Links for July 19th

  • Sunlight Foundation: Use the Net!
    Both Sen. Jim Webb and Mark Warner are still filing campaign finance reports with the FEC on paper. They've presumably each got small staffs who do all of their data collection and number crunching on computers, only to them print out their campaign finance reporters, snail-mail them to the FEC, who have to scan them in and key them in again. The result is a huge waste of federal dollars and a significant delay in making those reports public. The rest of the world—including every last member of the House of Representatives—long ago moved to electronic filing. What's the deal with Webb and Warner?
  • PhysOrg: Study shows voter turnout can be increased with simple word change
    This small-scale study found a substantial increase in voter turnout by asking people to be a "voter," rather than to "vote." No doubt this logic will be put to work on a larger scale within the next couple of election cycles, and that demonstrate whether this theory stands up or not.
  • BusinessJournalism.org: When visualizing numbers gets ridiculous
    A journalism pet peeve of mine is when reporters provide numbers without context. "The state spent $34.4B last year." Is that a lot? How did that compare to the prior year, or ten years prior? Or they'll put "$1M" next to "$1B." That's not helpful—use the same unit for comparison, listing "$1M" and "$1,000M." But some have gone too far the other way, providing meaningless visualizations. "That's enough dollar bills to stretch to the moon and back." What is the reader to do with this knowledge? Better to just use numbers to express numbers, and let their context provide context.

Published by Waldo Jaquith

Waldo Jaquith (JAKE-with) is an open government technologist who lives near Char­lottes­­ville, VA, USA. more »

8 replies on “Links for July 19th”

  1. RE: meaningless visualizations: “That’s enough dollar bills to stretch to the moon and back.”

    Okay, I know this is a lot of bills–the moon is very far away and even a stack of bills over my head would be a lot of money–but I’m lost to the scale. I don’t even know how many people standing on their heads it would take to reach the moon and back.

    One visualization (and I can’t remember if you posted it before) I like is this one: http://www.pagetutor.com/trillion/index.html
    “What does one TRILLION dollars look like?”

    To me, something like this is actually worth it and understandable (although I understand that newspapers can’t really run all those graphics each time they talk about trillions of dollars). I can understand the scope of a pallet and a small plastic grocery bag (that million’s looking pretty measly, ain’t it?).

  2. All 100 Senators file their reports on paper because they are denied by the rules of the Senate the ability to file electronically. Candidates for Senate must also file on paper.

    This isn’t Webb and Warner. This is the Senate as an institution.

  3. can’t remember where I’ve seen it before, but I do find that “trillion” explanation graph super-useful.

    Or, at least, useful for *visualizing* — it’s not like I ever actually need to know how much a trillion is in my day-to-day life.

    (I do like the author’s flippant commment that $10,000 is “more than enough for a week or two of shamefully decadent fun.” um, that’s half of my yearly income!)

  4. To me, something like this is actually worth it and understandable (although I understand that newspapers can’t really run all those graphics each time they talk about trillions of dollars). I can understand the scope of a pallet and a small plastic grocery bag (that million’s looking pretty measly, ain’t it?).

    And I think that’s a great example of when visualizations work—because it’s been brought down to the human scale. I don’t know what to do with “the moon and back,” but when it starts with “enough to fill your wallet,” then moves up to “a briefcase full,” etc., then that’s scale I can handle.

  5. Witness the current drama unfolding in our nation of financial illiterates, and the willfully ignorant – conflating the national debt limit and the national budget deficit. The former being the money owed on the car we crashed into the ditch last Saturday, and the latter being the necessary cost of buying the new car that got us back to work.

    Republicans and Teabaggers would have us walk – and if we lose that job, well, important life lesson! All the more galling since they were hosting the kegger we attended last Saturday.

  6. Transplant, thanks! For a long time there was no method by which they could file electronically. The requirement was for them to file with the Secretary of the Senate on paper and then the Secretary would transmit the paper reports to the FEC. I guess the FEC has initiated a voluntary program for them to use. This must be a fairly recent change.

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