Fewer than half of medical clinical trials published in the last year in leading medical journals are reported on the government site ClinicalTrials.gov, according to a new study published by the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA).
According to the study, despite a 2005 requirement by medical journal editors that researchers register their studies online before acceptance in a major journal, just 147 out of 323 articles published in the past year were properly registered before the end of the trial. To meet the requirement, researchers are supposed to state what outcomes they will measure to figure out ...
Continue readingOpen Notebook: Tax Havens
Just a few odds, ends and bits of reporting that didn't make it into this post that relies on data from the Foreign Lobbying Influence Tracker that we collaborated on with our friends from ProPublica:
Numbers: I really hesitated to use the administration's claims of $210 billion in tax revenue raised (there's a fairly good breakdown of which proposals raise what part of the $210 billion in the New York Times here). Tax havens offer secrecy, so even if the government knows how much money they hold (I doubt that it does) it can't determine who ...
Continue readingWhat Gov2.0 Means to Sunlight
Here’s Sunlight answer to the challenge from the folks at Gov2.0 Summit to create a video about what it means... View Article
Continue readingIt’s Our Money—Let’s Go Get It!
Money and power seduce before they corrupt. As evidence I have posted, in its entirety, an email urging VCs and... View Article
Continue readingBush Era Visitor Logs Show Visits from Evangelicals, Conservatives and a Foreign Lobbyist
Downloadable table of all earmark requests
Sunlight has compiled a list of House earmark requests--available here--for fiscal year 2010 which were disclosed this year for the first time under new rules, but scattered across hundreds of Web sites and in nearly unusable formats.
Sunshine.gop.gov, a new House Republican site, houses a machine-readable version of the database, but the site does not allow viewers to obtain all earmarks at a glance, instead forcing them to search for terms or browse a few at a time and making analysis impossible.
By writing a computer program to automatically access the site thousands of times, the ...
Continue readingMSNBC: Obama administration visitor disclosure policy exempts its first eight months
Bill Dedman, and investigative reporter at MSNBC.com, points out some limitations in the new policy announced by the White House today on providing open records:
...only visits after Sept. 15, 2009, will be revealed. The first wave of records is expected to be posted around Dec. 31.snip
...msnbc.com had sought records on all White House visitors. That request, for all visitors since Inauguration Day, still stands, and msnbc.com has filed an administrative appeal with the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees the Secret Service.
The new White House policy says it will consider requests for visitor ...
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USASpendingWatch.net monitors contracts – but are its conclusions meaningful?
Apps for America 2 runner-up USASpendingWatch.net is a visually appealing and ambitious take on the mounds of data on federal contracts at USASpending.gov. It aims to create an online community where readers can flag contracts they deem interesting or suspicious--though because the data provided by the government can be vague and misleading, participants in the best position to spot impropriety might be locals with their boots on the ground.
The site is easy to navigate and chock-full of information, but its designer's greatest obstacle may be one for which he can scarcely be faulted: The data sets being combined--the politics of local leaders and federally awarded, often competitive contracts--belie an incomplete understanding of the United States government; the author, Sven Regel, is German.
Continue readingMore TransparencyCorps
First of all, there's a new TransparencyCorps campaign up today: How Many Votes? We're trying get a database of the win percentages and vote totals for sitting members of Congress, for their last election. We'll be publishing the results in SQLite and CSV form, as usual, and we'll be integrating it into at least Congrelate, and a mysterious upcoming project.
In other awesome news, ThisWeKnow has taken the earmark data that we obtained through TransparencyCorps, and integrated it into their listings of data for cities. For example, check out the earmark requests for Pittsburgh.
Continue readingWhite House Takes Huge Step Toward Transparency
Early this morning, the White House took a huge step toward a more transparent government by announcing a historic new... View Article
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