Alfredo Covaleda,
Bogota, Colombia
Stephen Guerin,
Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA
James A. Trostle,
Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut, USA
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.
Developed by Birmingham-based technology firm Daden, NewsGlobe can combine Google's geographic search engine Google Earth with the user's favourite RSS news feeds to present stories on a local, regional or international map.
The application scans headlines for keywords that identify the location of the story, and then presents them by headline with the location pinpointed. A summary of the story appears when the user hovers over the text and they can click through to the full story on the original news site.
The popularity of RSS news feeds and projects such as BBC Backstage has triggered a wave of creative RSS-based tools from the web developing community, said Daden's managing director David Burden.
BBC Backstage was launched in May and encourages developers to use selected BBC content and software to create new applications. Recent contributions to the project have been a Flash-based news reader program and traffic maps.
“There has been an explosion of activity in the past four to five months driven by RSS,” said Mr Burden.
“Developers are exploring the possibilities of moving information from one format to another; this application simply uses Google Earth as a news aggregator.”
As well as providing a geographical view of breaking news, the application has interesting commercial possibilities for companies with specific or wide ranging regional interests such as estate agents or billboard advertisers.
To use NewsGlobe, web users must have Google Earth installed. More information is available on Daden's website.
We recently enjoyed meeting Stuart Kasdin at a Netlogo workshop. Stuart spent some years in the Peace Corps, then a decade with the OMB (Office of Budget Management). Currently he's working on his doctorate in Poly Sci at UC-Santa Barbara.
Stuart has also been thinking about “performance measurement,” the term-of-art used by auditors and managers of government agencies. (In the private sector, the term often used is “forensic accounting.”) We have generally thought well of performance measurement, especially as a vocabulary and tool journalists should know about to better understand and evalutate the performance of government. Stuart, however, has thought about this in greater depth, and from the perspective of someone inside the government. His paper, “When Do Results Matter? Using Budget Systems to Enhance Program Performance and Agency Management” is worthwhile reading. ABSTRACT: “Managing by results” is a widely used public budgeting approach based on developing performance measures that display the progress of a program toward its stated objectives. This paper considers the complex environment of government budgeting and how to establish budget systems that can successfully encourage improved performance by managers. The paper assesses the limitations in how governments currently apply performance budgeting and suggests ways that it might be made more effective. First, performance measures must be individually tractable and simple, as well as be coherent and revealing in the context of other program performance targets. In addition, performance budgeting must distinguish between program needs based on environmental changes and those based on management related decisions. Finally, the paper argues that multi-task, complex-goal programs will typically result in low-powered incentives for program managers. This outcome results because, even apart from information obstacles, program managers will be rewarded or punished on only a component of the program, representing a small fraction of the total program performance when performance measures as increase. A partial solution is to ensure that the number of policy instruments is not smaller than the number of targets.” Click here to read the Kasdin paper.
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.
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.”
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.
The article, “Bioinformatics,” is in the quarterly published by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Some highlights:
* 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.
We agree, there can be many reasons not to run a map in the IoP (Ink-on-Paper) version of a newspaper. And maps are sometimes run more as a graphic element in the page design than as a tool to tell a story in a better way. (Although this seems to happen less as “design and information consciousness” has percolated through journalism thanks to organizations like the Society for News Design.) Still, if a decision is made to use a map, then that graphic should add to the readers' understanding of usually complex data. Last week, the Palm Beach [Florida] Post carried a map showing the home county of U.S. troops killed in Iraq. The problem is, the KIA map shows the number killed without taking into account the size of the population from which those troops were recruited. Is there a better way? Of course, and the folks in the newsroom trenches had produced one: a map showing the KIA's relative to the population of the county where the soldiers were from. This one, of course, supplies some of the appropriate context. The problem was, the editors decided to publish the traditional-but-misleading map. Sigh.
Here is another on the same topic: * http://www.obleek.com/iraq/index.html
We're pleased that the PBS program “Frontline” is keeping up the good fight to produce important journalism. And thanks to the Librarian's Index to the Internet for pointing us to: Private Warriors
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/warriors/ Subjects: Government contractors — United States | Public contracts — United States | Private security services | United States — Armed Forces — Management | New this week Created by je – last updated Jul 6, 2005
Be sure to drill down to the section, “Does Privatization Save Money.” A nice example of a reporter asking the right questions.
One of the foundational cross-over disciplines we think are of value to journalists is Forensic Accounting, at least that's the term used when applied in business. (It's “performance measurement” when talking about government.) One of the basic measurements in forensic accounting is to compare the percent of dollar distribution by type or sector in one instution to the percent of dollar distribution in a comparable institution. So it is that we were please to see Glen Justice dipping into the forensic accountants toolbox in Wednesday's NYTimes in his story “For a Lobbyist, Seat of Power Came With a Plate.” The story is about how lobbyist, and Tom Delay pal, Jack Abramoff apparently used his own restaurant in Washington, Signatures, as a place to meet and greet legislators. He just forgot to give them a check. Justice wrote:
“…While Signatures was popular, it struggled to make money, according to employees and documents.
'Mr. Abramoff and his companies invested more than $3 million in Signatures from January 2002 to May 2003, records show. At the same time, he and his employees gave away tens of thousands of dollars in food, wine and liquor, the records show. That includes menu prices for Mr. Abramoff's own food and drink, as well as employee discounts and free meals given by restaurant managers and staff, according to the records. Nationwide, the median expense for marketing, including free meals and drinks, was about 3.5 percent of sales for expensive restaurants like Signatures that spend the most on such promotions, according to the National Restaurant Association. One national restaurant consultant, Clark Wolf, said the figure can go as high as 5 percent.
'At Signatures, free meals and drinks for managers and guests alone were about 7 percent of revenues for the restaurant's first 17 months, according to former employees and financial records. Mr. Blum, the spokesman for Mr. Abramoff, disputed that percentage.”
Seems like pretty basic reporting, but more reporters would do well to make that one more call if they want to establish context in their stories.
Our fellow traveler Bill Dokosh in Canada tips us to this article in the Toronto Star, “Don't tell anything to anybody,” discussing what the Canadian information commissioner learned after seven years on the job. The post is, essentially, responsible for ensuring that Canadian citizens get access to government documents.
“As a former Liberal cabinet minister, former opposition backbencher and former lobbyist for a powerful national association, John Reid thought he knew what he was getting into when he was named Canada's Information Commissioner, seven years ago. He was wrong, Reid now admits. He had no inkling that senior bureaucrats reached top-level decisions verbally to avoid leaving a paper trail. He never expected to fight an all-out court battle for access to something as innocuous as the Prime Minister's daily schedule. Most of all, he did not realize how hard it was for ordinary Canadians to get scraps of ostensibly public information, gathered on their behalf with their tax dollars.”
Amen.
Steven Roth was one of those guys who could see farther than most of us and, even more rare, make that vision a reality. He died in his sleep this past weekend in his home near Pittsburgh. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette obit sub-hed: “One of the pioneers in field of 'information visualization' a 'reluctant manager' http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/05165/521102.stm Roth was a founder of Maya Viz Ldt., one of the more interesting firms to emerge from the Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute in the 1990s. Maya Viz took infographics to higher levels of graphic clarity and data interaction.
“Described as 'dreamer,' a 'visionary' and most often, 'incredibly passionate' by his colleagues, Mr. Roth was probably best known for his oft-spoken desire to 'change the world' by developing software that allowed complex data and numerical information to be represented graphically, and in a way that humans could better see, use and manipulate it.”
Kudos to Dan Eggen, Julie Tate and Derek Willis for asking the basic question this week: “What do we know and how do we know it?” When that process is applied to White House claims about the value of the Patriot Act in fighting terrorists, the WH looks a little gray. And all it took was some digging of the data, followed by counting, to help set the record state. See: U.S. Campaign Produces Few Convictions on Terrorism Charges:Statistics Often Count Lesser Crimes“
