Safety at Northeastern.

After the tragic shooting at Northern Illinois University I find myself wondering about the safety of Northeastern University.

But according to Reader's Digest I'm pretty safe -- Northeastern ranked second on their list of safest universities in the country.

Reader's Digest asked 291 colleges and universities in the country to "participate in a survey to see how well prepared they were to handle various safety and security issues. 135 agreed."

The survey looked at several safety issues including residence hall security, whether students must show ID to enter the library and the number of full-time university police.

According to Reader's Digest:

We realize that each campus is different and that its security needs are unique. Therefore, we believe it is fairer to say that certain schools are excelling in the safety arena; others are doing a good job, and some would benefit by putting more resources into campus safety and security.

The Northeastern News* ran this story Thursday about Residence Hall safety. When I first lived on-campus, I found signing in guests to be a big pain but now I realize it is important. In addition, students are not allowed to have more than three people in their room at one time and students are 100 percent responsible for their guests.

But there are loopholes in some of Northeastern's safety procedures.

For example, students do have to show ID to get into the library but they just wave their ID and keep on walking. It's pretty easy to flash someone else’s ID, especially when the library is busy.

Maybe it's details like this that made Northeastern not fair too well in another survey.

Reader's Digest also compiled crime data for 285 universities from 2004 and 2005. They then put universities in either a "lower," "moderate" or "higher" category.

Northeastern received a ranking of 101, putting them in the moderate crime category. For a city campus I guess this isn't too bad. A large chunk of the crimes were burglaries, and there were no murders.

In general, I do feel safe on-campus.

I can't help but wonder though whether these safety procedures are enough to protect a tragedy as big as Northern Illinois or Virginia Tech.

*I am a former managing editor of The Northeastern News.

Chicago crime upgrade

Chicago crime is no more -- chicagocrime.org that is.

On Friday, Adrian Holovaty, a programmer/journalist who created the Web site, announced on his blog (holovaty.com) the site is being taken down because of an outdated server.

The site, created in 2005, was a combination of Google maps and Chicago police data. It allowed residents to interactively search crimes in their neighborhoods and surrounding areas.

Instead of upgrading the server, Holovaty wrote that all pages will be redirected this his latest project, EveryBlock, a new generation of chicagocrime.org.

Holovaty wrote:

I've often described [EveryBlock] to people as "chicagocrime.org on steroids — more than just crime, and more than just Chicago." It's brought to you by the same people (Wilson and me from chicagocrime.org, plus Paul and Dan, who've worked on similar projects), and it has the same philosophies. As we developed EveryBlock, we kept chicagocrime.org firmly in our minds — this new thing we were making had to be a superset, an expansion, a significant step forward. So there's almost nothing you could do on the old chicagocrime.org that you can't do on EveryBlock. And, unlike chicagocrime.org, which was always a side project, EveryBlock has a team of four people improving it full-time, meaning we have the resources to add features, such as e-mail alerts (just added yesterday), that chicagocrime.org never had. We hope EveryBlock is a worthy successor.

Currently EveryBlock serves three cities -- Chicago, New York and San Francisco.

I learned about Holovaty through journalism class and find him quite innovative.

Holovaty is known through the journalism world as a pioneer. He is one of the earliest journalist/programmers and works for Washingtonpost.com.

Chicagocrime.org won the 2005 Batten Award for Innovations in Journalism.

For more information about Holovaty, check out this interview from the Online Journalism Review.