Can anyone see this?
No, site appears to be down.
USA Facts – Federal, state, and local data from government sources
61–70 of 359 posts
Re: USA Facts – Federal, state, and local data from government sources
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isn't this just likely to be caused by the census data?
You mean people are more likely to die in census years? I mean, it could be true, but I'm not willing to bet on it. [edit] So I went and put "why is death rate higher in census years?" into the google search bar, and the first result is "Causes of Death - Census". I didn't actually click on the link to find out, but that title certainly sounds like the census kills people. So maybe you're right. :)
I think it's just that the intermediary years are estimations and the chart isn't compensated.
The estimates are just bad and not adjusted historically. Doesn't make the chart bad... just makes the data a little wonky.
Re: USA Facts – Federal, state, and local data from government sources
#63"USAFacts was inspired by a conversation Steve Ballmer had with his wife. She wanted him to get more involved in philanthropic work. He thought it made sense to first find out what government does with the money it raises." Had anyone made the comic strip version? Wife: it breaks my heart to hear about the many suffering Americans. We can't take our money with us when we die, let's help our fellow Americans? Steve: t…
I find PerotCharts more useful (with commentary), than this particular site. Too bad it has not been updated in a while. http://perotcharts.website/ Yes, its that Perot: Ross Perot.
For those prone to confirmation bias, commentary and interpretation of data can be counterproductive. The fact that Ballmer is purposefully not setting an agenda makes this more powerful. Otherwise people tend to accumulate their own set of convenient facts.
Re: USA Facts – Federal, state, and local data from government sources
#64This would be really powerful if it provided access to the original data sources. Imagine if you could analyze the results of public policy, with clean and detailed data, independently curated, without political or bureaucratic distortions. The US has 3,000 counties and 20,000 towns and cities, each one a petri dish of experiments in governance. Imagine what we could learn! From the NYT [1]: Want to know how many pol…
Given that I'm just now writing a professional development series for using R in the classroom, these data sources would be really useful. Having a broad source of things we could analyze would be rad.
Re: USA Facts – Federal, state, and local data from government sources
#65excellent link, I think it offers a great deal of transparency into USGOV and it's spending in a way that's never been done before.
Re: USA Facts – Federal, state, and local data from government sources
#66There is no such thing as a politically neutral fact these days. Where leadership is based on fantastical assertions pulled from the air, the machine measuring daily rainfall is a partisan political pundit to be attacked and sidelined at will. Fact-reporting organizations are moot when those in power care only for opinion and "gut". While i support such efforts, I fear that at the current moment our problems are too…
That's the beauty of it though. These are cold hard facts and as long as the veracity of the data is held true the insight can be enormous. The recent dialogue of fake news has made the public think far more about the media and information they're consuming. With something like public records where there is a significant paper trail it'll be much harder to dispute than climate change. There's a tangibility to this ve…
Climate change is impossible to dispute, unless you ignore the data. I doubt that ideological willful ignorance will ever go away.
Re: USA Facts – Federal, state, and local data from government sources
#67There is no such thing as a politically neutral fact these days. Where leadership is based on fantastical assertions pulled from the air, the machine measuring daily rainfall is a partisan political pundit to be attacked and sidelined at will. Fact-reporting organizations are moot when those in power care only for opinion and "gut". While i support such efforts, I fear that at the current moment our problems are too…
That's the beauty of it though. These are cold hard facts and as long as the veracity of the data is held true the insight can be enormous. The recent dialogue of fake news has made the public think far more about the media and information they're consuming. With something like public records where there is a significant paper trail it'll be much harder to dispute than climate change. There's a tangibility to this ve…
But these aren't public records. This is a curated list of public records, curated by an organization backed by a retired billionaire. This isn't even a new GAO. It is just another layer of political reporting pretending to be neutral. It itself must be vetted and fact-checked.
Even if one gets beyond that and down to actual public records of facts, what is and isn't available to the public in the US is itself political. The public is denied so much information that in other nations they would expected. Want to see a candidates tax return? You have to ask. Want to know how many firearms are sold or how many people were shot by police last week? There are no electronic databases, even the government doesn't know. Want to see how much your neighbour pays in property taxes on his new house? Canadians can look that up on a website. Americans cannot as "privacy" too often trumps information. When access to facts is itself politicized anyone trying to neutrally report on those facts can only amplify divides.
Re: USA Facts – Federal, state, and local data from government sources
#68Re: USA Facts – Federal, state, and local data from government sources
#69Before anyone goes putting a ton of trust in these charts... Compare the following: http://usafacts.org/metrics/31815 vs http://usafacts.org/metrics/12966 In the second chart half a million more people decide to die every 10th year? ( imgur link to screenshots in case the links don't work: http://imgur.com/a/tY02j )
It's the trend line generation, not the data. The start and end points are the same between the two graphs. To say that this nitpick throws shade on the entire project is a bit overstated.
Re: USA Facts – Federal, state, and local data from government sources
#70Dear USA Facts team, we would like to offer you few hints for public spending visualizations based on our experience. We are the creators of https://us.wikibudgets.org/w/united-states-budget-2016.
- Government spending is only a small part of the public finance. People need to see all public organisations: states and cities, departments, offices, bureaus and agencies, schools, hospital and prisons and obviously all public benefit corporations. If they spend our money we have the right to see their budgets.
- Governmental organisations borrow money outside of the government budget(!). This increases the government debt but does not show in the deficit. Just because the deficit is smaller than last year does not mean the debt is not growing faster.
- There is a world outside the US. The internet needs a one time stop for all public spending of the world, not just the US. Also you may want to connect the government receipts and expenditures from/to the international organisations, OSN, World Bank, the foreign aid etc.
- Public spending and receipts do not follow a tree hierarchy, it is a pseudograph. You will have to deal with so called offsetting receipts, extra budgetary fees, negative expenditures, positive taxes, transfers between organisations etc. We believe the only suitable visualisation style is a sankey diagram.
- There are huge size differences between individual budget items. Inside the executive branch you do not want to hide the $3 million sent to Marine Mammal Commission (https://us.wikibudgets.org/w/united-states-budget-2016?n=f22...) but you can not realistically show it next to the $7.52 billion sent to the Railroad Retirement Board (https://us.wikibudgets.org/w/united-states-budget-2016?n=3ca...). We solved this by a zoomable interface. (They call it the universe of public spending so let's give them a map!)
- The federal government does not even have a definite list of all governmental agencies. I am not kidding.
- You will never get all the data but you could build a wiki platform where city officials, school principals, government employees etc contribute with their bits and pieces. They can connect their receipts to the spendings of the superior organisations. If it does not match, citizens can investigate why. (If you want ordinary people to contribute with data you may need a human friendly editor too.)
- Different data dimensions will be useful to different people. Show the spending by agency, by programme, by function, by geography, by source etc. Let people combine the dimensions and create custom aggregates.
- Let people seamlessly share custom views and comparisons to social media (with relevant OG tags). We have a fake news industry to fight.
We wish you best luck.