Caution on comparing ACS to Census 2000
While this won't be news to those who follow Census developments closely, it is a nice summary of some of the important deficiencies in the American Community Survey:
- 2005 American Community Survey by Roger Owen Green, NYS SBDC Research Network (November 21, 2006)
Writing for the New York State Small Business Development Center (NYS SBDC) Green notes that:
...because of previous cuts in the Congressional funding, the 2005 ACS does not capture data from group quarters, which include prisons, college dormitories, and nursing homes.
One thing this means is that in geographic areas where there is a large group quarters population, comparisons of figures from ACS to Census 2000 may be inaccurate or misleading. As Green says, "...politicians and the media have glommed onto these new statistics, making assertions about populations that the methodology does not support."
Continue readingMore on Google working with agencies
Here is another article about Google working with government agencies to get them to use Google SiteMaps to make their information more accessible:
- Google wants you, by Joab Jackson, GCN (November 20, 2006).
John Lewis Needham, development manager for Google, is quoted as saying that at least 20 percent of all government information is locked in databases that can only be accessed from web forms. He also cites a study that discovered that "70 percent of visitors to the National Institutes of Health were directed there by search engines, whereas only 4 percent of the visitors came directly to the site by simply typing in the Web address."
Continue readingDirectorate of Legal Research at the Library of Congress
The Directorate of Legal Research at the Library of Congress: A Treasure Hidden Under a Bushel Basket, By Michael Ravnitzky, LLRX.com, November 12, 2006.
Michael Ravnitzky, a Washington, D.C. area attorney and journalist, has published this useful article about this "little known but well-regarded and highly influential research department contained within the Library of Congress." The mission of the Directorate of Legal Research is "to provide high quality, timely, and innovative research, analysis, and reference services on issues of international, and foreign and comparative law."
But obtaining reports from the Directorate is very difficult. No overall list of DLR reports has ever been produced or released and the Directorate itself says that it has no comprehensive list of its own publications. While the Pennyhill Press sells copies of 66 DRL reports, there are evidently many more that it does not sell.
Ravnitzky does an excellent job of digging into the sources that do exist to track down this useful information. Bookmark this article for future reference questions!
Continue readingTrue Sharing and Fake Sharing of Information
What is the difference between true and fake sharing? Lawrence Lessig addresses the question on his blog this week:
- More bad karma: When Web 2.0 meets lawyers 1.0, by Lawrence Lessig on Lessig Blog(Nov 16, 2006).
Government Secrecy in the Information Age
While it is easy for us to take government openness for granted and assume that government secrecy is an aberration, a new book that examines government secrecy world-wide warns us of dangers that exist today and identifies problems that we can see in the United States. From the publisher:
Roberts goes further than the popular view that secrecy is simply a problem of selfish bureaucrats trying to hide embarrassing information by showing how such powerful trends as privatization, globalization, and the "networking" of security agencies are complicating the fight against secrecy.
The book is Blacked Out: Government Secrecy in the Information Age by Alasdair Roberts of the Maxwell School of Syracuse University, New York, Cambridge University Press (January 2006, 334 pages).
We know about privatization of government information and this week we saw more about networking of security agencies when Director of National Intelligence John D. Negroponte submitted to Congress the Information Sharing Environment Implementation Plan (November 2006). This plan explicitly calls for "policies, processes, protocols and technology that enable the sharing of ["terrorist related"] information among federal, state, local, tribal and private sector entities, as well as our foreign partners." While this may seem a reasonable proposal in the abstract, it has two problems: First, it is not clear that the "terrorist related information" will always be information about terrorists; it may often be massive amounts of information on all citizens, which the government hopes to use to identify terrorists. Second, there is no proposal for sharing information with the public; that implies that this information will be shared and kept secretly -- exactly what Roberts discusses in his book.
Thanks to Secrecy News for the pointer to this book! Continue reading