Alfredo Covaleda,
Bogota, Colombia
Stephen Guerin,
Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA
James A. Trostle,
Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut, USA
Today, literally hundreds of square kilometers of Southern California — Los Angeles to San Diego — are burning. Some very alert newspapers and radio stations, though, are using Google Maps and a program called Twitter (www.twitter.com) to update the maps on a regular basis. A good example, I think, of applied tools of analytic journalism.
Southern California fires on Google Maps
CALL FOR ENTRIES:
Philip Meyer Journalism Award postmark deadline: October 31, 2007
The National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting, a joint program of IRE and the Missouri School of Journalism; the Knight Chair in Journalism at Arizona State University; and IRE are proud to invite you to participate in the Philip Meyer Journalism Award, a contest created to recognize the best journalism done using social science research methods.
Three awards will be given – a first, second and third place – to recognize the best work using techniques that are part of precision journalism, computer-assisted reporting and social science research. The awards include cash prizes: $500 for first, $300 for second, and $200 for third. Eligible entries must have been published or broadcast between Oct. 1, 2006 and Sept. 30, 2007.
The awards are in honor of Philip Meyer, Knight Chair in Journalism at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Meyer is the author of Precision Journalism, the seminal 1972 book (and subsequent editions) that focused growing numbers of journalists on the idea of using social science methods to do better journalism. He pioneered in using survey research as a reporter for Knight Ridder newspapers to explore the causes of race riots in the 1960s.
The contest also helps identify the techniques and resources used to complete each story. Entries are placed in the IRE Resource Center, allowing members to learn from each other.
For more information, please call the IRE Resource Center at (573) 882-3364 or refer to these helpful links on our website:
Philip Meyer Award FAQ: http://www.ire.org/meyeraward/meyerFAQ.html
Download a PDF of the entry form: http://www.ire.org/meyeraward/PhillipMeyerEntryForm07.pdf
Past winners:
2006: http://www.ire.org/meyeraward/06winners.html
2005: http://www.ire.org/history/pr/2005MeyerAward.html
It's important to note that Philip Meyer Journalism Award is unique in its efforts to avoid conflicts of interest. Work that included any significant role by a member of the IRE Board of Directors or an IRE contest judge may not be entered in the contest. This often represents a significant sacrifice on the part of the individual — and sometimes an entire newsroom. The IRE membership appreciates this devotion to the values of the organization.
Beth Kopine Contest Coordinator Resource Center Director Investigative Reporters and Editors, Inc. 138 Neff Annex Missouri School of Journalism Columbia, MO 65211 Phone: 573-882-6668 Fax: 573-884-8151 Email: beth@ire.org
Yes, call us fickle and lacking in loyalty when it comes to note-taking and research organization tools. Does anyone else remember the 5×8 cards with holes punched on all four perimeters? You entered “tags” or keywords by clipping out the outer edge of the hole, and when you needed to find a particular note card, a knitting needle-sized wire was inserted into the whole pack. Shake the cards and the desired note fell out. Sometimes.
Since going digital 25 years ago, we've tried dozens of tools to try and bring some order to what we've turned up online and need to save. Most were fine innovations and advances at the time, but there was often something that didn't quite meet all of our needs or desires. That still might be true, but a new entry in the research management derby (thanks to the cite from The Scout Report quoted below) delivers up an impressive new tool.
Zotero is a Firefox extension with rich, intuitive tools that are flexible enough to support the way YOU want/need to work. This is only version 1.0, but I think I have a new best friend.
Zotero http://www.zotero.org/ “It can be hard to keep Tom Wolfe and Thomas Wolfe straight at times, and if you are working on an academic paper that incorporates both of these august characters, you probably want to keep those research sources in good order. Thanks to Zotero, it is very easy to do just that. Zotero is a Firefox extension that helps users collect, manage, and cite their research sources. Zotero can automatically capture citation information from web pages, store PDF files, and also export these citations with relatively ease. This very helpful extension is compatible with computers running Firefox 2.0.” [KMG]
http://www.zotero.org/
“It can be hard to keep Tom Wolfe and Thomas Wolfe straight at times, and if you are working on an academic paper that incorporates both of these august characters, you probably want to keep those research sources in good order. Thanks to Zotero, it is very easy to do just that. Zotero is a Firefox extension that helps users collect, manage, and cite their research sources. Zotero can automatically capture citation information from web pages, store PDF files, and also export these citations with relatively ease. This very helpful extension is compatible with computers running Firefox 2.0.” [KMG]
Here's a train journos should get on, m'thinks, because of its long-term value, implications and potential for synergy.
http://openstreetmap.org/ — OpenStreetMap is a free editable map of the whole world. It is made by people like you. OpenStreetMap allows you to view, edit and use geographical data in a collaborative way from anywhere on Earth. OpenStreetMap's hosting is kindly supported by the UCL VR Centre and bytemark. — tj
Andy Crain, of the Cincinnati Enquirer, just posted an interesting item on the NICAR listserv related to an innovative integration of news stories and JAGIS. Check it out.
All, The Cincinnati Enquirer has just launched a database application we hope will become our primary vehicle for providing highly local database content to our readers. We call it CinciNavigator. It's a map-based application where users can search currently about half a dozen types of data from numerous sources (much more to come), updated as often as hourly, including stories published in the paper. Check it out, and please share any comments/criticisms/suggestions. Thanks! http://data.cincinnati.com/navigator/ Andy Crain The Cincinnati Enquirer acrain@cincinnati.com
All, The Cincinnati Enquirer has just launched a database application we hope will become our primary vehicle for providing highly local database content to our readers. We call it CinciNavigator. It's a map-based application where users can search currently about half a dozen types of data from numerous sources (much more to come), updated as often as hourly, including stories published in the paper. Check it out, and please share any comments/criticisms/suggestions. Thanks! http://data.cincinnati.com/navigator/
Andy Crain The Cincinnati Enquirer acrain@cincinnati.com
We were pleased to see last week (via the NICAR listserv) that multiple newspapers, at least in the U.S., have discovered they can get public records data bases, create specialized look-up tools for their frontends and post it/them on their web site. Let's keep on keeping on with this. It seems quite possibly that the next phase of bringing bits and bytes to the people might well be in the realm of 3D, mapping and simulation modeling. To that end, take a look at the “Terrain Tools & Software Packages” jumpstation. This is a nifty collection of commercial and open-source apps that just make your job easier and more interesting.
From O'Reilly Radar's Publishing blog comes this interesting item. See http://radar.oreilly.com/publishing/
The Traditional Future
“A prominent U.S. sociologist and student of professions, Andrew Abbott of the University of Chicago, has written a thought-provoking thesis on what he terms “library research” — that is, research as performed with library-held resources by historians, et. al, via the reading and browsing of texts — compared to social science research, which has a more linear, “Idea->Question->Data->Method->Result” type of methodology. “The pre-print, “The Traditional Future: A Computational Theory of Library Research,” is full of insights about library centric research, including intriguing parallels between library research and neural net computing architectures; a comparison that made me think anew, and with more clarity, about how the science of history is conducted. Armed with a distinctive interpretation of library research, Abbott is able to draw some incisive conclusions about the ramifications of large repositories of digitized texts (such as Google Book Search) on the conduct of scholarship…”
“A prominent U.S. sociologist and student of professions, Andrew Abbott of the University of Chicago, has written a thought-provoking thesis on what he terms “library research” — that is, research as performed with library-held resources by historians, et. al, via the reading and browsing of texts — compared to social science research, which has a more linear, “Idea->Question->Data->Method->Result” type of methodology.
“The pre-print, “The Traditional Future: A Computational Theory of Library Research,” is full of insights about library centric research, including intriguing parallels between library research and neural net computing architectures; a comparison that made me think anew, and with more clarity, about how the science of history is conducted. Armed with a distinctive interpretation of library research, Abbott is able to draw some incisive conclusions about the ramifications of large repositories of digitized texts (such as Google Book Search) on the conduct of scholarship…”
And this just in from CNet via O'Reilly Radar….
Google To Release Embeddable Maps
Posted: 15 Aug 2007 08:38 AM CDT By Brady Forrest Over on CNet they have the scoop on an upcoming cool Google Maps feature. Google will be releasing a new feature next week that will enable people to easily embed a Google Map into their Web site or blog, just like you can do with a YouTube video. No coding or programming required; just copying and pasting a snippet of HTML, a Google spokeswoman says. Google Maps “To embed a Google Map, users will simply pull up the map they want to embed–it can be a location, a business, series of driving directions, or a My Map they have created–and then click 'Link to this page' and copy and paste the HTML into their Web site or blog,” the spokeswoman said. Given how smart of a feature this is I can't believe its taken this long for one of the major providers to release a feature like. Yahoo, Google, Live – they've all had the ability to get permalinks to a map for easy inclusion in a website. They've also all had APIs, but now a fully featured map, even those that have Mapplet data, will be fully embeddable on a person's website with cut-n-paste. Google Maps already dominate on third-party websites; this will increase that margin substantially.
Posted: 15 Aug 2007 08:38 AM CDT
By Brady Forrest
Over on CNet they have the scoop on an upcoming cool Google Maps feature.
Google will be releasing a new feature next week that will enable people to easily embed a Google Map into their Web site or blog, just like you can do with a YouTube video. No coding or programming required; just copying and pasting a snippet of HTML, a Google spokeswoman says. Google Maps “To embed a Google Map, users will simply pull up the map they want to embed–it can be a location, a business, series of driving directions, or a My Map they have created–and then click 'Link to this page' and copy and paste the HTML into their Web site or blog,” the spokeswoman said.
Google will be releasing a new feature next week that will enable people to easily embed a Google Map into their Web site or blog, just like you can do with a YouTube video. No coding or programming required; just copying and pasting a snippet of HTML, a Google spokeswoman says. Google Maps
“To embed a Google Map, users will simply pull up the map they want to embed–it can be a location, a business, series of driving directions, or a My Map they have created–and then click 'Link to this page' and copy and paste the HTML into their Web site or blog,” the spokeswoman said.
Given how smart of a feature this is I can't believe its taken this long for one of the major providers to release a feature like. Yahoo, Google, Live – they've all had the ability to get permalinks to a map for easy inclusion in a website. They've also all had APIs, but now a fully featured map, even those that have Mapplet data, will be fully embeddable on a person's website with cut-n-paste. Google Maps already dominate on third-party websites; this will increase that margin substantially.
We have long admired the code underlying the visual data site, TheyRule.net. TheyRule was among the pioneering sites to link data — in this case, corporatate board members of American's largest public companies and their shared networks with other board members. So it is that we are pleased that Greenpeace has taken the concept, and maybe even a lot of the code, to visualize the networks of organizations and people tied to Exxon. According to the site:
This website is the first chapter of a larger Greenpeace project provide a research database of information on the corporate funded anti-environmental movement. The database compiles Exxon Foundation funding to a series of institutions who have worked to undermine solutions to global warming and climate change in recent years. Individuals working with these organizations and their global warming quotes and deeds are detailed. There are downloadable source documents or links to sources are provided throughout.
This website is the first chapter of a larger Greenpeace project provide a research database of information on the corporate funded anti-environmental movement.
The database compiles Exxon Foundation funding to a series of institutions who have worked to undermine solutions to global warming and climate change in recent years. Individuals working with these organizations and their global warming quotes and deeds are detailed. There are downloadable source documents or links to sources are provided throughout.
We've long been intrigued with Benford's Law and its potential for Analytic Journalism. Today we ran across a new post by Charley Kyd that explains both the Law and presents some clear formulas for its application.
An Excel 97-2003 Tutorial:
by Charley Kyd July, 2007 (Email Comments)
(Follow this link for the Excel 2007 version.)
Unless you're a public accountant, you probably haven't experimented with Benford's Law.
Auditors sometimes use this fascinating statistical insight to uncover fraudulent accounting data. But it might reveal a useful strategy for investing in the stock market. And it might help you to improve the accuracy of your budgets and forecasts.
This article will explain Benford's Law, show you how to calculate it with Excel, and suggest ways that you could put it to good use.
From a hands-on-Excel point of view, the article describes new uses for the SUMPRODUCT function and discusses the use of local and global range names. [Read more…]
