Alfredo Covaleda,
Bogota, Colombia
Stephen Guerin,
Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA
James A. Trostle,
Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut, USA
Late this afternoon, the 20 participants in Ver 1.0 will be gathering at the Inn of the Governors in Santa Fe, NM for the first session of the workshop. The first, set-the-tone speaker is George Duncan, professor of statistics at Carnegie Mellon University. George will be speaking on “Statistical Confidentiality: What Does It Mean for Journalists’ Use of Public Databases?“
We will post George's address as soon as possible, along with those of other participants in coming days.
We are very pleased with high-powered thinkers who are in or coming to Santa Fe to address the major problem of how do we verify the data in public records databases. The proceedings of the workshop will, we hope, be published by the end of the month and also available online.
Some new online resources for understanding, and engaging in, analytic journalism. See the BusinessJournalism.org site for:
A good learning opportunity in the Land of Lakes this summer….
Dear IPUMS Users,
I am pleased to announce the first annual IPUMS Summer Workshop, to be heldin Minneapolis on July 19th-21st. This training session will cover fourmajor databases: IPUMS-USA, IPUMS-International, IPUMS-CPS, and the NorthAtlantic Population Project (NAPP).
For more information, please visithttp://www.pop.umn.edu/training/summer.shtml.
I hope to see some of you in Minneapolis this summer.
Sincerely,
Steven RugglesPrincipal InvestigatorIPUMS Projects
We should have caught this on Friday, but….
Patrick Radden Keefe (The Century Foundation) offers up a good overview of the pros and cons of Social Network Analytis in last Friday's (12 March 2006) edition of The New York Times. In “Can Network Theory Thwart Terrorists?” he says that “the N.S.A. intercepts some 650 million communications worldwide every day.” Well, that's a nice round number, but one so large that we wonder how, for example, to account for basic variables such as the length of call? (You don't suppose the good folks at the N.S.A. have to wait while the “Please wait. A service technician will be with you shortly” messages are being replayed for 18 minutes, do we?)
We think Social Network Analysis is another of those tools in its infancy, but one with (a) great potential and (b) an equally great development curve.
We tend to comment more on analytic methods than news delivery techniques, but today we offer an interesting example of the latter. Ifra, the European-based newspaper training — and R&D — organization, publishes something called newspaper techniques ePaper. It is published IoP (ink-on-paper), but there is also an online version. Check it out at the link below. It is easier to read if you have a tablet PC with a vertical/portrait display mode. (Someday, every screen will have an easy-to-rotate mode, we hope.) Still, the quality of the delivered package here is better than anything we've seen coming out of the North American media or media association efforts.
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.
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)
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.
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:
