hacker journalist

Hacker journalism

• View spraying missions in Vietnam by date and location -- chicagotribune.com
  

  The map can be used to see defoliant spraying missions by U.S. and South Vietnamese forces over Vietnam, as well as Laos and Cambodia. The missions began in summer 1961 and ended more than a decade later, in spring 1971.

  
  

  Clicking and dragging on the timeline at the bottom of the map lets you view the spraying missions as they took place over months and years. You also can zoom in on a particular town or area by entering its name in the search box. Once you have found the spraying missions you are looking for, you can click on the lines on the map to get more details about the missions, such as the number of legs, or runs, the number of gallons and the type of defoliant.

• Illinois nursing home safety reports -- chicagotribune.com
  

  This site provides safety reports on nursing homes in Illinois,
  including information not searchable on government sites:

  
  
  
  
  • The number of residents who are convicted felons and sex offenders
  
  
  • Crimes reported at Chicago nursing homes
  
  
  • Fines levied because of deficiencies in care
  
  
• City Council's $3.7 million allowance: How aldermen spent your money -- chicagotribune.com
  

  Aldermen hired relatives, friends and campaign workers, leased automobiles and rented downtown parking spaces with money from their taxpayer-funded expense accounts, according to city databases and public records compiled by the Tribune.

  
  

  The municipal code of the City of Chicago defines appropriate uses for the allowance but allows broad discretion by the City Council members. Oversight is minimal. Aldermen are merely told to ensure that their spending is legal.

  
  

  Explore all of the aldermen’s 2008 expenses on this Web site.

• Burr Oak Cemetery: Browse the headstones -- chicagotribune.com
  

  Authorities believe about 300 graves were illegally disinterred and their sites resold at Burr Oak Cemetery near Alsip. To help families search for their loved ones' grave sites, the Cook County Sheriff's office has set up a database for families to search for images of headstones.

  
  

  So far the database has about 9,500 entries, collected since mid-July. This application allows you to search the sheriff's database by name, and browse by decade and year. As the sheriff's office releases more images, the data in this application will be updated.

• Dry cleaners’ toxic legacy: Find sites near you -- chicagotribune.com
  

  Illinois officials have identified 415 dry cleaners statewide where the toxic solvent perchloroethylene, also known as PCE or perc, has contaminated soil or poses a threat to nearby water supplies. The Illinois Environmental Protection Agency has signed off on cleanups at another 521 sites. In some cases, the spills date back to previous owners and predate environmental regulations.

  This application can help you to find sites near your home, learn if and when they were decontaminated, and see how much it has cost to clean them to date.

• Clout goes to college: Find how your school ranks -- chicagotribune.com
  

  Political connections and clout gave more than 800 students special consideration when applying to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign during the last five years. Of those, 616 were recent graduates from high schools in Illinois, mostly in the wealthy suburbs of Chicago. The others were from out of state or were transfer students.

  
  
  

  A database prepared by the university details how many students from each Illinois high school applied, were admitted and attended the campus, as well as how many were placed on the "Category I" clout list each year. The Tribune obtained the public document from a state commission investigating U. of I.'s admissions practices.

  
  
  

  Use this application to find your high school or hometown.

• ChangeTracker: Tracking Change in Washington
  

  ChangeTracker is an experimental new tool that watches pages on whitehouse.gov, recovery.gov and financialstability.gov so you don’t have to. When the White House adds or deletes anything— say a blog post, or executive order—ChangeTracker will let you know.

  
  

  But ChangeTracker is not really a piece of software. It's the output of a series of powerful and mostly free Web-based tools, lovingly connected over the Internet. And we've made those tools available for anyone to use.

• News Mixer
  

  News Mixer is an experiment in creating community connections around the news. It was designed and built in three months, as the final project for our group of six new media graduate students.

  
  

  Using an agile, iterative process, our team invented and implemented three new comment styles for news sites, and tied them back to the users' social networks using Facebook Connect.

  
  

  For more on our agile process, check out my blog posts on News Mixer and to read about the whole enchilada, visit the Crunchberry Project blog.

• enviroVOTE
  

  Ryan Mark and I built enviroVOTE to visualize the environmental impact of the 2008 elections. It was designed it in two evenings and realized in a three-and-a-half-day long bender of data crunching and code.

  
  

  Put simply, we tallied endorsements by environmental groups like the League of Conservation Voters to determine the environmentally-friendly candidates in races across the nation. As the results came in on election night, visitors were shown the proportion of earth-friendly wins, as well as the percent change since the last elections.

  
  

  For much more, read my blog post on how we built enviroVOTE.