iSimulate – collaborative economic modeling
Macroeconomic modeling might not be everyone's cup of tea but for those practitioners of the "dismal science", computer-based economic modeling is essential. David and Gauresh are two World Bank staff who work with economic data. In a kind of internal "grassroots" programming effort they've built a web interface to access the World Bank's economic simulation models. The nice twist is that they plan to offer it free to anyone who wants to use it. I met them this winter and I've been following their progress for several months now. Today I learned that the site is now on the web.
Some blurbage about iSimulate:
- Policy makers, students and others in developing countries are able to simulate domestic policies, analyze the impact of international developments and do cross-country analyses from remote locations.
- It is possible to organize collaborative forecasts and analyses of the world economy with teams of individuals spread across the globe.
- Provides a user-friendly and standardized interface to often complicated macroeconomic modeling tools.
Wiki the vote
Congresspedia.org has just launched a new site called "Wiki the Vote," a project to build citizen-written profiles on each and every candidate for Congress in 2008. What a cool new tool. Not only will it be collaborative in terms of reader-editors, but collaborative in terms of data -- collating campaign contributions from Open Secrets campaign database together with reader-submitted information on every Congressional candidate for the 2008 cycle.
The project is starting with nearly 300 basic profiles to be expanded and updated by citizens, journalists and even the campaigns themselves (or those of their opponents). Unlike Wikipedia, people connected to the subjects of articles are free to add to them as long as their contributions are rhetoric-free and comprised of fully documented, verifiable facts. The citizen editors are assisted and fact-checked by professional editors. The first set of articles is based on confirmed candidates according to 2008racetracker.com and will eventually expand to cover every candidate on the ballot in the primary and general elections next year. When the OpenSecrets.org 2008 congressional campaign contributions database goes online in a few weeks, the candidate profiles will also display live feeds tracking the money race and who is funding it.Continue reading
Mapping Human Rights
Some stuff for us map junkies:
The World Freedom Atlas uses Flash to mashup data from the Quality of Government Institute with maps.
GeoRSS is a new standard for encoding location information into RSS feeds.
You can get prebuilt GeoRSS feeds or build them yourself in ShapeWiki.
Continue readingThe IMF Starts Blogging
The International Monetary Fund launched its very first blog yesterday; the Public Financial Management blog. Some blurbage on this new blog:
The PFM blog aims at sharing the IMF staff's vast experience with PFM practitioners in Ministries of Finance and other fiscal agencies, academia, students, non-governmental organizations, as well as with the general public. It will also feature current news, resources and ideas about public financial management systems, their operation and improvement, and their contribution to economic growth and achieving national objectives, including economic and financial stability.
There will probably be more to come. The new managing director of the IMF (Dominique Strauss-Kahn) has been blogging since last year. He even set up a blog for his campaign to become MD.
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Did White House Lie About Loss of Five Million Emails?
Did White House Lie About Loss of Five Million Emails?, by Damon Poeter CMP Channel (03 October 2007).
When Congress asked about 5 million executive branch e-mails that went missing, a White House lawyer pointed the finger at an outside IT contractor. The only problem? No such IT contractor exists, according to sources close to the investigation of a possible violation of the Federal Records and Presidential Records acts.
The article includes a "Timeline of Events in White House E-mail Scandal."
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