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Finalists Chosen In Apps For America 2 Contest
Andurin writes "Sunlight Labs has announced three finalists for its $25,000 Apps for America 2 competition. Forty-seven apps were submitted, each relying on Data.gov and providing a useful spin on government data. This We Know compiles federal information on a local level; govpulse is a searchable version of the Federal Register; and DataMasher allows simple mashups of government data sets. Voting is now open to determine the winner in the contest."
Can we have an app that tells us where out tax dollars are really going, down to the dime? Thanks.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
I like the layout of ThisWeKnow, and it's probably the application that I can most imagine my mother using. DataMasher is a bit more cryptic, but much more powerful - I'm worried about people drawing the wrong implications from the simple analyses, but it's interesting in a "data mining, damn the statistics and causality" kind of way. Govpulse isn't really interesting to me.
I'd have a tough time chosing between ThisWeKnow and DataMasher, and I really hope both stick around after the award thing is over.
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
Even if Democrats and Republicans will never gracefully allow it in regular elections, competitions like this should offer preferential ballots with a Condorcet-compliant method of determining the winner.
What would be a nice app to have (and would probably be simple to build) would be an app that would measure taxes vs benefits and compare it to current and projected birthrates and project into the future along with certain "disasters" that you could add. So you could find out if a certain bill would be sustainable. For example, you could put in data for, say, state run healthcare, birthrates, tax dollars, etc. and figure out if it would end up paying for itself. We don't need the public to be scammed into another version of social security that is not sustainable without unreasonable conditions such as an increasing birthrate (globally birth rates are down for most people, yes, the population keeps growing but the birthrate decreases leaving with more "useless" people than working people) and find out if it would require even more tax dollars.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Try this...
http://wallstats.com/deathandtaxes/ - WallStats: Death and Taxes ...it doesn't get into the nitty gritty of, say, a congresscritter getting moneys - but it goes into fairly reasonable detail.
Data masher looks to be a great place where journalists can go when there are no real headlines to put on the news. Just mash anything together, toss on a knee-jerking headline and viola, instant news story.
So we're just giving up and rebooting already? I figured we had at least another 20 years.
I think this is great, and I'm excited to see people build and promote sites based on it.
That is all.
Forty-seven apps were submitted, each relying on Data.gov and providing a useful spin on government data.
Just what government data needs - more spin.
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
KDawson?
And I don't mean the whole "rule of the mob of amateur statisticians" part. Perhaps it's a partial slashdot effect, but it seems the mashups have been rolled back to around 25 mins ago. All the ones I've seen created in the last few minutes have vanished, including my own.
Okay, seems I can still create mashups and they appear. Perhaps they had to purge an influx of PONIES or some such thing.
As long as we are stuck in the mentality of "those bosses in charge will never let us peons get away with it" we are doomed to servitude. Do you really want that, or are you ready to open source human governance?
And I thought MS had learned their lesson about re-writing history....
Can they put boobs on the pope?
i searched thisweknow.org on my zip code and it returned a bunch of crimes that occurred outside my zip code. it also reported a county population that's more than 10x what it actually is.
i call shenanigans.
When you recognize love in another and realize how precious it is, everything else seems so insignificant.
I think the motivation behind DataMasher is to give people a tool to visualize and understand information about the country, and that's a great goal. But I feel pretty certain that in practice DataMasher would end up mostly generating a lot of bad information. The site as it exists now seems to encourage you to think about issues in a really simplistic way (with a simple arithmetic combination of two numbers on a state by state basis) that's going to mislead more often than inform. The devil is always in the spurious correlations, and DataMasher just doesn't give you ability to get at that sort of thing (nor do most people have the understanding of statistics anyway).
Basically, I looked at the highest rated mashups, and it just seems like a series of cautionary tales in how this could lead you astray. On the one hand you have seemingly meaningless combinations, like the product of gun ownership and teen pregnancy. On the other hand you have a comparison of (SAT score)/($ spent per student): People seem to be drawing conclusions about which states are "doing it right", when the results are likely explainable by diminishing returns on spending (once you've spent enough you don't get much more by spending more) and other social conditions (spending is hardly the only thing that affects student performance). Not to mention the fact there's no clue of how much of that money is spent on teachers vs. facilities vs. administration.
Statistics are extremely useful in determining public policy, but only if used carefully. There's already so much bad use of statistics in our public policy debates, and DataMasher seems perfectly designed (unintentionally, I'm sure) to exacerbate the problem.
"You call it a new way of thinking; I call it regression to ignorance!" -- Operation Ivy