Week 205: the hardest measure to measure
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Dialled into a (Microsoft Teams) conference call about the bally Bus Open Data Service. Sometimes when straightforward provincial bus managers clash with highfalutin London consultants it can be sort of entertaining, but this was just dispiriting. Thereâs rightly been some discourse about the stateâs addiction to the services of the big four accounting firms (the âbig threeâ in American, phonetically similar to the âbig threeâ menâs tennis players), and I have nothing intelligent to say, but ugh those creeps make me queasy.
This time, one of the things they were on about was âtimetable matchingâ, which to a lot of people sounds like measuring punctuality, but it isnât, communication is hard. Thereâs a longer separate something to be written, containing phrases like âworshipping at the altar of block numbersâ and examining the folly of measuring things just because theyâre easy to measure not because theyâre the best measures to measure. It will be a pity if the measurersâ measurements lead to things like rail replacement buses, poultry processing plantsâ staff shuttles, things of that nature being expunged from vehicle location feeds in order to gee up data quality scores, but letâs wait and see.
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Better news:
On Wednesday 22nd February the NTA will publish a new set of real time APIs from the NTA developer portal
A great opening sentence which I couldnât help reading in a certain kind of sonorous voice and autocompleting to âand youâll see why 1984 wonât be like 1984.â With that and the release of Cocaine Bear (2023), itâs going to be a big week.
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Not a single flower?