some sort of heatmap where number of deaths are normalized with respect to vehicle density (or I guess just population). That would give an idea of which states/regions/roads are more treacherous or have more dangerous drivers.
Vehicle density is itself a cause of increased accidents. If you normalized by it you would lose accuracy.
To make it more clear, 10 cars on the same road would increase the chance of an accident non-linearly. It would be more than 10x more likely to have an accident occur there simply because there is more chaos.
NPR is not trying Google's 20% time, per se; what they call "Serendipity Day" is simply their adaptation of the idea. The next one is planned for September, and the goal is to make it a quarterly event.
Yeah I wouldn't call that 20% time at all, it's just a quarterly hack day, which I think is also a cool way to get employees excited about working on cool things and ideas.
Yeah, internal hackathon. But if they want to make it really work, they should do the Silicon Valley long-weekend style hackathons:
1. Let your employees decide/vote on the weekend, so as few miss it due to vacation and whatnot as possible.
2. Make it Thursday night - Sunday afternoon, and give them Monday off to recuperate/run errands/catch up on life. 8 days off/year instead of 52 should be much more doable for a smaller operation like NPR.
3. Schedule it far in advance, encourage people/teams to brainstorm ideas and have a rough project plan or three ready to go Thursday night.
4. Provide all the junk food, health food, and caffeine they can eat, free. Let them choose the menu when they're voting on the dates. Set up an internal website for all of this.
5. Make sure they've got all the hardware and software they could anticipate needing all on-site and ready go at the start. Minimize setup time.
6. Have something for planned for families as well, involve them if possible. Imagine, instead of going to watch a baseball game on the weekend with your mom and/or dad, going to a hackathon with them. Have a mini-hackathon on the side for the kids.
7. Have demo night Sunday at the end, fun/funny awards as well. For example, I dig Foursquare's 'Bender' badge for someone who goes out 4+ nights in a row. A hackathon equivalent would be whoever worked on site the longest and slept the least.
8. etc.
I don't think one work day every quarter is going to do much for them, but if they set it up like a hackathon sprint party over a very long weekend, they might get some interesting results.
>they should do the Silicon Valley long-weekend style hackathons
>Make it Thursday night - Sunday afternoon,
>8 days off/year instead of 52 should be much more doable for a smaller operation like NPR.
Yeah, if I want to spend extra time at work I can focus on whatever the hell I'd like to, too.
You seem to be missing the point of a "20% time" or "serendipity day" if you think it can be duplicated by giving extra work to people in a salary exempt position.
One provides periods of autonomy without asking any more from workers, it only gives. The other asks for a huge time commitment. It shifts a big portion of benefit from employee to employer.
This morning they replaced the aspx server error on http://www.iconbuffet.com/ with the redirect to the mail login -- still, they've been down for months, with no explanation.
Two ways it could be improved:
1. Allow filtering by year, by type of death.
2. Allow data to be compared (deaths by state, by type, by year) in a non-map based form.
I'm sure there are more...