Private equity firms enlist Cohen, Quarles in effort to overturn Fed‘s bank ownership regulations. (NYT) To exit Treasury‘s TARP, banks will be required to forgo lucrative FDIC debt guarantees. (WSJ) DOJ torture probe, after consulting Yoo and Bybee, won’t recommend prosecution of Yoo or Bybee. (WSJ) Boston Globe escapes NYT‘s shutdown threat after major union …
Matthew Skomarovsky
Posts by Matthew Skomarovsky
LittleSis gets social with Analyst Notes
LittleSis is a latecomer to Twitter, and we’re still learning the ropes, but one thing is clear: microblogging makes nuanced argument difficult, but is quite effective for documenting simple facts and leads. What better model to mimic, then, for LittleSis’s much-needed analyst note system? We’ve decided to modify Twitter’s format to make it more flexible …
What’s next: help us prioritize!
During the building of the LittleSis beta, many good ideas for future projects were brainstormed by the development team and the dozens of colleagues and friends from whom we received advice and feedback. Although much of our time over the coming weeks will be devoted to fixing bugs, improving basic usability, and cleaning up existing …
New Administration, New Feature
Previously, user-created lists in LittleSis, such as Bush II Administration Officials, had limited value. They basically behaved like meta tags, but clunkier. If you added Paul Wolfowitz to the Bush II list, then the list name would show up on his profile, and someone browsing through members of that list would see Wolfowitz on it …
Why LittleSis Matters
There are thousands of people in the US, and plenty more around the world, who spend every day investigating the ties between people in the upper circles of government and business. These people have diverse backgrounds: investigative journalists, social scientists, political opposition researchers, social justice activists, public interest attorneys, and business intelligence types. There are …
Peaceful transfer of power
In preparation for next week’s beta launch, we’re moving our site to a new home over the next few days. There most likely will be a few hours of downtime Friday or Saturday, and it will take a while for the new site location to be updated across the interwebs. Please bear with us! …
References and Wikipedia
A quick but important note about References on Littlesis. From now on we’re encouraging Littlesis analysts to only use original sources when contributing data. Sites like Wikipedia that aggregate information from elsewhere without requiring documentation, though abundant with largely accurate information, are less useful to Littlesis users looking to verify information. Wikipedia pages often contain …
Excited About 2009
Last winter Kevin and I were just beginning to look for funding to grow Little Sister — as the project was then named — from a raggedy prototype to a sophisticated, fast, and reliable public resource. I was living at my parents’ house and Kevin was getting by writing about the (amazingly) still-obscure subprime housing …
Quick and Dirty
For the past two months we’ve been rebuilding this site with more data, better data, a more flexible architecture, version tracking, and other goodies. Eddie Tejeda has joined the team and progress is swift. Though in some ways unsurprising, recent events on Wall Street and in Washington are stunning and deeply troubling. It’s made us …