Death and Taxes: A Visual Guide to Where Your Federal Tax Dollars Go

The Budget Graph is the home of "A Visual Guide to Your Federal Taxes":

"Death and Taxes" is a large representational graph of the federal budget. It contains over 400 programs and departments and almost every program that receives over 200 million dollars annually. The data is straight from the president's 2008 budget request and will be debated, amended, and approved by Congress to begin the fiscal year. All of the item circles are proportional in size to their spending totals and the percentage change from 2007 is included to spot trends and disproportion.

This is the second year for this graphic, which you can purchase as a poster or view online.

Regret The Error Book

Regret the Error is a book by the creator of a Web site of the same name. Both chronicle mistakes made by journalists:

On display are all types of media inaccuracy—from “fuzzy math” to “obiticide” (printing the obituary of a person very much alive and well) to complete and utter ethical lapses.

While some of the errors can be laugh-out-loud funny, the book contains a sobering journey through the history of media mistakes (including the outrageous hoaxes that dominated newspapers during the circulation wars of the 19th-century) and a serious muckraking investigation of contemporary journalism’s lack of accountability to the public. It shines a spotlight on the media’s carelessness and the sometimes tragic and calamitous consequences of weak or non-existent fact checking.

The “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks

This is a "funny" blog.

Brijit, the magazine summarizer and rater

As introduced by The Washington Post:

The magazines stack up, unread, on your coffee table: the New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, Sports Illustrated, Vanity Fair. You subscribe to them but don't have time to read them. So there they sit, a glossy pile of guilt.

Where you see wasted money, Jeremy Brosowsky saw a business opportunity.

The Washington publishing entrepreneur recently rolled out Brijit, a Web site that creates 100-word abstracts of articles from dozens of magazines and rates them. Brijit, Brosowsky said, aims to be "everyone's best-read friend."

Now on Brijit are summations of articles in current issues of GQ, Wired, Mother Jones, ESPN the Magazine, the Economist, Smithsonian and more than 50 other magazines. Even if you never read the entire article, just scanning Brijit could make you the smartest person at your next cocktail party.

Now if only an entrepreneur will attend cocktail parties for me.

ClearForest Gnosis

… is a plug-in for Firefox that proclaims itself "the cutting edge of real time semantic processing for the web":

"By evaluating the pages you read – as you read them – Gnosis immediately locates key information such as people, organizations, companies, products and geographies hidden within the text.

By simply hovering over any of the identified topics, you can immediately locate relevant news, blog entries, maps, company information and Wikipedia entries. …

Currently, Gnosis automatically processes pages from CNN, Google Finance, Wikipedia, Forbes, the International Herald Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, MSNBC, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, the Washington Post, Yahoo News, BBC News and Wikipedia."

Listphile

"… is a free website that enables anyone to create collaborative lists, atlases, databases and more. Lists can be broad and ambitious (like a List of All Baseball Players Who Played in the Majors) or niche (Punk Bands from the Lower East Side, 1975-1980), or quirky or ridiculous. You can collaborate with other people to share, create, and make something that will benefit humanity."

An introductory video describes it as a "multimedia database." As of this writing, lists featured on the home page include T206 White Border Baseball Cards, a World Shark Attack Database, a compendium of Yoda quotes from Star Wars with video clips and the greatest divas of all time. There's also a blog for the site.

Coding Horror: How To Achieve Ultimate Blog Success In One Easy Step

The Coding Horror is one of my favorite geek blogs. I marvel at how well and how often the author writes about technical minutia in a consistently compelling way. Now he's written a post on how he went from being a nobody to a somebody who claims 100,000 readers a day:

... success takes time-- a lot of time. I'd say a year at minimum. That's the element that weeds out so many impatient people. I wrote this blog for a year in utter obscurity, but I kept at it because I enjoyed it. I made a commitment to myself, under the banner of personal development, and I planned to meet that goal. My schedule was six posts per week, and I kept jabbing, kept shipping, kept firing. Not every post was that great, but I invested a reasonable effort in each one. Every time I wrote, I got a little better at writing. Every time I wrote, I learned a little more about the topic, how to research topics effectively, where the best sources of information were. Every time I wrote, I was slightly more plugged in to the rich software development community all around me. Every time I wrote, I'd get a morsel of feedback or comments that I kept rolling up into future posts. Every time I wrote, I tried to write something just the tiniest bit better than I did last time.

National Personnel Records Center Opens more than Six Million New Military Personnel Files

From a press release:

The National Personnel Records Center (NPRC) will open for the first time all of the individual Official Military Personnel Files (OMPFs) of Army, Army Air Corps, Army Air Forces, Navy, Marine Corps and Coast Guard military personnel who served and were discharged, retired or died while in the service, prior to 1946. Collectively, these files comprise more than six million records. This is the second step in the progressive opening of the entire paper and microfiche OMPF collection of over 57 million individual files. Additional military personnel records will be made available to the public each year through 2067 until the entire collection is opened.

These archived files are treasured by family members, historians, researchers, and genealogists. Contained in a typical OMPF are documents outlining all elements of military service, including assignments, evaluations, awards and decorations, education and training, demographic information, some medical information and documented disciplinary actions. Some records also contain photographs of the individual and official correspondence concerning military service.

The press release includes information on how to obtain the records.

Law.com: MySpace Is a Treasure Chest for Cases

... the article begins:

At Malbrough & Lirette in Houma, La., a secretary browses MySpace and Facebook Web sites each day.

She's not checking the online social networking sites for personal reasons; she is performing one of her job duties.

"It's an everyday occasion," said Joan Malbrough, a partner at the three-attorney firm, which handles family law, personal injury and corporate law matters. "Every new client we do a MySpace and Facebook search on to see if they or their spouse have any useful information."

In one case, Malbrough said she helped secure shared custody for the father after finding his wife had posted sexually explicit comments on her boyfriend's MySpace page. In another case, a husband's credibility was questioned because, on his MySpace page, he said he was single and looking.

Lawyers in civil and criminal cases are increasingly finding that social networking sites can contain treasure chests of information for their cases. Armed with printouts from sites such as Facebook and MySpace, attorneys have used pictures, comments and connections from these sites as powerful evidence in the courtroom.

Southern California fire maps

Ah, the Santa Ana winds, I remember them well from my California childhood, when I had to lean my skinny body hard into the blast and fight just to inch my way down the sidewalk. I also remember all too well when my pre-teen self threw a match into the dry grass behind our San Clemente neighborhood and watched in horror as the flames took off. Fortunately the winds weren't blowing at the time, and my friends and I managed to stamp out the fire with our sneakers before it burned out of control. The latest fires are not only generating memories for a new generation of California children, they're also a near-perfect Google mapping opportunity.

Passion Pulse

Passion Pulse is an Australian TV station's slick variation of the standard -- and highly unscientific -- reader "poll" that purports to gauge the mood of the public by surveying only those who waste their time responding to such questions.

Each day during the election, we will be asking our audience to react to a choice quote from a politician, commentator or newsmaker. Voters react using a slider to indicate whether they strongly agree or disagree with the statement, or if they care at all. We then tally this information along with some basic demographic information about each voter.

From the results page, you will be able to learn not just what the country thinks, but what people with certain voting intentions think, how the sexes differ, and even how voters from within your own state or electorate are reacting.

The "mountain" graphic at the top of the page shows the overall size of the response to each daily quote, indicating the general interest or passion a topic is generating.

Information R/evolution

Free Excel Training Course at The Reporters' Cookbook

The Reporters' Cookbook is a still nascent wiki where reporters and fellow-travelers can "share code, examples, tutorials and other bits of information related to the practice of journalism, especially computer-assisted reporting." Yours truly is an administrator, although my most recent contribution was to write a script to battle an infusion of Chinese-language spam. Christopher Schnaars of The Morning Call has just contributed a free Excel training course, which can be found on The Cookbook's Excel page. There's a link there to download the course, which includes handouts and data sets for training others or yourself on how to use Excel. Schnaars is also writing a tutorial on using ASP.NET to put databases on the Web.

MediaShift Idea Lab

 

The MediaShift Idea Lab "is a group blog by innovators who are reinventing community news for the Digital Age":

Each author won a grant in the Knight News Challenge to help fund a startup idea or to blog on a topic related to reshaping community news. The authors will use Idea Lab to explain their projects, share intelligence and interact with the new-media community online.

Their bios are here.

Expert Witness Research

The Virtual Chase now has a page listing sites lawyers can use to research expert witnesses. These happen to be the kind of people journalists want to talk to, too.

Bootstrapper » 101 Little Hacks to Help You Get Your Work Finished More Quickly

... tips for handling email, using keyboard shortcuts, setting priorities, using Word, Outlook, Excel, Firefox and more.

Comcast Cable Law Enforcement Handbook

A reader passed along this link (PDF) to a copy of the Comcast Cable Law Enforcement Handbook posted on the Federation of American Scientists' Web site. The reader wrote that it's a good read "If you have ever wondered what type of info a cable tv company retains on you, how long it is kept and who can get it."

Get My FBI File

... is a Web site that promises to help you do just that.

This web site helps you generate the letters you need to send to the FBI to get a copy of your own FBI file. We can help you get your files from other "three-letter agencies" (CIA, NSA, DIA, ...) too. It's quick, it's easy, and best of all, it's free!

There's a companion site called Get Grandpa's FBI File. Here's their frequently asked questions page.

Federal Grand Jury Handbook

… is here (PDF):

"This Handbook will acquaint persons who have been selected to serve on a federal grand jury with the general nature and importance of their role as grand jurors. … Grand jurors are encouraged to refer to this Handbook periodically throughout their service to reacquaint themselves with their duties and responsibilities."

Mapping Phone Data in Four Easy Steps

... as explained by Juice Analytics:

Have you run into this problem: you have a list of phone numbers and associated values which would be best shown geographically to see patterns, but there isn't a clear way to put the data on a map. Maybe you'd like to see a map of customer service calls by call duration or inbound sales by average order size.

I wanted to share how to MacGyver a solution with a piece of twine, bubble gum, Excel and a free online map tool. To me, this is a nice testament to the simple but powerful data visualizations that can be accomplished without programming skills or expensive applications.

Social Science Statistics Blog: Visualization for data cleaning

Data cleaning is a boring, annoying task that is difficult, if not impossible, to do perfectly. Andy Eggers at the Social Science Statistics Blog explains how he and a colleague used data visualization to help:

The Times of London published election guides throughout the 20th century including voting results and candidate bios for every constituency in every election to the House of Commons. We scanned and OCR'd seven volumes of this series and wrote scripts to extract information about each constituency race, including the name, vote total, and short bio of each candidate. The challenge then was to determine which appearances belonged to the same individual. For example, when "P G Agnew" runs in 1950 and "Peter Agnew" runs in 1955, are they the same person? We trained a clustering algorithm to do this matching based on name similarity, year of birth, party, and gender, and wrote some scripts to catch likely errors. When we thought we had done as well as we could, we decided to produce a little visualization to admire our perfectly cleaned data. To our surprise, the visualization revealed a number of hard-to-catch remaining errors.

How to take great notes

Lifehacker's Gina Trapani gives her take, geared to the needs of business, not journalism, but all may find it useful:

Like it or not, our work lives involve meetings - status meetings, planning conference calls, brainstorming sessions, meetings for the sake of meetings. But a meeting is only as valuable as the action taken after everyone's left the conference room.

Whether you're headed off to a business meeting, a university lecture, or a conference session, taking effective notes is a necessary skill to move your projects, your career and your education forward.

Yahoo! Search Assist

... is an upgrade to Yahoo!'s search engine. Here's how the Yahoo! Search Blog introduces it:

Recent research conducted by Harris Interactive* indicates that consumers are suffering from "Web Search fatigue." The study revealed that while the vast majority of the population uses a search engine to find information on the Internet, only 15 percent of people find what they're looking for with their first search. Typically, people need to conduct three to four searches to find the right result.

While search engines can and will continue to improve, we think making queries smarter is also part of the solution. While there are a handful of seasoned users and professional searchers out there who employ Boolean operators, site restrict and other advanced techniques, no one (ourselves included) wants to have to think hard about which search terms to use. Our vision was to build a system that helps users confidently construct more sophisticated and targeted queries without slowing them down.

The Chicago Tribune's Internet critic, Steve Johnson, likes it a lot, saying it's "so impressive I'm going to make it my default searcher."

Journalism Daily

... introduces itself like this:

Love journalism? Each day, Journalism Daily.com identifies the top 15 journalism stories and blogs of the day.

We do this by monitoring the buzz of the journalism blog community. So YOU decide what's important.

We use SocialRank software to monitor each of the best journalism sites and determine today's hottest articles and bloggers in the field.

This is done by analyzing how sites and users link, connect, and discuss each other's content. Add a touch of math and what we have is a powerful filter into the hottest stories of the day.

Now you can find better journalism stories, learn more, and get updated... much faster and easier than before.

The endless navel-gazing about the future of the profession is wearing on me, so the possibility I can dump my many feeds debating for the umpteenth time whether bloggers are journalists for just this one has its appeal. Notes from a Teacher sees its value but says "it’s currently missing much of what I find interesting about the media blogophere."

The Virtual Chase: Web Searching with Advanced Commands

 This tutorial explains how to search specific sites, just the URL, certain file types, use synonyms and more. It covers 5 search engines: Ask, Exalead, Google, Live and Yahoo!

A visual medical dictionary and a cure for all diseases

ResearchBuzz writes about a new visual medical dictionary:

... enter a drug, disease, or therapy name. I tried shingles. I got two potential results — one for a disease and one for a drug (a vaccine). When I held my mouse over each word, I got a definition and some additional information. But even cooler is what I got on the right side of the screen.

The right side of the screen gives you a visual tree of medical terms related to the word you specified. Some of these words are WAY too general to be useful (like “pain”) but some of them are very specific. Each of the new items will also give you a definition and will branch out into its own tree of definitions.

The dictionary is from CureHunter, a company that offers "precision medical data mining." I know nothing about the company itself, but what it sells -- at $490 a year for an individual -- is intriguing:

CureHunter is the only fully integrated scientific search, data retrieval and analysis engine on the web that can read the entire US National Library of Medicine Medline Archive and automatically extract and quantify the evidence for successful clinical outcomes of all known drugs for all known human diseases.

I'm put off, though, by its search box on the home page. It says, "To find Cure enter Disease name." Yeah, right. If only a cure to all diseases was as simple as a Google search. The company does explain limitations to its methods on its frequently asked questions page.

Analyst Toolbox

I sniggered when I looked at this (PDF) because my first thought was, We're in even bigger trouble than I thought if law enforcement intelligence analysts need to be told what a word processor is and how it could be useful. This very basic 12-page guide from the U.S. Department of Justice introduces software useful for intelligence analysts, who have investigative needs very similar to journalists. In addition to word processors ("To produce text documents, including bulletins, fact sheets, investigative summaries, and analytical reports"), it briefly explains software for spreadsheets, databases, mapping, presentations, graphics, statistics, timelines, creating PDFs, publishing, analyzing phone records, link analysis, data mining, data visualization and investigative case management.

In the same spirit, allow me to offer intelligence analysts my own advice: Osama bin Laden. Bad guy. Go get him.

Teaching Online Journalism: What journalists should know about databases

Mindy McAdams at Teaching Online Journalism uses an interview with Derek Willis of the Washington Post to introduce her suggestions on how to learn about databases. She's addressing students, but these are good ideas for any database-phobic professional.

Why should you care about databases if you are a journalist? Think of it first as keeping track of bits of information. Well, heck — that’s essential for every journalist! How do you do it? With a messy stack of old reporter’s notebooks, perhaps. Uh-huh. How’s that working for you?

Is The Net Good For Writers?

10 Zen Monkeys asks ten professional writers to answer that question:

Novelist William Burroughs met playwright Samuel Beckett, and after some small talk, Beckett looked directly at Burroughs and said, propitiously, "You're a writer." Burroughs instantly understood that Beckett was welcoming him into a very tiny and exclusive club — that there are only a few writers alive at any one time in human history. Beckett was saying that Burroughs was one of them. Everybody writes. Not everybody is a writer. Or at least, that's what some of us think...

Now the web — and its democratizing impact — has spread for over a decade. Over a billion people can deliver their text to a very broad public. It's a fantastic thing which gives a global voice to dissidents in various regions, makes people less lonely by connecting other people with similar interests and problems, ad infinitum.

But what does it mean for writers and writing? What does it mean for those who specialize in writing well?

Presidential Election Maps 1789-2000

 Free to download from the National Atlas:

The National Atlas offers a wall map, Presidential Elections 1789-2000, which has also been reformatted into 14 pages designed to be viewed and downloaded from the Web. These Presidential Elections printable maps show electoral votes won, by political party, for the fifty-four Presidential elections from George Washington in 1789 to George W. Bush in 2000. The maps are grouped four or six to a page and show electoral vote results by State. The map for 2000 is also offered on a page by itself, showing popular vote results by county as well as electoral vote results by State.

Expert witness deposition and trial transcripts for sale

CrossExam.com sells them for $150, no matter the length:

CrossExam.com is a fully text searchable Internet database consisting solely of expert witness deposition and trial transcripts.

Attorneys and other legal professionals preparing for trial can see how particular experts have testified in prior cases by searching our database by expert name, case name, or expert type.

iheard, a new Web radio search engine

The site promises to help "find your favorite music, sports and talk radio stations."

Points to remember when making a FOIA request

... from LLRX.com's FOIA Facts, including: 

When making requests provide as much information about the topic as possible. If you know facts about the subject of your request, you should provide them to the FOIA Office. FOIA people often don’t know very much, if anything, about the subject of the requests to their agencies. If you provide as much information about the subject of your request it will expedite the processing of your request as the search for responsive documents will be that much easier. This is true for almost all agencies, even those that use computerized databases. A computerized database is only as good as the search terms provided to it.

The Yale Forum on Climate Change & The Media

This site can help you keep up with the debate on global warming:

The Yale Forum on Climate Change & The Media is an online publication and forum to foster dialogue on climate change among scientists, journalists, policymakers, and the public. The Yale Forum is an initiative of the Yale Project on Climate Change, directed by Dr. Anthony Leiserowitz of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies.

Edited by veteran environmental journalist and journalism educator Bud Ward, The Yale Forum seeks to provide print, broadcasting, and online reporters and editors timely and credible information on one of the most important and complicated issues of our time. The Yale Forum will include useful media resources on climate change causes, consequences, and solutions. It will also analyze and discuss the process by which climate change is communicated through traditional and new media.

Let us hear from you. We can be reached at info@yaleclimatemediaforum.org.

Ways to research foreign entities

... from BRB's Public Records Blog.