The Dallas Morning News crew started publishing last weekend a terrific study of jury selection — or de-selection — in Dallas.  Check it out at

http://www.dallasnews.com/s/dws/spe/2005/jury/



Striking Differences

Racial
discrimination in jury selection was a scourge on the Dallas
County district attorney's office for decades and was cited
recently by the U.S. Supreme Court as it overturned a 1986
death penalty case. The
Dallas Morning News spent two years gathering and analyzing
jury data from felony court trials to see what had changed.

Key Findings:
• Dallas County prosecutors excluded black jurors at more than twice the rate they rejected whites.
• Defense attorneys excluded whites at more than three times the rate they rejected blacks.
• Even
when blacks and whites gave similar answers to key questions asked by
prosecutors, blacks were excluded at higher rates.
• Blacks ultimately served on juries in numbers that mirror their
population primarily because of the dueling prosecution and defense
strategies.

From Directions Magazine:

“Machover Associates, a computer
graphics consultancy reports
that the worldwide market for scientific visualization in 2D and 3D
will grow from $10.7 billion in 2005 to $17.2 billion in 2010. The big
money is in 3-D imaging, the majority of which comes from private
industry. Still, a substantial amount of federal research funding is
available as well. Geospatial technologies have a role here: one
visualization film shown at Siggraph last week illustrated the 2002
Elbe River flooding and the use of geodata played in predicating the
need for evacuations.“

Tuesday, August 9, 2005

“Men and Women Seek Cartographic Intelligence Almost Equally

Men may not stop and ask, but according to a recent Hitwise study, 
49.1 percent of visitors to mapping Web sites were male for the
four-week period ending July 16, 2005.

 “Researching directions on the Web before a drive is a different
context than asking for directions once you're on the road and lost,”
said Bill Tancer, General Manager, Worldwide Research, Hitwise.
“However, the equal propensity of men to
use Internet mapping services represents not only an important
demographic attribute for marketers and mapping services, but insight
into the potential demand and adoption for mapping and driving
direction services”.

 More information for the week ending July 23, 2005 includes such thing as:

• 
  Yahoo! Maps and AOL's MapQuest dominate the online mapping category, with a combined category market share of 74.4 percent
  
• 
  Google Maps has become the third most popular map site since its launch
  in early 2005, and now claims 9.5 percent of visits to the category.  
• 
  Only 11.3 percent of Google Maps visitors departed directly for another map site, down from 17.6 percent in April 2005.
  
• 
  In the entire mapping category, 5.8 percent of visitors depart directly to a competing map site.
  
• 
  57 percent of visits to sites in the Travel/Maps category originated at a portal site or a search engine.
  
• 
  The term “mapquest” was the second most popular term (behind “ebay”)
  entered into all major Internet search engines (for the four weeks
  ending July 23, 2005.)
• 
  The term “maps” was number five and “driving directions” was number 18.
  
• 
  Visits to online map sites peak in the summer months, notes the report.
  The market share of visits to map sites increased 35 percent in June
  2004 versus December 2004. A category with a similar seasonal pattern
  is Travel/Destinations &
  Accommodation, which increased 95 percent in the same time period.
  Sites in this category include motels, amusement parks, and National
  Parks, which vacationers typically reach by car. 

From Journalism.co.uk….

Innovative software pinpoints news by location

Posted: 2 August 2005 By: Jemima Kiss

Email: jemima@journalism.co.uk

A UK firm has developed a free, innovative tool that plots breaking news by location.

To use NewsGlobe, web users must have Google Earth installed. More information is available on Daden's website.

Hey, we've been asking that question for decades now.  Turns out we are not alone.  The same thing occurred to Adena Schutzberg, Executive Editor of Directions Magazine.  In a current article, “Geographic (and Other Types) of Metadata in the Newsroom,” she writes:

“Despite the growth of the Web and the maturation of
search engines, somehow word is not trickling down to the news media
about geographic and other types of metadata. I’m seeing just as many
stories, especially on local
newspaper websites, which convey no information regarding the location
of the events in question….”

Rave on, Adena, rave on.

Marylaine Block, editor/publisher of Ex Libris and Neat New Stuff, tips us to a new journal, “Open Government.”  It is a British online-only publication, but addresses global issues related to freedom of information.

“Launched March 2005…..open access peer reviewed journal on Open Government and Freedom of Information

Journal Aim: To publish research and communications related to
Freedom of Information (FOI) legislation from the perspective of
academics, practioners and FOI users.

Scope:
-Freedom of Information legislation and information provision for citizens
-Comparative views of international freedom of information legislation
-Freedom of information legislation and the open government debate
-The impact of Freedom of Information on public administration
-Case studies from public authorities by FOI practioners
-Information Systems for managing records and FOI requests
-The relationship of Freedom of Information legislation and other access to information legislation

The Journal is run under open access principles is free to
access in electronic form. Printed copies of the journal are not
currently available.
The Journal is funded by the School of Business Information at Liverpool John Moores University” 

———————————————————–

Also….

Watching America 
http://www.watchingamerica.com/
"Discover what the world thinks about the US" with "Translated Foreign News 
Available NOWHERE Else In English." Includes text, videos, and other media from 
Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas. 

The good folks at Directions Magazine today tipped us off that Geodata.gov is open for business.  Geodata.gov was spawned by the “Geospatial One-stop” program.

• “Through the Geospatial One Stop portal (www.geodata.gov), anyone can access geospatial
  information from federal agencies and a growing number of state, local,
  tribal and private agencies through one comprehensive and comprehensible
  portal
• “Advanced information on future investments in geospatial information
  can provide opportunities for collaboration, intergovernmental partnerships
  and reduce needless duplication of data investment
• “Building communities around data categories through the efforts of
  “data stewardship leaders” and teams to seek out and highlight
  new and preeminent ways to utilize geospatial tools
• “In conjunction with FGDC, Geospatial One Stop facilitates standardization
  and intergovernmental agreements on standards and interoperability”

Geodata.gov
doesn't have everything about everywhere  (yet), but it's a solid — and
very rich — data resource that should be high on a reporter's list of
“data sites to check early in the reporting process.”

We appreciate NYTimes reporter SABRINA TAVERNISE's hard work last week reporting — and explaining what was behind the numbers Iraqi civilian deaths in “Data
Shows Rising Toll of Iraqis From Insurgency.”  There's always the
fog of war and all that, but Tavernise surely spent a fair amount of
time on the piece and, at the end of the day, does a good job of
explaining how and why the numbers can vary so much from source to
source and month to month.

Click here for the piece (unless the NYT has already archived it).

A recent profile of mathematician-turned-geneticist Philip Green is a good-read introduction to bio-informatics, and bio-informatics just might produce some methodologies journalists can use to validate public records databases.

* Using a detailed computational model, [researchers] found
that some kinds of [genetic] mutations occur at constant rates, like the
ticking of a clock, which makes them useful for dating evolutionary events.
Other kinds of mutations occur at varying rates de-pending on the generation
times of the organism. This information in turn makes it much easier to identify
parts of the genome that exhibit different patterns of change over time,
indicating that the DNA in those regions is subject to selection and therefore
playing a functional role. The idea, says Green, is to separate the noise of
meaningless changes in DNA so that the signals of consequential changes emerge
clearly from the background.” 
Journalists could look at which elements are changed in a data base and
how often as a clue for the importance of the data base and the
relative importance of various elements.

* “The main issue [in biology and genomics] is how
quantitative we’re going to be able to get,” [Green] says. “Most people will
accept the idea that we will know qualitatively how things are interacting with
each other. But what you really want is a quantitative result, so that you can
change the levels of one component and predict how it will affect the system.”

*  “Back then, [says a colleague of Green’s] we wondered if
there was a need for mathematics in biology. In the mid-1980s, there weren’t a
lot of data. Biology was about analyzing the notes in your lab book.

   
“In
the last 20 years, biology has become dominated by huge data sets. Now it’s an
exception rather than the rule to publish a paper that does not draw on large
databases of biological information. Mathematical analysis has become a
funda-mental part of biological research. It has turned out to be of equal
importance to experimentation.”

Take a look at the article.  It suggests some parallels of investigation for analytic journalism.

Journalists, cops and PIs do, essentially, the same thing, just for different audiences.  Tamara Thompson, a licensed private investigator in California, describes her areas of interest as:

“INTERNET: Researching internet news, company background, products and personal profiles.


ADOPTION: Locate any birth parent or child who was born in California, then given up for adoption.


BACKGROUND: I develop deep background on companies and individuals
related to personal habits, interests, activity, assets, business,
political and social associations, employment, litigation and, business
reputation and business ownership.”

That said, her blog, PI News Link, is a good, new resource related to public records.