to be inadequate for air travel, including domestic flights, as early as this spring.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security last fall declined to give Illinois a third deadline extension for meeting the Real ID Act standards put into place in 2005. As a result, it was expected that Illinois travelers by the middle of this year would need to present a passport or be subject to extra security checks unless Illinois was able to get another extension for compliance.
Illinois Secretary of State Jesse White still plans to seek another compliance extension, said spokesman David Druker. Also, White's staff is talking with members of the General Assembly about potential legislation to fund the changes necessary to bring the state's ID cards up to the federal standards.
The cost for that effort is estimated at $50 million to $60 million. The costs, as well as concerns about protecting individual privacy, have been stumbling blocks so far.
Meanwhile, the Secretary of State's office can't even mail out reminders to drivers to renew their vehicle registrations, because governor Bruce Rauner doesn't want to pay taxes.
And it's -10°C today. Moan moan moan.
As the work week slowly grinds down, I've lined these articles up for consumption tomorrow morning:
And now it's off to the barber shop. And then the pub.
Citylab reports that Chicago's open-sourced food safety analysis software has made our food inspectors much more effective. Other cities aren't adopting it, though:
Chicago started using the prediction tool for daily operations in February 2015, and the transition worked very smoothly, says Raed Mansour, innovation projects lead for the Department of Public Health. That’s because the department was careful to incorporate the algorithm in a way that minimally altered the existing business practices. Inspectors still get their assignments from a manager, for instance, but now the manager is generating schedules from the algorithm. The department will conduct an evaluation of the program after a year, and Mansour anticipates that the performance will meet or exceed the metrics from the test run.
But that was never meant to be the end of it. Back in November 2014, Schenk published the code for the algorithm on the programming website GitHub, so anyone in any other city could see exactly what Chicago did and adapt the program to their own community’s needs. That’s about as far as they could go to promote it, short of knocking on the door of every city hall in America. But the months since then have shown that it takes more than code to launch a municipal data program.
Chicago passed around the free samples, but a year later only one government has taken a bite: Montgomery County, Maryland, just northwest of Washington, D.C. The county hired a private company called Open Data Nation to adapt Chicago’s code for use in the new location. Carey Anne Nadeau, who heads the company, ran a two-month test of the adapted algorithm in fall 2015 that identified 27 percent more violations in the first month than business as usual, and finding them three days earlier.
There's a classic anti-pattern called "not invented here." That may be one of the factors. Another could be that the other cities' tech staff just aren't interested in trying new things. Chicago hasn't always been ahead of the curve, but I'm glad we've at least got the one guy.
Illinois State Climatologist Jim Angel lists all the records Illinois set last year:
- The warmest December on record: 4.8°C, 5.9°C above average.
- The second warmest September – December on record: 11.8°C, 2.7°C above average.
- The 8th coldest February on record: -7.0°C, 6.4°C below average.
- Annual: 11.6°C, 0.2°C above average (not ranked, but of interest)
Precipitation:
- The second wettest December on record 170.1 mm, 101.8 mm above average.
- The wettest November-December on record: 312.4 mm, 156.2 mm above average.
- The wettest June on record: 239.8 mm, 132.8 mm above average.
- The 6th wettest year on record: 1232 mm, 217 mm above average.
So far, January is a little warmer than average. We'll see what El Niño brings later on.
Yesterday, Chicago got up to 15°C, not a record but also not what one would expect in December. Our forecast for the next week has the temperature drifting just below freezing Sunday night but otherwise staying above 0°C, which feels a lot more like late March than New Year's Eve.
It's a little unnerving. Don't forget, warm winter means warm lake means warm summer—even without the driving force of El Niño, which may not dissipate before June.
Not that I'm complaining. I'm just...nervous.
Too many things showed up in my RSS feeds this morning. Fortunately, I've got a few days off this weekend and next.
And now, a conference call.
Officially at O'Hare right now it's 15.6°C, down slightly from the 16.1°C recorded earlier. My car says it's 17.5°C. These temperatures would be normal for late April or mid-October.
The forecast calls for temperatures to drop to a more-normal -1°C by next weekend, but after that the CPC forecast calls for a 75-90% probability of above-normal temperatures through March.
Keep in mind, warm winters in Chicago often lead to warm summers, because the lake can't dissipate as much heat as it does in a cold winter. And as we're seeing this year, summer temperatures have little influence on winter temperatures here. So while we're all excited about a warm winter, we need to keep in mind that next summer could be brutal.
Forecasters predicted that this year's El Niño would lead to a warm winter, but they weren't really sure. It looks like it will.
It turns out, Chicago has more revolving doors than any other city in the U.S.:
Angus MacMillan, the national sales manager for Crane Revolving Doors, says Chicago and New York are the biggest markets for revolving doors, and that Chicago was the No. 1 market for decades. He thinks downtown Chicago may have more revolving doors per block than New York: “I get my [sales] reps in from all around the country, and I’ll take them to downtown Chicago, and they’ll count more revolving doors in one block there than they have in their whole city.”
Architect Patrick Loughran of Goettsch Partners says Chicago’s still got a lot of revolving doors because we have so many tall buildings.
“Any high rise building is going to have to have elevator cores that take people from the bottom all the way up,” he says. “Those big open tubes create the stack effect where heat and air rise, and it creates this suction at the base of the building.”
Concerns about the stack effect in highrise buildings only partially explain why the revolving door is so common in the Chicago landscape. Because, if you take a stroll around the Loop, you’ll see contemporary low rise buildings with revolving doors as well: drug stores, restaurants, cafes, and clothing retailers. The likely reason doesn’t have to do with countering the stack effect. According to MacMillan, it comes down to comfort and economics — the need to maximize floor space.
I love WBEZ's Curious City series because of stories like this.
Despite organizing our company holiday party, which was last night, and performing later today at Chicago's Christkindlmarket, I still have to squeeze in some actual work. More interesting blog postings will recommence tomorrow or Sunday.