Alfredo Covaleda,
Bogota, Colombia
Stephen Guerin,
Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA
James A. Trostle,
Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut, USA
A recent profile of mathematician-turned-geneticist Philip Green is a good-read introduction to bio-informatics, and bio-informatics just might produce some methodologies journalists can use to validate public records databases.
The article, “Bioinformatics,” is in the quarterly published by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Some highlights:
* Using a detailed computational model, [researchers] found that some kinds of [genetic] mutations occur at constant rates, like the ticking of a clock, which makes them useful for dating evolutionary events. Other kinds of mutations occur at varying rates de-pending on the generation times of the organism. This information in turn makes it much easier to identify parts of the genome that exhibit different patterns of change over time, indicating that the DNA in those regions is subject to selection and therefore playing a functional role. The idea, says Green, is to separate the noise of meaningless changes in DNA so that the signals of consequential changes emerge clearly from the background.” Journalists could look at which elements are changed in a data base and how often as a clue for the importance of the data base and the relative importance of various elements.
* “The main issue [in biology and genomics] is how quantitative we’re going to be able to get,” [Green] says. “Most people will accept the idea that we will know qualitatively how things are interacting with each other. But what you really want is a quantitative result, so that you can change the levels of one component and predict how it will affect the system.”
* “Back then, [says a colleague of Green’s] we wondered if there was a need for mathematics in biology. In the mid-1980s, there weren’t a lot of data. Biology was about analyzing the notes in your lab book. “In the last 20 years, biology has become dominated by huge data sets. Now it’s an exception rather than the rule to publish a paper that does not draw on large databases of biological information. Mathematical analysis has become a funda-mental part of biological research. It has turned out to be of equal importance to experimentation.” Take a look at the article. It suggests some parallels of investigation for analytic journalism.
We're pleased that the PBS program “Frontline” is keeping up the good fight to produce important journalism. And thanks to the Librarian's Index to the Internet for pointing us to: Private Warriors
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/warriors/ Subjects: Government contractors — United States | Public contracts — United States | Private security services | United States — Armed Forces — Management | New this week Created by je – last updated Jul 6, 2005
Be sure to drill down to the section, “Does Privatization Save Money.” A nice example of a reporter asking the right questions.
From the good ol' Librarians' Index to the Internet comes a good site/toolbox for learning and teaching stats. “The Claremont Colleges' “Web Interface for Statistics Education” (WISE) seeks to expand teaching resources offered through Introductory Statistics courses, especially in the social sciences. This project aims to develop an on-line teaching tool to take advantage of the unique hypertextual and presentational benefits of the World Wide Web (WWW). This teaching tool's primary application is as a supplement to traditional teaching materials, addressing specific topics that instructors have difficulty in presenting using traditional classroom technologies. The tool serves to promote self-paced learning and to provide a means for advanced students to review concepts.”
Last week, NOAA predicated a serious hurricane season a'comin' in the Atlantic, which has implications for the entire U.S. East Coast. That's last week's news, but if one lives in California, Mexico, Central America or Japan, then today there's always the possibility of a major shaker. And those are just risks imposed by nature. Modeling these and other hazards of life is the mission of RMS, a fascinating California company demonstrating innovative thinking and analytic tools.
“RMS brings together a unique, multidisciplinary team of experts to create solutions for its clients’ natural hazard and financial risk management challenges. We are the technical leader in our market, with over 100 engineers and scientists devoted to the development of risk models. Of this number, approximately fifty percent hold advanced degrees in their field of expertise.
Our specialists track research among leading experts and academic institutions worldwide, and supplement this knowledge with internal R&D to ensure that our models provide the most complete and accurate quantification of risk.”
Yup — our kind of guys. Examples of the output of these “risk models” can be found here. Of special interest to U.S. journalists are the Catastrophe Risk maps. (They are a bit too small to read in detail, but big enough to get the gist of some of the RMS product.)
We hope to report more next week about RMS, how it does what it does and how there might be some synergy there for analytic journalists.
Here at the IAJ we believe one of the reasons people come to newspapers or broadcast stations is to get the data which, upon analysis, they can turn into information that helps them make decisions. Ergo, the more meaningful data a journalistic institution can provide, the greater value that institution has for a community. A good example arrived today thanks to Tara Calishain, creator of ResearchBuzz. She writes: ** Getcher Cheap Gas Prices on Google Maps <http://www.researchbuzz.org/getcher_cheap_gas_prices_on_google_maps.shtml> “Remember when I was saying that I would love a Gasbuddy / Google Maps mashups that showed cheap gas prices along a trip route? Turns out somebody has already done it — well, sorta. You can specify a state, city (only selected cities are available) and whether you're looking for regular or diesel fuel. Check it out at http://www.ahding.com/cheapgas/ “
The data driving the map is ginned up by GasBuddy.com It's not clear how or why GasBuddy gets its data, but it offers some story potential for journalists and data for news researchers. It has an interesting link to dynamic graphs of gas prices over time.
Surely the promotion department of some news organization could grab onto this tool, tweak it a bit, promote the hell out of it, and drive some traffic to and build loyalty for the organization's web site.
That's the obvious angle, but what if some enterprising journo started to ask some questions of the data underlying the map? What's the range in gas prices in our town/state? (In Albuquerque today, the range was from $2.04 to $2.28.) Are there any demographic or traffic flow match-ups to that price range? How 'bout the variance by brand?
Would readers appreciate this sort of data? We think so, especially if there was an online sign-up and the news provider would deliver the changing price info via e-mail or IM much like Travelocity tells us when airline ticket prices change by TK dollars.
Regional Economic Models Inc. cordially invites you to join us on June 7th for a teleconference regarding Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC). On Friday May 13th Department of Defense released Recommendations to the BRAC commission. We feel that a discussion of BRAC studies and analysis methods would be helpful to a number of communities: Topics to be discussed include: – Demographic effects of active military, reservists, & dependents. – Migration effects of re-alignment or closures. – Dynamic effects of government spending over time. – The Impacts of lost or reduced civilian contracts. – Previous BRAC studies using the REMI model. – Other topics by REMI Guest Speakers. A presentation will be sent out before the call in order to direct and facilitate discussion. There will be two teleconferences taking place on the 7th, one at 10am, one at 4pm EST, hosted by Frederick Treyz and Jonathan Lee. There is no fee for participation, but space is limited. If you are planning on joining us or would like to participate in the discussion please respond to this e-mail, register online at www.remi.com or contact us by phone at (413) 549-1169. We look forward to speaking with you in June! Yours truly, Frederick Treyz, Ph.D. Chief Executive Officer Regional Economic Models, Inc. 306 Lincoln Ave. Amherst, MA 01002 T. 413-549-1169 F. 413-549-1038 Fredtreyz@remi.com www.remi.com
The power of good infographics is that they can greatly aid in the upstream aspects of journalism — providing insight for journalists to understand what's happening with a particular phenomena — and then downstream, to help journalists tell the story and for the audience to understand it. The Digital Revolution has upped the ante far beyond what good ol' Leonardo was using and envisioning. One of the innovators in today's datasphere is Alexander Tsiaras. A recent story in Digital Journal has this to say about Tsiaras's company, Anatomical Travelogue: “Digital Journal — At ideaCity04, one presenter was so overflowing with information that host Moses Znaimer had to enter stage right and patiently sit beside him, a silent reminder to wrap it up. But you couldn’t ask Alexander Tsiaras to gloss over the wonders of the human body, from blood flow to cell mutation.
During his presentation, he showed images from his visualization software company Anatomical Travelogue, whose clients include Nike, Pfizer and Time Inc. Tsiaras and his 25 employees take data from MRI scans, spiral CT scans and other medical imaging technologies, and use them to create scientifically accurate 3D pictures and animations.
In 2003, his book of images of fetal development, From Conception to Birth, sold 150,000 copies and his latest work is Part Two of this fantastic voyage, The Architecture and Design of Man and Woman. For a chapter on sex, Tsiaras even scanned an employee doing the deed with his girlfriend — all in the name of science.”
“Positive Deviance” Has a nice ring to it, don't you think? In fact, the concept has been batted around for 14-plus years and has evolved enough to have its own physical and virtual place in the universe at the Plexus Institute and Tufts University Positive Deviance Initiative. “Positive Deviance … demonstrates that isolated examples of success can be tapped to benefit an entire community or organization. Accomplishing this requires a radical departure from 'benchmarking' and 'best practices' strategies of change….The PD approach builds on successful but 'deviant' (different) practices that are identified from within a community or organization. It is based on the observation that in every group there are certain individuals whose uncommon, but demonstrably successful practices or behaviors enable them to find better solutions than their neighbors or colleagues who have access to exactly the same resources. Its use was pioneered in developing countries and has led to sustainable improvements in seemingly intractable organizational and social issues.”
The approach was originally developed for — and continues to be applied to — health care. But we at the IAJ like it because it is a “transferable concept and social technology,” something that could take root in “deviant” journalism.
We also like the approach because it is an example of how the high-level concepts of complexity studies and Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS) can move from the theoretical to the experimental and on to application state. Again, something that journalism, and expecially journalism educators, should be thinking about.
We have long admired and appreciated the work of Dartmouth Professor J. Laurie Snell and his colleagues at the CHANCE project. (There are some terrific online lectures on all phases of statistics and probability at the Chance Lectures) We received the following recently: In order to give Chance News the chance for a longer life we have changed it to a ChanceWiki. The new url is http://chance.dartmouth.edu/chancewiki/ For the ChanceWiki we are using the software developed for the very successful free Encyclopedia Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ The wiki software makes it easy for anyone to add an item or to make changes in an existing article (hopefully an improvement) in the current Chance News. On the Main Page of the ChanceWiki you will find links to the current Chance news and “How to submit a new article or edit an existing article”. We hope you will try making a contribution. If you have any questions I will be happy to try to answer them. J. Laurie Snell jlsnell@dartmouth.edu
A talented band of coders in St. Petersburg, Russia has put together a nifty simulation modeling application written in Java. Anylogic™ “supports virtually all existing approaches to discrete event and continuous modeling, such as process flow diagrams, system dynamics, agent-based modeling, state charts, equation systems, etc. With this incredibly rich toolset you are not limited with the technology anymore – analyze the problem, identify the best approach, and find the solution!”
The package is relatively affordable, especially if one can qualify for the educational discount. It could make for a handy tool to model and/or illustrate a variety of dynamic aspects in an urban setting — ambulance response time, crowd movement during an anti-war demonstration. Today, too, the roll-out of the LA Times re-designed web site includes an intuitive interactive map of freeway traffic flow — real time — of the greater LA basin. Perhaps some enterprising news organization will figure out a way to tie these maps from SigAlert into the dashboard-mounted GPS navigation devices. Or will SigAlert itself deliver those goods?
