Simile Timeplot

Simile Timeplot is a slick, free widget for "for plotting time series and overlay time-based events over them." Examples at the site include energy prices, housing and stock market trends, immigration and George W. Bush's approval ratings. I haven't tried using it myself, but I have used Simile Timeline, a timeline maker, which uses the same data format, so I'm thinking it's got to be just as worthwhile and just as easy to use.

White House for Sale

Public Citizen's White House for Sale "allows you to follow the money trail of campaign bundlers – or people who funnel money to campaigns – as they collect thousands, and sometimes even millions, of dollars from other people for the 2008 presidential candidates." Left unanswered by the site, however, is whether you can buy it with a subprime mortgage.

“How to Vet an Expert”

The Virtual Chase reprints an article on "How to Vet an Expert":

… the Web harbors a variety of resources and tools that contain potentially valuable information but that many lawyers overlook in researching an expert's background.

Yes, we all now know to check Google, but this article looks at some of the lesser-known – and mostly free – research tools you may be bypassing. Of course, these Web tools are neither foolproof nor exhaustive. No Web site can substitute for using a reputable expert-search service.

NewsTrust: "Your guide to good journalism"

The still developing NewsTrust, "Your guide to good journalism," "rates news sources on their trustworthiness":

NewsTrust is an online social network that aims to help people identify quality journalism - or "news you can trust." Our members rate the news online, based on journalistic quality, rather than popularity or ideology. Our free web site and news feed will feature the best and the worst news of the day, selected from thousands of blogs and mainstream media. Submitted stories and news sources will be carefully researched and rated for accuracy, fairness and originality by non-partisan panels of citizen reviewers, students and practicing journalists. NewsTrust is currently in an early beta stage. We anticipate a full service launch in mid-2007.

This is what the site says about the people behind it:

Fabrice Florin, a former journalist and a digital media pioneer at Apple and Macromedia, is NewsTrust's executive director and founder. Our team includes award-winning journalist and media executive Rory O'Connor and former Lucasfilm product manager David Fox. Our advisors include Dan Gillmor, Howard Rheingold and other digital media innovators from organizations like Google, Harvard and others. Our initiative is rapidly gaining momentum with concerned citizens, educators and journalists, and thousands of volunteers have already signed up for this project.

The Sunlight Foundation gave them a $10,000 grant.

Summary of U.S economic and financial data

This page on FedStats.gov is a continuously updated compilation of the latest economic and financial data for the U.S.

Fired U.S. Attorney document search

Alberto Gonzales has a return engagement before Congress today, so you may want to check out the DOJ Documentation Project's document search, where you can query the contents of more than 9,000 emails, memos and other documents released as part of the Congressional investigation into the firing of U.S. Attorneys:

This is a tool to search text files of the documents released by the DOJ. Each page of each released document has been scanned and turned into a text (.txt) file - there are over 9,000 such files. Some effort has also been made to clean up these files with common OCR errors, but not all of them have been found, as you will see. This is a work in progress and it is not even close to perfect. Most of the released documents were scanned files (i.e. pictures) of the documents. They have been put through an OCR process which is never perfect. Some corrections have been made and more will be made in the future and you can help.

The site doesn't explain its origins or its motives, as far as I can see, but it does link to images of the original documents on government Web sites, so at least the search results can be verified.

"D.C. Madam" phone record lookup

If you or someone you love, respect or want to bring down was in Washington D.C. anytime between August 1994 and August 2006, you may find it hard to resist plugging their phone number into dcphonelist.com. This is a searchable database made from the client phone lists released by Deborah Jeane Palfrey, the alleged "D.C. Madam" who maintains she ran a legitimate escort service, not a prostitution ring. CNN is among many news organizations poring over the records, which have already generated a public apology from Louisiana Senator David Vitter. CNN reports:

What have CNN's researchers found so far, apart from five instances of the apologetic Vitter's number? Quite a lot of doctors, actually, and people in the tech industry. Armchair sociologists will make of that what they will. Lots of lawyers, too, but of course in Washington it sometimes feels like everyone is a lawyer. Others run the gamut from the sports world to college professors.

Federal Contractor Misconduct Database

The non-profit Project on Government Oversight (POGO) has revamped its Federal Contractor Misconduct Database:

The improved database will include a company profile for each of the top 50 federal contractors, as well as contact information and links to their website, ethics page, SEC filings, and political activities. For each instance of misconduct, there is a summary describing the occurrence, as well as links to POGO's sources of information. Additionally, the database features a list of helpful contracting resources, as well as a new, user-friendly sorting mechanism that will allow users to refine their searches by items like contractor name, misconduct type, date, and dollar amount.

Included in the top 50 are GE and Raytheon, which have a presence in Louisville, and Humana, which is based here.

Two Democratic lawmakers argue this is something the government should do itself, instead of leaving it to non-profits.

There are federal government databases that attempt to flag bad contractors, but testimony at a hearing this week showed that "Agencies lack a standard way of entering data on contractor performance, making it hard for them to share information," GovernmentExecutive.com reported. The story said the inspector general for the Homeland Security Department testified that "There are gross inconsistencies in how people put information into these systems. It doesn't appear that there is any discipline or standards on what needs to be put in or what format it needs to be put in."

That's not reassuring to anyone relying on the Excluded Parties List System, which purports to be the federal government's clearinghouse for identifying bad contractors.

Free science search tools

ResourceShelf gives a quick look at what's out there.

Readable Laws

… is "a wiki dedicated to translating legislation into plain English."

You too can rank law schools, just like U.S. News & World Report

Two law professors have released detailed data on law schools on their Web site. They say their goal is "to facilitate rigorous, comprehensive, and transparent empirical analysis of law schools and legal education." The data, from the Official Guide to ABA-Approved Law Schools, includes information on law school faculties, curriculum, enrollment, the ethnicity of students, tuition, living expenses, GPA and LSAT scores, attrition, grants, scholarships and student employment after law school. The data has been available on the American Bar Association's Web site, but the professors, Bill Henderson of Indiana University and Andrew Morriss of the University of Illinois, massaged it to make it easier to analyze. The professors recently wrote a column for The American Lawyer defending U.S. News & World Report's law school rankings.The rankings, which attempt to name the nation's best law schools, are despised by many law school faculty and administrators. So much so that one professor created his own rankings, which purport to be better because they place more emphasis on academics, while another developed The Law School Ranking Game, an attempt to prove the rankings are so arbitrary as to be meaningless. The rankings have spawned critical academic papers, including one that discusses the lengths to which some schools may go to boost their rank. Henderson and Morriss, however, argue that law schools have only themselves to blame:

U.S. News is influential among prospective students at least in part because the magazine does what the law schools don't: give law students easy-to-compare information that sheds light on their long-term employment prospects. Law schools could easily supply that information themselves, but they choose not to. In fact, as the collective head shaking about the rankings has increased, the growth of the large law firm sector—which pay salaries that justify the rapidly escalating cost of legal education—has made the rankings more important.

Our research suggests that prospective students care a great deal about their post–law school employment and bar passage prospects—information that law schools could readily compile and supply. We found that rather than work to provide applicants with the kind of information they say they want and need, law schools tend to report information in a manner that undermines the applicants' ability to engage in meaningful comparative assessments on measures that matter. These practices, which range from puffery to borderline deceit, are all aimed at improving their U.S. News rankings. As a result, even as the rankings have become more important, they have become less reliable.

Hans Rosling: "Unveil the beauty of statistics"

Hans Rosling, one of the founders of Gapminder, delivered an impassioned speech to an OECD forum on statistics recently, encouraging governments to make data more freely available. Gapminder's software, Trendalyzer, was recently acquired by Google. It is a superb tool that lets you compare countries over time by various statistical measures. Rosling, who is Swedish, said the hardest thing about building Gapminder was not getting the money, coming up with ideas, or making the technology work -- it was borrowing databases from tax-funded institutions. Such "database hugging" by public institutions hampers innovation, he said. He told how when he visited the U.S., he brought his American Express card to Wall Street, assuming that at such a citadel of capitalism, he would have to pay to walk the sidewalks. Instead, he could stroll unhindered to the door of the New York Stock Exchange. He said governments need to make data freely available so innovators and entrepreneurs can experiment with it. "When sidewalks are free, why can't we make statistics to be the intellectual sidewalks of human societies? … There's no reason to charge for it."

Participants in the forum, which was in Istanbul, did sign a declaration (PDF) that declared "Official statistics are a key 'public good' that foster the progress of societies."

Search engine for easier international calling

Michele Stuart, a private investigator writing in PI Magazine recommended this search engine for making international calls. This is how the search engine describes itself:

It's one of a kind. An engine based on placing international calls from international locations, not just from the United States as most telephone search engines are programed to do. It gives you the calling code instructions from each of the world's nations to any other nation. In addition this engine allows you to search every on-line telephone directory in the world. (Over 700 directories) Plus it gives you an instant link to all of the embassies of the nation you are calling, the lowest international rates for your call, and a link to that countries voltage for those who are planning on traveling or relocating to that nation. We designed this engine with expatriates in mind, but it will work for anyone.

YouTube entertainment for Perl geeks (others please ignore)

Perl is a programming language that has been compared to "line noise" because it can (but doesn't have to be) written like this: undef $/;open(_,$0);/ \dx([\dA-F]*)/while(<_>);@&=split(//,$1);@/=@&; $".=chr(hex(join("",splice(@&,0,2))))while(@&); eval$”; I have no particular talent for it but have found it invaluable for processing data, parsing text, automating email, generating documents and more. Just the fact that I was amused by this video and am posting it here is a sign I'm suffering from a Perl-induced form of mental illness:

Death knell for the page view?

Nielsen//NetRatings announced yesterday (PDF) they were demoting the page view as a measure of Web traffic. Instead the audience measurement company will base its ratings on average minutes spent on a site and the average number of sessions per visitor. The company said it was doing this because more and more people are watching video online, which doesn't generate page views, and because programming techniques like AJAX refresh content without making readers visit a new page.

Many celebrated the news as the beginning of the end for the page view, a much-abused measure of traffic. As Micro Persuasion's Steve Rubel noted in calling for audits of Web traffic claims, "Everyone tries hard to spin data a certain way to make it seem like they're delivering more qualified eyeballs/ears than their competitors."

Danny Sanchez of Journalistopia said that for newspapers, building user-friendly sites will become more important than designing sites that juice page views with "photo galleries that load new pages for each image, "multi-page stories," and "multi-page photo narratives."

Sanchez also thinks it will encourage newspapers to offer more video and more "engaging interactive features" ("Big Flash features are notorious for not necessarily getting big page view numbers for the large amounts of staff time to produce them. ") And he hopes it will lead to better quality stories ("Getting a reader to go to the end of a long story *may* be more valuable than trying to get them to read lots of three-paragraph stories.")

Not everyone is happy. Some argue it rewards inefficiency. Google's ranking, for example, declines under the new order, while sites like MySpace, which make you click through a lot of pages to get anything done, are rewarded.

"I always hate these corporate pages where you spend half a minute searching for (a) link to find something you want," one person wrote at the Read/WriteWeb, "and now they would get even more credit for it?"

Added Thomas Claburn of InformationWeek: "... it's only a matter of time before unscrupulous Web site operators design their Web pages to delay visitors as a way to make their sites appear more engaging. And there are a variety of possible scenarios by which a user might have multiple browsers, browser windows, and browser tabs open while paying attention to none of them. "

The American Legal Ethics Library

The American Legal Ethics Library "contains both the codes or rules setting standards for the professional conduct of lawyers and commentary on the law governing lawyers, organized on a state by state basis." It's likely of little interest to many Kentucky lawyers, since taking responsibility for keeping the profession clean here is strictly voluntary. Kentucky is also conspicuously absent from the list of states that have contributed narratives on the law of lawyering in their jurisdictions.

Google’s director of research on how to spot bad studies

I'm not going to make any cheap jokes or draw any untoward conclusions (OK, I just did) because Google's director of research, Peter Norvig, cites the "Cartoon Guide to Statistics" as one of seven references in the bibliography for this article about "Warning Signs in Experimental Design and Interpretation." It's a summary of how to spot weak or bogus research.

Lots of data breaches, little theft

The GAO reports (PDF) that "Data Breaches Are Frequent, but Evidence of Resulting Identity Theft is Limited":

The extent to which data breaches have resulted in identity theft is not well known, largely because of the difficulty of determining the source of the data used to commit identity theft. However, available data and interviews with researchers, law enforcement officials, and industry representatives indicated that most breaches have not resulted in detected incidents of identity theft, particularly the unauthorized creation of new accounts. For example, in reviewing the 24 largest breaches reported in the media from January 2000 through June 2005, GAO found that 3 included evidence of resulting fraud on existing accounts and 1 included evidence of unauthorized creation of new accounts. For 18 of the breaches, no clear evidence had been uncovered linking them to identity theft; and for the remaining 2, there was not sufficient information to make a determination.

Mashable: "Mashup Maker Smackdown"

It's much too hard right now to take data and mash it up on the Web. In the last year or so there's been a wave of tools that purport to help, and Mashable gives a quick rundown:

All these tools have one thing in common: they make it easier to do things that only programmers could do until now. Each of them has a quite different approach, which makes this a very diverse set of applications. Will these tools be a foundation for a new breed of easy-made applications that will become a strong presence on the web in a year or two, or will they be merely toys for enthusiasts with too much time on their hands?

Usability expert says write articles, not blog entries

Good writing and good reporting takes time, which is why there's so little of it on blogs, including this one. Usability expert Jakob Nielsen uses some pseudo statistical reasoning to make the case that if you're going to build your reputation online, "Write Articles, Not Blog Postings":

Blog postings will always be commodity content: there's a limit to the value you can provide with a short comment on somebody else's comments. Such postings are good for generating controversy and short-term traffic, and they're definitely easy to write. But they don't build sustainable value. Think of how disappointing it feels when you're searching for something and get directed to short postings in the middle of a debate that occurred years before, and is thus irrelevant.

"Open-Source Journalism: It's a Lot Tougher Than You Think."

So reports Wired:

... I contribute to crowdsourced journalism because I want my work to yield a high "social good" return, and by that metric, overall, the experience has been frustrating. With some of these projects I ended up with nothing to show for the time I put in -- either from being unable to get or enter the data, or from not following through where I probably would have, had there been support. (Support is crucial: if not for my editor's encouragement at a bleak moment, you wouldn't be reading this now.) And in the projects where I did contribute, my work had no visible effect -- because of no follow-up or no publicity, or because what I provided just wasn't very significant. All in all, I likely could have spent the time more productively at home on my own weblog.

How to check your Excel formulas

It's easy to make mistakes in Excel because a formula points to the wrong cells. Mr. Excel shares some tips for auditing them.

Public data links, courtesy of Jon Udell

 Jon Udell, a former InfoWorld writer now working at Microsoft, says he's going to share sources of public data at del.icio.us. He's inviting everyone to share their sources there too using the publicdata tag.

Choose your own route with Google Maps

Google shows how you can use its new map feature that allows you to choose your own route between two points by dragging and dropping. You drag and drop the roads you want to take and Google Maps automatically updates the directions, including the distance traveled and the estimated time the trip will take. I tried it, experimenting with different ways to drive to and from work, and found it difficult to get the route I wanted on tightly packed city streets. I kept missing my mark and my route would wander off in strange ways. It's easier if the route you're planning gives you more room to work, such as a trip from Mountain View, CA, to Kirkland, WA, as demonstrated in the video.

The Sunlight Foundation's "Insanely Useful Websites"

It describes them thusly:

The following sites and resources are “insanely useful Web sites” for government transparency. They provide a broad range of information available to track government and legislative information, campaign contributions and the role of money in politics.

Many of these resources apply the Web 2.0 ethos to sift, share and combine this information in innovative ways – often times by mashing data together from disparate sources to maximize the usability of that information.