Institute for Analytic Journalism

From a story in the San Francisco Chronicle:

Does this proposed legislation have implications for what we do? For example, what if your county is licensing tax assessor data to a reseller? Yet another barrier to public access to our data? How about what the good guys at http://www.fecinfo.com/ do, commercially, with the FEC data?

Wednesday, April 6, 2005 (SF Chronicle)
Another incident for UC
By David Lazarus
   The University of California has suffered yet another potential data breach, this one involving the names and Social Security numbers of about 7, 000 students, faculty and staff at the San Francisco campus.
   For Sen. Diane Feinstein, D-Calif., enough is enough. She told me Tuesday that she'll introduce federal legislation within the next few days requiring encryption of all data stored for commercial purposes.
   "What this shows is that there is enormous sloppy handling of personal data," Feinstein said.
   This latest incident involving UCSF follows news that UC Berkeley lost control of personal info for nearly 100,000 grad students, alumni and applicants last month when a laptop computer was stolen from an unlocked
campus office.
   It also follows a flurry of other security lapses, including San Francisco's Wells Fargo, the nation's fourth-largest bank, experiencing no fewer than three data breaches due to stolen computers over the past year and a half....

More at http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/04/06/BUGEOC3L5N1.DTL

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Sometimes I-o-P (Ink-on-Paper) IS better

by JTJ on Wed 06 Apr 2005 03:48 PM MDT

Matt Ericson, the top-flight map/infographics journalist/designer at The New York Times, produced another fine piece of work Tuesday related to changes in the Roman Catholic world. But what we get in print is superior [click here to see IoP version] to the online version of the cartogram (i.e. proportional map), which illustrates how the church has grown in Latin America, Africa and Asia. The print page positions the RC world c. 1900 right next to the RC population c. 2005. Readers' eyes can quickly shift from one region to the other and see the differences. On the other hand, the online treatment of those graphics, while supplying data for three different eras -- 1900, 1978, 2005 -- bring up each era individually, making it difficult to compare one to the others. Snazzy presentation, but at a loss of comprehension. Go to NYT story "Third World Represeents a New Factor in Pope's Succession" and click on the right column link for "Interactive: After John Paul II." Then, after the java window pops up, click on "Changes in Catholics."

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Correcting racial gaps in education

by Patrick Mattimore on Wed 06 Apr 2005 12:09 PM PDT

Sometimes the biggest changes in education occur in the smallest ways. See, Correcting racial gaps in education

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