Posts Tagged ‘transportation’
Relive the 2013 Lightning Talks
Short and sweet, Lightning Talks have become a highlight of the CAR conference. In Louisville this year they played to an overflow crowd at the biggest NICAR yet. And this year, attendee Fernando Diaz of Hoy Chicago captured them on video. Hear Ben rant. Be Nate Silver. Make games for news. Learn a new language.…
Read MoreGetting the widest impact out of your software project
Last week at the 2013 CAR Conference, DocumentCloud’s Lead Developer Ted Han joined a panel discussing how to get the widest impact out of a software project. Reporter’s Lab has a thorough write-up of the panel, addressing the questions how much code is really re-used, and how to measure the success of a software project.…
Read MoreBehind the Story: Post-Dispatch mapping finds ‘hot spots’ of pedestrian railroad deaths
Photo courtesy of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Photo courtesy of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. In December, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch released Death on the Rails, a special report on the surprising number of pedestrian deaths that have occurred on railways. Reporter Todd Frankel explains how he cross-referenced databases and resources to build his own map…
Read MoreVote now for the NICAR 2013 T-shirt
Voting is now open in the NICAR 2013 T-shirt contest. We received more than 50 proposals for this year’s T-shirt, so voting will happen in two rounds: An initial round with all the proposals, and a second round of five finalists to choose the T-shirt design for the 2013 conference. Click here to see the proposals again. Look…
Read MoreData science, meet campaign finance
If you ever get the urge to feel a chill run down your spine, particularly if you’re interested in political journalism, give Sasha Issenberg’s new book The Victory Lab a good, close read. Here’s the headline: When it comes to using data to understand politics, journalists are playing checkers while political consultants are playing chess. Just listen to…
Read MoreBehind the Story: The San Diego port, altered public records and interactive presentation
San Diego’s Tenth Avenue Marine Terminal is home to a rare deep water port that’s valuable to the maritime industry, but for the last ten years, developers have argued that the area should be transformed into an entertainment district. When two businessmen responsible for running the U-T San Diego began promoting the stadium, Brooke Williams…
Read MorePennsylvania open records laws exempt Penn State
Despite being supported by tax dollars, Penn State University is not subject to the state’s open records laws. Penn State’s records, including police records, e-mail, phone records, calendars and memos, are closed. Poynter’s Al Tompkins writes about how that exemption played a role in surpressing information in the Jerry Sandusky case. Tompkins quotes Sara Ganim, who won…
Read MoreThe value of adding CAR to your arsenal
John Diedrich of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel recalls the moment everything clicked for him with computer-assisted reporting, at an IRE Boot Camp in 2010. When crash-course training didn’t stick with him, he convinced his bosses to send him to Columbia, Mo. What Diedrich left with were the skills that allowed him to produce ‘Wiped Clean‘,…
Read MoreSchool Test Scores data now available at the Database Library
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, after releasing its “Cheating Our Children” series that identified suspicious test scores around the country, provided the NICAR Database Library with test scores data gathered from state education departments. From the AJC: “The data include state testing data paired in approximate cohorts by school, test subject and grade. An approximate cohort would…
Read MoreFollow the campaign money trail at the 2012 IRE Conference
Learn how to follow the campaign money trail and track political influence in a series of panels at next month’s IRE Conference in Boston.Our focus on Campaign 2012 kicks off with a free pre-day workshop focusing on companies’ influence on politics and the election. The sessions, sponsored by the Donald W. Reynolds National Center for…
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