From Complexity Digest:

Semantic Descriptors To Help The Hunt For Music, ( Innovations-report)

Excerpts: You like a certain song and want to hear other
tracks like it, but don't know how to find them? Ending the
needle-in-a-haystack problem of searching for music on the Internet or
even in your own hard drive is a new audio-based music information
retrieval system. Currently under development by the SIMAC project, it
is a major leap forward in the application of semantics to audio
content, allowing songs to be described not just by artist, title and
genre but by their actual musical properties such as rhythm, timbre,
harmony, structure and instrumentation. This allows comparisons between
songs to be made (…).

Source: Semantic Descriptors To Help



Should
this come to fruition, might there be stories in patterns — regional
patterns — in music?  How could we map this?  And when?

Tamara Thompson provides yet another good pointer:

~ researching private companies ~

By Tamara Thompson Investigations

The LLRX newsletter reports:

Old
and New

THOMAS, the legislative Web site from the
Library of Congress, has received its second facelift in the space of a year.
(For information on the previous set of tweaks, see my January 2005 column
THOMAS: New Congress, A Few
Changes.) The latest redesign, announced in a November 2005
press release, does
not add much substantial content or functionality but gives THOMAS an updated
look similar to the main Library of Congress web
site and a consistent site-wide navigation scheme that certainly was needed.

Gerry Lanosga, an investigative producer at WTHR-TV in Indianapolis, was kind enough to send along this link — http://www.cs.indiana.edu/~markane/i590/contributors.html to a nifty first shot at merging GoogleMaps with The Fundrace Project., that site that shows you who in any ZIP Code made contributions to which politicians.  Matthew Kane, a CS student at the Univ. of Indiana, put this together, and it's a fine beginning.  Be alert, however, that the Fundrace data is not always correct.  For example, we know a guy named John T. Johnson, who lives in ZIP 87505, fairly well.  The Fundrace Project says he is an airline pilot who works for UPS.  We know for sure that is not the case. 

The drill-down on Kane's 
Following the Dollars doesn't give the degree of detail that the Fundrace Project does itself, but keep on truckin',  Mr. Kane.  We need all of these utilities we can get.

We
don't know if there has as yet been any empirical research done on how
interested media consumers are in online crime mapping — and how good the coverage is —  but there is a body of
literature debating readers' interest in crime per se.  It would
seem to be a pretty good bet, though, that if people are interested in
crime AND if more and more are going online via broadband, that
some dynamic crime maps would get some hits. 

See, too: Paulsen, Derek J.  “WRONG SIDE OF THE TRACKS: EXPLORING THE ROLE OF NEWSPAPER COVERAGE OF HOMICIDE IN SOCIALLY CONSTRUCTING DANGEROUS PLACES.” Journal of Criminal Justice and Popular Culture, 9(3) (2002) 113-127

Sometimes
journalists have a tendency to be too literal.  We want to ask a
question and we want the response to be a quote that is without
ambiguity.  One that's fills in some of the space between our
anecdotes.  But other times, we need tools that work like a
periscope, a device that allows us to not look at the object directly
but through a helpful lens.  Such periscopes for analyzing the
economy are indirect indicators.



Monday's
(5 Dec. 2005) NYTimes' Business Section was loaded with references to
such indicators that journos could keep in mind when looking for
devices to show and explain what's happening.  Check out “What's Ahead: Blue Skies, or More Forecasts of Them?”   Be sure to click on the link “Graphic: Indicators From Everyday Life“


Another indirector was mentined Sunday on National Public Radio in “Economic Signs Remain Strong“  There, an economist said he tracks changes in the “titanium dioxide” data, the compound is used in all white paint and reflects manufacturing production. 

Kudos to Derek Willis and Adrian Holovaty of The Washington Post for the Washingtonpost.com site “U.S. Congress Votes Database.”  One element we find of recent and special interest is the “late night votes”
variables for both the House and Senate.  With a little more
probing and data slicing and dicing, it would make an interesting bit
of visual
statistics/infographics to do a longitudinal comparison of the time of
votes in various congresses.




This site/searchable database is a fine example of how investing in some basic data preparation
can create the potential for a ton of stories.  Why, for example, do
Democrats have such a preponderance (18 out of 20) of Representatives on the “missed
votes” list, but only 9 out of 20 on the similar list for the Senate?



This is
also a fine example of how a newspaper can do good things for itself
while doing good things for the community and readers.  This
database gives the WP reporters and editors a quick look-up of
Congressional activity, the kind of fact and detail that can enrich a
story.  At the same time, citizens can turn to this value-added
form of the public record to answer their own questions.



Derek Willis wrote to the news librarians listserv:



“Folks,



It's not part of a story or series, but the Post today launched a site

that may prove useful to your newsrooms or even as an inspiration to

learn Python: a congressional votes database that covers the

102nd-109th congresses (1991-present). Currently browsable, we're

working on adding a search engine and other features to it. Adrian

Holovaty, who works for washingtonpost.com, and I assembled the data

and he built the web framework to display it. All of the data is

gathered using Python, the database backend is PostgreSQL and the web

framework is Django.”

A
couple of articles have passed across our desk in recent days that
illustrate the impact — and  importance of understanding —
decentralized (or “distributed”) systems and complex adaptive systems.

For starters, take a look at “Reinventing 911
How a swarm of networked ­citizens is building a better ­emergency broadcast system.”
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.12/warning.html

Author Gary Wolf writes: “I've been talking with security experts about one of the thorniest
problems they face: How can we protect our complex society from massive
but unpredictable catastrophes? The homeland security establishment has
spent an immeasurable fortune vainly seeking an answer, distributing
useless, highly specialized equipment, and toggling its multicolored
Homeland Security Advisory System back and forth between yellow, for
elevated, and orange, for high. Now I've come [to Portland, Oregon] to take a look at a
different set of tools, constructed outside the control of the federal
government and based on the notion that the easier it is for me to find
out about a loose dog tying up traffic, the safer I am from a terrorist
attack.

“To understand the true nature of warnings, it helps to see them not
as single events, like an air-raid siren, but rather as swarms of
messages racing through overlapping social networks, like the buzz of
gossip. Residents of New Orleans didn't just need to know a hurricane
was coming. They also needed to be informed that floodwaters were
threatening to breach the levees, that not all neighborhoods would be
inundated, that certain roads would become impassible while alternative
evacuation routes would remain open, that buses were available for
transport, and that the Superdome was full.

“No central authority possessed this information. Knowledge was
fragmentary, parceled out among tens of thousands of people on the
ground. There was no way to gather all these observations and deliver
them to where they were needed. During Hurricane Katrina, public
officials from top to bottom found themselves locked within
conventional channels, unable to receive, analyze, or redistribute news
from outside. In the most egregious example, Homeland Security
secretary Michael Chertoff said in a radio interview that he had not
heard that people at the New Orleans convention center were without
food or water. At that point they'd been stranded two days.

“By contrast, in the system Botterell created for California,
warnings are sucked up from an array of sources and sent automatically
to users throughout the state. Messages are squeezed into a standard
format called the Common Alerting Protocol, designed by Botterell in
discussion with scores of other disaster experts. CAP gives precise
definitions to concepts like proximity, urgency, and certainty.
Using CAP, anyone who might respond to an emergency can choose to get
warnings for their own neighborhood, for instance, or only the most
urgent messages. Alerts can be received by machines, filtered, and
passed along. The model is simple and elegant, and because warnings can
be tagged with geographical coordinates, users can customize their cell
phones, pagers, BlackBerries, or other devices to get only those
relevant to their precise locale.”


Second item of interest
I'm sure many of you noted Dexter Filkins Pg1 lead story in the NYT on
Friday, 2 Dec. 2005.  The online version headline is “Profusion of Rebel Groups Helps Them Survive in Iraq.”  That, unfortunately, lacks the truth and insight of the print version headline:
“Loose Structure of Rebels Helps them Survive in Iraq — While Al Qaeda Gains Attention, Many Small Groups Attack on Their Own.“ 

It
seems that finally someone in the journalism community has figured out
that what's happening in Iraq — and around the world — is a
decentralize, CAS.  Too bad journalists — journalism educators, students and professionals — haven't been exposed to the
concepts and vocabulary to really present the problem in all its, ahem,
complexity.

A recent edition of MIT's Technology Review
tells a tale with direct parallels to analytic journalism.  That
is, investigators bringing well-known and established analytic tools to
new applications.  In this case, using computer scans to conduct a
“visual autopsies.”  See:



“Dead Men Do Tell Tales
Virtual autopsies reveal clues that forensic pathologists might miss. By John Gartner
http://www.technologyreview.com//wtr_15922,1,p1.html?trk=nl

Serious Games Initiative

http://www.seriousgames.org/



The Serious Games Initiative is focused on uses for games
in exploring management and leadership challenges
facing the public sector. Part of its overall charter
is to help forge productive links between the
electronic game industry and projects involving the use of
games in education, training, health, and public policy.




Says information specialists Marylaine Block:


 “As one who believes nobody should be allowed to run for office until they have played


Sim City for at least six months, I think such games have enormous


potential for helping people explore complex social problems and possible


solutions.”