Box UK: BBC Innovation Labs Blog

I spent a few hours yesterday setting up a script that periodically grabs the BBC Road Travel XML data, parses it into a database, then grabs the current weather conditions for any new incidents (for the local area), and stores that alongside each incident. Hopefully in a week-or-two there’ll be enough data to produce some interesting graphs, such as number of incidents vs. weather conditions, or number of incidents vs. time of day.

In the meantime, just out of interest, I’ve quickly grabbed the BBC 7 Day Listings data, and grep’ed it for some different genres of output that the BBC is pushing to its audience in the next week. As a committed atheist with a scientific background, it’s a bit dis-heartening to see this kind of balance of output from the BBC:

With about half of British people now having no religious beliefs, and I expect a slightly higher percentage having some belief in Science, I wonder how long this situation can last before the public demands a more even balance.

*** Dan