This article in the New Republic by Lisbet Rausing takes a look at the future of libraries and knowledge and... View Article
Continue readingThe Transparency Campaign: Who We Are
A few weeks back, we asked members of our community to tell us a little about themselves: What are people... View Article
Continue readingMassa, Maf54 and the Ethics Committee
And now to totally contradict my previous post stating why no one needs to talk about tickle-monster Eric Massa. The... View Article
Continue readingEarmark Season: Republicans up the ante on Democratic for-profit ban
Following the announcement by Rep. David Obey, chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, and Rep. Norm Dicks, incoming chairman of the House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, that members can no longer earmark funs to for profit companies, the House Republicans have adopted a one-year moratorium on earmark requests.
The deadline for House members to submit earmark requests to the Appropriations Committee is March 19.
As of now, neither Senate Democrats or Republicans have announced any changes to their earmarking procedures, so for-profit companies could still receive earmarks and Republican Senators could request earmarks for districts represented by House G.O.P ...
Links after lunch
1) Rep. Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick and a member of her staff are being called before a grand jury in Michigan.... View Article
Continue readingHow a grant grew from $35,000 to almost a million
In 2004, the National Park Service gave the George Wright Society, a Hancock, Mich.-based nonprofit that promotes preservation and understanding of natural and cultural resources, a $35,000 cooperative agreement (a kind of grant in which the recipient will work closely with a federal agency to accomplish a public purpose) to host a pair of conferences. Over five years, that initial cooperative agreement grew in value to more than $800,000, and came to include such projects as coordinating the complex travel arrangements for archaeologists to visit Afghanistan (something the nonprofit has yet to do).
The Inspector General ...
NYT: E-mails Indicate Deepening of Scandal Surrounding Sen. John Ensign
While everyone’s been running around writing about former congresstickler Eric Massa, Eric Lichtblau and Eric Lipton of the New York... View Article
Continue readingIntroducing the Cycle of Transparency
This "Cycle of Transparency" demonstrates, in one image, the specific actions and the variety of actors that need to work together to create the open, transparent government we seek.
Continue readingLinks at Noon
1) Roll Call prints a classic headline: “Earmark Advocates Skeptical of Ban.” Who would have thought that? 2) Bailed-out firms... View Article
Continue readingQuantifying Data Quality
You've already heard me complain about data quality -- how it's a bigger problem than most people realize, and a harder problem than many people hope. But let's not leave it there! Perfect datasets mostly exist in textbooks and computer simulations. We need to figure out what we can do with what we have. In this and other posts, I hope to give the developers in our community some idea of how they can deal with less-than-perfect data.
The first step is to figure out how bad things actually are. To do that, we'll use some simple statistics -- those of you with a strong stat background can skip to the next entry in your RSS reader (or better yet, correct my mistakes in comments).
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