revisiting the axis of evil

Now that Iran has announced it has no plans to reduce it's nuclear capability, the House of Representatives' Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence has released a 29 page report that concerns the country's initiatives against the U.S. Titled Recognizing Iran as a Strategic Threat: An Intelligence Challenge for the United States, the report, released August 23rd, offers significant information (including photographs) regarding this potential danger.

by the numbers

The Census Bureau has released some numbers today that could potentially change everything! Well, perhaps not that dramatic, but the American Community Survey is an attempt to get more stats out there, faster than you can say Decennial Census (which, by the way, happens every ten years). This ACS 2005 release contains social and demographic data for all 50 states and DC, and marks the first time that this survey reached areas with populations less than 250,000. This is huge, since the idea is that in four years, the ACS will replace the long form, and data that demographers, lobbyists, and social programmers depend on for funding will not come from a survey mandated by the Constitution.

code plaid

This morning, after hearing the news about the foiled terror plot in England and the elevation of the terror threat level, I decided to check some agency websites to see how this information was being disseminated. Particularly, I wanted to check the graphic each agency is allegedly supposed to display.

Here's a tally of what I found when I checked the sites at 9:45am on August 10th, 2006:

--Customs and Border Patrol: reported the level at orange
--Office of Personnel Management: holding steady at yellow
--Federal Aviation Administration: the agency you'd think most effected, does not display the color code but did indicate, via a link on the home page: "Homeland Security raised the threat level for aviation and imposed new restrictions on carry on items."
--White House: off on the right side, you can read about the elevetad level, and also watch Tony Snow's press conference
--The Senate and the House: no display of the threat level
--Department of Homeland Security: displays the threat level at yellow, though the first entry on the home page describes the situation-- code red for flights traveling between the UK and the US, code orange for all commercial flights and those bound for the US, yellow for everyone else.

This is a prime example of how government agencies lack consistency for disseminating information that's pretty confusing to begin with.

Of course, you can always keep track of the threat level with the muppets:

interdepository library extravaganza!

Last week, I attended the Interdepository Library Seminar over at the Government Printing Office. An extravaganza for those librarians who provide reference service regarding government documents. My apologies to my co-horts who toughed it out in the extreme heat of DC (being a local, I feel somewhat responsible). In the coming weeks I'll be posting some of the resources I learned about, and (hopefully) some pictures.

that's so meta!

Text mining is the idea of extracting information from texts and indexing the results. I like to think of it like an electronic concordance (which may or may not be correct, but that's how my analog brain works). It's used a lot in security, but databases also like it because it's basically what allows you to search for a term in the entirety of an article.

Recently, some folks decided to data mine the Congressional Record. Ars Technica reported on a group of political scientists who wrote a formula to mine the CR, just to see exactly what it is that gets discussed on the House and Senate floors. What did they find? Read their report!