Alfredo Covaleda,
Bogota, Colombia
Stephen Guerin,
Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA
James A. Trostle,
Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut, USA
Yet another fine example of creative thinking wherein a good idea in one discipline is morphed into an unintended application in another. (Something all-too-rare in the practice of journalism.) The journal Nature reports:
The website wheresgeorge.com invites its users to enter the serial numbers of their US dollar bills and track them across America and beyond. Why? “For fun and because it had not been done yet”, they say. But the dataset accumulated since December 1998 has provided the ideal raw material to test the mathematical laws underlying human travel, and that has important implications for the epidemiology of infectious diseases. Analysis of the trajectories of over half a million dollar bills shows that human dispersal is described by a 'two-parameter continuous-time random walk' model: our travel habits conform to a type of random proliferation known as 'superdiffusion'. And with that much established, it should soon be possible to develop a new class of models to account for the spread of human disease.
D. Brockmann, L. Hufnagel and T. Geisel
We missed this one when it was originally posted on the National Public Radio site, but the story offers such interesting info and links, we wanted to get it into the IAJ archive. The NPR links at the top are of value, but be sure to scroll down to see other fascinating mashups from around the world.Jan 12, 2006
A Google Maps mashup of brew pubs and breweries around Wilwaukee, Wis. Beer Mapping Project
See Google Maps “mashups” of public radio stations and their coverage areas in the top 10 markets:
Public radio stations in the San Francisco market. NPR
All Things Considered, January 12, 2006 · Google's popular mapping service has inspired people to add their own information to maps. The resulting “mashups” are maps overlaid with clickable icons that provide a unique look at fast-food restaurant locations, crime statistics and other data sets.
Robert Siegel talks to Mike Pegg, whose Google Maps Mania Web log tracks the latest mashups, by category.
Topics include transit (Boston subway stations), current events (BBC world news), and weather and Earth (meteor impact sites).
Some are clearly designed to be useful for everyday life: New York pizza places, Washington, D.C., home prices, and Chicago crime locations. Others are more for fun: find the nearest pub or brewery, peek in on Webcams, or look for a convenient jogging route.
“One of my favorites is a mashup in Dublin, Ireland, which takes the real-time locations of a commuter train and plots it onto the map, and it actually shows that train moving,” Pegg says.
Another popular mashup lets users see where they would end up if they drilled through the Earth to the other side. For example, click on Wichita, Kan., and you come out in the middle of the Indian Ocean.
“I think we're destined to see big things from this, both as the maps improve and as people's imaginations just continue to go wild with this,” Pegg says.
From the Nieman Watchdog.org posting….
A fed-up Berkeley economics professor joins up with the J-school to teach journalists and would-be journalists how to cover – and even more emphatically, how not to cover – economic news.
By Dan Froomkinfroomkin@niemanwatchdog.org
Brad DeLong – the Berkeley economics professor whose popular blog includes more than a bit of media criticism – launched a fascinating experiment last week: He joined forces with Journalism School Professor Susan Rasky to teach a class for would-be journalists called “Covering the Economy.”
In DeLong’s hands, the class might be better titled “How Not to Cover the Economy.” As DeLong writes in the syllabus, he took up the challenge “because he is being gradually driven insane by stories in major newspapers and other outlets.”
DeLong, who was a senior Treasury Department official in the Clinton administration, has long been the scourge of sloppy economic reporting in his blog. He’s also been a contributor to NiemanWatchdog.org.
And although his official audience is made up of Berkeley students, anyone who covers the economy would be well advised to follow along online. In fact Rasky says several established Bay-area journalists have already asked for – and received – permission to sit in.
The syllabus, reading list and what DeLong calls “after-action reports” will be available on the class’s Web site. And DeLong will be providing regular updates to NiemanWatchdog.org as well.
DeLong and Rasky write in their syllabus:
We both start with this premise: Nobody goes into journalism to write bad stories that mislead their readers and omit or downplay the important news of the events that they are covering. Journalists, especially daily journalists have a very difficult job. They are under ferocious deadline pressure. They are beat reporters–which means that they cannot afford to alienate their sources too far, for they have to go back to them again and again. They are dealing with complicated and subtle issues. And at least half the people they talk to are telling them subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) lies. So what has gone wrong? And how can journalists–and those among their sources who are interested in public education and in raising the level of the debate–make things go right?”
We both start with this premise: Nobody goes into journalism to write bad stories that mislead their readers and omit or downplay the important news of the events that they are covering. Journalists, especially daily journalists have a very difficult job. They are under ferocious deadline pressure. They are beat reporters–which means that they cannot afford to alienate their sources too far, for they have to go back to them again and again. They are dealing with complicated and subtle issues. And at least half the people they talk to are telling them subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) lies.
So what has gone wrong? And how can journalists–and those among their sources who are interested in public education and in raising the level of the debate–make things go right?”
Among DeLong’s horror stories: This November 4, 2005 New York Times story: “Senate Passes Budget With Benefit Cuts and Oil Drilling,” By Robert Pear with Carl Hulse.
The first paragraph:
The Senate on Thursday narrowly approved a sweeping five-year plan to trim a variety of federal benefit programs and to allow drilling for oil and natural gas in a wilderness area of Alaska, increasing the chances that the energy industry and Alaska officials will achieve a long-sought goal. The budget bill, the most ambitious effort to curb federal spending in eight years, was approved by a vote of 52 to 47. Five Republicans opposed the measure; two Democrats voted for it. Senator Judd Gregg, Republican of New Hampshire, the chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, said, “This bill is a reflection of the Republican Congress's commitment to pursue a path of fiscal responsibility.” It will, Mr. Gregg said, reduce the deficit and save roughly $35 billion over the next five years…”
DeLong explains why it’s a horror:
The Federal government currently spends money at the rate of $2.6 trillion a year. Total incomes in the entire American economy are about $12 trillion a year. Saving $35 billion over five years means that you are saving $7 billion a year–0.3% of federal spending; 0.06% of GDP. Out of a federal budget that spends $9,000 per person per year, Judd Gregg is saving $27 a year. Thus reading a lead like that makes Brad DeLong, at least, foam at the mouth: phrases like “sweeping,” “ambitious,” “commitment,” and “fiscal responsibility” simply have no place here–especially since [the author] does not give his readers any of the numbers needed as reference points to assess the magnitude of the Senate's action.
The Federal government currently spends money at the rate of $2.6 trillion a year. Total incomes in the entire American economy are about $12 trillion a year. Saving $35 billion over five years means that you are saving $7 billion a year–0.3% of federal spending; 0.06% of GDP. Out of a federal budget that spends $9,000 per person per year, Judd Gregg is saving $27 a year.
Thus reading a lead like that makes Brad DeLong, at least, foam at the mouth: phrases like “sweeping,” “ambitious,” “commitment,” and “fiscal responsibility” simply have no place here–especially since [the author] does not give his readers any of the numbers needed as reference points to assess the magnitude of the Senate's action.
DeLong argues that there were three responsible ways to report this story: By writing that Judd Gregg had labored mightily and brought forth a mouse; by noting that the Republicans were so eager to be associated with “deficit reduction” that they were only announcing the spending side of their budget proposal – and delaying the announcement of the tax side (which, it turned out, would more than offset their spending cuts); or by writing about the institutional factors that make it so hard to cut the budget these days.
Rasky says she is thrilled that DeLong is joining her. And she credits a grant from the Carnegie-Knight Initiative on the Future of Journalism Education (described here by Katharine Q. Seelye in the May 26, 2005, New York Times), which calls in part for improving subject-matter education for journalists by having journalism school classes team-taught by experts from throughout the university.
The first six weeks of the class will be spent “looking at how the bread-and-butter economic news is covered and how it should be covered… During the next six weeks, we will focus more closely on four or five big economic trends,” the syllabus promises.
Following that, if there’s time, DeLong hopes to “examine the work done by some extremely good and skilled practitioners of journalism” such as William Greider, John M. Berry, Greg Ip, Paul Blustein, Julie Rovner, and Rebecca Smith.
Another reason to use Firefox….Copying and pasting data from online tables into a spreadsheet is often fraught with frustration, often centering around invisible characters or custom formatting in web tables. And then there's the problem of getting data from non-adjacent cells. Some fine fellow — actually, it is Davide Ficano — has written a slick extension for Firefox to minimize these, um, challenges. See:
Table2Clipboard 0.0.1, by Davide Ficano, released on January 13, 2006
More Previews»
Friend-of-IAJ Griff Palmer alerts us to an impressive series this week that examines the conduct of the DA's office in Santa Clara County, California. If nothing else, the series illustrates why good, vital-to-the-community journalism takes time and is expensive. Rick Tulsky, Griff and other colleagues spent three years — not not three days, but YEARS — on the story. Griff writes:
Three-Day Serieshttp://www.charlotte.com/mld/charlotte/news/special_packages/foreclosure/summary stolen from (http://www.thescoop.org/)Charlotte Mortgage ForeclosuresPosted by Derek on January 18th, 2006. Filed under Fed Data, Mapping. Lisa Hammersly Munn, Binyamin Appelbaum and Ted Mellnik of theCharlotte Observer have a three-part series on mortgage foreclosures,finding that home loan failures have more than quadrupled in MecklenburgCounty since 1999. More foreclosures are filed here, per person, than anyother county in the state. On average, 11 Mecklenburg houses are sold inforeclosure auctions every business day. The owners are evicted, theircredit ruined, and they face thousands in court fees and moving expenses. Included with the series is an interactive map of Mecklenburg Countyforeclosures and a sidebar reporting that local loans from the FederalHousing Administration are failing at almost twice the national rate.
Posted on Thu, Jan. 19, 2006 Feds dispute mine safety report By SETH BORENSTEIN and LINDA J. JOHNSON Knight Ridder Newspapers http://www.montereyherald.com/mld/montereyherald/news/nation/13661497.htm WASHINGTON – Federal mine safety officials on Wednesday disputed a Knight Ridder analysis showing a dramatic reduction in the dollar amount of large fines for mine safety violations during the Bush administration, saying in an Internet posting that those fines are actually up. Mine Safety and Health Administration spokesman Dirk Fillpot said that Knight Ridder made “assumptions that were incorrect'' in its Jan. 6 analysis. But when Knight Ridder conducted a new analysis in the manner suggested by Fillpot using MSHA's newest database, it showed the same dramatic drop. The newest data show a 43 percent reduction in proposed median major fines from the last five years of the Clinton administration when compared with the first five years of the Bush administration. That's the same percentage reduction found in Knight Ridder's original analysis, using a smaller, online database of MSHA violations. When asked about that drop and the analysis, Fillpot refused Wednesday to answer 11 specific questions about MSHA's fines, its analysis or the posting of its critique. Instead Fillpot repeated a prepared statement that said “it is unfortunate that Knight Ridder's analysis of MSHA's penalties was inaccurate.'' But four statistical experts who looked at the databases and analyses said Knight Ridder's findings were accurate and that MSHA's assessment didn't contradict the newspaper's findings of smaller fines during the Bush administration. “It's really wrong for them (MSHA) to say you're incorrect,'' said John Grego, a professor of statistics at the University of South Carolina in Columbia. “There's no question that the average/median proposed penalty has gone down.” MSHA's response “is looking at two different things and making a statement as if they are looking at the same thing,'' said Jeff Porter, a database library director for Investigative Reporters and Editors Inc., an association of journalists. Porter also teaches data analysis at the University of Missouri School of Journalism. On its Web site, MSHA said the size of the final assessments — which are lower after bargaining and appeals — are up by “nearly 38 percent.'' Knight Ridder looked only at proposed fines because some of the actual fines are determined not by MSHA, but by administrative judges when mining companies appeal those penalties. Further, Knight Ridder found that fines finally assessed and paid fines are still lower on average in the Bush administration. Fillpot wouldn't explain how his agency came up with the 38 percent figure. The statistical experts said they couldn't understand how MSHA figured that out. Fillpot said “that information is taken from actual MSHA enforcement records and is accurate.'' He refused to elaborate. In an unusual posting on the Internet on the Martin Luther King Jr. Day holiday on Monday, MSHA said, “Knight-Ridder's numbers are inaccurate, obscuring the reality that penalties issued by MSHA have gone up during this Administration — not down.'' After Knight Ridder questioned the posting, it was taken down Tuesday afternoon. It went back up Wednesday morning. Among fines of $10,000 or more, the median penalty levied in the past five years was $27,139. During the last five years of the Clinton administration, the comparable fine was $47,913, according to Knight Ridder's analysis of the newest data from MSHA. That data, which included 221 large fines that weren't in the publicly available database used by Knight Ridder for its initial analysis, show that the total number of large fines increased to 527 in the Bush administration from 461 during the last five Clinton years. Fillpot declined to say where those extra fines came from or why they weren't in the online database.| (Johnson reports for Lexington Herald-Leader.)
From the Librarians' Internet Index “AP News and Google Maps Mashup This mashup plots selected current Associated Press (AP) news stories superimposed on a Google map or satellite image of the United States. It includes national news, sports, business, technology, and “strange” stories. Clicking on a marker provides a synopsis with a link to the full story as hosted on the site for the San Francisco Chronicle. From a software developer with a degree in computer science. URL: http://81nassau.com/apnews/ LII Item: http://lii.org/cs/lii/view/item/20125″
From CCA:
http://sedac.ciesin.columbia.edu/
Socioeconomic Data and Applications Centre, or SEDAC, is a branch of NASA that offers geospatial on human interactions with the environment. World datasets that are available for download include population and urban development and wilderness areas. Other data focus on a specific area of the world. Most of the datasets seem to be in some sort of grid or e00 format. Some of the sites also offer maps of the data.http://sedac.ciesin.columbia.edu/ SEDAC Projects are designed to help users synthesize and apply earth science and socioeconomic data and information in their research, educational activities, analysis and decision making. These projects include data products and applications that address various types of interdisciplinary data integration.”
