Future Perfect: The Case for Progress in a Networked Age
by
Steven Johnson
Published 14 Jul 2012
At Arnold Air Force Base in Tennessee, a team of scientists and engineers use high-pressure helium gas to launch chicken carcasses at high velocity into spinning jet engines. Every make of engine that powers a commercial jet aircraft in the United States has passed the chicken gun test. The chicken gun, it should be noted, is an exemplary case of government regulation. Those dead birds being shot out of a pneumatic cannon are Your Tax Dollars at Work. For the passengers flying on US Airways 1549, those tax dollars turned out to be very well spent. Because the first lucky break the plane experienced after a flock of Canada geese crashed into both its engines was the simple fact that neither engine disintegrated. Neither one propelled shards of titanium into the fuselage; neither engine caught fire.
Interactive Data Visualization for the Web
by
Scott Murray
Published 15 Mar 2013
A choropleth map showing agricultural productivity by state Adding Points Wouldn’t it be nice to put some cities on this map, for context? Maybe it would be interesting or useful to see how many large, urban areas there are in the most (or least) agriculturally productive states. Again, let’s start by finding the data. Fortunately, the US Census has us covered, once again. (Your tax dollars at work!) Here’s the start of a raw CSV dataset from the Census that shows “Annual Estimates of the Resident Population for Incorporated Places Over 50,000”. table with row headers in column A and column headers in rows 3 through 4,,,,,,, ,,, "Table 1. Annual Estimates of the Resident Population for Incorporated Places Over 50,000, Ranked by July 1, 2011 Population: April 1, 2010 to July 1, 2011" ,,,,,,,,,, Rank,Geographic Area,,"April 1, 2010",,Population Estimate (as of July 1),, ,,,,Place,State,Census,Estimates Base,2010,2011,,,, 1,New York city,New York,"8,175,133","8,175,133","8,186,443","8,244,910",,,, 2,Los Angeles city,California,"3,792,621","3,792,625","3,795,761","3,819,702" ,,,, 3,Chicago city,Illinois,"2,695,598","2,695,598","2,698,283","2,707,120",,,, 4,Houston city,Texas,"2,099,451","2,099,430","2,108,278","2,145,146",,,, 5,Philadelphia city,Pennsylvania,"1,526,006","1,526,006","1,528,074","1,536,471" ,,,, 6,Phoenix city,Arizona,"1,445,632","1,445,656","1,448,531","1,469,471",,,, 7,San Antonio city,Texas,"1,327,407","1,327,606","1,334,431","1,359,758",,,, 8,San Diego city,California,"1,307,402","1,307,406","1,311,516","1,326,179",,,, 9,Dallas city,Texas,"1,197,816","1,197,816","1,201,715","1,223,229",,,, 10,San Jose city,California,"945,942","952,612","955,091","967,487",,,, … This is quite messy, and I don’t even need all this data.
We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves
by
Karen Joy Fowler
Published 29 May 2013
And then, twenty-four hours before I was supposed to be on a plane to Indianapolis, while I was in the very midst of packing a duffel bag borrowed from Todd, humming “Joy to the World,” thinking about what I should and shouldn’t say to my parents about Lowell and whether the new house might be bugged, too, the way we’d always assumed the old one was, which drove my father crazy—like we were lab rats or something, under constant surveillance, your tax dollars at work, he’d say—and was probably the real reason they’d moved. As well as trying to figure out how to ask them for a new bike for Christmas, since I’d lost the last one in a drug-induced fugue. While all this was happening, a policeman came to the door. It wasn’t Officer Arnie this time. This officer didn’t introduce himself.
Nerds on Wall Street: Math, Machines and Wired Markets
by
David J. Leinweber
Published 31 Dec 2008
This is the Heidi Klum of bar charts; it looks so perfect that one suspects something odd or artificial is going on, like graphing the row numbers. If the guys at NASA can mix up meters with feet and misplace their $100 million babies on Mars, it is maybe just possible that we mixed up some data. However, a closer look at decile returns, seen in Figure 2.15, shows otherwise. Language Technology: Your Tax Dollars at Work The U.S. government has been busy spending your money on technologies to do this kind of content extraction and analysis for years.When the Gr eatest Hits of Computation in Finance 55 0.04 Cumulative Abnormal Return 0.02 0.00 0.02 0.04 research first started, the language researchers were most interested in was Russian.
No One Would Listen: A True Financial Thriller
by
Harry Markopolos
Published 1 Mar 2010
As she told Kotz, “I was trying to come up with a theory of what he was doing, so I was thinking was this like an accounting case, is this like cookie-cutter reserves, does he have money somewhere else? When he said he had these other accounts, I just thought let’s get the records and see if there is some way he’s smoothing earnings. I don’t even know if you can do that. I was wondering.” Once again, your tax dollars at work. Bachenheimer sent my submission to Simona Suh, an attorney on the enforcement staff. Suh had even less experience in this area than Bachenheimer; in fact, this was the first time she had led an investigation. She had never been involved in a Ponzi scheme and had no idea how to proceed.
Riding Rockets: The Outrageous Tales of a Space Shuttle Astronaut
by
Mike Mullane
Published 24 Jan 2006
The face was narrow, cadaverous, with two bolts at the back of the skull looking like horns. Satan himself was riding with us. During a break in our payload work, I floated into a sleep restraint and extended my arms through the armholes, then ducked my head into the bag. Pepe and Dave taped the skull on top of the restraint so it appeared our friend had a body. (Your tax dollars at work.) They silently floated the bag to the flight deck and maneuvered me behind John Casper, who was engaged at an instrument panel. When he turned to find the creature in his face with arms waving, it scared the bejesus out of him. Later, we clamped Satan on the toilet. No doubt my desecration of the poor anonymous soul who had volunteered his body (and skull) to science has earned me a few more millennia in hell’s fires.
Kiln People
by
David Brin
Published 15 Jan 2002
The busy worker ants who keep civilization going -- every hue and candy-striped combination -- bustled in/out of nearby factories and workshops, bearing heavy loads, hurrying to confidential meetings or carrying rush orders on spindly legs. Traffic snarled for a while, forcing us to wend around an open pit construction site, marked by a broad holo sign: CITYWIDE ROXTRANSIT PNEUMATIC-TUBE PROJECT: YOUR TAX DOLLARS AT WORK A glimmering animated display showed steady progress toward the day when clayfolk and other cargo would zip to every part of town via an extended network of airless tubes, shuttling to any address like so many self-targeted Internet packets, automatically and at hardly any cost. Jitney and brontolorry drivers complained that the completed portions of the project were already spoiling their most lucrative routes.
The Moral Animal: Evolutionary Psychology and Everyday Life
by
Robert Wright
Published 1 Jan 1994
Government laborer were also paid in bread, fish, oil—all such disbursements precisely registered, as were the hour spent earning them by, for example, digging canals. And when the work was done, the government, like governments today, took conspicuous credit. In the Babylon of Hammurabi’s day, one canal was named “Hammurabi is the Prosperity of the People.” Your tax dollar at work. All of this bureaucratic accounting required standard units of measurement—a kind of information technology in their own right. One of the most widely found artifacts in the early Near East is the “bevelrim bowl,” which is thought to have been a measure for foods paid to workers. It shows up in Mesopotamia in the fourth millennium B.C., as do cylindrical seals, writing, and city-states.
Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny
by
Robert Wright
Published 28 Dec 2010
Government laborer were also paid in bread, fish, oil—all such disbursements precisely registered, as were the hour spent earning them by, for example, digging canals. And when the work was done, the government, like governments today, took conspicuous credit. In the Babylon of Hammurabi’s day, one canal was named “Hammurabi is the Prosperity of the People.” Your tax dollar at work. All of this bureaucratic accounting required standard units of measurement—a kind of information technology in their own right. One of the most widely found artifacts in the early Near East is the “bevelrim bowl,” which is thought to have been a measure for foods paid to workers. It shows up in Mesopotamia in the fourth millennium B.C., as do cylindrical seals, writing, and city-states.