CT Progressive

… to the mighty barcode, friend to retail workers and political canvassers alike.

Actually, I’ve heard it said that the barcode was the first step of two in a fight that radically scaled back the need for labor at grocery stores: the widespread adoption of barcodes led to the end of individual pricing laws, and today prices on the shelves are updated remotely by radio frequency — meaning fewer “stock boys” counting and labeling the inventory. So maybe it hasn’t, in the end, been such a great friend of retail workers.

For political purposes, though, they’re still great, and on a related note I’m considering doing a series of how-to posts on creating a voter file using Connecticut-based data sources. I ran across a series at the blog “Overdetermined,” which touched on many of the challenges involved in setting a file up, but glossed over how to solve most of them. (And, it seems to assume both a flat-file database design and working knowledge of SQL - both problematic.)

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 27th, 2009 at 5:30 pm and is filed under In the News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.