Elliot Jaspin, MICAR's founder, has left the University of Missouri School of Journalism to take a position with Cox Newspapers in Washington, D.C. We'll miss his smiling mug around the office, but he's promised to continue advising us on technical matters and help out when he can with MICAR's programs. In fact, his first return engagement was last month when he came to help teach a week-long TRI-DART seminar.
MICAR and its programs will continue at the School of Journalism with some help from Investigative Reporters & Editors, a non-profit organization also based at the University of Missouri.
Bruce Melzer at the Anchorage Daily News discovered the feds don't know their state abbreviations. When Melzer tried to call up Alaskan lending institutions in the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act data, he got Arkansas too. Apparently whoever entered the data used "AK" as the abbreviation for both states at least part of the time. HMDA data is divided into two files. "LARS Public" contains information about the loan and loan applicant. This first file lists lending institutions by a numeric code composed of two fields: "respondent id" and "agency code." This code must be cross-referenced with the second file, "TS Public," which contains the name and address of the lending institutions, including two-letter state abbreviations. Inaccurate state abbreviations make filtering the TS file by state difficult. But it's not likely anybody would need to do this. Instead, use the numeric state code in LARS to filter for applicants in the desired state. Then search the TS file using the institution code to get names and addresses of lending institutions. Uplink needs your input! Send bits to MICAR, 120 Neff Hall, University of Missouri, Columbia, Mo. 65211.