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Tag Archives: Data
Big Data, Environmental Data
The Journal Nature has a special issue about "Big Data" with articles by Clifford Lynch, Cory Doctorow, and others. The whole issue is worth reading and is freely available online for a short time.
Coping with floods of data is now one of science's biggest challenges. In this Nature Special, we assess the need to complement smart science with smart searching; look at what the next Google will be; talk to the pioneering biologists who are trying to use wiki-type web pages to manage and interpret data; and recall that the first mass data crunchers were not computers, but the remarkable women of Harvard's Observatory.In the area of government information, David Goldston, the former chief of staff of the House Committee on Science, writes about environmental data.
- Big data: Data wrangling by David Goldston, Nature 455, no. 7209 (September 3, 2008): 15.
District of Columbia provides live data feeds
I had not seen this before, but it looks like a model for open government. The District of Columbia provides free access to "city operational data" (e.g., Demographics, Health Care, Environment, Human Services, Education, Economic Development, Public Safety) in a variety of formats including RSS (Atom) feeds, XML, CSV, and ESRI Shapefiles. The feeds are drawn from more than 150 data sets, ranging from the all- important crime reports to pothole complaints. DC Data Catalog and Data Feeds Continue reading
Ruggles report on preservation and use of economic data liberated!
A few weeks back, we posted a story about an Atlantic article from November, 1967 called, "The National Data Center and Personal Privacy" in which was discussed the idea of a National Data Center, the precursor to Total Information Awareness. It was such a hot topic of the day that Congress held a hearing on computers and the invasion of privacy of US citizens (The computer and invasion of privacy. Hearings, Eighty-ninth Congress, second session. July 26, 27, and 28, 1966. by United States. Congress. House. Committee on Government Operations. Special Subcommittee on Invasion of Privacy.) I started reading the hearing, and found that Yale Economics Professor Richard Ruggles (NYT obituary from 2001) had also testified before that hearing. So I started poking around about Ruggles, looking in WorldCat and Google Scholar. I found quite a few citations to a document entitled, Report of the Committee on the Preservation and Use of Economic Data submitted to the Social Science Research Council in 1965. But for such a well-cited document that spawned a Congressional hearing and much worry in the mainstream press about computers and privacy, there were only 3 libraries in the whole country that held the report. Imagine that! Well, I decided to liberate the report, so -- after much finagling! -- got a copy, scanned it, and uploaded it to the Internet Archive. Score one for the digital public domain!! I hope to see more libraries listed as having a copy in WorldCat in the near future. And if you've got any fugitive documents laying around your hard drive, send them to us here at admin AT freegovinfo DOT info. We'll make sure they get up on the open Web safe and secure in the Internet Archive!! Continue reading
NetSquared $100K mashup competition
TechSoup's NetSquared mashup challenge pays out a total $100K this year to the best of 122 submitted projects. I'm going to have way too much fun browsing through the project proposals. Casting my votes, though, is already proving difficult... Using user downtime? Massive mashup calendars? Warnings for hidden corporate abuses every time I make an online purchase? Ohboyohboyohboyohboy. And of course, many of these envisioned projects would not even be imaginable were it not for widely available and mostly reliable government information data sources. Continue reading
Scientists fear committee’s dissolution will result in lost data
Scientists oppose move to restrict satellite data, by Les Blumenthal, McClatchy Newspapers, The Tacoma, WA News Tribune, January 13, 2008
There is a little-noticed but influential government committee known as the Civil Applications Committee, which, under the jurisdiction of the U.S. Geological Survey, reviews civilian requests for classified reconnaissance information that can be useful to scientists studying volcanoes, forest fires, earthquakes and landslides, climate change, hurricanes, flooding and pollution. Now the Bush administration plans to abolish the committee and create an office within the Department of Homeland Security to review such requests.
Rep. Norm Dicks, chairman of the House appropriations subcommittee with control over the Geological Survey and is the senior member of the House Homeland Security Committee, said in a letter to administration officials:
"We believe the elimination of the civilian orientation of the Civil Applications Committee represents explicit harm in the near term to USGS and other civilian federal agencies, and it represents a potentially serious harm over the longer term to the constitutional protections U.S. citizens expect and deserve."Continue reading
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