michael henry keller

my latest interactive and NewsBeast Labs...

Fri, 16 Nov 2012 16:56:57 -0500

my latest interactive and NewsBeast Labs post

newsbeastlabs:

A defining characteristic of this election cycle was Super PACs and the hundreds of millions of dollars outside groups were spending to influence races. Now that it’s all over, we wanted to see which outside groups spent their money on succssful races and which did not. The result was our interactive Not-So-Super PACs: 2012’s Winners and Losers.

Super PACs abounded this cycle. So instead of trying to document and display all of them, we focused the narrative on how well the biggest spenders and their donors fared. To execute it, we used Center for Responsive Politics anaylsis of FEC data to find how much each PAC had spent so far in each race and then manually went through and coded each race whether the outcome was in line with or against the PAC’s interest. Then we added everything up.

Visualizing it

This idea went through a few iterations before settling on what you see above. For a while, we’ve been wanting to use a tower graphic template - one of those vertical scroll layouts with a sticky table of contents - that I built a couple of months ago but it never seems to work out. This time, after thinking about all of the detail we wanted to display we thought bigger.

If you’re trying to visualize money flows, Sankey lines are a go-to. ProPublica did a great one showing overlapping Super PAC expenditures and you see them as flat graphics too. They show direcionality and volume = great for money.

Getting the right data

Money was flowing from donors to PACs and then to races, so we used the JSON structure that D3 lays out for its network layouts (and Sankey) visualizations. You have a list of nodes (People and PACs) and a list of node to node links (X person gave $Y to Z PAC). We were working collaboratively in Google Docs so were able to do some formulas that would print out or data structure in JSON as we were editing the document. Very handy in case you need to correct any numbers or name spellings.

Our D3 visualization was a failure.

Here’s a link to the interactive version (yes, it’s in the “failures” folder). As you can see, there were too many races to fit on the screen and the dollar amounts in some races were so high that they dwarfed everything else. So showing each race in the Sankey was out.

This led to Sankey Idea #2.

We connected photos of the donors to the PACs, showed the percentage of succesful funds, and then put the races in a table down below. The photos were very useful because you can quickly understand that money is coming from a person and going somewhere. If we just had text, I think, without photos, it would be less clear and have less of a personality. Someone remarked that the lines almost form bodies and arms that reach out to touch Super PACs. It’s interesting to see visualized data combined with photography work out to tell a story like that.

Under the hood

We used Raphael to draw the lines, which was an improvement from D3 since we do indeed support Internet Explorer 8. We tweaked Al Shaw’s Sankey line from Tom Counsell’s Sankey library to make them span vertically instead of left to right. Here’s a jsFiddle of the code to draw the line.

The table uses Isotope.js for its animated sorting, which is snazzy but I also think does help make tabular data more understandable. Instead of clicking on a column header and everything resorts in a flash, you can see how dramatically different rows vary from view to view. It’s also nice because you can do filtering. So without much code you have a filterable, sortable table. It also saves a step of turning the object data into arrays for sorting. I’ve been wanting to add those ascending / descending arrows for a while to our tables so this was a good time for that.

This table will probably become our first stand-alone NewsBeast Labs plugin since we’ve been using it pretty frequently. That’s pretty cool because five months ago we didn’t have any interactive news code and now we’ve done enough projects that we can see what’s worked, what functionality we like and can wrap it all up into something more robust and reusable, which will make our future development that much faster.

-mk

Come peak behind the curtain.

What I learned about John McCain listening to This American Life archives

Sat, 05 May 2012 18:21:34 -0400

This is a fascinating TAL from 1996 entitled “Politics” where Ira Glass speaks to an oddly comical right wing Mexican-American self-deportation proponent, Daniel D. Portado, (back before that became an actual law like it is Alabama) and Michael Lewis reads a story of his on John McCain, portraying him as one of the only people in Washington with integrity, reinstilling Lewis’s faith in politicians.

Listen here: http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/41/politics

sunfoundation: How We Pay Taxes: 11 Charts I’ll come right out...

Tue, 17 Apr 2012 16:11:32 -0400

sunfoundation:

How We Pay Taxes: 11 Charts

I’ll come right out and say it: Taxes are awesome.

Yes, awesome. If you care about national values, or the relationship of citizens to their government, or the way we choose to award and discourage behavior, there is nowhere better to start than the gnarled and fascinating world of levies and tax breaks. Tax week gives American families a reason to consider moving to Bermunda, but it also gives me an excuse to spend the day finding my favorite, most controversial, and most illuminating graphs about taxes. Here they are. If you’ve think I’ve picked the wrong ones, or if you’ve got a better chart yourself, leave it in the comment section. I’m rounding up your favorite tax graphs tomorrow.

"Like, if you exist in the world, you don’t need somebody to tell you what the weather is. You..."

Thu, 05 Apr 2012 19:52:02 -0400

“Like, if you exist in the world, you don’t need somebody to tell you what the weather is. You exist in the world and the weather is happening around you.”

- —Ira Glass on Google Glasses

Knight News Challenge: 1. What do you propose to do? [20 words]Buy Washington City Paper and...

Sun, 18 Mar 2012 16:14:43 -0400

Knight News Challenge: 1. What do you propose to do? [20 words]Buy Washington City Paper and...:

I like wam’s idea

newschallenge:

1. What do you propose to do? [20 words]

Buy Washington City Paper and transform it into a non-profit membership organization.

2. Is anyone doing something like this now and how is your project different? [30 words]

While many people are exploring non-profit models for journalism, this is a…

CIA Chief: We’ll Spy on You Through Your Dishwasher

Sun, 18 Mar 2012 14:34:49 -0400

CIA Chief: We’ll Spy on You Through Your Dishwasher:

Earlier this month, Petraeus mused about the emergence of an “Internet of Things” — that is, wired devices — at a summit for In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital firm. “‘Transformational’ is an overused word, but I do believe it properly applies to these technologies,” Petraeus enthused, “particularly to their effect on clandestine tradecraft.”

Isn’t this plus artificial intelligence pretty much the whole backstory to Battlestar Galactica?

Better hashtag tracking

Sat, 17 Mar 2012 18:20:00 -0400

The other day I was thinking about hashtag line graphs — charts that show traffic on a particular topic over time — and how to make them more interesting. Visualizing traffic around a hashtag over time usually tells the story that everyone already knows i.e. some huge event happened and people started tweeting about it. Not terribly surprising.

Other experiments into semantic analysis of tweets have tried to characterize what this conversation is about. The Guardian’s riot rumor visualization is one great example but it has some high barriers to entry even if you have the crazy datavis chops. First, you need a huge sample of tweets to analyze and you’ll have trouble getting that unless you’re Twitter white-listed or want to pay a company like DataSift. Second, to ensure accuracy, you need to either build a semantic tagger more advanced than what’s currently out there, or get a bunch of people to make sure your semantic analysis coded each tweet correctly and correct mistakes. So you need manpower.

So what story could you tell if you’re not a huge paper?

Clearly identifying the meaning behind a sentence has some barriers but what about individual tags? What if you could chart how the audience around an event shifted by looking at the evolution of tags around a single topic? Surely, sheer tweet volume will tell you something about how popular an event is that but it could be confounded if a spike in traffic is from a small group tweeting a hundred times as fast as opposed to a hundred times as many people tweeting at the same rate. (Yes you could use network analysis to get picture of audience but again you need all that data.)

Like with most data visualizations, stories in data start to come out when you can mash together different datasets.

One experiment:

When Occupy Wall Street started, I remember the hashtag began as the cumbersome #occupywallstreet because know one knew about it. I briefly saw an #occupywallst and now #ows is the clear choice. The question is, when did Occupy Wall Street become commonplace enough where people were comfortable just referring to it by #ows?

In other words, by looking at hashtag evolution could you see the moment when an obscure march became part of the national discourse?

Let’s use Trendistic. Tumblr won’t let me embed the graph so click on the image to see the interactive version, or click here (Trendistic doesn’t display this data forever so depending on when you’re reading this, the data from fall 2011 may be gone. But the image below remains!)

#Occupywallstreet = Red

#Occupywallst = Blue

#OWS = Yellow

A couple of things are interesting: first, #ows became the dominant tag early on Friday Oct 7 (the first OWS protest was Sept 17); and second, the rise of yellow-lined #OWS correlates with the demise of the red-lined #occupywallstreet, which lends credence to the theory that #ows was replacing #occupywallstreet as opposed to people using both concurrently (if you click the lines you can see that some tweets do use both, even from the beginning. Here’s a tweet from day one from @Korgasm “Truck of barricades headed up Pine St toward Wall.#occupywallstreet #takewallstreet #ows #sep17”).

Interestingly, the moment #ows took over #occupywallstreet was in a lull between two spikes of activity. If you were just going just by tweet volume you would have a difficult time knowing that the six days following the spike of activity on Oct 2nd had a tremendous impact on the movement’s notoriety. Searching through that week’s news, a number of unions joined the protest on the 5th, which certainly led to more coverage and a larger audience.

In all, people tweeting about Occupy Wall Street felt confidant that they would be understood by the movement’s abbreviation only a few weeks after it started.

If you wanted to spend some serious time with this you could, though. For instance, are there any points where traffic volume or the rates of change around these hashtags differ? Is one population of hashtag-tweeters reacting differently than another? How would a line graph of media coverage look on this graph? Would you see a rise in media coverage corresponding to the rise of #ows use or did it take even longer for the media to catch on?

This example works because of the twitter-unfriendliness #occupywallstreet. But for future events, it would be interesting to see how people are tagging it and, using simple tools, what insights we can glean about those interested communities.

CJR Digital Cover Design

Tue, 17 Jan 2012 00:06:00 -0500

I got my start in journalism designing covers for my college newsmagazine the Georgetown Voice. It was a swell time, reading the first draft of a cover story hopefully the day before production night — usually at 6pm the night of, eight hours before we had to Cyberduck our PDFs — and designing an image that would capture the story and make college kids want to pick up newsprint.

I haven’t designed a cover since then so it was delightful when Columbia Journalism Review EIC and my old professor Mike Hoyt asked me to help them launch CJR’s experiment in digital longform publishing — I even got to name it “CJR Longreads,” until the folks at Columbia University Press decided they wanted “Columbia Journalism Review Books” instead. Can’t win em all. For the 50th anniversary issue, CJR ran two ~10,000 word cover stories and sold them as kindle singles.

They needed covers:

This was the first piece, “Confidence Game: The Limited Vision of the News Gurus” by Dean Starkman responding to the so-called “Future of News” thinks such as Jay Rosen and Clay Shirkey. CJR has a round-up of the debate the piece generated here.

The second story was the first part in a series of profiles on newspapers confronting the digital age by my other former professor Michael Shapiro. “The Newspaper that Almost Seized the Future” chronicles the downfall of the San Jose Mercury News who was ahead of everyone until they weren’t. A really great read.

Liner notes: For the Starkman cover I licensed a Lonely Planet image to alter it, adding texture, tone, and the puzzle pattern you see in Photoshop. I had originally thought to do some type of God Save the Queen ripped paper texture but it looked too negative. This odd antique store in my neighborhood had an assembled puzzle in its window of some chinese calendar type design — I had the idea to convey the “limited vision” as a half finished puzzle.

For the Shapiro piece, the light was good on my fire escape and I had bought a 1928 Underwood for 70 euro in a sidewalk sale when I was living in France so I typed out the title and took a few photos. I also had an old Macintosh SE from the 80s back home that my brother took a photo of and sent to me. I overlaid the title in the retro Mac Techno font over an empty MS Word document but the typewriter version came out better.

Fusion Table New Years Mashup

Fri, 30 Dec 2011 15:00:00 -0500

I’ve been wanting to make a google map with workable mouseovers for a quite a while. Fusion Tables are super useful for drawing shapes on a map and clicking for more info. But, the excessive clicking can be tedious and hide a great deal of the data.

I decided to play around with Albert Sun’s GMap Features that draws shapes based on a KML file. Link: https://github.com/albertsun/gmap-features. And since the payroll tax extension was in the news, I took the median income by census tract dataset from the American Community Survey through American Fact Finder2 and calculated how much people would save for the approved tax cut extension, which is 3.1% of income under $110,100. I got the shapefiles from the census (link: http://www.census.gov/geo/www/tiger/tgrshp2010/tgrshp2010.html) and merged the data and the shapes into one Fusion Table. Why a Fusion Table? FT seemed like the easiest way I knew of to quickly merge a table of polygons with a table of data as long as they shared a common column. Also, FT lets you export all of this as a single KML file, which I could plug into Sun’s template.

I did all that but it wasn’t working and wasn’t giving me an error. After comparing the sample KML files with my FT export, I noticed that my data was wrapped in <Polygon> tags but the sample files were <Multigeometry>. I wrote a simple macro in TextMate that added the tag and it worked! I looked deeper into Sun’s code and it looks like it searches specifically for the <Multigeometry> tag when it draws the shapes, but I’m no KML expert so perhaps there are other important differences for drawing polygons.

UPDATE: After learning some more about KML shapes, I found that you need to clean up the data a bit more to render complex shapes correctly. Sometimes FT outputs some KML polygons as MultiGeometry shapes by default. If you just run a find change to replace “<Polygon>” with “<MultiGeometry><Polygon>” and “</Polygon>” with “</Polygon></MultiGeometry>” you’ll get duplicates on those shapes that are already wrapped in MG tags. The structure should look like:

The (simplified) structure looks something like:

<multigeometry><polygon>otherTagsAndNumbers</polygon><polygon>otherTagsAndNumbers</polygon></multigeometry>

as opposed to with duplicates:

<multigeometry><multigeometry><polygon>otherTagsAndNumbers</polygon></multigeometry><multigeometry><polygon>otherTagsAndNumbers</polygon></multigeometry></multigeometry>

The macro I recorded is just a series of find/replaces but if you’d like a copy, send me a message at @mhkeller.

Sun included callbacks, which let me add the hoverbox that updates on mouseover, which was awesome and what I’ve been wanting to do for ages now. Here’s the map — more code talk after the jump:

Address Finder

One important feature that I wanted was to be able to put in your address and then have an infowindow appear, so the map could really add some value to people using it. I had used similar functionality in the NY World redistricting map and I realized that since my data was already in a Fusion Table, I could use the same method of querying that table without even adding its data to my map.

The code looks like this and since it just sends back the information from each polygon, the shapes just needed to be the same as my KML shapes:

var queryText = encodeURIComponent(“SELECT censusTract,totalEst,medianIncome,savingsYear,twoMonth,medianMoe FROM “+ tableid +” WHERE ST_INTERSECTS(geometry, CIRCLE(LATLNG(” + coordinate.lat() + “,” + coordinate.lng() + “), 0.1))”);

var query = new google.visualization.Query(‘http://www.google.com/fusiontables/gvizdata?tq=’ + queryText);

query.send(addInfoWindow);

The next step was to make a more attractive infowindow to pop up when people look up their address. What’s wrong with the default? It has that extra shadow, white pointer and why use something default when you’re making something custom? Also, I wanted it to be draggable so it wouldn’t hide any data below it. Especially when maps are zoomed out, the infowindow can hide a lot of data points below it — often making comparisons between neighboring shapes impossible. Since those can be the most interesting comparisons, I wanted an info window that would keep that data visible but still movable so it wouldn’t get in the way.

Unfortunately, the google maps API doesn’t have a draggable option that I know of, but markers do (I didn’t want to just make another floating div since it would lose its placement when the map moved or zoomed). In a GoogleCode Group that Ryan Murphy at the Texas Tribune turned me on to there’s a script for a RichMarker, which lets you put custom css/html into a google maps marker (linke: http://google-maps-utility-library-v3.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/richmarker/docs/reference.html).

That worked well for turning it into an infowindow except I wanted the existing mouseover box to disappear when I moused over the new marker. Without this detail, the interaction very felt awkward with both boxes visible. Unfortunately, the RichMarker JS didn’t include a mouseover event listeners so I added it around line 270 with the other event listeners. That worked.

I added some dynamic boundaries for the mouseover box based on the width and height of the map and box, which could probably be refined a bit, as could the overall organization of the js and css, but so far it works. It also wasn’t obvious that people could drag that darker infowindow so I modifed the RichMarker.js to add the “move” cursor on mouseover and added those tooltips you see after you put in your address. Feel free to embed!

More photos from the Christmas Eve when OWS protesters held a...

Sun, 25 Dec 2011 01:29:00 -0500

More photos from the Christmas Eve when OWS protesters held a candlelight vigil in front of the New York Stock Exchange.

On Christmas Eve, around 50 OWS protesters marched from Zuccotti...

Sun, 25 Dec 2011 01:29:00 -0500

NYPD smoking a cigar at GA meeting

attaching the drums

On Christmas Eve, around 50 OWS protesters marched from Zuccotti Park to the New York Stock Exchange to hold a candlelight vigil with “Fuck you” candles

The Mystery Of Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s Missing Records

Thu, 22 Dec 2011 10:56:00 -0500

My NY World story ran today in City & State. It’s about weak record keeping laws in New York and whether Cuomo could pull a Romney with his official records.

A year ago, as Gov.-elect Andrew Cuomo prepared to move out of the state attorney general’s office after one term, his records officer directed staff to pack old memos, along with hard copies of emails, press releases and other correspondence, in large boxes.

The records, documenting the inner workings of Cuomo and his administration, were destined for the State Archives for “permanent historical preservation,” according to Attorney General Eric Schneiderman’s spokeswoman Lauren Passalacqua.

That much is known. The whereabouts of the records since then remain a mystery.

“I can tell you right now the records of the attorney general aren’t in the Archives,” said Robert Bullock, spokesman for the New York State Archives.

[…]

Cuomo is widely assumed to have presidential ambitions. Yet future chroniclers looking to assess his time in office as attorney general or governor may have a hard time obtaining access to the documents they seek. State law specifically exempts the governor from any obligation to keep records except “as are deemed by him of sufficient value for preservation.”

Read the full story

"In other parts of Manning’s user profile, Shaver said he found two files each containing 100..."

Mon, 19 Dec 2011 09:21:41 -0500

“In other parts of Manning’s user profile, Shaver said he found two files each containing 100 complete department of state cables. They had all been put into a form of file known as a CSV, which Saver said meant they were easier to transmit from one database to another.”

- Apparently the military’s Computer Crime Investigative Unit considers CSVs a secret technology. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/dec/19/cables-bradley-manning-computer-wikileaks

City life, science journalism, and the amygdala

Wed, 14 Dec 2011 09:49:00 -0500

I wrote a (timelier) draft of this post over the summer before News21 took over. Dusting it off and posting it now…

A category of science writing exists that you could call the “This is your brain on X” category. The writer takes an activity in everyday life and discusses how it, unknowingly to you, changes your very biology. The headline of a June post on Wired.com is a prime example. It reads: City Life Could Change Your Brain for the Worse, but a closer look at the study shows how this conclusion is a reach and is an example of how easily journalists can make false claims when writing about the brain.

The article is based on a German fMRI study comparing reactions to stress in urban versus rural subjects’ brains. To summarize the study, subjects were placed in an fMRI machine (a large magnet that measures blood flow to different parts of the brain) and were criticized by researchers while performing a task they were designed to fail at. The researchers wanted to induce stress and judge whether the urbanites’ brains reacted differently than the rural folks’. And they did find a measurable difference — in an area known as the amygdala. In fact, urbanites’ amygdalae reported more activation than those of rural folks’. The popular press often discusses the amygdala only as a center of negative emotions such as fear, stress and fight or flight reactions even though substantial amounts of research strongly implicate it in memory, as well.

So the study seems to be doing fine: urban people are getting a higher activation in an brain region often linked to stress. Brandon Keim, the author of the Wired piece writes: “Between the crowds and the noise and the pressure, city life often seems to set one’s brain on edge. Turns out that could literally be true.” He also describes the link between being stress-sensitive and developing any number of psychoses such as schizophrenia or a mood disorder: implying that city life will turn you crazy.

But the researchers also measured what they call “subjective measures” of stress such as salivary cortisol level (stress indicator), heart rate, and blood pressure. However, the researchers point out a major limitation of the study is that cortisol levels did not differ between the two groups. That is to say, even though brain readings differed, urban subjects did not feel more stressed than rural subjects.

Keim and the study he writes about conflate what’s going on in the brain with what’s going on in the person. This fallacy is common in journalism about neuroscience. In a recent email to me, my former neuropsychology professor, Dr. Steven Sabat at Georgetown University, calls it the “mereological fallacy (attributing to part of an organism, the brain in this case, what is logically attributable only to the whole organism - the person).” [edit: This term, he pointed out to me, was coined by Maxwell. Bennett and Peter Hacker in Neuroscience and Philosophy.]

fMRI limitations and the amygdala’s other functions

Even in the absence of any increased subject measure of stress, the researchers assume that increased fMRI amygdala activity causes increased anxiety. But, as Dr. Sabat, points out, activity from an fMRI can’t tell you whether that activity is excitatory or inhibitory: a key distinction in knowing whether the amygdala is firing or being suppressed. Moreover, the amygdala (a three centimeter-wide almond shaped body deep in the brain) is consists in turn of smaller, more localized units of neurons the differences between which require a much more powerful fMRI scan than normally used.

Dr. Sabat points out that research by Abigail Marsh has found that a lack of activation in the amygdala correlates with a lack of empathy. So you should be skeptical when someone makes the simplistic amygdala=fear formulation you so often read about.

Science journalism

But the most interesting question the article raises is, even if the findings were true, why is this study interesting in the first place? Why is it not just “duh” that something in our environment could change something about our biology? After all, if someone worked as a coal miner for 40 years, wouldn’t we expect that to show in deep wrinkles? In our everyday lives of meeting people we expect whether they grew up in a city, or on a certain coast, or as an only child to have some residual effect on their personality and how they react to the world. Why when people write about the brain, an extremely plastic organ, do these effects suddenly seem newsworthy?

Take these two headlines that describe the same scenario:

a) Study finds having a large social network alters brain

b) Shy kid forced to make friends becomes more sociable over time

One you could expect to see in the New York Times, the other in the Onion. But both are the idea that things in our lives change who we are, and some of the changes are probably reflected in our brain. I still think, however, that the degree to which conscious experience and pure brain chemistry are related is nowhere near a settled debate.

Finally, to redeem myself and fellow non-neurotic city dwellers: a great deal of research has shown higher levels of schizophrenia in urban settings but I disagree with Keim when he writes: “After all, cities are hyper-social places, in which residents must be constantly on guard, and have mathematically more opportunity to experience stressful interaction. Too much stress may ultimately alter the brain, leaving it ill-equipped to handle further stress and prone to mental illness.”

What about the opportunity for positive social interaction? What of the negative affects of loneliness that people in a rural setting may feel? The majority of people in a city don’t have schizophrenia or a mental pathology. Cities, due to their density, make life a lot easier in any number of ways and not every city is the same. Also, as my friend Katy pointed out, crossing a midtown street in midtown may be stressful to a tourist but to someone used to New York traffic it’s fine. This points to desensitization as opposed to the sensitization mechanism proposed in the study. So let’s think about how complex this question is before we start vilifying modern life.

Science isn’t built on single earth-shattering studies but many small pieces of a very complicated puzzle coming together. If brain-science journalism can improve, it would be wiser to do more meta-analyses and find the links between ideas instead of just reprint them with little attention to detail.

Recent writing round-up

Tue, 13 Dec 2011 14:14:00 -0500

Since The New York World launched a couple of months ago I’ve had the chance to work on some pretty fun projects. Here’s a round-up from our inaugural fall:

Privately Owned Public Spaces

We partnered with WNYC to produce this crowdsourcing project on POPS. We’re using the info to followup on property owners not living up to their end of the deal. I also did a write-up for Columbia’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism on how we made the map. Here’s our full coverage.

WNYC and The New York World collaborated on a project to map and report on New York City’s privately owned public spaces, aka POPS, to figure out how public these public spaces are. Through zoning incentives, New York’s city planners have encouraged private builders to include public spaces in their developments. Many are in active public use, but others are hard to find, under heavy surveillance, or essentially inaccessible.

Stop Question and Frisk

We’re just at the beginning of this project but this week we rolled out our first piece aiming to show the effect of the NYPD’s Stop, Question and Frisk policy on the New Yorkers they police. For this we shot video, took audio stories, some serious PDF-scraping data reporting and some custom coding to display our multimedia. Below is our audio gallery, here is our coverage so far. The formatting on this is a little messed up since it was built for our site which is 600px wide. But it should work fine.

Redistricting

Working with Sasha and Peishan we put together this story on how New York State legislatures systematically under or overrepresent different parts of New York, effectively diluting citizens’ votes.

Open Government

My beat coverage has focused on issues of government transparency and technology. So far, I’ve written about a significant new transparency bill that may die in the next two weeks, disappearing state records, and I have two stores in the works about gubernatorial records and court data. So I’ll be sure to give updates as we go along.

Sociology Mapping Project h/t @yoyolanne

Fri, 02 Dec 2011 19:06:00 -0500

Inspired by my colleague @yoyolanne, we mapped the bars in Complex.com’s 25 Douchiest Bar guide to see what that showed.

Initial findings: The east side is clearly home to more “douche bars” than the west side. Surprisingly, a large amount of them are below 14th street, long-time bastion of well-to-do hipsters. Is nothing sacred?

Click each dot for name, address and a link to Complex’s write-up.

Passed through #occupyLA from Nov 26, the weekend before it was...

Wed, 30 Nov 2011 10:00:47 -0500

Passed through #occupyLA from Nov 26, the weekend before it was cleared out. I didn’t know it was literally on the steps of City Hall.

On the Effectiveness of Aluminium Foil Helmets: An Empirical Study, MIT/Berkeley

Sun, 20 Nov 2011 23:54:00 -0500

On the Effectiveness of Aluminium Foil Helmets: An Empirical Study, MIT/Berkeley:

Abstract

Among a fringe community of paranoids, aluminum helmets serve as the protective measure of choice against invasive radio signals. We investigate the efficacy of three aluminum helmet designs on a sample group of four individuals. Using a $250,000 network analyser, we find that although on average all helmets attenuate invasive radio frequencies in either directions (either emanating from an outside source, or emanating from the cranium of the subject), certain frequencies are in fact greatly amplified. These amplified frequencies coincide with radio bands reserved for government use according to the Federal Communication Commission (FCC). Statistical evidence suggests the use of helmets may in fact enhance the government’s invasive abilities. We speculate that the government may in fact have started the helmet craze for this reason.

Aggregating aggressive police tactics #ows

Sat, 19 Nov 2011 20:04:00 -0500

I put together this storify today aggregating instances of aggressive police force at Occupy protests across the country. As I write in the intro:

The story about national Occupy movement has now become as much about aggressive police tactics as it is about its original focus of income inequality. Videos or photos of non-violent protesters being pepper sprayed or beaten have come out of almost every single march or day of action and a group of professors at the Columbia Journalism School (my alma mater) recently sent a letter to Mayor Bloomberg protesting the arrest of so many journalists this week.

Most of these photos we’ve already seen — but in the constant cycle of digital news, I think it’s useful to have a place where these images don’t get buried in our twitter feeds or home page carousels and fade from public view. I’m also including links to followup articles where available and hopefully this could serve as a list of stories to be reported more fully. If you have links that are missing from this list you can tweet me at @mhkeller or email me at: michael [dot] keller [at] gmail [dot] com.

[Update] Apparently and to much more acclaim, AdBusters decided to do the same thing and is the featured story on storify. Oh well. I’ll keep updating mine and including followup reporting and stories.

Click the “Read More” tag to view the embedded storify.

"If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous he will not bite you. This is the principal..."

Mon, 07 Nov 2011 11:24:36 -0500

““If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and man.””

- Mark Twain (via s0nata)