The guys from The Media Center write:

“We wanted to give you a heads up on a conference we're conducting in
New York, Oct. 5, called We Media. Marketing is about to begin in
earnest, and we're sure our highly verbal communications director,
Gloria Pan, will make us sound much smarter and hipper than we really
are. Some extraordinary people will be joining us. We hope you will
too.

The Oct. 5 program, hosted at The Associated Press headquarters
in New York, will include a series of discussions that will frame the
next phase of participatory communications and the opportunities we see
emerging. Details and online registration are here.

We'd love to see you there, with colleagues, and we hope you can
share this information throughout your organization. We expect about
220 people. And of course, best – we'd love to see you there to
represent your company as a member of The Media Center Network. More
about the Network here.

We're also seeking sponsors to help defray the costs of the
event, so we'd be grateful for any effort you could make to persuade
the right people within your organization to sponsor the conference.
Sponsor details are here.

Regards,

Andrew and Dale

:: The Media Center

:: 11690 Sunrise Valley Drive, Reston, VA 20191 USA

:: o: 703.715.3318 | f: 703.935.1083

The gang at AskSam has posted a searchable file of John Robert's work, at least that released so far.

Check out “the entire text of all 49 published opinions of Judge John G. Roberts on-line in a searchable
database. You can search and browse through the information from your
Web browser.”  Go to http://www.asksam.com/ebooks/johnroberts/

The Published Opinions of Judge John G. Roberts

Free Searchable Version

Search and
analyze the published opinions of Supreme Court nominee, Judge John G Roberts.

On
July 19, 2005, Judge John G. Roberts was nominated by President George
W. Bush to fill the vacancy on the U.S. Supreme Court left by the
retirement of Associate Justice Sandra Day O'Connor. In two years on
the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, Judge
Roberts has helped decide about 120 cases and written 49 published
opinions.”

We recently enjoyed meeting Stuart Kasdin at a Netlogo workshop. 
Stuart spent some years in the Peace Corps, then a decade with the OMB
(Office of Budget Management).  Currently he's working on his
doctorate in Poly Sci at UC-Santa Barbara.

Stuart has also been thinking about “performance measurement,” the
term-of-art used by auditors and managers of government agencies. 
(In the private sector, the term often used is “forensic
accounting.”)  We have generally thought well of performance
measurement, especially as a vocabulary and tool journalists should
know about to better understand and evalutate the performance of
government.  Stuart, however, has thought about this in greater
depth, and from the perspective of someone inside the government. 
His paper, “When Do Results Matter?  Using Budget Systems to
Enhance Program Performance and Agency Management” is worthwhile
reading.


ABSTRACT: “Managing by results” is a widely used public
budgeting approach based on developing performance measures that display the
progress of a program toward its stated objectives.  This paper considers the complex environment of government
budgeting and how to establish budget systems that can successfully encourage
improved performance by managers.  The
paper assesses the limitations in how governments currently apply performance
budgeting and suggests ways that it might be made more effective.  First, performance measures must be individually
tractable and simple, as well as be coherent and revealing in the context of
other program performance targets.  In addition, performance budgeting must distinguish between
program needs based on environmental changes and those based on management
related decisions.  Finally, the
paper argues that multi-task, complex-goal programs
will typically result in low-powered incentives for program managers.  This outcome results because, even apart
from information obstacles, program managers will be rewarded or punished on only
a component of the program, representing a small fraction of the total program
performance when performance measures as increase.  A partial solution is to ensure that the number of policy
instruments is not smaller than the number of targets.”   


Click here to read the Kasdin paper.

Some weeks back we were quite critical
of Newsweek coming out with what we concluded was a bogus index of the
best high schools in the United States.  Such lists or indexes are
not new, of course.  U.S. News & Report has been doing them for years but, according to a piece in the NYTimes “Education Life” supplement, it is the only publication to rank law schools.



Today's story, “The $8.78 Million Maneuver” lays out an interesting tale of how some law schools can juggle their numbers to increase their ranking in the U.S. News' list. 
Such little fiscal slight-of-hands as including the law school's water
bill in the school's total spending.  That, in turn, adds to the
“spending-per-student” factor, which is part of the ranking
index.  Turns out some schools DO add such utility costs, others
not.



Of
course the real question is, exactly how significant is the qualitative
difference between No. 1 Yale and No. 3 Stanford or No. 26,
Illinois.  We suspect it only matters to the alumni.

We have long-enjoyed — and learned from — Chance News, published by
the good folks in the math dept. at some Eastern school in the wilds of
the far, far north.  The current issue has an interesting link to
some paper related to “modeling conflict.”
See:
http://chance.dartmouth.edu/chancewiki/index.php/Rules_of_engagement_-_modelling_conflict

Steve
writes a good column, especially if you're interested in utilities that
make driving our digital beasts just a bit easier or more fun. 
From today's column:

“Maps, Maps, and More Maps

Y'all like maps–that's pretty obvious from all the e-mail I
received after “Maps for Fun and Business” hit your inboxes:
http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,121387,tk,sbx,00.asp

* Google Earth. Tons of you complained that I didn't mention
Google Earth in that newsletter. This one's a stunner–and a time killer. Our
uberboss, Harry McCracken, describes it in detail in his blog, “First
Impressions: Google's Amazing Earth”:
http://blogs.pcworld.com/techlog/archives/000748.html

Unfortunately, you can't have it: The Google folks pulled
the beta. Too many people accessing it, they said. There may still be a way for
you to get it, though. Read through the comments at Harry's follow-up blog:
http://blogs.pcworld.com/techlog/archives/000761.html

You could also try going to a mirror site:
http://find.pcworld.com/48978 

And when you do get a copy, I promise, you'll kill an hour
or more playing with it (which is why this newsletter's being filed late).

* Mapdex. Jeremy Bartley wrote to tell me about Mapdex, a
“GeoGoogle” for map servers. Jeremy is the assistant GIS Coordinator
and Geoinformatics Project Lead of the Kansas Geological Survey at the
University of Kansas (hey, I get paid by the word). He explained that Mapdex
uses roughly 1550 servers, serving 26,000 map services, containing more than
400,000 GIS layers, and covering more than 3,250,000 columns. Check it out:
http://www.mapdex.org

* ESRI Conference. It's too late this year, but mark your
maps for the next “Virtual Woodstock for digital mapmakers from 110
countries around the globe.” It's the ESRI International User Conference
for GIS geeks (meaning “geographic information system”). Here's the
Web site:
http://www.esri.com/uc

Interactive Storytelling, Rethinking
Journalism

Mark 2005 Batten Awards Finalists

“COLLEGE
PARK, Md. – A
national panel of judges has selected five finalists to win the 2005
Batten Awards for Innovations in Journalism,
honoring them for setting new standards for interactive journalism,
advancing creativity in
digital storytelling and recalibrating the role that news organizations play
in their communities….

“'We were impressed again this
year with the range of talents and ideas presented — from a collaboration of
former broadcast professionals from Europe to the transformation of a newsroom
in North Carolina to the wild idea of a lone innovator in Chicago” said Bryan
Monroe, chairman of the
Batten Awards Advisory Board and Knight Ridder assistant vice president/news.
“Prevailing themes were the increasing transparency, accessibility and democratization
of
news.”

“The Batten Awards spotlight the creative use of new information ideas and technologies to involve citizens in
public issues. They are administered by J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive
Journalism at the University of Maryland.”

Check out “Mapping Hacks,” a new book on the O'reilly list by Schuyler Erle, Rich Gibson, Jo Walsh .



“Mapping Hacks is a collection of one hundred simple techniques
available to developers and power users who want to draw digital maps.
You'll learn where to find the best sources of geographic data and then
how to integrate that data into your own creations. With so many
industrial-strength tips and tools, Mapping Hacks effectively takes the sting out of digital mapmaking.”

One
of the insights to the craft that business reporters learn early in the
game is that the key to understanding annual reports is to read the
footnotes and endnotes.  That's where the juicy stuff is.  So
it is, it seems, for educational reporters.



A story in Sunday's St. Paul (Minn.) Pioneer-Press by higher education writer Paul Tosto, “'Home alone' data debatable” points out the importance of reading the footnotes.

“My concerns about the Minnesota Commission on Out-of-School Time
findings surfaced when the report came out June 2. The sweeping nature of one statement, “Minnesota is
home to 950,000 young people and has the highest percentage in the country of
children ages 12 and older alone at home every single afternoon” startled me.
That was going to lead my story.

But when I tried to
trace back the footnote, I
found the Web link that was supposed to provide
the source for the information didn't work. When
I asked for clarity, I was sent information about 10- to 12-year olds, not
teenagers, and the data was from 1997 and involved only 13 states.

I became worried enough about it that day that I didn't write anything
on the report or its release.

I spent the next few weeks on and off asking the
commission's chief of staff for more information, trying
to nail down three key pieces of information the
group was using.

With the first finding, they eventually acknowledged
to me that they did not have data showing Minnesota as the state with
“the highest percentage in the country of
children ages 12 and older alone at home every single afternoon.” Somone had apparently confused information from a couple of
reports.

With the second finding — Minnesota has the
country's highest percentage of 10- to 12-year-olds caring for themselves after
school — I went back to the origins of that data, calculations by the Urban
Institute of data from the 1997 Survey of America's Families.

Minnesota did have the highest percentage of children
reported in self care and it was much higher than the national average the Urban
Institute had calculated. But when I talked to one Urban Institute researcher
who'd worked with the data, she said it was incorrect to say that Minnesota had
the highest in the country since the data involved only 13 states. And surveys
done by Minnesota's Wilder Foundation just a couple of years later showed
percentages of children in self care that were much smaller than the Urban
Institute report.

With the third finding —  “about half” the state's children were not part of a structured after
school activity — I had concerns about the
methodology.

The commission's press release initially cited a
report by one of its researchers a year earlier as the source. When I looked at
that report, I found essentially unscientific discussion groups conducted by the
researcher at nine sites across the state. Only 101 kids participated and the
demographics did not reflect Minnesota's race and ethnicity. When I raised
questions about it, the commission said (despite its press release) that it
didn't base its conclusion on those site visits. But the commission did not
provide any local, scientific data to back it up.”

Very nice work by a reporter who simply asked: “What do we [in this case, they,] know and how do we know it.

We agree, there can be many reasons not to run a map in the IoP
(Ink-on-Paper) version of a newspaper.  And maps are sometimes run
more as a graphic element in the page design than as a tool to tell a
story in a better way.  (Although this seems to happen less as
“design and information consciousness” has percolated through
journalism thanks to organizations like the Society for News Design.)  
Still, if a decision is made to use a map, then that graphic should
add to the readers' understanding of usually complex data.




Last week, the Palm Beach [Florida] Post
carried a map showing the home county of U.S. troops killed in Iraq. 
The problem is, the KIA map shows the number killed without taking into
account the size of the population from which those troops were
recruited.  Is there a better way?  Of course, and the folks in the newsroom trenches had produced one: a map showing
the KIA's relative to the population of the county where the soldiers
were from.  This one, of course, supplies some of the appropriate
context.  The problem was, the editors decided to publish the
traditional-but-misleading map. 



Sigh.

Here is another on the same topic:
* http://www.obleek.com/iraq/index.html