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Could Pass-The-Hat Kill Open Government?
Could Pass-The-Hat Kill Open Government?, By Joseph Marks, NextGov (05/18/11).
With the E-Gov fund, which paid for open government websites such as data.gov and usaspending.gov, severely trimmed and unlikely to be restored, the open government group OMB Watch speculated in an article Wednesday that those sites may have to turn to the so-called pass-the-hat funding model to stay in business.The Trouble with the "Pass-the-Hat" Funding Model for Government Technology Projects, OMB Watch (May 17, 2011).
Rather than using funding expressly designated by Congress, a project under a pass-the-hat model is funded by contributions from other purpose accounts of multiple agencies, frequently prorated based on agency size or use. This model is different from "fee for service," which also involves agency payments but is usually in return for specific services, such as payroll.Continue reading
Wegman ‘Hockey Stick’ report in the news
Earlier this week I reported on a significant report that may be hard to find and preserve (Senate Anatomy Of Financial Collapse). Here is another example of a prominent government report that may be hard to identify and preserve.
- Wegman, E.J., Scott, D.W., Said, Y.H., 2006. Ad-hoc Committee Report on the ‘Hockey Stick’ Global Climate Reconstruction, "A Report to Chairman Barton, House Committee on Energy and Commerce and to Chairman Whitfield, House Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations: Paleoclimate Reconstruction." (PDF, 1.5 MB), 91pp (missing page 1) [citation based examination of item and on a footnote in the Computational Statistics & Data Analysis article listed below.]
This report is in the news this week because a scholarly journal has withdrawn a paper based on the report.
- Climate study gets pulled after charges of plagiarism, By Dan Vergano, USA Today (May 15, 2011).
Based on information in another USA Today story, (Retracted climate critics' study panned by expert, By Dan Vergano, USA Today, May 19, 2011), the retracted paper is, apparently, this one (still available as of this morning from ScienceDirect):
- Yasmin H. Said, Edward J. Wegman, Walid K. Sharabati, John T. Rigsby, Social networks of author-coauthor relationships, Computational Statistics & Data Analysis, Volume 52, Issue 4, 10 January 2008, Pages 2177-2184, ISSN 0167-9473, DOI: 10.1016/j.csda.2007.07.021. (http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/B6V8V-4PCPFBJ-1/2/ed2ebad17cecf44b880d0d266133cbfc)
A hearing before the same committee, from 2006, with testimony by Wegman is available from FDsys:
- House Hearing, 109Th Congress - Questions Surrounding The 'Hockey Stick' Temperature Studies: Implications For Climate Change Assessments, U.S. House of Representatives. Committee on Energy and Commerce, July 19, 2006, July 27, 2006, Serial No. 109-128, Y 4.C 73/8
Because climate change is a contentious political issue, it is easy to find on the web lots about the original "Wegman report" and the retraction of the journal article. It is not easy to find citations to the article that has been retracted (one citation in USA Today was apparently built from a Google Scholar search and breaks). Copies of the report with the missing first page are available at a number of web sites, but I could not find it in FDsys. The only "official" copy I found (linked above) was buried on the Committee web site. One wonders if this report will be easy to find and attribute and authenticate in a year or ten years or fifty years. Continue reading
Senate Anatomy Of Financial Collapse
It is not always clear to me if reports like this are centrally listed or cataloged anywhere and when or if or where they will end up in FDsys. This report is massive and important and seems worth listing here with links that may or may not last.
U.S. Senate. Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.
- PSI Financial Crisis Report, "Senate Investigations Subcommittee Releases Levin-Coburn Report On the Financial Crisis" Press Release, (April 13, 2011) [PSIfinancialreportrelease041311.pdf] (PDF 86.2 KBs). (Another copy in HTML available at Committee Chairman Carl Levin's website. Using their own words in documents subpoenaed by the Subcommittee, the report discloses how financial firms deliberately took advantage of their clients and investors, how credit rating agencies assigned AAA ratings to high risk securities, and how regulators sat on their hands instead of reining in the unsafe and unsound practices all around them. Rampant conflicts of interest are the threads that run through every chapter of this sordid story.
- Wall Street And The Financial Crisis: Anatomy Of A Financial Collapse, Majority And Minority Staff Report (April 13, 2011) (PDF 5.7 MBs, 646pp). Another copy at Committee Chairman Carl Levin's website.
- Footnote Exhibit Locator (by FN and Bates)
- FN 107 - 1342 (pgs 1-1037)
- FN 1343 - 1459 (pgs 1038-2164)
- FN 1462 - 1576 (pgs 2165-3003)
- FN 1584 - 1622 (pgs 3004-3448)
- FN 1623 - 2406 (pgs 3449-4484)
- FN 2409 - 2706 (pgs 4485-5459)
- FN 2724 - 2831 (pgs 5460-5901)
Elections Database 1787-1825
A New Nation Votes is a searchable collection of election returns from the earliest years of American democracy. The data were compiled by Philip Lampi; The American Antiquarian Society and Tufts University Digital Collections and Archives have mounted it online. So far 18,146 elections (about 54% of Lampi's overall collection) have been made digital. Read more about this database:
- A New Nation Votes: Election Data from 1787 to 1825, By Elisabeth Grant, AHA Today, (May 17, 2011). Those interested in conducting their own analysis can download the entire A New Nation Votes dataset or the dataset for a single state.
- Revisiting the Early American Republic: The New Nation Votes Database Enables a New Political History, By Rosemarie Zagarri, Perspectives on History (May 2011) [membership required].
Google, Facebook, Twitter oppose California Privacy Law
It almost seems like this is privacy week. After stories about a new book on privacy and Eli Pariser's compelling TED talk about how "search personalization" silently filters out useful information, now we have this:
- Take Your Paws Off Our Privacy Laws! Facebook, Google, Twitter, Zynga Formally Oppose California Social Networking Bill, by Liz Gannes, All Things Digital (May 16, 2011) A coalition of industry associations and Internet companies including Facebook, Google, Twitter, Zynga, Match.com and Skype this afternoon submitted a formal letter of opposition to proposed California legislation that would mandate new privacy policies for social networking sites.
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