Alfredo Covaleda,
Bogota, Colombia
Stephen Guerin,
Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA
James A. Trostle,
Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut, USA
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
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.
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:
By Tamara Thompson Investigations
The LLRX newsletter reports:
Old and New
THOMAS, the legislative Web site from the Library of Congress, has received its second facelift in the space of a year. (For information on the previous set of tweaks, see my January 2005 column THOMAS: New Congress, A Few Changes.) The latest redesign, announced in a November 2005 press release, does not add much substantial content or functionality but gives THOMAS an updated look similar to the main Library of Congress web site and a consistent site-wide navigation scheme that certainly was needed.
[click to enlarge]
The current THOMAS website.
Gerry Lanosga, an investigative producer at WTHR-TV in Indianapolis, was kind enough to send along this link — http://www.cs.indiana.edu/~markane/i590/contributors.html to a nifty first shot at merging GoogleMaps with The Fundrace Project., that site that shows you who in any ZIP Code made contributions to which politicians. Matthew Kane, a CS student at the Univ. of Indiana, put this together, and it's a fine beginning. Be alert, however, that the Fundrace data is not always correct. For example, we know a guy named John T. Johnson, who lives in ZIP 87505, fairly well. The Fundrace Project says he is an airline pilot who works for UPS. We know for sure that is not the case.
The drill-down on Kane's Following the Dollars doesn't give the degree of detail that the Fundrace Project does itself, but keep on truckin', Mr. Kane. We need all of these utilities we can get.
We don't know if there has as yet been any empirical research done on how interested media consumers are in online crime mapping — and how good the coverage is — but there is a body of literature debating readers' interest in crime per se. It would seem to be a pretty good bet, though, that if people are interested in crime AND if more and more are going online via broadband, that some dynamic crime maps would get some hits.
Remember that crime mapping is not just about pushing digital push-pins on a map, GoogleMap or otherwise. “Journey to Crime” maps or maps showing where a car was stolen and when it was recovered can provide interesting insights.
Here are some links recently posted to the CrimeMapping listserv that could be of value to journalists:
Journey-after-crime: How Far and to Which Direction DO They Go? http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/nij/maps/boston2004/papers/Lu.ppt
Linking Offender Residence Probability Surfaces to a Specific Incident Location http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/nij/maps/dallas2001/Gore.doc
Journey to Crime Estimation http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/CRIMESTAT/files/CrimeStatChapter.10.pdf
Applications for Examining the Journey-to-Crime Using Incident-Based Offender Residence Probability Surfaces http://pqx.sagepub.com/cgi/content/refs/7/4/457
The Geography of Transit Crime: http://www.uctc.net/papers/550.pdf
See, too: Paulsen, Derek J. “WRONG SIDE OF THE TRACKS: EXPLORING THE ROLE OF NEWSPAPER COVERAGE OF HOMICIDE IN SOCIALLY CONSTRUCTING DANGEROUS PLACES.” Journal of Criminal Justice and Popular Culture, 9(3) (2002) 113-127
Sometimes journalists have a tendency to be too literal. We want to ask a question and we want the response to be a quote that is without ambiguity. One that's fills in some of the space between our anecdotes. But other times, we need tools that work like a periscope, a device that allows us to not look at the object directly but through a helpful lens. Such periscopes for analyzing the economy are indirect indicators. Monday's (5 Dec. 2005) NYTimes' Business Section was loaded with references to such indicators that journos could keep in mind when looking for devices to show and explain what's happening. Check out “What's Ahead: Blue Skies, or More Forecasts of Them?” Be sure to click on the link “Graphic: Indicators From Everyday Life“ Another indirector was mentined Sunday on National Public Radio in “Economic Signs Remain Strong“ There, an economist said he tracks changes in the “titanium dioxide” data, the compound is used in all white paint and reflects manufacturing production.
