Finally in the last presidential debate education made an appearance. Want to find out more about what Obama and McCain stands on this very important issue?
Diane Rehm recently hosted a segment on “The Presidential Candidates’ Education Proposals.” Some guests include Michelle Rhee and Lisa Graham Keegan.
(disclaimer: I work for Edweek.org.)
Edweek on Tuesday (10/21) carried a live webcast of a debate between the education advisers of both the Obama and McCain camp. The turn out was great. The debate itself was very informative and at times testy. You can see the archived webcast or read the transcript from this page.
Or, stay tuned to Edweek’s Youtube channel for clips of the debate broken down by topics. And check Edweek’s Vimeo Channel for full archived videos.
Also, who can miss out on the twitter fun? If you search for #tcdebate or tcdebate on twitter, you should see all the related tweets - which were shown here during the debate (bottom of page now after debate ended).
Speaking of fun, can’t miss out on Wordle either! Here’s the word cloud generated from the debate transcript. BIGGEST word is “education.” (seriously? there’s a shocker…not.)
(updated 10/23 17:05)
Edweek’s reporter/blogger David Hoff actually used another Wordle cloud to blog about the focus of the debate. I created this alternative version stripping out some common words (as you can see from the first cloud) that do not help indicate the focus (i.e. “education, senator”).
Ok, this is the end of my self-promotion of the day!
The issue of congressional earmarks continues to make the news after McCain’s attack on Obama’s “projector” earmark during the second presidential debate.
McCain has long been an opponent to earmarks spending. But his singling out (and what seems to be a mischaracterization) of the projector as an example to criticize Obama soon drew some defensive responses from the scientific community (Chicago Tribune story, and Science News story.)
But what are earmarks anyway?
More importantly how much were spent and how are they really being applied?
Here are some good online sources to find out for yourself.
Original pages for thie Sunlight Labs project are no longer available. Couldn’t find any replacement but plesae click here to similar or new pages from Sunlight Labs on earmakrs. 02/11/09
Visualize earmarks spending:
• Most by state per capita = Alaska
• Most by state total = California (change “bubble size” selector choice to see this)
• Most by agency total = Department of Defense
• Most by type of organization = For-profit organizations
2007 & 2008 defense earmarks
The Favor Factory Year 2008 and Year 2007, Seattle Times.
This resource shows who received and who gave in the 2008 defense bill.
It is part of an extensive investigative project by the Seattle Times with some really detailed stories, reports and analysis from the newspaper.
This resource enables user to search by state and by lawmaker - very user-friendly and accessible. The database only includes defense earmarks, by far the largest category of earmarks spending.
Of interest since it is election season:
• Obama’s 2008 and 2007 defense earmarks records.
• McCain’s 2008 and 2007 defense earmarks records.
Official database
Earmarks records, the U.S. Office of Management and Budget
This is the least user-friendly resource I found (certainly met my expectation for government web applications). However, it is supposed to be the most complete. If you are interested in siffing through tons of data, this one is for you. Data included in this site:
• Estimates of FY 2009 Appropriations Earmarks
• FY 2008 Appropriations Earmarks
• FY 2005 Appropriations Earmarks
• FY 2005 Authorization Earmarks
Users can search by state, federal agency, keyword, institution and member of Congress to see all higher education earmarks.
Follow the trend of news and blogs coverage of the Presidential candidates on PresidentialWatch08.
This screen shot shows Obama, McCain and Palin. On the site, user can also select Paul, Edwards, Clinton, Biden, and Huckabee. It’s interesting to see how “news” and “blogs” stats correspond or don’t correspond with each other.
PresidentialWatch08 also has a pretty telling map of the political blogosphere. It has not been updated since June though. It labels, ranks the blogs and displays inter-links as well.
Following debates on TV used to be pretty “passive.” Well, not anymore! During the past two election debates, savvy web users are taking advantage of a new social media tool Twitter. (see my previous post on Twittering the debate.)
Want to make twittering the debate even more interesting? How about rating the candidates’ performance in real time? Try Plodting using twitter next time.
NPR started a new experiment for the debate tonight calling for Twitter users to rate the candidates’ performances live (much like CNN’s dial test). The ratings were then aggregated by Plodting.com (this is not exclusive to debate rating. you can plodt anything that you tweet by following these steps).
I think the experiment turned out pretty nicely, especially when it was only announced this morning. Great idea @acarvin and NPR!
Here is the link to the live Plodts chart of the debate. http://plodt.com/debate
Here’s what the Plodt chart looks like at one point tonight.
Obama in orange. McCain in blue.
As of now (11:36PM), there are 821 submissions with Obama averaging 7.242 and McCain averaging 2.248.
Out of curiosity, I followed the CNN dial-test on TV at the same time. The live results seem quite similar to Plodt’s dial-test chart. What does that mean? I’ll leave that up to the spin doctors.
So, remember to try this next time! (if no new and more fun experiments come up between now and then.)
• More about this experiment -
Making Presidential Debates More Interesting With Twitter
• Check out NPR’s other crowd sourcing experiment,
fact-checking the debate.
• My previous post on
Twittering and Current TV.
The first Presidential debate is over. Watching it on TV was not the most exciting thing. Watching it while twittering, however, was a hoot. It was like being in a big debate party (the beer also helped).
There were lots of news organizations using twitter last Friday to present/cover the debate. The application I found most interesting was CurrenTV’s “Hack the Debate” - live streaming of (some) tweets from tweeps on its TV channels and online. (I suppose there’s a level of vanity to see my own tweets show up on TV.)
The tweets were from updates on Election.Twitter.com and updates with hash tags #current and #debate08. Of course, not all tweets were shown. Looked like some editorial judgments were used.
Really must know more? Hear from CurrentTV themselves.
I wonder what Current TV viewers thought about this?
Another channel that is doing extensive online debate coverage is C-Span with its Debate Hub. This C-Span mini site had live streaming of the debate (with embeddable video clips for anyone to use), twitter feeds and blogsphere coverage. One very useful tool is the live debate timeline that serves as a navigation tool to transcript texts and video clips.
Can’t wait for the VP debate - now, THAT will be entertainment.
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