According to Wired:
AT 10 AM the Saturday before inauguration day, on the sixth floor of the Van Pelt Library at the University of Pennsylvania, roughly 60 hackers, scientists, archivists, and librarians were hunched over laptops, drawing flow charts on whiteboards, and shouting opinions on computer scripts across the room. They had hundreds of government web pages and data sets to get through before the end of the day—all strategically chosen from the pages of the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration—any of which, they felt, might be deleted, altered, or removed from the public domain by the incoming Trump administration.
So it's very cool that people are doing this, but of course sad that they feel like they have to. (I've been teleworking because of the security stuff downtown and won't be able to read the Inside EPA article that Wired cites until I'm back in the office.)
At the other end of the table, Nova Fallen, a Penn computer science grad student, was puzzling over an interactive EPA map of the US showing facilities that violated EPA’s rules.
“There’s a 100,000 limit on downloading these. But it’s just a web form, so I’m trying to see if there’s a Python way to fill out the form programmatically,” said Fallen. Roughly 4 million violations filled the system. “This might take a few more hours,” she said.
I am pretty sure there's an easier way to get that data.
HT: Justin Wolfers
This work is not a product of the United States Government or the United States Environmental Protection Agency, and the author is not doing this work in any governmental capacity. The views expressed are those of the author only and do not necessarily represent those of the United States or the US EPA.
