It’s been 2 years since we first showed you guys this, but with the recent discussions at the US Capital, it seems now is a great time to pick it up again. Check out the “US Debt Clock” For a real-time animated view of the US Deficit and Revenue, and all the other numbers associated with it.
Recovery.gov, the government website that’s supposed to introduce some transparency into government my showing how the billions in US Stimulus funds is allocated, is rolling out a new feature today that allows users to create and customize their own visualizations of the data.
“This remarkable new feature allows you to chart data submitted by recipients of Recovery funds in ways that are most important to you,” Devaney said. “Recovery Explorer is easy to navigate. If you want to change what is being displayed on a graph or chart, all you have to do is change the category and a new graph or chart with the information you want will be displayed.”
In addition to the new tools on their website, they plan to launch a pair of new iPhone and iPad apps later next month.
I played around with it a bit, at a first it seemed rather restrictive, forcing you to choose one of their pre-built visualizations. However, very quickly I found myself almost overwhelmed with options, finally settling on a basic treemap of the US Army Corps of Engineers spending by State. They is an astounding amount of information and flexibility here, but it can take a bit to find it. It’s lacking any kind of nice Embed option for the Web2.0 crowd, but it allows you to export the data and visualizations into CVS, excel, and a few other formats. Go check it out, and post some of your own finds in the comments!
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via New Recovery.gov Feature Allows for Improved Visualization of Recipient Data — WASHINGTON, June 16, 2011 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ –. and The Recovery.gov Announcement
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M.A. Thomas of John Hopkins University has published a little piece of code that analyzes the government database of contracts to see just how the contracts land amongst the many players in the industry. No surprise, the bulk of the contracts land in the hands of just a few big companies.
Scholars and practitioners are expressing concerns about the impact of unprecedented levels of government contracting on economic and political concentrations of power and on government accountability and transparency. Understanding the total organizational structure of government contractors is key to many of their concerns, such as identifying and resolving organizational conflicts of interest. Until recently, there was little publicly available information on the ownership of government contractors. However, a government database includes partial information, allowing the first visualizations of these ownership structures by means of a STATA program that exports to Netdraw or Pajek.
Obviously this is only as accurate as the database, which is a bit suspect since some big players are missing from that visualization above (Lockheed, Raytheon, CSC, and many others). But his concept and data would make for some great interactive viz, I imagine.
via usgcontractors.info.
PBS takes an in-depth look at several different visualizations of the US Federal Spending practices, ranging from the government-provided USASpending.gov to independent solutions from the New York Times and the famous “Death & Taxes” annual poster.
USASpending.gov was launched in 2007 by the Office of Management and Budget as mandated by the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006. The website’s mission is: “To provide the public with information about how their tax dollars are spent.” It lets viewers search and browse through the federal funds awarded for government projects. But there’s a catch. The data are what the government has legislated to give out for projects, not the actual cash disbursements that were eventually made for the work.
via Federal Spending, Visualized | The Rundown News Blog | PBS NewsHour | PBS.
Over at SeekingAlpha, they’ve updated their US National Debt visualizations and come up with some new charts like the one above. While at first it may not seem so bad, look closer at that left axis: It’s logarithmic.
The national debt data used in the charts above is for the United States’ total public debt outstanding, which includes the so-called intragovernmental holdings category, which mostly represents where surplus Social Security tax collections have gone since the early 1980s.
Looking at linear axes make for near right-angle graphs.
via Visualizing the U.S. National Debt: 1791-2010 – Seeking Alpha.
Pitch Interactive has a great writeup on their “US Federal Contract Spending Data” visualization, the winner of the 2010 Design For America award for Visualization of Federal Budget Data. They show some of the graphics close-up, and discuss the process used to create the two-part graph.
What our government spends vs. how much we talk about it. Two important aspects that help define and shape our society. Most Americans know that our government spends an insane amount of our tax dollars on defense, but how do you show just how much we spend compared to all other areas in our country? We wanted to use a minimal approach with no labeling necessary. The design says it all and shows what almost 70% of Federal contract spending going to defense looks like com paired to all other agencies (Education get’s around 1%). For anyone asking for the numbers, scroll down this page. We’ve added all the data used to create the left visualization above.
For the right visualization, we used the New York Times API to parse through all articles written in 2009. Using general keywords that dealt with characteristics of each agency, we displayed their frequency usage in comparison with one another. The colors on the right rings are representative of their colors from the left. What we see is that all of the much less-budgeted agencies from the left ring are discussed about far more in our news. The Dept. of Health and Human Services, which was a major issue of discussion in 2009 with health care reform being hotly debated only accounts for about 4% of our federal budget, though it’s the most discussed issue in the media.
via US Federal Contract Spending Data Visualization :: Pitch Interactive, Inc..
The Federal Virtual Worlds Challenge has wrapped up, and among the finalists the winners have been chosen: UK-based Daden Limited and their PIVOTE and Datascape systems took home the gold in Skills Building and Collaboration categories.
Tami Griffith, creator of the challenge, adds “Daden’s submissions exemplify what we were hoping to see in the challenge. Datascape’s demonstration of streaming real-time data will be very useful for the analysis community while PIVOTE goes a long way in demonstrating interactive capabilities that could be used by first-responders. We are delighted that they were in our winners circle and we expect to see a great relationship form between the U.S. Government and Daden.“
Both of Daden’s entries are based on Second Life and run within the world, are available for public view in Second Life® at http://slurl.com/secondlife/Daden%20Cays/126/217/22 and http://slurl.com/secondlife/Daden%20Prime/223/224/21
I’m a fan of PhD Comics, and recently the comic strip has been tackling the issue that many PhD students are paid via federal research grants, essentially being paid by the US Taxpayer. Today’s strip breaks down the Research portion of the US Federal Budget.
The text is a bit small, but overall it’s a good breakdown a’la “Death & Taxes” but focused entirely on the R&D portions.
See fullsize after the break.
Several months ago, RDECOM issued the “Federal Virtual Worlds Challenge”, challenging the public and contractors to develop innovative virtual world tools to aid in research, education, and collaboration. Now they’ve narrowed down the submissions to a handful of entries in each of 4 areas: Collaboration, Skill Buildings, Instruction, and Visualization. You can hit their website for links to each of the websites accompanying the entry for more information.
I find it impressive how many entries are based on SecondLife. Of the 4 Visualization entires, all are in SecondLife. Several of the entries we have commented on before (like DataScape from Daden), but all are exemplary uses of Virtual Worlds.
Congratulations to all of the finalists, and a special congratulations to Linden Labs!
The National Geospatial Intelligence Agency wants to update their aging satellite maps and it seems the Department of Defense has ordered that the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) and other DoD Organizations must “play nice” and contribute to the efforts. Of course, not everything will be added as many of the maps are of such immense resolution as to be considered classified, but it seems they’ll be publishing content in the Global Content Delivery Server & Defense Enterprise Computing Center. The combined efforts will be rolling into the “Geospatial Visualization Shared Enterprise Service”.
Also, some of the information will be made available worldwide via the Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications Systems.
Still gathering details on what exactly this means. Anyone know any more details about this?
DISA ordered to contribute to geospatial intelligence suite — Federal Computer Week.
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