Brand Niemann

 

Posts by Brand Niemann

Public Debt: Congressional Charts Plot Need For Action

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As everyone in the federal government–and most citizens–know, the government has been recording the largest budget deficits, as a share of gross domestic product (GDP), since the end of World War II. As a result of those deficits, the amount of federal debt held by the public has soared-surpassing $9 trillion at the end of fiscal year 2010 to a level equal to 62% of GDP.

The interest the government pays on that debt is currently low by historical standards as a percentage of GDP but it is expected to grow rapidly over the next several years as interest rates rise. (A summary of key facts about the Federal debt are available on my Wiki site.) Keep reading →

 /  Published July 23, 2011 at 9:02 AM

Parsing Obama’s Town Hall Tweets

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Last week, President Barack Obama kicked off his first Twitter town hall with – what else? – a tweet.


“At 1:53 PM Today (July 12), from the White House: I am going to make history here as the first President to live tweet,” he wrote.

And then he sent another tweet to get the conversation really going: “Today 2:07 PM Obama says: in order to reduce the deficit, what costs would you cut and what investments would you keep – both.”

Before it ended about an hour later, a number of well-known tweeters (e.g. House Speaker John Boehner) and lots of lesser known folks had tweeted hoping to catch the President’s attention and get a personal response to their question or comment.


While lots of commentary has already and will be written about this historic event, I thought I could provide something different (wearing my data scientist/data journalist hat) and parse his tweets, and those of previous town halls, if I could just recover the tweet steam. I used Searchtastic to retrieved 346 Tweets for visualization. Keep reading →

 /  Published July 21, 2011 at 12:00 PM

Our Mountain of Debt: Seeing And Understanding the Numbers

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My eyes caught the full-page graphic in the print version Washington Post Business Section Sunday entitled “Our Mountain of Debt” and they strained to see all the numbers and text about them because this is a subject of considerable interest and importance right now to me and many others.

The article said: “In the American political conversation, the national debt has become something almost mythical. The debt has become a metaphor for all that ails the United States, a scary monster under the bed. It isn’t. It’s an accounting concept. The nation’s numbers, in the billions and trillions of dollars, start to get away from us quickly. But the challenge is not unlike any household’s juggle to manage its finances.” Keep reading →

 /  Published July 20, 2011 at 7:00 AM

Cartwright, McGrath say semantic interoperability will drive DoD’s information environment

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I am attending the 3rd Annual DoD SOA & Semantic Technology Symposium. This year the focus is on the necessity of semantic technology to achieve interoperable business operations through shared understanding. The theme is how semantic interoperability will drive DoD to a more efficient and effective information environment.

DoD Deputy Chief Management Officer Beth McGrath welcomed about 300 attendees yesterday and referred to her April 4th memorandum that said: DoD historically spends more than $6.0B annually developing and maintaining a portfolio of more than 2,000 business systems and Web services. Many of these systems, and the underlying processes they support, are poorly integrated. It is imperative, especially in today’s limited budget environment, to optimize our business processes and the systems that support them to reduce our annual business systems spending. She said: “It is all about all of the data and how to work with it”.

During his afternoon keynote, I had the opportunity to ask General James Cartwright, Vice Chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff and our nation’s second highest ranking military officer, what the goal of that memo reduction was: say reduce the cost and number of systems by 50%? General Cartwright responded by saying the goal was to drive the cost down significantly and get more agile results. He also said that the military’s highest priority was to get programmers and social scientists “deployed to the edge” to met the needs of our warfighters.

A recurring question has been: show me the analytic for any claim about a more efficient and effective DoD information environment. So I decided to first check the Federal IT Spending Dashboard that I had reproduced to see what the DoD situation was. More on that in my next report.

 /  Published July 15, 2011 at 6:00 AM

Mapping 2011 Federal Data Center Consolidation Update: Better data but over half the data centers are still not shown.

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Today my eye caught Shutting Down Duplicative Data Centers on AOL Gov:

Today, as part of the President’s Campaign to Cut Waste, we are announcing that in 2012, we will shut down 178 data centers, bringing us to a total of 373 data centers that will be shut down by the end of 2012. We are closing 195 data centers in this calendar year, of which 81 have already been shut down. This represents substantial progress towards our goal of shutting down more than 800 data centers by 2015, a move that is expected to save taxpayers more than $3 billion. The author is Jeffrey Zients, Federal Chief Performance Officer and OMB’s Deputy Director for Management. This article originally appeared on the White House website http://CIO.gov.

Because I had written an earlier story on AOL Gov entitled Federal Data Center Map: Why are over half the data centers missing? and I decided to see if the data set was better and the facts were correct using Spotfire again because Socrata at Data.gov does not support faceted search:

Fact Check: 373 data centers in the data set – Yes. Closed by end of 2012: To be closed between 1/1/2012 and 12/31/2012 – 178 – Yes; Closed between Initiative Kickoff 2/26/2010 and Report 7/19/2011 – 81 – Yes; and To be closed between 7/19/2011 and 12/31/2011 -114 – Yes, for a Total of 195 – Yes!

Statistics: Departments (18), Data Center Names (373), Street Addresses (33), City and State (155), Latitude (147), and Longitude (147), and Status (373). Data Source: Excel

I still had to cleanup some of the data in the newer data set and found over half the locations were still missing. In addition the recent article mentions the goals of shutting down 373 data centers by the end of 2012 and more than 800 data centers by the end of 2015. So where’s the data? And it would be nice to see a column of data for the cost saving by data center so citizens can see the individual closures and savings in their own locations.

Keep reading →

Post a comment  /   /  Published July 13, 2011 at 5:02 PM

Federal Data Center Map: Why Are Over Half The Data Centers Missing?

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The federal government’s CIO.gov web site put together what seems like a smart-looking interactive map showing where some 137 federal data centers are slated to be closed or consolidated this year as part of the White House Office of Management and Budget’s announced plans last year to dramatically reduce the number of government data centers.

The map provides two options: View List of Closures (Locations 1) and View Interactive Map (Locations 2). The List of Closures has locations for only 56 of the 137 data centers and the interactive map shows only 36 data centers. So what happened to the remaining data centers?

There are 137 data centers in the data set available for download, but it turns out 81 data centers do not have specific locations (latitude and longitude).

Any map is severely limited, even misleading, by only showing less than half its subjects–in this case, data centers. Certainly some data center’s locations are not provided for security reasons, but at least the reason for so many missing locations should be given.

In addition, when I mouse over the Data Center Location Column, I see the latitude and longitude in parentheses, but the data is not available for use in mapping so I had to manually extract it to Latitude and Longitude columns. I found that two Alaska and two Washington, DC data center locations appear to be in error so readers can have more confidence in the map Locations 2 that I produced than the one produced from the downloaded data set using Locations 1! The two maps can be compared below and interactive versions are provided on a wiki site I maintain for the Semantic Community.


Federal Data Center Consolidation Initiative Locations 1-View List of Closures: There are 137 Data Centers in the data set available for download, but 81 Data Centers do not have specific locations (Latitude and Longitude). So any map is severely limited, even misleading, by only showing less than half the Data Centers. In addition this map shows four locations that are clearly wrong.

Federal Data Center Consolidation Initiative Locations 2 – View Interactive Map: There are only 36 Data Centers CIO.gov map. This map, similar to the one above, shows the locations of the data centers from the CIO.gov interactive map and does not have the four mis-located data centers in the above map.

 /  Published July 12, 2011 at 7:58 AM
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