Alfredo Covaleda,
Bogota, Colombia
Stephen Guerin,
Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA
James A. Trostle,
Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut, USA
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.”
“ePodunk is a site that focuses on place and provides information on 25,000 communities in the U. S. The site also contains a number of interesting maps, including maps of the Katrina diaspora, ethnic origin, fastest growing counties and others. There is also a Canadian version of the site, focusing on Canadian places, but it, sadly, does not seem to have any maps.”
A piece on calling the elections in Detroit:
BY CHRIS CHRISTOFF FREE PRESS LANSING BUREAU CHIEF
November 10, 2005
What was a viewer to believe?
As polls closed Tuesday, WDIV-TV (Channel 4) declared Freman Hendrix winner of Detroit's mayoral race by 10 percentage points.
WXYZ-TV (Channel 7) showed Hendrix ahead by 4 percentage points, statistically too close to call.
But WJBK-TV (Channel 2) got it right, declaring just after 9 p.m. that Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick was ahead, 52% to 48%, which turned out to be almost exactly the final 53%-47% outcome declared many hours later.
And it was vote analyst Tim Kiska who nailed it for WJBK, and for WWJ-AM radio, using counts from 28 of 620 Detroit precincts.
Kiska did it with help from Detroit City Clerk Jackie Currie. She allowed a crew that Kiska assembled to collect the precinct tallies shortly after the polls closed at 8 p.m.
Using what he calls a secret formula, Kiska calculated how those 28 precincts would predict the result citywide.
His formula also assumed that absentee voters chose Hendrix over Kilpatrick by a 2-1 ratio.
That's different from the methods of pollsters who got it wrong Tuesday, Steve Mitchell for WDIV and EPIC/MRA's Ed Sarpolus for WXYZ and the Free Press. Both men used telephone polls, calling people at home during the day and evening and asking how they voted.
It's a more standard method of election-day polling, but Tuesday proved treacherous.
Kiska, a former reporter for the Free Press and Detroit News, has done such election-day predictions since 1974, but said he was nervous Tuesday.
“Every time I go into one of these, my nightmare is I might get it wrong,” said Kiska, a WWJ producer. “I had a bad feeling about this going in. I thought there was going to be a Titanic hitting an iceberg and hoping it wouldn't be me.”
Kiska said he especially felt sorry for his friend Mitchell.
Mitchell said he's been one of the state's most accurate political pollsters over 20 years, but said his Tuesday survey of 800 voters turned out to be a bad sample.
He said polling is inherently risky, and that even well-conducted polls can be wrong one out of 20 times. “I hit number 20 this time.”
For Sarpolus, it's the second Detroit mayoral race that confounded his polls. He was the only major pollster in 2001 who indicated Gil Hill would defeat Kilpatrick.
Sarpolus said the pressure to get poll results on the air quickly made it impossible to adjust his results as real vote totals were made public during the late evening.
Of Kiska, Sarpolus said: “You have to give him credit. … But you have to assume all city clerks are willing to cooperate.”
Contact CHRIS CHRISTOFF at 517-372-8660 or christoff@freepress.com.
For those interested in the forensic process — and in this case, computer forensics — be sure to check out this fine, fine piece of digital detective work by Mark Russinovich, a computer security expert with Sysinternals. He discovered evidence of a “rootkit” on his Windows PC.
We don't think journalists need to know how to DO this kind of deep-diving probing, but we should be aware that it is possible and, broadly speaking, the methods if only to know the appropriate search terms. Through heroic forensic work, he traced the code to First 4 Internet, a British provider of copy-restriction technology that has a deal with Sony to put digital rights management on its CDs. It turns out Russinovich was infected with the software when he played the Sony BMG CD Get Right With the Man by the Van Zant brothers.
Here's WIRED Magazine's take on the story, “The Cover-Up Is the Crime“
And here's what Dan Gillmor had to say about it, with additional links.
We're all awash in data, so finding the significant bits and bytes that can lead to information is a maddening process. Jon Burke, writing in the November 2, 2005 edition of MIT's Technology Review, presents some web-based technological options. See “Finding Signals in the Noise.” We were impressed by a new product/site called “Memeorandum,” but Burke points out a handful of alternatives. Excerpt:
“Few would dispute that we live in an age of information overload. In the last few years alone, blogs have increased the torrent of information each day to unmanageable levels. This would explain, then, why a corresponding torrent of startups has surfaced recently to help us filter, manage, and control this flood of information. Some rely on insightful algorithms that understand popularity to filter the news, while others rely on the preferences of readers.
For example, Digg is a San Francisco startup that ranks news items by letting people choose which stories they like. It just landed $2.8 million in venture capital from Omidyar Network, former Netscape founder Marc Andreessen, and Greylock Partners. We also understand that a comparable site — Memeorandum — may close a round of financing shortly.
The concept of making users prioritize or create hierarchies for news is not new — Slashdot has been doing it since 1997. But the latest generation of sites like Digg and Memeorandum are showing that user-prioritized news is, indeed, a powerful and easy way to drive traffic — in some cases to a site created by a single employee with a lone server.”
Simulation modeling is one of the four cornerstone areas of interest to the IAJ. It's a relatively new, and largely unknown, field that can be of great advantage to journalists if we can take the time to learn how it works and then how we can apply it to our field. The best resource to date for journalists is the J-Lab, (http://www.j-lab.org/) at the University of Maryland.
But today along comes this announcement of a rich issue of the Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation. It's filled with deep thinking and application.
============================================= The Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation (http://jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk) published issue 4 of Volume 8 on 31 October 2005. JASSS is an electronic, refereed journal devoted to the exploration and understanding of social processes by means of computer simulation. It is freely available, with no subscription. ================= This issue is our largest ever, with 12 peer-reviewed articles, eight of them forming a special section on Epistemological Perspectives, edited by Ulrich Frank and Klaus Troitzsch. If you would like to volunteer as a referee and have published at least one refereed article in the academic literature, you may do so by completing the form at http://www.epress.ac.uk/JASSS/webforms/new_referee.php
How Can Social Networks Ever Become Complex? Modelling the Emergence of Complex Networks from Local Social Exchanges by Josep M. Pujol, Andreas Flache, Jordi Delgado and Ramon Sanguesa <http://jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk/8/4/12.html>
Violence and Revenge in Egalitarian Societies by Stephen Younger <http://jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk/8/4/11.html>
Influence of Local Information on Social Simulations in Small-World Network Models by Chung-Yuan Huang, Chuen-Tsai Sun and Hsun-Cheng Lin <http://jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk/8/4/8.html>
It Pays to Be Popular: a Study of Civilian Assistance and Guerrilla Warfare by Scott Wheeler <http://jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk/8/4/9.html>
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Towards Good Social Science by Scott Moss and Bruce Edmonds <http://jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk/8/4/13.html>
A Framework for Epistemological Perspectives on Simulation by Joerg Becker, Bjoern Niehaves and Karsten Klose <http://jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk/8/4/1.html>
What is the Truth of Simulation? by Alex Schmid < http://jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk/8/4/5.html>
The Logic of the Method of Agent-Based Simulation in the Social Sciences: Empirical and Intentional Adequacy of Computer Programs by Nuno David, Jaime Simao Sichman and Helder Coelho <http://jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk/8/4/2.html>
Validation of Simulation: Patterns in the Social and Natural Sciences by Guenter Kueppers and Johannes Lenhard <http://jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk/8/4/3.html>
Stylised Facts and the Contribution of Simulation to the Economic Analysis of Budgeting by Bernd-O. Heine, Matthias Meyer and Oliver Strangfeld <http://jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk/8/4/4.html>
Does Empirical Embeddedness Matter? Methodological Issues on Agent-Based Models for Analytical Social Science by Riccardo Boero and Flaminio Squazzoni <http://jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk/8/4/6.html>
Caffe Nero: the Evaluation of Social Simulation by Petra Ahrweiler and Nigel Gilbert <http://jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk/8/4/14.html>
==============================
Edmund Chattoe reviews: Routines of Decision Making by Betsch, Tilmann and Haberstroh, Susanne (eds.) <http://jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk/8/4/reviews/chattoe.html>
The new issue can be accessed through the JASSS home page: <http://jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk>.
The next issue will be published at the end of January 2006.
Submissions are welcome: see http://jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk/admin/submit.html
______________________________
Print journalists often ignore audio (and video) content when researching a story. Partially there is the “medium bias” at play (i.e. “Hey, I work in print, so that must be the most important source.”), but that bias also has something to do with the lack of search tools and the difficulty of getting those audio words into a transcript that can flow into text. Still, there is gold in those sight-and-sound files for a reporter who can find them and take the time to extract the ore. The always helpful blog “PI News Link” run by Tamara Thompson posts the following: “A new form of audio files called podcasts, so named because they can be downloaded from the Internet to a portable digital listening device (such as an iPod), are searchable through many search engines. Yahoo has just rolled out their podcast search. A keyword search of “legal” returned Involuntary Manslaughter: A Double Standard?, a broadcast with the editor of Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly. The Podcast Search Service catalogs a more extensive collection of websites with podcasts, searching terms within the site title or description. Pod Spider includes international audio files. Individual podcasts are beginning to be tagged, which will enable the searcher to uncover specific relevant audio files.”
He has posted some handouts at dicar.org/global2005 or
Friday's highlights from the conference in Amsterdam…. Henk van Ess has given two fine training sessions yesterday and this morning. The first: Training 02: Forensic surfing (Thursday 14.00 – 15.15) How can you figure out the reliability of a website – even without opening the site? How do you find the owner of a web site? How can you see how old a page is, even if it doesn't say 'Page last updated at..'? How do you find the author of a Word document? Welcome to the world of forensic surfing. Extra: CD-ROM with the course 'Internet Detective' for all participants. Watch the HTML version at www.searchbistro.com/forensic.htm The second session: Hacking with Google (Friday 9.30 – 10.45)
“People make mistakes. They put sensitive data on servers. They forget to remove delicate material. They leave directories open with hidden files. Learn how to use Google in a different way. The best search techniques for finding secret documents from governments, institutions and companies. Open them with the right questions. Henk van Ess (AD, Netherlands) teaches you what sort of words you have to type, which special syntax you have to use and how you should interpret the answers. Note: this training will teach you how to find material that shouldn't be on the web. It doesn't teach you how to hack into systems.” This presentation can be viewed at www.searchbistro.com/hack.htm There is a companion book – The Google Hacker’s Guide: Understanding and Defending Against the Google Hacker by Johnny Long (johnny@ihackstuff.com) — partial section at www.searchbistro.com/googlehacks.pdf
By Tamara Thompson Investigations
“This bill would require a local elections official to extend this confidentiality of voter registration information to specified public safety officials, upon application, as specified, for a period of no more than two years, if the local elections official is authorized to do so by his or her county board of supervisors. The application of a public safety official would be a public record.”
