Ford Fessenden, of the NYTimes, has yet another strong piece in Thursday's paper, “Health Mystery in New York: Heart Disease.”  The lede lays out the perplexing problem in NYC: “Death rates from heart disease in New York City and its suburbs are
among the highest recorded in the country, and no one quite knows why.”

But among possible answers — and here especially is where the AJ kicks in — is that there is some “…speculation that doctors in the area may lump deaths with more subtle
causes into the heart disease category, making that toll look worse
than it actually is.”  And “…the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, at the health
department's request, has sent specialists to determine whether doctors
in New York City ascribe causes of death substantially differently.”


I know, I know, we're preaching here, but we don't think it can be pointed out too often: journalists and all social scientists cannot simply accept given numbers as a true, valid, honest.  We always have to swim up the data-creation stream to determine where, why and from who came the numbers. 

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.

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.

* 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.”

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/ “

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.