MAPLight’s awesome Money Near Votes tool

If you haven’t heard of MAPLight.org before, here’s what they do (which is fantastic):

MAPLight.org, a groundbreaking public database, illuminates the connection between campaign donations and legislative votes in unprecedented ways. Elected officials collect large sums of money to run their campaigns, and they often pay back campaign contributors with special access and favorable laws.

They’re a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, non-partisan organization.

MAPLight recently announced Money Near Votes, which shows you how campaign contributions closely mirror voting records:

…combines information on campaign finance and congressional votes. Journalists, citizen activists and bloggers can easily track campaign contributions from special-interest groups given within a month, a week, or a day of each vote in Congress.

It’s available for every bill they track. It’ll be interesting to follow HR 3200, America’s Affordable Health Choices Act with Money Near Votes.

Hey Chase bank — 1995 called, they want their user agreement back

Buried in my Amazon Chase Visa “This E-Sign Disclosure and Consent” was this gem:

Hardware and Software Requirements. In order to access, view, respond to, and retain electronic Communications that we make available to you, you must have:

  • an Internet browser (Microsoft ® Windows 95 or higher, Windows NT 4.0 or higher with Microsoft Internet Explorer 5+, Netscape 4.6+ or AOL 4+) that supports 128 bit encryption;
  • sufficient electronic storage capacity on your computer’s hard drive or other data storage unit;
  • an e-mail account with an Internet service provider and e-mail software in order to participate in our electronic Communications program;
  • a personal computer (for PCs: Pentium 120 Hhz or higher; for Macintosh, Power Mac 9500, Power PC 604 processor 120-MHz Base or higher), operating system and telecommunications connections to the Internet capable of receiving, accessing, displaying, and either printing or storing Communications received from us in electronic form via a plain text-formatted e-mail or by access to our web site using one of the browsers specified above.

I’ll dig out that Power Mac 9500. It’s around here somewhere…

I’d rather you be right

Jeff Ello wrote an interesting article for Computerworld about managing geeks.

Here’s the heart of it:

While everyone would like to work for a nice person who is always right, IT pros will prefer a jerk who is always right over a nice person who is always wrong. Wrong creates unnecessary work, impossible situations and major failures. Wrong is evil, and it must be defeated. Capacity for technical reasoning trumps all other professional factors, period.

The US Congress doesn’t understand the Internet

Recently, I received an email from Nancy Pelosi:
Screen shot 2009-08-27 at 12.06.47 AM

Apparently no one explained to her (despite representing Internet central), that scanning your letterhead and pasting it in to your email is a bad idea. It looks worse when it’s on a funny angle.

Having text as images this must be some sort of ADA violation.

Finally, the message lacks an unsubscribe link.

Of course, Speaker Pelosi isn’t the only one with problems. Anna Eshoo, who represents the only slightly gerrymandered California 14th, home to none other than Google and Yahoo, can’t get her web presence together, either.

First, her mailing list is woefully out of date. I left her district almost three years ago, yet I still get emails from her. As with Pelosi, there’s no unsubscribe link. I’ve left her district office staff numerous emails and voicemails, but they won’t remove me from her list.

Second, when you visit her web site, you get an SSL error:
Eshoo Certificate fail
…this certainly doesn’t instill confidence her ability to keep constituent communications secure and private.

Once you submit the form, you get obtuse error messages like this one:
Eshoo form validation fail
…1996 called, they want their form validation code back.

For those wondering what required-prefix means — that’s the formal prefix that precedes your name, such as “Ms” or “Mr.” Which, of course, shouldn’t be required in the first place.

Awesome healthcare roundup: lower costs, better quality

Health Beat has a terrific roundup of health care new:

Physicians and hospital leaders in Cedar Rapids began by counting how many CAT scans they were doing, only to find that in just one year 52,000 scans were done in a community of 300,000 people. “I was embarrassed for us,” confides Jim Levett, a cardiac surgeon and the head of a large physician group in Cedar Rapids. It’s just not likely that 1/6 of the population needed a CAT scan in a given year.