Finalists Chosen In Apps For America 2 Contest 64
Andurin writes "Sunlight Labs has announced three finalists for its $25,000 Apps for America 2 competition. Forty-seven apps were submitted, each relying on Data.gov and providing a useful spin on government data. This We Know compiles federal information on a local level; govpulse is a searchable version of the Federal Register; and DataMasher allows simple mashups of government data sets. Voting is now open to determine the winner in the contest."
App suggestion. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:1)
Re:App suggestion. (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd be happy with "down to the nearest $million", myself. With all the special allocations, supplemental funding bills, temporary shifts of funds, etc., it's nearly impossible to figure out what money is going where.
WallStats: Death and Taxes (Score:3, Interesting)
Try this...
http://wallstats.com/deathandtaxes/ [wallstats.com] - WallStats: Death and Taxes ...it doesn't get into the nitty gritty of, say, a congresscritter getting moneys - but it goes into fairly reasonable detail.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
According to the FAQ, that's just based on the official, once-a-year budget request. So it doesn't include supplemental or temporary allocations, like the various Iraq War supplemental funding bills, the recent Cash for Clunker supplemental funding bill, the AIG bailout bill, etc. What I'd like to see is a total for, say, fiscal year 2008, of all money spent, both on- and off-budget.
Re: (Score:2)
America 2 sounds like a nice place but I'd need to know more about it before I write apps for it.
Re: (Score:2)
it's nearly impossible to figure out what money is going where.
At least we know where it comes from [brillig.com].
Re: (Score:1)
It's fun to compare the U.S. national debt to the personal debt that many people blithely take on; it isn't uncommon for people to have debts amounting to 5 or 6 years of their entire income, whereas the national debt in the U.S. is still less than a single years GDP (projections for 2020 put the National debt then at about 1.25 times GDP, if I am understanding the correctly, maybe somewhat higher). Now, the government doesn't get to use the entirety of GDP to pay off its debts, but neither do most of those
Re: (Score:2)
It's fun to compare the U.S. national debt to the personal debt that many people blithely take on; it isn't uncommon for people to have debts amounting to 5 or 6 years of their entire income, whereas the national debt in the U.S. is still less than a single years GDP ...
Not quite a fair comparison; to make that comparison valid, the government debt should be compared to the government income, not the GDP.
Re: (Score:1)
Why? In theory land, the productivity of the nation is entirely available to the government (well, sort of, there are problems actually collecting it). It certainly isn't a precise comparison.
I guess it comes down to whether you consider the debt to be owed by the government or by society, the GDP is certainly available to society, it just happens to have more pressing concerns than the contracts and obligations the government has entered into.
Re: (Score:1)
in what theory? since when Americans think they are Gov's bitches?
even if in the extreme theory that Gov is slave master, and we are his slaves, Gov still have to let us keep something before we starve or rebel. that is the cost of business for the slave master, therefore his net income should not include this part.
Re: (Score:2)
The debt is owed by Americans as a people, not some abstract entity that doesn't actually exist. We borrowed money from the Chinese (and others) to fund things that we collectively voted for, and we owe it back at some point. How exactly we want to pay it back, presumably China doesn't care a lot about, but the American people owe it.
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
correction: *some Americans* voted for it, and *some Americans* are paying for it.
it's like a group of rapists saying to the victim: *we* democratically and collectively decided to have a consensual sex, and you are responsible too!
Re: (Score:2)
There's very few parts of the American political spectrum that haven't contributed significantly to it. The biggest portions of the debt were contributed by Reagan, Bush II, and Obama, under both Republican and Democratic congresses, which adds up to a pretty big portion of the American political spectrum.
I could see that argument if it was a single person who represented a minority of the population--- maybe Chileans would have a good argument for not owing Pinochet's debts. But the American debt was racke
Re: (Score:1)
nah, it's mostly the old people. the young wasn't there in creating the system, which by sheer coincidence screws the young and benefits the old.
Re: (Score:1)
In the second paragraph there, where society is responsible for the actions of government. 'Gotta eat' doesn't really break down the comparison, personal debtors do that to.
Re: (Score:2)
Yes -- a fair comparison is to compare debt, deficit, or interest to tax receipts and other state income.
Re: (Score:1)
I don't think it is entirely clear that government is separate from the people that create it (or suffer the presence of it). It sort of sucks for the people who don't like the actions that government takes, but that seems to be the way things go.
Re: (Score:2)
My last-minute slap-dash entry (it didn't get picked, and no wonder) does more or less what you want: http://yournearby.com/budget/ [yournearby.com]
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
I bet you drive or ride on roads all the time.
Re: (Score:2)
What good would it do you? GWB was able to pretend that the Iraq war wasn't costing the U.S. anything. And he wasn't hiding the information, he was just leaving it out of the budget. Everybody was afraid to call him on it lest they look unpatriotic. Secrecy is not the problem.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
So, you're not interested in policies On priorities. You just want the ability to flame a civil servant every time they make a purchase you don't approve of, no matter how small. ("That brand of paper clips is too expensive!") Oh yeah, that's certainly going to make things more efficient.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Then why do you need to know how every dollar is spent? If a project costs, say, $10 Million and you think a lot of that was wasted, having access to small expenses won't help you make your case.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Now you're being childish. Of course I grasp that. What I can't get you to explain is what you'd do with the information once you had it.
Re: (Score:2)
Public officials, from the Senate down to the local level, can't be held responsible for these issues if there isn't a clear and ind
Re: (Score:2)
Which justifies getting a reasonable breakdown of how they spend your money. But you want an accounting down to the individual dollar! So we're back to the paper clips.
Re: (Score:2)
I believe this really comes down to a basic need for complete transparency in government spending, so the People as a whole can make educated decisions and hold their elected officials (regardless of the level) responsible for decisions that
Re: (Score:2)
I suppose I want a complete picture to completely eliminate any means of obscuring spending.
The problem is your definition of "complete". When you define it as every expenditure, no matter how small, you actually make it easier for them to slip pork and waste past you. Recall the expression about forests and trees.
Ever catch the British TV comedy "Yes Minister"? It's about a politician tasked to eliminate waste and bureaucracy in a government department and his fights with the bureaucrats who do everything they can to thwart him. When they want to hide something from him, they don't refuse him acc
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Then you're talking almost the direct opposite of an iphone app. You want a data stream, a very fat pipe to receive it on (we're talking billions of records!) and some serious hardware to crunch the numbers.
Not cheap. Maybe you can get a government grant...
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
That one I see mainly as a good thing--- smallish levels of inflation are felt mainly on the long term, so mainly serve to erode attempts to maintain long-lived, large fortunes, while helps keep the United States from sprouting a hereditary nobility.
Re: (Score:2)
That one I see mainly as a good thing--- smallish levels of inflation are felt mainly on the long term, so mainly serve to erode attempts to maintain long-lived, large fortunes, while helps keep the United States from sprouting a hereditary nobility.
I can guarantee you that no long-lived, large fortunes are held in cash. They are held largely in land, real estate and stocks -- all of which keep step with inflation. The institutions that keep long-lived fortunes in fixed income instruments (and thus lose out to inflation) are pension funds, insurers and central banks, i.e. either stewards of the small peoples' money or public sector institutions.
Since anyone with a large fortune can pay people who know how to invest their money in any environment, the
Initial thoughts on the three (Score:5, Insightful)
I like the layout of ThisWeKnow, and it's probably the application that I can most imagine my mother using. DataMasher is a bit more cryptic, but much more powerful - I'm worried about people drawing the wrong implications from the simple analyses, but it's interesting in a "data mining, damn the statistics and causality" kind of way. Govpulse isn't really interesting to me.
I'd have a tough time chosing between ThisWeKnow and DataMasher, and I really hope both stick around after the award thing is over.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
DataMasher is a bit more cryptic, but much more powerful - I'm worried about people drawing the wrong implications from the simple analyses, but it's interesting in a "data mining, damn the statistics and causality" kind of way. [snip] I'd have a tough time chosing between ThisWeKnow and DataMasher, and I really hope both stick around after the award thing is over.
Thanks! And yes, Datamasher, for one, will be here after the contest is long gone.
We were concerned about appearing statistically valid when we knew very well it wouldn't be in most cases, so we chose to encourage discovery and discussion over rigor. We have ideas of things we'd like to do for it, but it was literally built over a few weekends after hours, limiting what we could do by the contest deadline.
The cool thing about the contest is that all the applications are open source, so if a contestant can't
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
But I read it on the internet! It must be true!
More seriously, I wonder if this is because they report 0 when they lack data on something, or if they actually got a zero from some report.
Lies, Damned Lies, and DataMasher (Score:2)
I think the motivation behind DataMasher is to give people a tool to visualize and understand information about the country, and that's a great goal. But I feel pretty certain that in practice DataMasher would end up mostly generating a lot of bad information. The site as it exists now seems to encourage you to think about issues in a really simplistic way (with a simple arithmetic combination of two numbers on a state by state basis) that's going to mislead more often than inform. The devil is always i
Re: (Score:2)
That's entirely fair, but I think we're better off seeing sites that give us the raw data and let us make baby steps at the problem. It's better to get this stuff out in the open so we can start to talk about what constitutes good and bad data-based reasoning, so we can make mistakes and learn how to do it right, than to let FoxNews (and a few other no-journalistic-standards organisations) blindside us with mistakes we don't need to handle.
Regarding that particular SAT score and per-student-spending analysi
Re: (Score:2)
Oh yeah, I'm all for getting the data out there in a form that can easily be analyzed, which I think is essentially what Data.gov is about. The problem is that I think this tool will give people the illusion they understand when, in fact, they don't understand at all. And it doesn't provide the tools to reach a correct understanding.
For something like DataMasher to be very useful, it would have to provide more sophisticated tools, and those tools would have to be paired with some sort of resources that
Re: (Score:2)
Supplemental: the particular analysis you reference is here [datamasher.org], and by odd coincidence I commented on it a few days ago.
Can we vote for a voting method? (Score:2, Informative)
Even if Democrats and Republicans will never gracefully allow it in regular elections, competitions like this should offer preferential ballots with a Condorcet-compliant method of determining the winner.
Another app suggestion... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
Data masher is for journalists hard up for a headl (Score:1, Insightful)
Data masher looks to be a great place where journalists can go when there are no real headlines to put on the news. Just mash anything together, toss on a knee-jerking headline and viola, instant news story.
America 2? (Score:2, Funny)
So we're just giving up and rebooting already? I figured we had at least another 20 years.
Three Cheers for data.gov (Score:1)
I think this is great, and I'm excited to see people build and promote sites based on it.
That is all.
Summary (Score:2)
Forty-seven apps were submitted, each relying on Data.gov and providing a useful spin on government data.
Just what government data needs - more spin.
Re: (Score:1)
Darn (Score:2)
Can they put boobs on the pope?
bogus data? (Score:2)
i searched thisweknow.org on my zip code and it returned a bunch of crimes that occurred outside my zip code. it also reported a county population that's more than 10x what it actually is.
i call shenanigans.