Alfredo Covaleda,
Bogota, Colombia
Stephen Guerin,
Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA
James A. Trostle,
Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut, USA
Marylaine Block at Ex Libris: an E-Zine for Librarians and Other Information Junkies. http://marylaine.com/exlibris/ points us to a new and potentially valuable site for “context creation” this week. Though World Public Opinion is rather U.S. centric at the moment, it has promise for including more non-American survey companies and results. Check out:
Scott Hodes, in a recent column on the LLRX site, points us to a potentially helpful Dept. of Justice page listing the chief FOIA officers for federal agencies. That said, he also has some appropriate criticism of some of those appointments.
“FOIA Facts
Chief FOIA Officers Named
By Scott A. Hodes
Published February 15, 2006
Agencies have now named their Chief FOIA Officers pursuant to Executive Order (EO) 13392. This act is the first milestone of the EO which was issued to increase agency FOIA performance on December 14, 2005.
The Chief FOIA Officer is supposed to be “a senior official of such agency (at the Assistant Secretary or equivalent level), to serve as the Chief FOIA Officer of that agency.” Most agencies have complied with this requirement by naming Chief FOIA Officers at that level. However, from the list of Chief FOIA Officers available at the Department of Justice's FOIA website, some agencies have not met this requirement. The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), an agency that has seen the numbers of FOIA requests to it rise dramatically over the years, named its FOIA/PA Branch Chief, Celia Winter to be the Chief FOIA Officer. Ms. Winter is responsible for overseeing the processing of FOIA and Privacy Act requests made to the SEC, a position that I do not believe is considered Assistant Secretary or equivalent level at any other federal agency. Additionally, the Federal Housing Finance Board named Janice A. Kaye, their FOIA Officer, which may not be at the acceptable level.
Furthermore, other agencies have also made questionable appointments. The Environmental and Protection Agency named Linda Travers, an Assistant Manager, Office of Environmental Information. The Department of Agriculture named Peter J. Thomas, a Deputy Assistant Secretary, which is of course one step below an Assistant Secretary. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence named Joseph P. Mullin Jr. an Executive Administrator for the Deputy Director of National Intelligence for Management, a position which is hard to figure out exactly what level it is.
I challenge OMB and the Department of Justice to go back to these agencies and ask them to either provide proof that these appointments are at the required level. If the agencies fail to prove this fact, they should be required to appointment individuals at the proper level.
The reason this is important is that the EO wanted individuals at a certain level for a reason. The reason is that the higher the appointment, the more weight the individual would have in getting results in their delegated responsibilities under the EO (which to summarize, making agency FOIA processes work better). By appointing the individual in charge of the program or deputies, agencies show scorn for the process named in the EO and by implication the FOIA itself.
As this was an EO, there are no remedies for FOIA requesters to challenge these appointments. This, in and of itself, is one more reason that FOIA legislation is needed with stronger oversight of certain agency FOIA practices.
The folks at CCA again point us to a helpful story. Perhaps some concerned group — Enviromental Journalists? — could fire up a web page like this and make it available to any publication that would want to put it on its front web page.
Published Monday, February 20, 2006 by CCAer |
And from the creative mind of M. E. J. Newman comes this interesting collection of cartograms. Newman's work, “Images of the social and economic world,” shows the national, proportional distrubution of AIDS, energy consumption, total national spending on health care, etc. Also, be sure to scroll to the bottom of Newman's page and then click on the World Mapper site link. Interesting stuff to contemplate.
The good folks at Directions Magazine turned up this interesting mapping report. Be sure to drill down into the explanations for the “fuzzy line” and the “blobby” algorithm concepts.
“The algorithm for drawing neighborhoods is the “blobby” algorithm, well known in computer graphics. You can think of each point in a neighborhood as a little magnet, and the neighborhood is the region where the combined attraction of all those magnets is above a certain strength. A single point makes a small circle on the map. The influence of a number of nearby points will combine to make a curved blob. Read more about blobbies:
This is one of the first references I've come across using the concepts of the mathematical idea of “fuzzy logic” applied to geography. Perhaps some readers can point us to similar examples.
The site uses housing post data from craigslist, which includes addresses and neighborhoods, as well as a public poll on the site, to generate address/neighborhood pairs. Open source products (geocoder.us, Python and PostgreSQL) are used to geocode and map the data.
By EditorsWeblog
De Tijd, the Antwerp based daily with Belgium's highest online readership, will be the world's first paper to launch a digital version, for a three month trial period beginning in April 2006. The paper will take the form of a portable electronic device; a paper thin screen the size of a newspaper page. Users will connect to the internet with the device and download their newspaper. Updates will be provided throughout the day. 200 subscribers to the newspaper will be able to take part in this initiative. The paper can be read indoors or outside. Based on an estimated use time of three hours per day, the device's battery would last for a week. The device has a storage capacity of 244 megabytes; the equivalent of a month's worth of newspapers, thirty books and office documents in different formats. E Ink, creators of the electronic ink technology integral to the initiative, are working on developing coloured ink; currently 16 different shades of grey are available. Added video and sound features could take up to 10 years to develop.Readers will be able to write comments and scribble on the paper by using a special marker. Interactive advertising will also be featured. Source: M&C Tech (through the IFRA newsletter)
From WIRED:
02:00 AM Feb, 06, 2006
Click on the aerial view of a cityscape on Google Earth or Microsoft's Live Local, and most of us don't discern much more than a cluttered expanse of buildings and car-lined streets.
But where others see a sprawl of empty rooftops, Colin Fitz-Gerald sees a cornucopia of unused advertising space.
Fitz-Gerald, who runs a roofing business in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, wants to make a business out of posting promotional messages on top of buildings. He's started a company, RoofShout.com, and is looking for roof owners and advertisers to bring his vision to fruition.
“I'm currently launching RoofShout.com with no money, no real experience running a business on the internet, and no real solid business plan,” Fitz-Gerald said. “But I figure there's a lot of blank roofs and a lot of advertising that could go on the roofs.”
So far, the venture has attracted more interest than Fitz-Gerald anticipated. An eBay listing he posted to auction a virtual rooftop ad on his company's homepage garnered hundreds of pageviews, though only three bids. The high bid was $105.
Fitz-Gerald isn't sure how much it will cost to put an ad on a real roof, or exactly how the process will work. He's considering using housewrap, a weather barrier material, as a base and painting ads on top of it. He's also working on a technique to ensure the advertising messages are printed in letters that are clear and large enough to be picked up by aerial mapping sites.
RoofShout isn't the only firm attempting to capitalize on the same virgin ad space. RoofAds, a division of Saber Roofing in Woodside, California, runs a service for posting ads on rooftops that are close to airports and highly visible to airplane passengers. The company is currently marketing to other areas as well.
“We realized with Google Earth and this satellite imagery that it doesn't have to be near airports. It can be anywhere,” said Jay Saber, who owns Saber Roofing. Saber said he can install ads visible from 10,000 feet overhead.
Saber is also working on ads that glow in the dark. He's talking with organizers of the annual Burning Man festival about creating a 1,000-yard-long image of a burning man visible from high in the sky.”
The Canadian Cartographic Association tells us….
Read the press release on GISUser.com.”
Danny Sullivan, a long-time search engine maven, has this to say. (Newspapers? Clueless? Gasp! How can it be?)
Newspapers want search engines to pay over at News.com covers the World Association Of Newspapers planning to challenge the “exploitation of content” by search engines. Apparently search engines are taking newspaper content for free and repacking it up within things like Google News and Yahoo News. A task force to study the isssue is being formed, DMNews reports in Newspaper Group Questions Aggregation of News Content. Reuters also has coverage here.
Hey WAN. Don't like being in search engines? Tell your members to put up a robots.txt file to block the search engines, and they'll be happy to drop them. When they do, then blogs and other news sources can have the traffic the search engines were previously sending to your members.
FYI, I'm trying to finishing a rundown on what the New York Times has been doing recently to gain search engine traffic. Watch for that soon. In the meantime, see this past post about what Marshall Simmonds did for About.com and is now doing for the NYT.
