October 28th, 2009 | by Derek | published in Campaign Finance, Fed Data
The good folks at the Federal Election Commission launched a disclosure data catalog recently, continuing the federal government data catalog trend. And while there are few (if any) people better at explaining campaign finance data than the FEC’s Bob Biersack, the data catalog is a work in progress and has room for improvement.
It should be [...]
March 25th, 2009 | by Derek | published in FOIA, Fed Data
When it first appeared I was really excited to see Show Us The Data, which gave visitors a chance to list and vote for their “Most Requested Documents” that should be more readily available from the federal government. Sure enough, there were plenty of strong choices for the top 10 list. And then people starting [...]
November 5th, 2006 | by Derek | published in Fed Data
Ken Ward Jr. of the Charleston Gazette, who pretty much owns the mine safety beat, has a story showing that “mine disasters like Sago get headlines. But far more coal miners die … alone, crushed by heavy equipment, ground up by runaway machinery, buried beneath collapsed mine roofs … Only 13 percent of the more [...]
October 12th, 2006 | by Derek | published in Fed Data
Farah Stockman, Michael Kranish, Peter S. Canellos and Kevin Baron of the Boston Globe have a four-part series on foreign aid spending by the United States, finding that “President Bush has almost doubled the percentage of US foreign-aid dollars going to faith-based groups such as Food for the Hungry, according to a Globe survey of [...]
October 11th, 2006 | by Derek | published in Fed Data
Jean Guccione and Doug Smith of the Los Angeles Times used federal data to find that “most New Orleans-area property owners seeking government aid for hurricane damage are showing a strong preference for restoring their old neighborhoods rather than take the money to seek new horizons.” About 2 percent of the people who individuals approved [...]