Google your tax dollars!

A bill sponsored by Senators Obama (D-IL) and Coburn (R-OK) is set to create a searchable database for citizens to track government spending. According to Obama's press release, Bill S. 2590 (which became Public Law 109-282 a couple of days ago) a.k.a. the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006. The database "will list every entity receiving federal funds, along with information about the amount and purpose of the spending." Though don't expect to see any action on this until 2008, the time frame stipulated by the law on how long they can take to actually provide this service to the public.

long time, no update

Yes, it sure has been a while! Congress is back in session, the first Monday in October is nigh... we're just churning things away here in govdocs land.

The next few posts in the next few days will serve to keep track of what's going on up on the Hill, starting with this first report, from the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence: al-Quada: The Many Faces of an Islamic Extremist Threat. See how it compares to what President Clinton said on Fox News and what President Bush is saying in response to that!

conspiracy this!

The State Department debunks September 11th conspiracy theories. Complete with explanations and links for further review.

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!

a congressional stroll down memory lane

When the House and the Senate come to some kind of a compromise on a law, a conference report is published with all the details. As we prepare to say "don't let the door hit you on the way out" to the 109th Congress, the GPO has posted both sessions Conference Reports, which includes some great moments in legislation like the Deficit Reduction Act of 2005, the USA Patriot Improvement and Reauthorization Act of 2005, and the Energy Policy Act of 2005.

sign here

When the president signs a bill into law, it is sometimes customary that he includes a little message to go along with it: a signing statement. They don't become part of the law, but are findable on the GPO's electronic version of the Weekly Comp (just put "signing statement" in the search box).

This is a presidential privilege that kind of functions like having the last word. It's used more by some than others, particularly the current administration, it seems, to a degree that the custom was not intended. So... the American Bar Association issued a task force to determine the constitutionality of this practice: the Task Force on Presidential Signing Statements and the Separation of Powers Doctrine. Download the PDF of the task force's recommendations, or attend the ABA's annual meeting in Honolulu next month.

stem cell

Yesterday, the president vetoed HR 810, the Stem Cell Research Enhancement Act of 2005.

Read Bush's veto as published in the Daily Digest, and all actions on the bill, as well as how each rep voted on Thomas.

9/11 Commission Report becomes a Comic Book

It happens quite often with government documents... since they are in the public domain, there is a tendency to repackage the information found within the items and sell them for a fee. Sometimes, with databases like Lexis-Nexis Congressional (which is now available through Aladin!), it actually makes the information easier to find. With the case of a new version of the report released by the 9/11 Commission, a republishing might actually make it easier to comprehend. The 9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation by two greats of the comic industry, Sid Jacobson (who created Richie Rich) and Ernie Colon (he drew Richie Rich and Casper). It will be available next month from Hill & Wang.

protecting the assets

What's does the Hoover Dam, METRO, and a high stakes bingo palour have in common? Well, according to the National Asset Database, these are places that the DHS is concentrating on protecting from terrorist activity. This report details how it's all coming along. It's good to know that those keeping us safe are treating petting zoos and national monuments the same.

"it's a series of tubes"

The above title is a direct quote from Senator Ted Stevens' explanation of his vote on a recent net neutraility bill last month. While his written testimony gives some hint of his perception of the internet, it's his comments published by wired.com that are incredibly intriguing. It seems the Senator from Alaska feels that his own personal internet is getting tangled up with people who are watching ten movies at a time, and that the internet is not a truck, it's a series of tubes, and the Defense department has their own Internet "because they have to have theirs delivered immediately. They can't afford getting delayed by other people."

there oughta be a law...

The Law Librarian's Society of Washington DC has created a website called the LLSDC's Legislative Source Book, with a page all for laws related to federal agency operations. The interface is a little too simple, and kind of suggests that you should know what you're looking at before you look at it. Still, if you're wanting lots of information all in one place, this is as good as it gets. Examples of laws and bills featured: the E-Government Act of 2002, the Sunshine Act of 1976, and the Freedom of Information Act.

GovDocs in SecondLife

The MMORG Second Life (think World of Warcraft without so much of the Dungeons and Dragons) is in the process of building an on-line virtual library for those avatars who want a little education mixed in with their gaming. One of the stories in the brand new, ten-story building that sits upon info island is exclusive to government documents. It's maintained by Alaskan Nighbor, a.k.a. Daniel Cornwall, a GovDocs librarian in Alaska (of course!). So if you happen to be "in-world" fly on up ton the sixth floor for a looksee.

hurricanes by the numbers

Earlier this month, the Census Bureau released Hurricane Data and Emergency Preparedness, an electronic resource showing the impact of last year's storms. This source includes estimates of the population of the affected areas, and compares the data to the 2005 American Community Survey.

check out my stat abs!

The Census Bureau has taken my beloved favorite, the Statistical Abstract of the United States into the 21st Century!

The home page for this source, subtitled The National Data Book, has gotten a facelift to include more web-friendly navigation (note the side menu of categories) and even excel files to download. These improvements are only applied to the most recent edition (2006), which means you might could create a real pretty pie chart displaying Household Pet Ownership in 2001, but you couldn't create a chart to assess trends in pet ownership over a decade or so unless you wanted to plug in the numbers yourself.

Of cousre, the best use of this amazing source is by browsing the print... the most recent edition lives on the Ready Reference shelf (sandwiched in between the Reference and Circulation desks) and on the fourth floor of Gelman under the call number HA205 .A51.

because a duck may be somebody's mother

Brand spankin' new today! Google announces that they've launched a new U.S. Government Search!

But really, how new is it?

Not so new, really. Some of you might be familiar with Google/Unclesam, which the company hasn't really done a whole lot to promote. It searches across federal and state government websites, along with agencies and other "selected" pages. This seems to be the same M.O. for this new fangled search, so I tested it. I generically searched for "immigration bill" and you know what happened? I got the same exact results from both engines.

So what's the deal? Is Google just recycling an underused engine, or do they really mean to do something different? And also, what's the difference between this and FirstGov's Clustered search powered by Vivisimo?

And more importantly, it just begs for me to point out that it's not really so much about the search engine, but about what data government agencies are making available on their websites. These entities are notoriously stingy with what they make available electronically. It's what I call "the love you make is equal to the love you take" theory of information dissemination. If the agencies actually want us to find stuff, first, they gotta get it out there!

100 Years of Consumer Spending

The Bureau of Labor Statistics has just released 100 Years of U.S. Consumer Spending: Data for the Nation, New York City, and Boston, a report with some fantastic data about life in America (full disclosure: I'm thanked in the acknowlegements!). This time, the writers of the report took a longitudinal approach to incorporate significant events in time and effects on demographics and the economy.