Alfredo Covaleda,
Bogota, Colombia
Stephen Guerin,
Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA
James A. Trostle,
Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut, USA
From All Points Blog
University of Southern California students developed the online game for the Annenburg Center for Communications to teach about the challenges (and partisanness) of redistricting. Along the way players learn that to keep their candidates elected they may need to examine ethical issues. The game is Flash-based.
From the [original News 10] site: The Redistricting Game is designed to educate, engage, and empower citizens around the issue of political redistricting. Currently, the political system in most states allows the state legislators themselves to draw the lines. This system is subject to a wide range of abuses and manipulations that encourage incumbents to draw districts which protect their seats rather than risk an open contest.
This weekend, friend-of-the-IAJ Joe Traub sent the following to the editor of the New York Times. Here's the story Joe is talking about: “White House….“
The headline error is bad enough (it's only in the hed, not not in the story) — and should be a huge embarrassment to the NYT. But the error gets compounded because while the Times no longer sets the agenda for the national discussion, it is still thought of (by most?) as the paper of record. Consequently, as other colleagues have pointed out, the reduction percentage gets picked up by other journalists who don't bother to do the math (or who cannot do the math.) See, for example: * CBS News — “Troop Retreat In '08?” — (This video has a shot of the NYT story even though the percentage is not mentioned. Could it be that the TV folks don't think viewers can do the arithmetic?)(NB: We could not yet find on the NPR site the transcript of the radio story that picked up the 50 percent error. But run a Google search with “cut in Troops by 50%” and note the huge number of bloggers who also went with the story without doing the math.)Colleague Steve Doig has queried the reporter of the piece, David Sanger, asking if the mistake is that of the NYT or the White House. No answer yet received, but Doig later commented: “Sanger's story did talk about reducing brigades from 20 to 10. That's how they'll justify the “50% reduction” headline, I guess, despite the clear reference higher up to cutting 146,000 troops to 100,000.”
Either way, it is a serious blunder of a fundamental sort on an issue most grave. It should have been caught, but then most journalists are WORD people and only word people, we guess.
We would also point out the illogical construction that the NYT uses consistently in relaying statistical change over time. To wit: “… could lower troop levels by the midst of the 2008 presidential election to roughly 100,000, from about 146,000…” We wince.
English is read from left to right. Most English calendars and horizontal timelines are read from left to right. When writing about statistical change, the same convention should be followed: oldest dates and data precedes newest or future dates and data. Therefore, this should best be written: “…could lower troop levels from about 146,000 to roughly 100,000 by the midst of the 2008 presidential election.”
Juan C. Dürsteler, in Barcelona, Spain, edits a fine online magazine devoted to information graphics. The current issue describes “… the diagram for the process of Information Visualisation as seen by Yuri Engelhardt and the author after a series of discussions about its nature and the process that leads from Data to Understanding.”
And it is available in English and Spanish. Check out http://www.infovis.net/printMag.php?num=187&lang=2
No story? Then check out Swivel, a web site rich with data — and the display of data — that you didn't know about and which is pregnant with possibilities for a good news feature. And often a news feature that could be localized.Here, for example, is a posting from the SECRECY REPORT CARD 2005 illustrating the changing trends in the the classification and de-classification of U.S. government data. (You can probably guess the direction of the curves.)
The number of classified documents is steadily increasing, while the number of pages being declassified is dwindling. This data were uploaded by mcroydon.
Paul Parker, of the Providence (Rhode Island) Journal, is the Quick and an impressive list of folks on the state's voter registration rolls are the Dead this week. Below is a note Parker posted to the NICAR-L listserv. The great thing about this is the recipe Parker provides for an analytic journalists' cookbook. Said he:
Here's the link:http://www.projo.com/extra/election/content/deadvoters9_11-09-06_DN2P2GR.33b46ef.html
I know it's CAR101, but I'll outline how we did it (which is alsoexplained in the story):
1. Get your state's central voter registration database.2. Get your state slice of the Social Security Administration's DeathMaster File from IRE/NICAR.3. Run a match on First Name, Last Name and Date of Birth.4. Exclude matches where middle initials conflict. (Allow P=PETER orP=NULL, but not P=G.)5. Calculate a per capita rate for each city/town by dividing the numberof dead people by the total registered.6. Interview the biggest offenders about why they're the biggest offenders.
This was so easy, and now everyone at the paper thinks I'm some sort ofjournalism deity. (And the voter registration people called to ask,“Where do I get a copy of that Social Security list.”)
As for the possibility of false positives, we pointed this out in thestory, which I think sufficed because the odds are low enough. I alsohand checked a few against our obituary archives.
—Paul ParkerReporterThe Providence Journal75 Fountain StreetProvidence, RI 02902401-277-7360pparker@projo.com
Then David Heath, at the Seattle Times layered in his experience. Said he:
A brief comment was passed along on the NICAR-L (National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting) listserv this morning by Daniel Lathrop, of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Said he:
Well, yeah. An interesting story, but also one demonstrating why newspapers as institutions simply do not grasp the shift in power inherent in the Digital Age, a shift away from institutions and to citizens.
First, the story reports: “The family connections between lobbying and lawmaking are prompting complaints that Congress is not doing enough to police itself.” Fair enough, but can't you SHOW us, in the online version, the evidence to support this sweeping generalization of “prompting complaints.” Why should we take your word for it, guys, when the evidence must be at hand.
Second, “…USA TODAY reviewed thousands of pages of financial disclosures and lobbyist registrations, property records, marriage announcements and other public documents to identify which lawmakers and staffers had relatives in the lobbying business.” WOW! Would I like to see those pages, and even drill down into them to see if there's anything there related to my representative. But nooooooooo. The paper must of had some way to manage all this public-record data, some way to cross-reference it, to search it, to retrieve documents and content. Why not put all that up on the web and let readers peruse their own subjects of interest?
Ironically, an example of the power shift mentioned above turns up, buried in a sidebar to the story, “Little Accountability in Earmarks.” There we find reference to something called the Sunlight Foundation. I had not heard of the Sunlight Foundation, but, hey, it's only been around since the first of the year. It turns out this organization is doing just what newspapers should be doing: leveraging the power of the digital environment to connect people to the data and tools needed to analyze that data so they can make informed decisions.
Another opportunity missed by the industry, and tragically so.
Eric Lipton has a piece in Wedneday's (4 Oct. 2006) NYTimes about some “new” research efforts to come up with software “that would let the [U.S.] government monitor negative opinions of the United States or its leaders in newspapers and other publications overseas.” (See “Software Being Developed to Monitor Opinions of U.S.“) Surely this is an interesting problem, and one made especially difficult when the translation factor kicks in.
This is not, however, the first attempt to gin-up such software. We have long admired the work done some years ago at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in the ThemeRiver™ visualization.
We hope the PNNL will continue by giving us more of this intriguing tool.
Another unique investigation by The New York Times gets A1 play in this Sunday's edition (1 Oct. 2006) under the hed “Campaign Cash Mirrors a High Court's Rulings.” Adam Liptak and Janet Roberts (who probably did the heavy lifting on the data analysis) took a long-term look at who contributed to the campaigns of Ohio's Supreme Court justices. It ain't a pretty picture if one believes the justices should be above lining their own pockets, whether it's a campaign fund or otherwise.
In any event, there seems to be a clear correlation between contributions — and the sources — and the outcome to too many cases. A sidebar, “Case Studies: West Virginia and Illinois,” would suggest there is much to be harvested by reporters in other states. There is, thankfully, a fine description of how the data for the study was collected and analyzed. See “How Information Was Collected“
There are two accompanying infographics, one (“Ruling on Contributors' Cases” ) is much more informative than the other (“While the Case Is Being Heard, Money Rolls In” ), which is a good, but confusing, attempt to illustrate difficult concepts and relationships.
At the end of the day, though, we are grateful for the investigation, data crunching and stories.
Friend Laura Soto-Bara posts the following to the NewsLib listserv:
Any discipline always has subsets of argument, typically about definitions, methodologies, process or significance. Statistics, of course, is no different. Below is an interesting article from the Washington Monthly about what constitutes statistical significance. The article is OK, but the commentary below it even better. See http://www.blogware.com/admin/index.cgi/cmd=post_article
