Information

Happiness is a Positive Cash Flow. What’s the Cost of Ignorance?

April 23, 2012 Cash

Unhappiness is a negative cash flow. Even worse is not knowing what your cash position is. For the past year, I’ve been submitting Freedom of Information (FOIL) requests to Albany County, getting their cash position each week. I’ve been using the data to prototype some displays of public data. It’s not cash flow, but rather […]

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Moneyball: Maybe it’s the Geek in Me. Maybe Because it Saved Me.

February 25, 2012 Data

Tomorrow night’s the Oscar awards ceremony and I have a favorite. We’re movie goers and usually analyze them pretty carefully. Well, even if I didn’t think it was a good movie, Moneyball would be my sentimental favorite. Fortunately, it is a good movie. But I owe them. Here’s why. Michael Lewis has been a favorite […]

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NoSQL (Geek Stuff)

February 16, 2012 Computing

What we try to be about here is the intersection of information and organizational strategy and design and meeting complex challenges, both public and private. And sometimes, we get a bit caught up in single issues where policy and decision-making flies in the face of the data. So tonight we’re wading through a backlog of […]

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A More Accurate & Richer Way to Think about Economic Growth, Budgets, & Other Forecasts

February 9, 2012 Economics

In the past four years, Nate Silver has done more than anyone else I can think of to bring the world of probability and statistics to the realms of politics. Oh, everyone reads polls, but Silver introduced a wider audience to many subtleties and to how to combine multiple polls into richer and more reliable […]

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Kudos to the NYS State Comptroller, but …

December 9, 2011 Budget

My last post, Yes, Rockland County is in Trouble, was devoted to the release by New York’s Comptroller, Tom DiNapoli, of an Audit (PDF) of Rockland’s financial condition. Clearly, the Comptroller and his staff have been watching closely enough to start their audit earlier this year. Good for them. Carefully done audits take time and […]

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NYT on the end of OBL and using all the data

May 17, 2011 Information

Delayed reaction here, but they did a nice job so I’ll post anyway. The New York Times received lots of reactions to the the killing of Osama Bin Laden and here’s how they displayed it. Note that all the structured data are quite visible so that that the viewer can see both concentrations and variability. […]

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