Groundwater

There was an interesting post on BLDGBLOG yesterday that reminded me of one of the pages I added to the wiki on Thursday about the Great Miami Valley Buried Aquifer. The post refers to an article on New Scientist that's about the work UNESCO is doing related to groundwater resources. I figure it's a good excuse to do a post with a lot of maps in it...



If you live in the northwestern part of Hamilton County, you probably get your water from the GMVBA, an extensive sand and gravel aquifer that extends in a southwesterly direction from Indian Lake, north of Dayton, Ohio, to the Ohio River, generally following the course of the Great Miami River.



If you live in the orange area, you're served by the GMVBA:



Greater Cincinnati Water Works puts it through this filtering process before it gets to your house.



Since this aquifer doesn't cross any international boundaries, the UNESCO Convention on transboundary aquifers doesn't apply to us much here, but we do have a consortium that protects the aquifer, dealing mostly with pollution issues.



These are the areas protected by various municipalites nearby:



Just for good measure, here are some more maps of groundwater resources for the whole state of Ohio:

One Month

The wiki turned one month old on Sunday. Interestingly over this past weekend, the wiki received both its 100th page and its first bit of spam. I added one more anti-spam plugin that should help prevent any more spam from accumulating. So far so good.

From the November 2008 Elections page I created pages for each of the four Hamilton County Commission candidates and also one for Steve Chabot and one for Steve Driehaus.

All of these articles are just stubs right now. They will need a lot more information to become more useful, but we'll get there eventually. I'm happy with how far the wiki has come in just one month.

November 2008 Elections

I made a page today for the November 2008 Elections. I would like to get information on as many of the candidates as possible. Ongoing wikification of elections is something I would like to continue.

The page also contains the Local Issues that will be on the ballot on November 4th.

Recent Wiki Work

I haven't posted in several days but I have been contributing to the wiki here and there. I haven't been staying on pace with answering The Big Here questions though.

I added the first of what I hope will eventually become numerous articles for neighborhoods: College Hill, Madisonville, Pleasant Ridge, and Westwood. The articles are all fairly short. I created them because those four are mentioned in this article about form-based codes as being neighborhoods that are interested in pursuing FBCs. I hope the articles will grow and encompass much more information about each neighborhood over time.

I also added an article for Fifth Third Bank because I wanted to see who was in its board and administration, but that hasn't yielded anything particularly interesting yet.

Yesterday I created articles for The Planning Department, and some Charterites. I also created an article for Milton Dohoney.

I addition to many other minor edits, the main strategy I've been using is to take each article on the In The News page one by one and add the relevant information to each page. Once I've edited every page that seems like it could possibly use the information from the new item, I remove the item from the list of news stories. I try not to let any news story older than a month sit on that page, although I think I'm digging up articles fast than I'm wikifying them.

Today I got started on wikifying the story on the Fifth & Race site, but I haven't gotten all the way done yet.

Wiki Work for 10/13/2008

I updated the wiki some more today. I started with this article about Form Based Codes and worked out from there, and did some work on the Urban Land Institute of Cincinnati, Cincy Character, and Roxanne Qualls.

I also found another interesting person, Candace Klein, that reminded me of when I discovered Robert Maly. Candace is connected all over the place. She is a part of many, many different groups and organizations around the city related to planning and "young professionals". This is why I'm doing this. To find people like her. I think it is extremely interesting.

I found a good way of discovering more interesting people too. You can look at the "most linked-to pages" and see what article names are popping up in the most places. The nice thing here is that it includes names of articles that don't exist yet. Any page with more than one link is potentially interesting, particularly when it comes to people. You can see that there are a number of names on the list that apparently belong to more than one group that I've wikified so far. Those are the people and organizations that I'm going to start writing articles for first.

Also, I must mention that I haven't had a chance to answer another Big Here question in a while. I guess I've been filling up my time with other things. Hopefully I will have time to tackle some of them this week.

Two Questions Answered Today

I answered two questions today since I was lazy and didn't do one yesterday. I'm still picking all the easy ones for now.

First, for question #16 I found out that the nearest active fault line to Cincinnati is the New Madrid fault line in New Madrid, Missouri.

Next, for question #30 I found out that the next full moon will be on October 14th.

Wiki Updates

I've made some modifications to the wiki that should be useful.

First, I've created a logo! It is very simple, but it works:



I copied the pixelated "Cincinnati" from the big sign on the Duke Energy building downtown, which can be seen in this photo:


Cincinnati Skyline: Duke Energy, originally uploaded by showcorvettelove

I also added two "extensions" to the wiki. One is the "Cite" extension which lets you use the "ref" and "reference" tags to cite references on a page. This should make it easier to cite sources and keep a page easy to read.

I also added a anti-spam filter that should only come into effect if someone tries to make an edit including a hyperlink that leads to a blacklisted url. If we never see anything from that one that means it's working!

Yesterday I added entires for Children's Hospital and Procter & Gamble as well as a few others. Right now I'm focusing on getting the boards of directors up for these big companies so as to see the overlap between said boards. Eventually I want to added in other relevant info as it comes along.

I didn't answer a Big Here question yesterday, so I'm going to see if I can get two answered tonight.

Wiki Work for 10/02/2008

Today I was short on time ( watched the VP debate ). I was able to fill in some more answers on The Big Here quiz. First I filled in #7: "How far do you have to travel before you reach a different watershed?", which was easy since I found most of the answer yesterday. By my estimate (which is very rough), you'd have to travel almost 200 miles to reach a different watershed from here.

Next, I filled in #19: "How many days is the growing season here (from frost to frost)?". I found two different answers, and it's obviously something approximate that varies from year to year. Cincinnati usually has around 192 days from frost to frost.

The only other thing I added was a lengthy quote from Roxanne Qualls about Form Based Codes.

Wiki Work for 10/01/2008

Today I started out by trying to incorporate some information about Uptown and The Uptown Consortium. I also created an entry for Tony Brown.

From there I moved onto 3CDC and UC. I added the boards of directors and important staff for both organizations.

The other thing I did was to try to add Categories onto some of the articles to make it easier to see which groups of articles go together.

The Big Here question that I answered today is #3 "Trace the water you drink from rainfall to your tap.". I found out some interesting information from the city's website.