Once confined to cutting-edge labs, nanotechnology has an increasingly pervasive place in everyday life. Its ultra-tiny engineered particles are now in as many as 10,000 products. A series by Andrew Schneider of AOL News shows a growing body of research suggests these nanomaterials pose significant and potentially fatal health risks including lung, heart and brain…
Read MoreJoe Mahr and Gerry Smith of the Chicago Tribune did a computer analysis of state police speeding tickets and driving records. They found that nearly two-thirds of the time, people caught going 100 mph or faster were given a special kind of probation that kept the tickets off their driving records. That included those triple-digit…
Read MoreKeeping Secrets, a three-part series by The News & Observer (Raleigh, NC)Â for Sunshine Week, found North Carolina’s 35-year-old personnel law is among the most secretive in the nation, barring access to disciplinary actions, hiring decisions and employment histories. The series had plenty of examples showing how this secrecy is preventing the public from learning…
Read MoreNearly 180 public university buildings in California used by tens of thousands of people have been judged dangerous to occupy during a major earthquake — including libraries, classroom buildings, student apartments, gyms, a hospital and even a child care center, a California Watch investigation has found.
Read MoreBy Jaimi Dowdell, IRE Training Director IRE Resource Center staff have been busy adding tipsheets from the CAR conference. Handouts include information on forensic accounting, Web scraping, data on deadline, Twitter and more. In addition to this, many of the wonderful presenters and attendees have been sharing their tips, data and tutorials on the NICAR…
Read MoreTodd Wallack of The Boston Globe reports on the misuse of the Massachusetts’ Economic Development Incentive Program which provides tax incentives to companies that invest and create jobs in the state. A review of records shows that hundreds of projects created fewer jobs than promised while others actually reduce employment while still collecting the tax…
Read MoreAn investigation by Shannon Mullen of the Asbury (N.J.) Park Press shows that special-education stimulus funds have been diverted to other costs in Monmouth and Ocean counties, including legal fees and teacher benefits. “The redirection of funds was possible thanks to a previously little-used provision in the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, the federal statute…
Read MoreLast week, President Obama nominated Army Maj. Gen. Robert Harding to head the Transportation Security Administration, but Harding’s ties to several TSA contractors via Harding Security, a firm he founded in 2003, have raised ethics concerns. Â “A review of Harding Security’s business activities by CongressDaily showed that of 21 companies listed on the firm’s…
Read MoreIRE members have access to a Web-based data exploration application to quickly and easily analyze demographic data while on deadline. ESRI and IRE made a special agreement to offer ESRI data to IRE members at no cost. This program will save journalists time and money by making ESRI data available in an easy-to-view format. A…
Read MoreTake a look at some of the best computer-assisted news stories from the past year in this presentation: Year in CAR slideshow. IRE executive director Mark Horvit and training director Doug Haddix gave the presentation last week during the Computer-Assisted Reporting conference in Phoenix. Each slide has a short description of the story, along with a…
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