February 2012
1 post
January 2012
4 posts
November 2011
3 posts
August 2011
1 post
July 2011
2 posts
Lazy Sunday LazyWeb Request
A thought: There are all these services that will dump personal data (location, exercise, activities, music prefs, “likes”, bookmarks, etc.) into your facebook or twitter stream, but nobody wants to see that crap there. It’s not (generally) social data. It’s useful to collect and aggregate, but only for the individual or perhaps a small circle of friends. Why isn’t...
June 2011
7 posts
Visualizar’11: Understanding Infrastructures →
“Visualizar’11: Understanding Infrastructures aims to tackle the big questions around infrastructures — the big systems that support global processes such as the production and transportation of energy and water or the provision of global communication and mobility.”
I spoke at Visualizar ‘09, representing Sunlight Foundation. It was an interesting experience. Particularly the...
WhereCampDC
I don’t generally write much here, preferring to post graphics and experiments, but I wanted to note that I recently attended WherecampDC. As an outsider at most technical conferences, unconferences, BarCamps, and Hack Days, I’m pretty use to that feeling of not quite fitting in and having very little to offer to the discussion/conversation. That said, this weekend’s WhereCampDC...
May 2011
3 posts
Outside Spending - New York 26th
Last year, I started working on a script that would pull the Outside Spending data from the Sunlight Foundation’s Reporting Group site and build simple pie-charts in protovis for all the races. This data from the special election in NY’s 26th reminded me that I really need to finish that project.
March 2011
4 posts
February 2011
2 posts
January 2011
3 posts
December 2010
5 posts
November 2010
6 posts
Playing with OpenHeatMap
2010 - Nevada Senate Race - Outside Spending
2010 - Kentucky Senate Race - Outside Spending
October 2010
5 posts
Playing with Protovis and Sunlight Reporting Group...
The idea I was playing with was that the amount of money, while substantial, wasn’t as significant as how it was being spent. You’ll notice no amounts are listed. This is intentional. A quick glance reveals that the Republicans in this particular race are doing almost 75% of the spending. This was just a piece of potentially larger visualization of all the races, but the real-time...
WatchThis doesn’t really fit in as “data jamming” but since it is created with congressional collateral I figured I’d stick it here.
I used to maintain the congressional photo collection as part of the Sunlight Labs API (bit.ly/9i1zl7). This was a pretty thankless task, but someone had to do it. I have no idea who does it now, but I feel for them. In any case, I always wanted...
August 2010
1 post
5 tags
Are Capitalism and Transparency mutually...
Recently, Honolulu’s local news venture Civil Beat released a database of State Employee Salaries. While I appreciate and applaud this effort, the database is behind a paywall and the source PDFs are not downloadable (download has been disabled). In fact, the source data is not downloadable in any form, as far as I can tell. No CSV, JSON, or XML. Nothing. Essentially, what Civil Beat has...