Data

Nursing Home Problems Visualized Nationally

October 18, 2013 Dashboard

John Kelly of USA Today and Emily Le Coz of the Jackson (Miss) Clarion-Ledger on USA Today have done an exemplary job of using the latest in data visualization technology to display and enable interactive exploration of nursing home problems. Take a look here! Note the interactivity. Be sure to look at each of the […]

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More Measures of Muni Fiscal Stress

February 5, 2013 County Government

Yesterday, the Budget Division of New York’s Governor, Andrew Cuomo, released a list of municipalities indicating at least one form of fiscal distress. While the list and measures are preliminary (for information only), they are evidently precursors of more definitive measures that would enable municipal governments to benefit from capped binding arbitration decisions in labor […]

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Enhancing Our NYS Interactive Budget Visualization

January 28, 2013 Budget

We’ve added some new screens to our interactive visualization of the New York State Budget. You’ll find two new screens showing historical change by functions and a screen that shows the estimated current and proposed levels of full-time equivalent employees. Next up? Adding receipts/revenues and some other functionality. And most important, from time-to-time, we’ll actually […]

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Empire Center’s Tool on the NYS Budget

January 25, 2013 Budget

The Empire Center‘s SeeThroughNY has created and put online a new tool for examining New York’s Budget. It features: A nice, clean interface Ability to download the data into Excel files Trendline graphics Popup explanations and definitions of some terms and titles, e.g., the difference between “All Funds” and “State Operating” funds. “Special Features,” which […]

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Government Technology Notices Us

January 24, 2013 Data

Government Technology ran a story this morning, Transparency: New York State Reveals All (Its Numbers) on the Governor’s budget transparency initiative. And they even mentioned the interactive visualizations that we put online. Who knows how they found us so quickly, but thanks.

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Opening New York’s Budget

January 24, 2013 Budget

We recently congratulated Governor Cuomo for his promoting data transparency in his State of the State message. Little did we know how quickly his administration was moving to actually take concrete steps to make it so. Yesterday’s Budget showed us not only that his commitment was serious, but that the staff of the State Division […]

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Making the Public’s Data Public – Cuomo Edition

January 9, 2013 Data

Well, this seems an especially appropriate topic with which to kick off our 2013 posts. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s 2013 State-of-the-State address’s includes an entire section on using technology to promote “transparency.” Among other things, the Governor has now committed to providing online copies of the State budget in “machine-readable” form. That means you […]

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Albany County: Working Hard to Make it Harder for the Public to Understand its Budget

November 3, 2012 Budget

The past several years, Albany County made its tentative (proposed) budget available online, not only in a readable format (PDF), but in a format (Excel) that the public and occasional legislators could actually do calculations with. No more. When the County Executive’s Tentative Budget was released last month, the PDF documents were posted online, but […]

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Political Moneyball and the End of Horserace Punditry?

November 2, 2012 Analysis

The past few days, there’s been a lot of chatter about the contrast between 538’s Nate Silver and subjective observers like Joe Scarborough and their respect electoral analyses. Some of it has gotten pretty ugly, especially about Silver. So Silver offered Scarborough a bet on Twitter. If Silver’s right and Obama wins, Scarborough gives $1,000 […]

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More on Political Moneyball

October 27, 2012 Data

John Cassidy of the New Yorker has a nice explanation of Nate Silver‘s statistical approach to forecasting elections and a balanced view of how much weight to give it. He contrasts that approach with that of David Brooks, New York Times columnist, who describes himself as a pollaholic, but who’s ultimately a skeptic. So here […]

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