Alfredo Covaleda,
Bogota, Colombia
Stephen Guerin,
Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA
James A. Trostle,
Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut, USA
The Search Engine Report is yet another valuable tool that serious researchers use as a “heads up” device. It's a monthly newsletter that covers developments in the search engine industry [Industry? Who would have thought it?] and changes to the Search Engine Watch web site, http://searchenginewatch.com/. You can subscribe at http://searchenginewatch.com/sereport/
Griff Palmer, of the San Jose Mercury-News, reminded us today of something called a “DOD-compliant wiper.” (Yeah, yeah. Hold your jokes.) These software utilities are intended to really clean data sets from hard drives. Why do we care? Read this piece, “Hard Disk Risk,” by Simson Garfinkel wherein he does the equivalent of HD dumpster diving.
But here's the related message from Griff Palmer: “Here's a by no means comprehensive list: http://buy.cyberscrub.com/csutility/compare.html I used an evaluation copy of BC Wipe and found it very easy to use. After installation, you can right-click on a file and choose “erase by wiping” from the pop-up menu. It does the ostensibly DOD-compliant wipe on the file and also on the virtual memory. If you're serious about the subject, Peter Gutmann's seminal paper on the topic is worthwhile reading, particularly the caveats about achieving secure deletion from journaling filesystems (which NTFS is, I believe) and RAID systems: http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/secure_del.html If you search for “5220.22-m” and “dod 5200.28-std” you can find information on software that claims to meet the standards. The search will also turn up lots of technical info on the standards, themselves.“
From a story in the San Francisco Chronicle: Does this proposed legislation have implications for what we do? For example, what if your county is licensing tax assessor data to a reseller? Yet another barrier to public access to our data? How about what the good guys at http://www.fecinfo.com/ do, commercially, with the FEC data? Wednesday, April 6, 2005 (SF Chronicle) Another incident for UC By David Lazarus The University of California has suffered yet another potential data breach, this one involving the names and Social Security numbers of about 7, 000 students, faculty and staff at the San Francisco campus. For Sen. Diane Feinstein, D-Calif., enough is enough. She told me Tuesday that she'll introduce federal legislation within the next few days requiring encryption of all data stored for commercial purposes. “What this shows is that there is enormous sloppy handling of personal data,” Feinstein said. This latest incident involving UCSF follows news that UC Berkeley lost control of personal info for nearly 100,000 grad students, alumni and applicants last month when a laptop computer was stolen from an unlocked campus office. It also follows a flurry of other security lapses, including San Francisco's Wells Fargo, the nation's fourth-largest bank, experiencing no fewer than three data breaches due to stolen computers over the past year and a half…. More at http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/04/06/BUGEOC3L5N1.DTL
Matt Ericson, the top-flight map/infographics journalist/designer at The New York Times, produced another fine piece of work Tuesday related to changes in the Roman Catholic world. But what we get in print is superior [click here to see IoP version] to the online version of the cartogram (i.e. proportional map), which illustrates how the church has grown in Latin America, Africa and Asia. The print page positions the RC world c. 1900 right next to the RC population c. 2005. Readers' eyes can quickly shift from one region to the other and see the differences. On the other hand, the online treatment of those graphics, while supplying data for three different eras — 1900, 1978, 2005 — bring up each era individually, making it difficult to compare one to the others. Snazzy presentation, but at a loss of comprehension. Go to NYT story “Third World Represeents a New Factor in Pope's Succession” and click on the right column link for “Interactive: After John Paul II.” Then, after the java window pops up, click on “Changes in Catholics.”
Sometimes the biggest changes in education occur in the smallest ways. See, Correcting racial gaps in education
David Burnham and Susan B. Long, co-directors of the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University have spent many good years tracking the relationship between U.S. government and corporations. They have a new report out today.
“Greetings — New IRS data show far fewer agency audits aimed at large corporations providing investment advice, various kinds of banking and credit services and insurance than to corporations in other businesses. The big disparities — documented in previously undisclosed data obtained and analyzed by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) — concern corporations with $250 million or more in assets. At one extreme are the corporations providing financial services where less than one in five were audited in FY 2002, 2003 and 2004. At the other extreme are the corporations involved in either agriculture, mining and construction, or heavy manufacturing and transportation. Here, 100% were audited.
Considered as a whole, the corporations with $250 million or more in assets are a major force in the economy, controlling 90% of all corporate assets and 87% of all corporate income. Despite their dominant role, however, the new IRS data document that on an overall basis only about one in three were audited.
Other data show that despite recent IRS claims that it is vigorously enforcing the tax laws, the audit rate for all corporations has continued to decline along with the face-to-face audits of wealthy taxpayers.
To see TRAC's IRS press advisory go to http://trac.syr.edu/media/
David Burnham and Susan B. Long, co-directors Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse Syracuse University 488 Newhouse II Syracuse, NY 13244-2100 315-443-3563 trac@syr.edu http://trac.syr.edu
An impressive list of fine work by journalists in 2004. Note the increasing number of stories that employed digital analytic tools. http://www.ire.org/contest/04winners.html
This seems to be National Library Week at the IAJ. But we are especially in sympathy with the concerns raised by Victoria McCargar, associate technology editor at the Los Angeles Times, concerns she writes about in The Sybold Report addressing the issue “Following the Trail of the Disappearing Data.” The piece lays out the very real issues facing not just institutions of journalism but, we believe, the fabric of democracy. Though McCargar is talking about newspapers, her arguments should be applied to ALL journalism institutions. There's no reason — except short-sightedness — that broadcast operations have any less responsibility to maintaining information patrimony. (Well, maybe they do: they long ago dropped having real news operations because, gee, that would cut into shareholder returns.)
Elliott Parker, and the Journet listserv, tips us to a NewScientist.com report…. “Governments and big business like to indulge in media spin, and that means knowing what is being said about them. But finding out is becoming ever more difficult, with thousands of news outlets, websites and blogs to monitor. “Now a British company is about to launch a software program that can automatically gauge the tone of any electronic document. It can tell whether a newspaper article is reporting a political party’s policy in a positive or negative light, for instance, or whether an online review is praising a product or damning it. Welcome to the automation of PR. ” http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn7210&feedId=online-news_rss20)–at Interesting perhaps in its nuance, but hardly new in concept. Here at the IAJ we've long been impressed with the work done at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory around “information visualization.” “Information Visualization is the direct visualization of a representation of selected features or elements of complex multi-dimensional data. Data that can be used to create a visualization includes text, image data, sound, voice, video – and of course, all kinds of numerical data.” See http://www.pnl.gov/infoviz/about.html and http://www.pnl.gov/infoviz/technologies.html
As believers in the RRAW-P process well know, it all good journalism starts with the first “R” – Research. And good research starts with regular tips and pointers from professional researchers, a class to which journalists are usually adopted cousins. That’s why we look forward to Thursdays, when e-mail newsletters come from some of the best in the business.
