Following the Money Trail Online - Pogue’s Posts - Technology - New York Times Blog

Following the Money Trail Online - Pogue’s Posts - Technology - New York Times Blog

The New York Times has a great article (and links!) on how the $$$ influences lawmakers into passing bills. It also provides two great sites MapLight.org and OpenSecrets.org to help track these "contributions" *cough*bribes*cough*.

"May 24, 2007, 2:58 pm
Following the Money Trail Online

The first step to solving a problem is recognizing that you have one.

That’s what I keep telling myself, anyway, to avoid becoming depressed by Maplight.org.

It’s a new Web site with a very simple mission: to correlate lawmakers’ voting records with the money they’ve accepted from special-interest groups.

All of this is public information. All of it has been available for decades. Other sites, including OpenSecrets.org, expose who’s giving how much to whom. But nobody has ever revealed the relationship between money given and votes cast to quite such a startling effect.

If you click the “Video Tour” button on the home page, you’ll see a six-minute video that illustrates the point. You find out that on H.R.5684, the U. S.-Oman Free Trade Agreement, special interests in favor of this bill (including pharmaceutical companies and aircraft makers) gave each senator an average of $244,000. Lobbyists opposed to the bill (such as anti-poverty groups and consumer groups) coughed up only $38,000 per senator.

Surprise! The bill passed.

If you click “Timeline of Contributions,” you find out that — surprise again! — contributions to the lawmakers surged during the six weeks leading up to the vote. On this same page, you can click the name of a particular member of Congress to see how much money that person collected.

Another mind-blowing example: from the home page, click “California.” Click “Legislators,” then click “Fabian Nunez.” The resulting page shows you how much this guy has collected from each special-interest group — $2.2 million so far — and there, in black-and-white type, how often he voted their way.

Construction unions: 94 percent of the time. Casinos: 95 percent of the time. Law firms: 78 percent of the time. Seems as though if you’re an industry lobbyist, giving this fellow money is a pretty good investment.

A little time spent clicking through to these California lawmakers’ pages reveals a similar pattern in most of them.

(A few, on the other hand, appear to be deliciously contrary. Jim Brulte has accepted over $67,000 from the tobacco industry, but hasn’t voted in their favor a single time. Is that even ethical — I mean, by the standards of this whole sleazy business?)

For some reason, Maplight.org doesn’t reveal these “percent of the time” figures for United States Congress, only for California. You can easily see how much money each member has taken, but the column that correlates those figures with their voting record is missing.

Now, not all bills exhibit the same money-to-outcome relationships. And it’s not news that our lawmakers’ campaigns accept money from special interests. What this site does, however, is to expose, often embarrassingly, how that money buys votes.

I probably sound absurdly naïve here. But truth is, I can’t quite figure out why these contributions are even legal. Let the various factions explain their points till they’re blue in the face, sure — but to cut checks for millions of dollars?

Maplight.org isn’t always easy to figure out, and not all of its data is complete. In fact, it’s not even evident from the list of bills which ones have already been voted on — a distinct disappointment, since the juicy patterns don’t emerge until the vote is complete.

On the other hand, it’s painstakingly non-partisan. And it uses very good data; for example, the information on contributions comes from the Center for Responsive Politics (the nonprofit, nonpartisan research group behind OpenSecrets.org), and each special industry’s interests (for or against each bill) are taken exclusively from public declarations of support or opposition (Web sites, news articles, Congressional hearings and so on).

Spend a few minutes poking around. Check out a couple of the people you voted for. Have a look at how often their votes align with the interests of the lobbyists who helped to get them elected.

And be glad Maplight.org makes it so easy to spot those correlations.

[UPDATE: This very timely Times article hints that this new transparency might be gaining momentum:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/25/washington/25lobby.ht ml?_r=1&ref=todayspaper&oref=slogin

–Pogue]"

Daily Web Travels: aka "My RSS Fetish"

ok, so i have this thing where i'm constantly information hungry - techie stuff, crafty stuff, security stuff, programming stuff, design stuff, book whore (half price books, i love you), blah blah blah, the list goes on. and to make matters worse, my attention span is that of a goldfish...no i'm serious.

[side note about the short attention span thing: hasn't anyone noticed that almost all television programming is made that way? Don't believe me, watch MTV for a little bit. No camera shot gets more than 3-4 seconds on air time - and usually it's less than a second - creepy. we're being hand-fed AADD on a plate. moving on...]

OK, so how do i further worsen my need for information? RSS - Really Simply Syndicate (some people will call it something else - Rich Site Summary - stupid - HA!). Ok, so having said that, here are some of the RSS feeds i subscribe to and monitor on a sometimes minute-by-minute basis:

Jezebel:
I just found this one a few days ago. I think it just launched, too. It's a celeb blog run by 3 New York journalist with a twist - no "air-brushing" any information. I suppose Bust would be a good place to read up on stuff too, but I'm trying this one out for now.

Tutorial Blog:
Just as the title states - a web programming and design tutorial blog. I don't have a use for any of the Photoshop ones since i refuse to ever pay that much for an image editor. I'm sure there's more to it but....\\\///\\\///hatever!

Mashable!:
get all your news on what's going on in the world of social networking sites.

LifeHacker:
i love it - i love it - i love it! Not just for technology, but for life. Great site for getting technology to work for you and not the other way around.

Spoofee:
I purchased two 4 gig SD memory cards through Spoofee for $60 bux!

Digg.com:
...who doesn't subscribe to this?

Flickr:
...because I like looking at pictures. I'm all Pro now!

Google News reader:
all the news from the major sources all in one page...the page is so well laid out it makes me wanna cry (an AADD's dream come true!)

and an honorable mention to:
Woot: get over stock stuff for a crazy good price...limited quantity so they don't release the info until they have it...nerve racking. i avoid it like i do the auction site eBay ("...what?! I just clicked 'bid' and someone has already out-bid me?!?!? WTF!!!!!!!!!!!!!!").

From these sites I pretty much head everywhere else. It is still possible to concentrate on other things of course. However, I usually need to make a conscious effort to focus about 5 whole minutes in a task to get into it (about 15-20 for programming). It sux, but this way i keep things "well-rounded" and can take in lots of information while still being productive.

Ok...i think i feel better. back to work! :-)

Kelly Gets Her Masters!

Kelly Gets Her Masters!, originally uploaded by ku5h.

Graduation was last night - Kelly, you're ALL DONE!!!!! Congratulations!

MochiKit

MochiKit, originally uploaded by ku5h.

"MochiKit is a highly documented and well tested, suite of JavaScript libraries that will help you get shit done, fast. We took all the good ideas we could find from our Python, Objective-C, etc. experience and adapted it to the crazy world of JavaScript."

Grab MochiKit here.

Wubi

Wubi, originally uploaded by ku5h.

WUBI: Wubi allows you to install and uninstall Ubuntu as any other application.

I've tried the Ubuntu LiveCD, but never Wubi...i wonder how this would work with SafeBoot? ;-)

AnalogX

The dude that runs this site is super talented. I haven't seen him release anything new for a couple of years, but the small utilities he has available (FOR FREE) are VERY, VERY HANDY! I remember using his Proxy program to setup a Windows 95 box as a proxy server to share a dial up connection with a Windows NT 4.0 box. ...I know what you're thinking, "why not have the NT box be the proxy?". I used AOL back then to connect (then changed to the then-free NetZero later on) to the Internet. AOL's software didn't function on my NT box. ...ok, whatever. I used a 4 port hub back then too, so laugh.

Here's the link to the NETWORKING software. Be sure to check out Shredder software under System too!

Life Hack - Preserve Your Credit Card Signatures

I picked this one up from a customer service person at Office Max. Signatures become faded or scratched away from constant swiping of credit / debit cards. Re-sign them and then put a piece of Scotch tape (a.k.a. cellophone or clear tape) over the signature. Make sure to avoid getting tape on the magnetic strip or else you might mess with the card readers reading your card (did that last part make sense?).

That's it - all done. All my cards are setup this way and I haven't had any trouble.

Kelly Puts Up the Congrats Flag!

Congrats_flag, originally uploaded by ku5h.

I gave Kelly some OJT on using a drill and had her put up the new flag pole. My existing flag holder was too small for the "modern" flag poles so we had to drill up a new one.

No Fat32 Chicks

some neat "geek" t-shirts. My personal favorite...



source: HERE

Imogen Heap

I don't usually follow popular music, but this lady is super-duper talented. In this first clip, she uses an Electrix Repeater (about $500) and ONLY HER VOICE to make the entire track - live.




This next one was recently used in a Saturday Night Live Digital Short called "My Sister"

Pictures of the Kursk Submarine Remains

This is so surreal.

"K-141 Kursk was a Russian nuclear cruise missile submarine which was lost with all hands when it sank in the Barents Sea on August 12, 2000. It was named after the Russian city Kursk, around which the largest tank battle in military history, the Battle of Kursk, took place in 1943.

The Kursk sailed out to sea to perform an exercise of firing dummy torpedoes at Pyotr Velikiy, a Kirov class battlecruiser. On August 12, 2000 at 11:28 local time (07:28 UTC), the missiles were fired, but an explosion occurred soon after on Kursk. The only credible report to-date is that this was due to the failure and explosion of one of Kursk’s new/developmental torpedoes. The chemical explosion blasted with the force of 100-250 kg of TNT and registered 2.2 on the Richter scale [1]. The submarine sank to a depth of 108 metres, approximately 135km (85 miles) off Severomorsk, at 69°40′N, 37°35′E. A second explosion 135 seconds after the initial event measured between 3.5 and 4.4 on the Richter scale, equivalent to 3-7 tons of TNT [2]. Either this explosion or the earlier one propelled large pieces of debris far back through the submarine.

Kursk was eventually raised from her grave by a Dutch team using the barge Giant 4, and 115 of the 118 dead were recovered and laid to rest in Russia. Russian officials have strenuously denied claims that the sub was carrying nuclear warheads. When the boat was raised by a salvage operation in 2001 there were considerable fears moving the wreck could trigger explosions."

link to story: HERE

Yahoo! launches Web Messenger - Not Blocked At Work

I remember Yahoo! having a web-based messenger client before that looked like the standalone client - I'm guessing this is a re-release...? I can't really say that 'cause this thing looks totally different, plus adds lots of features/abilities (same difference?) that the old client didn't have.

here the link: http://webmessenger.yahoo.com/

you can find me using the alias pietness, however, i probably won't ever log in from work unless it's an emergency - IM can be like crack - SUPER addictive. My current addiction is RSS feeds.