Wednesday, November 17, 2010

Earmarks Everywhere: How Does Your State Stack Up? | PBS NewsHour
I love these little data interactives. They're simple and clean and invite you to ask your own questions.
Earmarks Everywhere: How Does Your State Stack Up?


In this one for example, one is curious if Montana's status holds up over a 5 year period, or if its a one year spike. Of course it would be good to know what this money actually went for.

Having aimed for some earmark money myself, and also run the normal grants processes, I'm not 100% clear that one path is inherently more evil than the other. Yet data interactives like these make it easier to expose the abuses of any govenrment spending, so let's open up the source code and make many more.

...Wait. Someone has. There are 75,000 such visualizations at IBM's Many Eyes project.

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