a nurd, mechanic, tourist, organizer, & perpetual civic servent.
as of 14 feb 2009, the new york state senate started using @NYbudgetIdeas to announce updates on NYBudgetIdeas.org. once again, a baby step in modernizing govenment’s ability to communicate with the general public. also, check out the twitter hashtag #NYBudgetIdeas #NYSenate for more conversations.
The transition has allowed for the first real glimpse inside the sprawling patronage machine built by Senate Republicans and operated with a veil of secrecy that sometimes left even rank-and-file G.O.P. members in the dark.
Overall, Twitter users engage with news and own technology at the same rates as other internet users, but the ways in which they use the technology – to communicate, gather and share information – reveals their affinity for mobile, untethered and social opportunities for interaction. Moreover, Twitter as an application allows for and enhances these opportunities, so it is not so surprising that users would engage in these kinds of activities and also be drawn to an online application that expands those opportunities.
Of course there is no right way or wrong way to use Twitter: it’s about Twitter using you! This, like Facebook, is just another vehicle to gather information about individuals and distill them into a list of marketable categories.
To the girl staring at the box I had on the subway, I didn’t mean it when I said “how else are you supposed to transport tarantulas?”
my friend kristin sends me the coolest videos. (via hybrism)
yesterday at noon, the NY State Senate launched it’s first step in making NY’s government more transparent and accessible to all. while the site doesn’t feature rounded corners, RSS feeds, or other wizz-boom-bang web 2.0 features, NYBudgetIdeas.org offers THE WORLD access to the NY State budget and four ways for you to suggest ideas to close the budget gap – text messaging, 800 number, webform, email.
for those of you who are wondering about the geek tools – note, this site is super simple. first, the landing site is a basic webform that captures – first & last name, phone, zipcode and comment. the 800 number is connected to PhoneTag.com which translates a voice mail and then emails us text. as for text messages, i have to credit to Nathan Freitas for building out the TextMarks backend. Using a simple PHP script, we get an email that captures the time submitted, cell phone number and comment.
while some might see this as trivial site, it is not. THIS IS ONE BIG BABY STEP. the vision set forth by State Senate Majority Leader, Sen. Malcom Smith, resonates with the Brennan Center for Justice’s report on the dysfunctional nature of NY State Government. his goal – our goal – is to find new ways to bring greater transparency and accessibility to State Government.
if you have any suggestions, we’re all ears!
(via everthusthedeadbeats)
Under the draft procurement standards, software makers that do business with New York State agencies must certify that they have rid their code of the Top 25 Errors. The language insists that vendors should conduct an analysis using the Top 25 list and document in writing that they have been mitigated.
LiveLeak has caught a scary moment of previously undisclosed insight by Paul Kanjorski where he reveals some facts that have not been captured by the media previously. At 2 minutes and 20 seconds in the video below, Democratic Representative Kanjorski explains how the Federal Reserve told Congress members about a “tremendous draw-down of money market accounts in the United States, to the tune of $550 billion dollars.” According to Kanjorski, this electronic transfer occurred over the period of an hour or two. And it gets worse. Kanjorski paraphrases the following disclosure by Bernanke and Paulson:
On Thursday (Sept 18), at 11am the Federal Reserve noticed a tremendous draw-down of money market accounts in the U.S., to the tune of $550 billion was being drawn out in the matter of an hour or two. The Treasury opened up its window to help and pumped a $105 billion in the system and quickly realized that they could not stem the tide. We were having an electronic run on the banks. They decided to close the operation, close down the money accounts and announce a guarantee of $250,000 per account so there wouldn’t be further panic out there.
If they had not done that, their estimation is that by 2pm that afternoon, $5.5 trillion would have been drawn out of the money market system of the U.S., would have collapsed the entire economy of the U.S., and within 24 hours the world economy would have collapsed. It would have been the end of our economic system and our political system as we know it.
We are no better off today than we were 3 months ago because we have a decrease in the equity positions of banks because other assets are going sour by the moment.
via NPR’s planetmoney on twitter.