Skip to main content

Home/ DJCamp2011/ Group items tagged this

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Tom Johnson

8 must-reads detail how to verify information in real-time, from social media, users | ... - 0 views

  •  
    8 must-reads detail how to verify information in real-time, from social media, users Craig Silverman by Craig Silverman Published Apr. 27, 2012 7:46 am Updated Apr. 27, 2012 9:23 am Over the past couple of years, I've been trying to collect every good piece of writing and advice about verifying social media content and other types of information that flow across networks. This form of verification involves some new tools and techniques, and requires a basic understanding of the way networks operate and how people use them. It also requires many of the so-called old school values and techniques that have been around for a while: being skeptical, asking questions, tracking down high quality sources, exercising restraint, collaborating and communicating with team members. For example, lots of people talk about how Andy Carvin does crowdsourced verification and turns his Twitter feed into a real time newswire. Lost in the discussion is the fact that Carvin also develops sources and contacts on the ground and stays in touch with them on Skype and through other means. What you see on Twitter is only one part of the process. Some things never go out of style. At the same time, there are new tools, techniques and approaches every journalist should have in their arsenal. Fortunately, several leading practitioners of what I sometimes call the New Verification are gracious and generous about sharing what they know. One such generous lot are the folks at Storyful, a social media curation and verification operation that works with clients such as Reuters, ABC News, and The New York Times, among others. I wrote about them last year and examined how in some ways they act as an outsourced verification service for newsrooms. That was partly inspired by this post from Storyful founder Mark Little: I find it helps to think of curation as three central questions: * Discovery: How do we find valuable social media content? * Verification: How do we make sure we c
Tom Johnson

http://theyrule.net - 1 views

  •  
    They Rule Overview They Rule aims to provide a glimpse of some of the relationships of the US ruling class. It takes as its focus the boards of some of the most powerful U.S. companies, which share many of the same directors. Some individuals sit on 5, 6 or 7 of the top 1000 companies. It allows users to browse through these interlocking directories and run searches on the boards and companies. A user can save a map of connections complete with their annotations and email links to these maps to others. They Rule is a starting point for research about these powerful individuals and corporations. Context A few companies control much of the economy and oligopolies exert control in nearly every sector of the economy. The people who head up these companies swap on and off the boards from one company to another, and in and out of government committees and positions. These people run the most powerful institutions on the planet, and we have almost no say in who they are. This is not a conspiracy, they are proud to rule, yet these connections of power are not always visible to the public eye. Karl Marx once called this ruling class a 'band of hostile brothers.' They stand against each other in the competitve struggle for the continued accumulation of their capital, but they stand together as a family supporting their interests in perpetuating the profit system as whole. Protecting this system can require the cover of a 'legitimate' force - and this is the role that is played by the state. An understanding of this system can not be gleaned from looking at the inter-personal relations of this class alone, but rather how they stand in relation to other classes in society. Hopefully They Rule will raise larger questions about the structure of our society and in whose benefit it is run. The Data We do not claim that this data is 100% accurate at all times. Corporate directors have a habit of dying, quitting boards, joining new ones and most frustratingly passing on their name
  •  
    I think this data must be very useful to the people in Occupy Wall Street
Tom Johnson

TransparencyCamp '11 Recap - Sunlight Foundation - 0 views

  • TransparencyCamp '11 Recap Nicole Aro May 4, 2011, 11:28 a.m. Sunlight’s fourth TransparencyCamp was this past weekend, and I’d like to take this moment to say to all of our attendees: Thank you -- you guys rock. To everyone else, I’m sorry that you missed such an awesome weekend, but we hope to see you next time around! This weekend was made possible by the generosity of our sponsors: Microsoft, Google, O’Reilly, Governing, iStrategyLabs, Forum One, and Adobe. I’d like to say a special thank you to Patrick Svenburg of Microsoft who stayed late to make sure we could finish setup and even helped us carry supplies(!). The weekend brought together about 250 government workers, software developers, investigative journalists, bloggers, students and open government advocates of all stripes to share stories, build relationships, and plan together to take on the challenges of building more open government. This year, TransparencyCamp also went global, bringing in 22 amazing transparency advocates from around the world to teach, learn and share with us here in the states.
  • TransparencyCamp '11 Recap Nicole Aro May 4, 2011, 11:28 a.m. Sunlight’s fourth TransparencyCamp was this past weekend, and I’d like to take this moment to say to all of our attendees: Thank you -- you guys rock. To everyone else, I’m sorry that you missed such an awesome weekend, but we hope to see you next time around! This weekend was made possible by the generosity of our sponsors: Microsoft, Google, O’Reilly, Governing, iStrategyLabs, Forum One, and Adobe. I’d like to say a special thank you to Patrick Svenburg of Microsoft who stayed late to make sure we could finish setup and even helped us carry supplies(!). The weekend brought together about 250 government workers, software developers, investigative journalists, bloggers, students and open government advocates of all stripes to share stories, build relationships, and plan together to take on the challenges of building more open government. This year, TransparencyCamp also went global, bringing in 22 amazing transparency advocates from around the world to teach, learn and share with us here in the states.
  •  
    "TransparencyCamp '11 Recap Nicole Aro May 4, 2011, 11:28 a.m. Sunlight's fourth TransparencyCamp was this past weekend, and I'd like to take this moment to say to all of our attendees: Thank you -- you guys rock. To everyone else, I'm sorry that you missed such an awesome weekend, but we hope to see you next time around! This weekend was made possible by the generosity of our sponsors: Microsoft, Google, O'Reilly, Governing, iStrategyLabs, Forum One, and Adobe. I'd like to say a special thank you to Patrick Svenburg of Microsoft who stayed late to make sure we could finish setup and even helped us carry supplies(!). The weekend brought together about 250 government workers, software developers, investigative journalists, bloggers, students and open government advocates of all stripes to share stories, build relationships, and plan together to take on the challenges of building more open government. This year, TransparencyCamp also went global, bringing in 22 amazing transparency advocates from around the world to teach, learn and share with us here in the states. "
Tom Johnson

Timeline JS - Beautifully crafted timelines that are easy, and intuitive to use. - 0 views

  • Document History TimelineJS can pull in media from different sources. It has built in support for: Twitter, Flickr, Google Maps, YouTube, Vimeo, Dailymotion, Wikipedia, SoundCloud and more media types in the future. Creating one is as easy as filling in a Google spreadsheet or as detailed as JSON. Tips and tricks to best utilize TimelineJS. Keep it short, and write each event as a part of a larger narrative. Pick stories that have a strong chronological narrative. It does not work well for stories that need to jump around in the timeline. Include events that build up to major occurrences. Not just the major events. Sign up for Updates Get updates, tips and news by email. No Spam. Subscribe var fnames = new Array();var ftypes = new Array();fnames[0]='EMAIL';ftypes[0]='email';fnames[1]='NAME';ftypes[1]='text'; try { var jqueryLoaded=jQuery; jqueryLoaded=true; } catch(err) { var jqueryLoaded=false; } var head= document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0]; if (!jqueryLoaded) { var script = document.createElement('script'); script.type = 'text/javascript'; script.src = 'http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.4.4/jquery.min.js'; head.appendChild(script); if (script.readyState && script.onload!==null){ script.onreadystatechange= function () { if (this.readyState == 'complete') mce_preload_check(); } } } var script = document.createElement('script'); script.type = 'text/javascript'; script.src = 'http://downloads.mailchimp.com/js/jquery.form-n-validate.js'; head.appendChild(script); var err_style = ''; try{ err_style = mc_custom_error_style; } catch(e){ err_style = '#mc_embed_signup input.mce_inline_error{border-color:#6B0505;} #mc_embed_signup div.mce_inline_error{margin: 0 0 1em 0; padding: 5px 10px; background-color:#6B0505; font-weight: bold; z-index: 1; color:#fff;}'; } var head= document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0]; var style= document.createElement('style'); style.type= 'text/css'; if (style.styleSheet) { style.styleSheet.cssText = err_style; } else { style.appendChild(document.createTextNode(err_style)); } head.appendChild(style); setTimeout('mce_preload_check();', 250); var mce_preload_checks = 0; function mce_preload_check(){ if (mce_preload_checks>40) return; mce_preload_checks++; try { var jqueryLoaded=jQuery; } catch(err) { setTimeout('mce_preload_check();', 250); return; } try { var validatorLoaded=jQuery("#fake-form").validate({}); } catch(err) { setTimeout('mce_preload_check();', 250); return; } mce_init_form(); } function mce_init_form(){ jQuery(document).ready( function($) { var options = { errorClass: 'mce_inline_error', errorElement: 'div', onkeyup: function(){}, onfocusout:function(){}, onblur:function(){} }; var mce_validator = $("#mc-embedded-subscribe-form").validate(options); $("#mc-embedded-subscribe-form").unbind('submit');//remove the validator so we can get into beforeSubmit on the ajaxform, which then calls the validator options = { url: 'http://verite.us4.list-manage2.com/subscribe/post-json?u=7cc197123f5f6d3b8dc4e176f&id=d7f2b5d664&c=?', type: 'GET', dataType: 'json', contentType: "application/json; charset=utf-8", beforeSubmit: function(){ $('#mce_tmp_error_msg').remove(); $('.datefield','#mc_embed_signup').each( function(){ var txt = 'filled'; var fields = new Array(); var i = 0; $(':text', this).each( function(){ fields[i] = this; i++; }); $(':hidden', this).each( function(){ var bday = false; if (fields.length == 2){ bday = true; fields[2] = {'value':1970};//trick birthdays into having years } if ( fields[0].value=='MM' && fields[1].value=='DD' && (fields[2].value=='YYYY' || (bday && fields[2].value==1970) ) ){ this.value = ''; } else if ( fields[0].value=='' && fields[1].value=='' && (fields[2].value=='' || (bday && fields[2].value==1970) ) ){ this.value = ''; } else { if (/\[day\]/.test(fields[0].name)){ this.value = fields[1].value+'/'+fields[0].value+'/'+fields[2].value; } else { this.value = fields[0].value+'/'+fields[1].value+'/'+fields[2].value; } } }); }); return mce_validator.form(); }, success: mce_success_cb }; $('#mc-embedded-subscribe-form').ajaxForm(options); }); } function mce_success_cb(resp){ $('#mce-success-response').hide(); $('#mce-error-response').hide(); if (resp.result=="success"){ $('#mce-'+resp.result+'-response').show(); $('#mce-'+resp.result+'-response').html(resp.msg); $('#mc-embedded-subscribe-form').each(function(){ this.reset(); }); } else { var index = -1; var msg; try { var parts = resp.msg.split(' - ',2); if (parts[1]==undefined){ msg = resp.msg; } else { i = parseInt(parts[0]); if (i.toString() == parts[0]){ index = parts[0]; msg = parts[1]; } else { index = -1; msg = resp.msg; } } } catch(e){ index = -1; msg = resp.msg; } try{ if (index== -1){ $('#mce-'+resp.result+'-response').show(); $('#mce-'+resp.result+'-response').html(msg); } else { err_id = 'mce_tmp_error_msg'; html = ' '+msg+''; var input_id = '#mc_embed_signup'; var f = $(input_id); if (ftypes[index]=='address'){
  •  
    Document History TimelineJS can pull in media from different sources. It has built in support for: Twitter, Flickr, Google Maps, YouTube, Vimeo, Dailymotion, Wikipedia, SoundCloud and more media types in the future. Creating one is as easy as filling in a Google spreadsheet or as detailed as JSON. Tips and tricks to best utilize TimelineJS. Keep it short, and write each event as a part of a larger narrative. Pick stories that have a strong chronological narrative. It does not work well for stories that need to jump around in the timeline. Include events that build up to major occurrences. Not just the major events. Sign up for Updates Get updates, tips and news by email. No Spam. Download Coming Soon Changelog Issues The project is hosted on GitHub, the largest code host in the world. We encourage you to contribute to the project and we value your feedback. You can report bugs and discuss features on the issues page, or ask a question on our Google Group TimelineJS Download View on GitHub Google Group Wordpress Plugin Download View on GitHub This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details. http://www.gnu.org/licenses/ Map tiles by Stamen Design, under CC BY 3.0. Data by OpenStreetMap, under CC BY SA. TimelineJS was created and built by VéritéCo, as a project of the Knight News Innovation Lab Stay connected with us on twitter Examples
Tom Johnson

The Overview Project » Using Overview to analyze 4500 pages of documents on s... - 0 views

  • Using Overview to analyze 4500 pages of documents on security contractors in Iraq by Jonathan Stray on 02/21/2012 0 This post describes how we used a prototype of the Overview software to explore 4,500 pages of incident reports concerning the actions of private security contractors working for the U.S. State Department during the Iraq war. This was the core of the reporting work for our previous post, where we reported the results of that analysis. The promise of a document set like this is that it will give us some idea of the broader picture, beyond the handful of really egregious incidents that have made headlines. To do this, in some way we have to take into account most or all of the documents, not just the small number that might match a particular keyword search.  But at one page per minute, eight hours per day, it would take about 10 days for one person to read all of these documents — to say nothing of taking notes or doing any sort of followup. This is exactly the sort of problem that Overview would like to solve. The reporting was a multi-stage process: Splitting the massive PDFs into individual documents and extracting the text Exploration and subject tagging with the Overview prototype Random sampling to estimate the frequency of certain types of events Followup and comparison with other sources
  •  
    Using Overview to analyze 4500 pages of documents on security contractors in Iraq by Jonathan Stray on 02/21/2012 0 This post describes how we used a prototype of the Overview software to explore 4,500 pages of incident reports concerning the actions of private security contractors working for the U.S. State Department during the Iraq war. This was the core of the reporting work for our previous post, where we reported the results of that analysis. The promise of a document set like this is that it will give us some idea of the broader picture, beyond the handful of really egregious incidents that have made headlines. To do this, in some way we have to take into account most or all of the documents, not just the small number that might match a particular keyword search. But at one page per minute, eight hours per day, it would take about 10 days for one person to read all of these documents - to say nothing of taking notes or doing any sort of followup. This is exactly the sort of problem that Overview would like to solve. The reporting was a multi-stage process: Splitting the massive PDFs into individual documents and extracting the text Exploration and subject tagging with the Overview prototype Random sampling to estimate the frequency of certain types of events Followup and comparison with other sources
Tom Johnson

Corporate Accountability Data in Influence Explorer - Sunlight Labs: Blog - 0 views

  •  
    Again, US-centric, but this might generate some ideas of what could be accomplish in your city/nation. Late yesterday we announced a bunch of new features for Influence Explorer: http://sunlightlabs.com/blog/2011/ie-corporate-accountability/ As the blog post explains, you can now find information about a corporation's EPA violations, federal advisory committee memberships, and participation in the rulemaking process -- all in one place. I wanted to highlight that last feature a bit more, though. To my knowledge, this is the first time that the full corpus of public comments submitted to regulations.gov has been available for bulk download and analysis. This isn't a coincidence: regulations.gov is built using technologies that make scraping it unusually difficult. This is unfortunate, since everyone seems to agree that federal rulemakings are gaining in importance -- both because of congressional gridlock that leaves the regulatory process as a second-best option, and because of calls to simplify the regulatory landscape as a pro-growth measure. It's an area where influence is certainly exerted -- rulemakers are obliged to review every comment -- but little attention is paid to who's flooding dockets with comments, and which directions rules are being pushed. It's taken us several months to develop a reliable solution and to obtain past rulemakings, but we now have the data in hand. We plan to do much more with this dataset, and we're hoping that others will want to dig in, too. You can find a link to the bulk download options in the post above -- the full compressed archive of extracted text and metadata is ~16GB, but we've provided options for grabbing individual agencies' or dockets' data. If anyone wants the original documents (PDFs, DOCs, etc) we can talk through how to make that happen, but as they clock in at 1.5TB we'll want to make sure folks know what they're getting into before we spend the time and bandwidth. Finally, note that we currently o
Tom Johnson

The Overview Project » Document mining shows Paul Ryan relying on the the pro... - 0 views

  •  
    Document mining shows Paul Ryan relying on the the programs he criticizes by Jonathan Stray on 11/02/2012 0 One of the jobs of a journalist is to check the record. When Congressman Paul Ryan became a vice-presidential candidate, Associated Press reporter Jack Gillum decided to examine the candidate through his own words. Hundreds of Freedom of Information requests and 9,000 pages later, Gillum wrote a story showing that Ryan has asked for money from many of the same Federal programs he has criticized as wasteful, including stimulus money and funding for alternative fuels. This would have been much more difficult without special software for journalism. In this case Gillum relied on two tools: DocumentCloud to upload, OCR, and search the documents, and Overview to automatically sort the documents into topics and visualize the contents. Both projects are previous Knight News Challenge winners. But first Gillum had to get the documents. As a member of Congress, Ryan isn't subject to the Freedom of Information Act. Instead, Gillum went to every federal agency - whose files are covered under FOIA - for copies of letters or emails that might identify Ryan's favored causes, names of any constituents who sought favors, and more. Bit by bit, the documents arrived - on paper. The stack grew over weeks, eventually piling up two feet high on Gillum's desk. Then he scanned the pages and loaded them into the AP's internal installation of DocumentCloud. The software converts the scanned pages to searchable text, but there were still 9000 pages of material. That's where Overview came in. Developed in house at the Associated Press, this open-source visualization tool processes the full text of each document and clusters similar documents together, producing a visualization that graphically shows the contents of the complete document set. "I used Overview to take these 9000 pages of documents, and knowing there was probably going to be a lot of garbage or ext
Tom Johnson

Open Flash Chart - Home - 0 views

  •  
    Hello, this is the Open Flash Chart project. Note: "Open Flash Chart 2" is LGPL. OK, Open Flash Chart 1.x was great and it works like a dream. But I made some little mistakes which over time grew and anyoyed me and made the source code weird. So I decided it was time to re-jigger the code and make it pretty again. The big change is moving the data format to JSON. This has made a big difference and has allowed some pretty cool new features. While I was hacking away at the source code I moved it all to Actionscript 3, and used Adobe Flex to compile it. This means everything is open source. If you want to make changes to the charts all you need is laid out in these instructions. Just because there is a new version doesn't make V 1.x obsolete. You can use both versions at the same time so leave your current working code in V 1.x and make all the new charts using which ever version you find easier to use. Why is V2 better? Well it uses JSON as the file format and this means you can do cool stuff like Grant Slender has: http://code.google.com/p/ofcgwt/ If you like Open Flash Chart and want to see it continue, please help Donate some money :-) Blog about it (promotion takes up about a third of my time) Write a cool library Really. You can make a massive difference to the project! Need help choosing reseller hosting for your charts? Make sure you read reliable web hosting reviews. Why choose Open Flash Chart? This is a little gentle propaganda for the project. Like all opinions, disregard it and make up your own mind. Edge cases such as tooltips encourage user interactivity and data exploration what happens to the tooltip when two points are in the same position? you can re-size the charts missing data save the chart as an image You can highlight or emphasize one (or many) points PC Pro loves open flash chart. Server Side Helper Libraries PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby, .NET, Google Web Toolkit and JAVA. Libraries. Next: Che
Tom Johnson

International Dataset Search - 0 views

  • International Dataset Search View View Source Description:  The TWC International Open Government Dataset Catalog (IOGDC) is a linked data application based on metadata scraped from an increasing number of international dataset catalog websites publishing a rich variety of government data. Metadata extracted from these catalog websites is automatically converted to RDF linked data and re-published via the TWC LOGD SPAQRL endpoint and made available for download. The TWC IOGDC demo site features an efficient, reconfigurable faceted browser with search capabilities offering a compelling demonstration of the value of a common metadata model for open government dataset catalogs. We believe that the vocabulary choices demonstrated by IOGDC highlights the potential for useful linked data applications to be created from open government catalogs and will encourage the adoption of such a standard worldwide. Warning: This demo will crash IE7 and IE8. Contributor: Eric Rozell Contributor: Jinguang Zheng Contributor: Yongmei Shi Live Demo:  http://logd.tw.rpi.edu/demo/international_dataset_catalog_search Notes: This is an experimental demo and some queries may take longer time to response (30 ~60 seconds). Please referesh this page if the demo is not loaded. Our metadata model can be accessed here . Procedure to getting and publishing metadata is described here . The RDF dump of the datasets can be downloaded here. Welcome to S2S! International OGD Catalog Search (searching 736,578 datasets)
  •  
    International Dataset Search View View Source Description: The TWC International Open Government Dataset Catalog (IOGDC) is a linked data application based on metadata scraped from an increasing number of international dataset catalog websites publishing a rich variety of government data. Metadata extracted from these catalog websites is automatically converted to RDF linked data and re-published via the TWC LOGD SPAQRL endpoint and made available for download. The TWC IOGDC demo site features an efficient, reconfigurable faceted browser with search capabilities offering a compelling demonstration of the value of a common metadata model for open government dataset catalogs. We believe that the vocabulary choices demonstrated by IOGDC highlights the potential for useful linked data applications to be created from open government catalogs and will encourage the adoption of such a standard worldwide. Warning: This demo will crash IE7 and IE8. Contributor: Eric Rozell Jinguang Zheng Yongmei Shi Live Demo: http://logd.tw.rpi.edu/demo/international_dataset_catalog_search Notes: This is an experimental demo and some queries may take longer time to response (30 ~60 seconds). Please referesh this page if the demo is not loaded. Our metadata model can be accessed here . Procedure to getting and publishing metadata is described here . The RDF dump of the datasets can be downloaded here. International OGD Catalog Search (searching 736,578 datasets) http://logd.tw.rpi.edu/demo/international_dataset_catalog_search
  •  
    Loads surprisingly quickly. Try entering your favorite search term in top blue box. Can use quotes to define phrases.
Tom Johnson

Constructing the Open Data Landscape | ScraperWiki Data Blog - 0 views

  • Constructing the Open Data Landscape Posted on September 7, 2011 by Nicola Hughes In an article in today’s Telegraph regarding Francis Maude’s Public Data Corporation, Michael Cross asks: “What makes the state think it can be at the cutting edge of the knowledge economy“. He writes in terms of market and business share, giving the example of the satnav market worth over $100bn a year yet it’s based on free data from the US Government’s GPS system. He credits the internet revolution for transforming public sector data into ‘cashable proposition’. We, along with many other start-ups, foundations and civic coding groups, are part of this ‘geeky world’ of Open Data. So we’d like to add our piece concerning the Open Data movement. Michael has the right to ask this question because there is this constant custodial battle being fought every day, every scrape and every script on the web for the rights to data. So let me tell you about the geeks’ take on Open Data.
  •  
    Constructing the Open Data Landscape Posted on September 7, 2011 by Nicola Hughes In an article in today's Telegraph regarding Francis Maude's Public Data Corporation, Michael Cross asks: "What makes the state think it can be at the cutting edge of the knowledge economy". He writes in terms of market and business share, giving the example of the satnav market worth over $100bn a year yet it's based on free data from the US Government's GPS system. He credits the internet revolution for transforming public sector data into 'cashable proposition'. We, along with many other start-ups, foundations and civic coding groups, are part of this 'geeky world' of Open Data. So we'd like to add our piece concerning the Open Data movement. Michael has the right to ask this question because there is this constant custodial battle being fought every day, every scrape and every script on the web for the rights to data. So let me tell you about the geeks' take on Open Data.
Tom Johnson

Shapefiles to Google Fusion Tables - 0 views

  • Shape to Fusion Hi. This website lets you import a shapefile to Google Fusion Tables. This blog post has some details on how it was built. To continue, you will need to authorize this site to access your Fusion Tables data on your behalf. Site by Josh Livni. Source code available at http://code.google.com/p/shpescape/
  •  
    Shape to Fusion Hi. This website lets you import a shapefile to Google Fusion Tables. This blog post has some details on how it was built. (http://porcupinealley.com/2010/dec/20/shape-escape/) To continue, you will need to authorize this site to access your Fusion Tables data on your behalf. Site by Josh Livni. Source code available at http://code.google.com/p/shpescape/
Tom Johnson

We Just Ran Twenty-Three Million Queries of the World Bank's Website - Working Paper 36... - 0 views

  •  
    "Abstract Much of the data underlying global poverty and inequality estimates is not in the public domain, but can be accessed in small pieces using the World Bank's PovcalNet online tool. To overcome these limitations and reproduce this database in a format more useful to researchers, we ran approximately 23 million queries of the World Bank's web site, accessing only information that was already in the public domain. This web scraping exercise produced 10,000 points on the cumulative distribution of income or consumption from each of 942 surveys spanning 127 countries over the period 1977 to 2012. This short note describes our methodology, briefly discusses some of the relevant intellectual property issues, and illustrates the kind of calculations that are facilitated by this data set, including growth incidence curves and poverty rates using alternative PPP indices. The full data can be downloaded at www.cgdev.org/povcalnet. "
Tom Johnson

National Science Foundation Helps Fund scrible, A New Web Annotation Tool/Per... - 0 views

  • INFOdocket Information Industry News + New Web Sites and Tools From Gary Price and Shirl Kennedy National Science Foundation Helps Fund scrible, A New Web Annotation Tool/Personal Web Cache + Video Demo Posted on May 12, 2011 by Gary D. Price scrible (pronounced scribble) launched about a week ago and you can learn more (free to register and use) here. The company has received a $500,000 grant from the National Science Foundation. From Venture Beat: The company lets users do three things: Save articles and pages so they’re available if the original goes offline; richly annotate online content using tools reminiscent of Word (highlighter, sticky note, etc.), and share annotated pages privately with others. scrible is free and will continue to be free to all users (125MB of storage space). A premium edition is also planned but features (aside from a larger storage quota) have not been announced. Robert Scoble has posted a video demo of scrible with the CEO of of the company, Victor Karkar, doing the “driving.” scrible sounds a lot like Diigo without the mobile access options. It also sounds similar (minus the markup features) to Pinboard. Pinboard does charge $9.97 for a lifetime membership with almost all features (there are many with new ones are debut regularly). For an extra $25/year all of the material you’ve bookmarked is cached by Pinboard. Cached pages look great INCLUDING PDF files. Pinboard is extremely fast and has a very low learning curve. Think Delicious and then add a ton of useful tools to it. Pinboard also provides mobile access to your saved bookmarks and cached documents. Finally, when used responsibly (aka abused) there are no storage space quotas. Which service do you prefer or does each service have a niche depending on the work you’re doing? What other tools to you use? Hat Tips and Thanks: @NspireD2 and @New Media Consortium Share this: Share Share Tagged: Annotation Tools, Diigo, Pinboard, scrible Posted in: Personal Archiving, Web To
  • INFOdocket Information Industry News + New Web Sites and Tools From Gary Price and Shirl Kennedy National Science Foundation Helps Fund scrible, A New Web Annotation Tool/Personal Web Cache + Video Demo Posted on May 12, 2011 by Gary D. Price scrible (pronounced scribble) launched about a week ago and you can learn more (free to register and use) here. The company has received a $500,000 grant from the National Science Foundation. From Venture Beat: The company lets users do three things: Save articles and pages so they’re available if the original goes offline; richly annotate online content using tools reminiscent of Word (highlighter, sticky note, etc.), and share annotated pages privately with others. scrible is free and will continue to be free to all users (125MB of storage space). A premium edition is also planned but features (aside from a larger storage quota) have not been announced. Robert Scoble has posted a video demo of scrible with the CEO of of the company, Victor Karkar, doing the “driving.” scrible sounds a lot like Diigo without the mobile access options. It also sounds similar (minus the markup features) to Pinboard. Pinboard does charge $9.97 for a lifetime membership with almost all features (there are many with new ones are debut regularly). For an extra $25/year all of the material you’ve bookmarked is cached by Pinboard. Cached pages look great INCLUDING PDF files. Pinboard is extremely fast and has a very low learning curve. Think Delicious and then add a ton of useful tools to it. Pinboard also provides mobile access to your saved bookmarks and cached documents. Finally, when used responsibly (aka abused) there are no storage space quotas. Which service do you prefer or does each service have a niche depending on the work you’re doing? What other tools to you use? Hat Tips and Thanks: @NspireD2 and @New Media Consortium Share this: Share Share Tagged: Annotation Tools, Diigo, Pinboard, scrible Posted in: Personal Archiving, Web Tools
  •  
    " INFOdocket Information Industry News + New Web Sites and Tools From Gary Price and Shirl Kennedy National Science Foundation Helps Fund scrible, A New Web Annotation Tool/Personal Web Cache + Video Demo Posted on May 12, 2011 by Gary D. Price scrible (pronounced scribble) launched about a week ago and you can learn more (free to register and use) here. The company has received a $500,000 grant from the National Science Foundation. From Venture Beat: The company lets users do three things: Save articles and pages so they're available if the original goes offline; richly annotate online content using tools reminiscent of Word (highlighter, sticky note, etc.), and share annotated pages privately with others. scrible is free and will continue to be free to all users (125MB of storage space). A premium edition is also planned but features (aside from a larger storage quota) have not been announced. Robert Scoble has posted a video demo of scrible with the CEO of of the company, Victor Karkar, doing the "driving." scrible sounds a lot like Diigo without the mobile access options. It also sounds similar (minus the markup features) to Pinboard. Pinboard does charge $9.97 for a lifetime membership with almost all features (there are many with new ones are debut regularly). For an extra $25/year all of the material you've bookmarked is cached by Pinboard. Cached pages look great INCLUDING PDF files. Pinboard is extremely fast and has a very low learning curve. Think Delicious and then add a ton of useful tools to it. Pinboard also provides mobile access to your saved bookmarks and cached documents. Finally, when used responsibly (aka abused) there are no storage space quotas. Which service do you prefer or does each service have a niche depending on the work you're doing? What other tools to you use? Hat Tips and Thanks: @NspireD2 and @New Media Consortium Share this: Share Tagged: Annotation Tools, Diigo, Pinboard, scrible Posted in: P
Tom Johnson

Data Visualization Platform, Weave, Now Open Source | Government In The Lab - 0 views

  •  
    Data Visualization Platform, Weave, Now Open Source Logo Open Source Initiative Image via Wikipedia Civic Commons, Contributors (Karl Fogel, Author) With more and more civic data becoming available and accessible, the challenge grows for policy makers and citizens to leverage that data for better decision-making. It is often difficult to understand context and perform analysis. "Weave", however, helps. A web-based data visualization tool, Weave enables users to explore, analyze, visualize and disseminate data online from any location at any time. We saw tremendous potential in the platform and have been helping open-source the software, advising on community engagement strategy and licensing. This week, we were excited to see the soft launch of the Weave 1.0 Beta, which went open-source on Wednesday, June 15. Weave is the result of a broad partnership: it was developed by the Institute for Visualization and Perception Research at the University of Massachussetts Lowell, with support from the Open Indicators Consortium, which is made up of over ten municipal, regional, and state member organizations. This consortium will probably expand now that Weave is open source, leading hopefully to greater collaboration, more development, and further innovation on this important platform. Early-adopter data geeks should give it a spin. One of Weave's key features is high-speed interactivity and responsiveness, which is somewhat unusual in web-based visualization software; try out the demo sites or watch the video below. Our congratulations and thanks to the Weave team! As city management is increasingly data-driven, so data analysis and visualization tools will continue to be an important part of every city manager's toolkit. We are excited to see this evolving toolkit enter the civic commons. http://govinthelab.com/data-visualization-platform-weave-now-open-source
Tom Johnson

Google Map Sheet - 0 views

  •  
    Mapping Sheets Another favorite Google Drive add-on of mine is definitely Mapping Sheets. With this add-on, you can make better use of any geographical data you may have in your spreadsheet. If you've ever wanted an easy way to quickly plot locations from your data onto a Google Map, this is it. drive addons8   5 Google Drive Add ons You Need To Use Using it is ridiculously easy. Just make sure you've got a list of addresses and other related data in your sheet, and then trigger this add-on. You'll see a form where you tell it what columns in your sheet to use for creating the map. drive addons9   5 Google Drive Add ons You Need To Use Once you submit it, the add-on creates the map right in the sheet for you so that you have a useful visualization of all of that data.
Tom Johnson

Intro to cleaning data | Knight Center - Berkeley - 0 views

  • Understanding how to clean  data is an important skill every reporter needs. Demographic, financial and other data is available on a city, county, state and national level in the United States. But understanding how to take a large data file and distill it into a usable form can be daunting. In this tutorial, you'll learn how spreadsheets work, basic data-cleaning workflow and how to use formulas and functions to clean data. This is a general tutorial and it doesn't delve deeply into one program. We'll use Microsoft Excel but most of the same techniques work in Google Spreadsheets and other programs.
  •  
    Understanding how to clean data is an important skill every reporter needs. Demographic, financial and other data is available on a city, county, state and national level in the United States. But understanding how to take a large data file and distill it into a usable form can be daunting. In this tutorial, you'll learn how spreadsheets work, basic data-cleaning workflow and how to use formulas and functions to clean data. This is a general tutorial and it doesn't delve deeply into one program. We'll use Microsoft Excel but most of the same techniques work in Google Spreadsheets and other programs.
Tom Johnson

How to: verify content from social media | Online Journalism Features | Journalism.co.uk - 0 views

  •  
    How to: verify content from social media Experts advise on the process of verification Posted: 3 April 2012 By: Rachel McAthy 0 Comments and 0 Reactions Facebook and Twitter for how to There are a wealth of questions, tools and techniques journalists can use to verify content from social media The mass of information now available and being shared online offers a fantastic arena for journalists to engage with online communities and pick up on breaking news at the same time. This means journalists are also having to sharpen their verification and fact-checking skills in a digital environment. This how-to features advice from a panel of experts on the key considerations, questions and tools journalists should have in mind when carrying out verification of content that surfaces via social media, be it a news tip, an image, a piece of audio or video. The process covers three main stages: monitoring of social networks and the online community before news breaks, checking the content when it comes into play and subsequently reporting that content once verified. The comprehensive advice outlined in this how-to guide offers practical steps, specific questions and cross-checks journalists can make at each stage, as well as online tools to support them.
Tom Johnson

The Open Data Handbook - Open Data Manual - 0 views

  • The Open Data Handbook¶ This handbook discusses the legal, social and technical aspects of open data. It can be used by anyone but is especially designed for those seeking to open up data. It discusses the why, what and how of open data – why to go open, what open is, and the how to ‘open’ data. To get started, you may wish to look at the Introduction. You can navigate through the report using the Table of Contents (see sidebar or below). We warmly welcome comments on the text and will incorporate feedback as we go forward. We also welcome contributions or suggestions for additional sections and areas to examine.
  • The Open Data Handbook¶ This handbook discusses the legal, social and technical aspects of open data. It can be used by anyone but is especially designed for those seeking to open up data. It discusses the why, what and how of open data – why to go open, what open is, and the how to ‘open’ data. To get started, you may wish to look at the Introduction. You can navigate through the report using the Table of Contents (see sidebar or below). We warmly welcome comments on the text and will incorporate feedback as we go forward. We also welcome contributions or suggestions for additional sections and areas to examine.
  •  
    "The Open Data Handbook This handbook discusses the legal, social and technical aspects of open data. It can be used by anyone but is especially designed for those seeking to open up data. It discusses the why, what and how of open data - why to go open, what open is, and the how to 'open' data. To get started, you may wish to look at the Introduction. You can navigate through the report using the Table of Contents (see sidebar or below). We warmly welcome comments on the text and will incorporate feedback as we go forward. We also welcome contributions or suggestions for additional sections and areas to examine."
Tom Johnson

T-LAB Tools for Text Analysis - 0 views

  •  
    The all-in-one software for Content Analysis and Text Mining Hello We are pleased to announce the release of T-LAB 8.0. This version represents a major change in the usability and the effectiveness of our software for text analysis. The most significant improvements concern the integration of bottom-up (i.e. unsupervised) methods for exploratory text analysis with top-down (i.e. supervised) approaches for the automated classification of textual units like words, sentences, paragraphs and documents. Among other things, this means that - besides discovering emerging patterns of words and themes from texts - the users can now easily build, apply and validate their models (e.g. dictionaries of categories or pre-existing manual categorizations) both for classical content analysis and for sentiment analysis. For this purpose several T-LAB functionalities have been expanded and a new ergonomic and powerful tool named 'Dictionary-Based Classification' has been added. No specific dictionaries have been built in; however, with some minor re-formatting, lots of resources available over the Internet and customized word lists can be quickly imported. Last but not least, in order to meet the needs of many customers, temporary licenses of the software are now on sale; moreover, without any time limit, the trial mode of the software now allows you to analyse your own texts up to 20 kb in txt format, each of which can include up to 20 short documents. To learn more, use the following link http://www.tlab.it/en/80news.php The Demo, the User's Manual and the Quick Introduction are available at http://www.tlab.it/en/download.php Kind Regards The T-LAB Team web: http://www.tlab.it/ e-mail: info@tlab.it
Tom Johnson

Searchable Map Template with Google Fusion Tables - 0 views

  •  
    Searchable Map Template with Google Fusion Tables Turn a spreadsheet in to a searchable map You want to put your data on a searchable, filterable map. This is a free, open source tool to help you do it. Features clean, full screen layout new mobile and tablet friendly using responsive design address search (with variable radius) geolocation (find me!) new RESTful URLs for sharing searches results count (using Google's Fusion Tables API) ability to easily add additional search filters (checkboxes, sliders, etc) all done with HTML, CSS and Javascript - no server side code required Technologies used Google Fusion Tables (useful resources) Google Maps API V3 jQuery jQuery Address Twitter Bootstrap Note: This template is now supports the Fusion Tables v1 API. For more info on this, see their migration guide
1 - 20 of 71 Next › Last »
Showing 20 items per page