How CT Signal works
The whole system in four steps — and the rules that keep us honest.
1 · Listen
We watch Connecticut feeds (CT Mirror, Google News CT) and national feeds (NYT, NPR, PBS), plus a civic calendar (school year, tax deadlines, census releases). Headlines are deduplicated and tracked by age.
2 · Choose the question
A language model reads the headlines against our closed catalog of validated indicators and proposes only questions the catalog can actually answer. News arrives as language; data speaks in dataset codes — reading intent is the AI's entire job. An unmatched story produces nothing. If the model is unavailable, a keyword heuristic falls back; the catalog is the same either way.
3 · Fetch, never write
No number on this site was written or rounded by a language model. Answers come from executed queries against Data Commons and the Connecticut Open Data Portal (Socrata), dry-run validated before publication. Every story page shows the dataset link and the literal query.
4 · Publish
Cards land on the board, get their own permalink story page, the RSS feed, and the
archive — every 15 minutes, via a scheduled job whose commits are the audit trail.
If a fetch fails, the card falls back to labeled cache or doesn't run.
We fail by absence, never by invention.
The honesty rules
- Ranks use all 52 peers (50 states + DC + PR) and are phrased human-first: "3rd safest", "10th lowest poverty" — never a bare "#50 of 52".
- Data dates are printed on every card. ACS is annual, employment is monthly; the card tells you which vintage you're reading. The card answers the news question; the date tells you how current the answer is.
- Unflattering cards publish too — including ones with caveats printed on the card (e.g., revaluation-driven grand-list jumps).
- Our failure log is public: endpoint failures, dead APIs, and portal quirks are documented in the repo, not hidden.
Corrections
Found something wrong? Email us — we annotate the story, re-publish, and the change is visible in the commit history. See the corrections policy.