Alfredo Covaleda,
Bogota, Colombia
Stephen Guerin,
Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA
James A. Trostle,
Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut, USA
Today, literally hundreds of square kilometers of Southern California — Los Angeles to San Diego — are burning. Some very alert newspapers and radio stations, though, are using Google Maps and a program called Twitter (www.twitter.com) to update the maps on a regular basis. A good example, I think, of applied tools of analytic journalism.
Southern California fires on Google Maps
We've long been intrigued with Benford's Law and its potential for Analytic Journalism. Today we ran across a new post by Charley Kyd that explains both the Law and presents some clear formulas for its application.
An Excel 97-2003 Tutorial:
by Charley Kyd July, 2007 (Email Comments)
(Follow this link for the Excel 2007 version.)
Unless you're a public accountant, you probably haven't experimented with Benford's Law.
Auditors sometimes use this fascinating statistical insight to uncover fraudulent accounting data. But it might reveal a useful strategy for investing in the stock market. And it might help you to improve the accuracy of your budgets and forecasts.
This article will explain Benford's Law, show you how to calculate it with Excel, and suggest ways that you could put it to good use.
From a hands-on-Excel point of view, the article describes new uses for the SUMPRODUCT function and discusses the use of local and global range names. [Read more…]
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.
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.
Dan Gillmor picks up a story from California's Contra Costa Times about a Republican operative who has been sending phony letters-to-the-editor bashing Demos, more than 200 letters for the past 10 years. According to the CC Times story…. “”Bogus letters have a tremendous effect on the readers,” Times Editorial Page editor Dan Hatfield said. “People need to be able to know that the letters to the editor are real people, writing about real issues. They need to be able to believe what they read in the newspaper. The discovery of false letters makes the reader wonder about the veracity of the opinions on our pages…. “Hatfield said the paper has tightened its policy, but there is no way to screen writers intent on breaking the rules…. “The Times, [San Francisco] Chronicle and [Tri-Valley] Herald have similar letter to the editor verification policies. A writer must provide his or her resident city and phone number. A newspaper employee then calls the writer to verify that they sent it in. “Unfortunately, there is not a fail-safe way that I have found. No matter how elaborate the system one designs, there is always some knucklehead out there who wants to ruin it for everyone by proving that he or she can beat it.” Maybe not a “fail-safe” way to stop this Astro-turfing, but stronger controls would be possible if an organization like the American Press Institute or Newspaper Association of American would create an online data base that all newspapers could have access to. The calling-to-check approach is pretty standard in the business. Each letters editor could enter the pertinent info on the writers they decide to publish into the data base. It wouldn't take much programming to do some automated data mining on phone numbers and/or cities or addresses or spelling patterns of names for flags to be raised. Sure, someone could always have a couple phone numbers and even a couple mailing addresses. But 200?
As to text analysis that could be applied to the language of the letters-to-the-editors, see the IAJ link lower right to Don Foster's book, Author Unknown.
“Will Yancey, a Dallas accountant who specializes in litigation support, started compiling bookmarks of his favorite sites in 1995. Today, his site offers users links to other portals as well as to legal and political directories.” http://www.willyancey.com/forensic.htm “Portals for Prying”, by Jennifer Saranow, The Wall Street Journal, Technology Report, September 15, 2003, page R6.
