The November election is roughly five weeks away. While ballots are taking their final form across the country, the total number of ballot questions is expected to be just shy of 160. 63 of these are citizen initiatives. In 2006, the number of initiatives totaled 76, the second-highest total. (The record of 87 ballot initiatives occurred in both 1914 and 1996.)
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This year, some of the most controversial issues include abortion (California, Colorado and South Dakota), anti-affirmative action (Colorado and Nebraska), immigration (Arizona, California, Missouri and Oregon), and same-sex marriage (Arizona, California and Florida, and a ban on adoption by gay couples in Arkansas). Other issues on the ballot in more than one state include environmental protection and land/water conservation (Alaska, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Minnesota and Ohio), criminal justice (multiple measures in both California and Oregon), elections (Arkansas, Connecticut, Hawaii, Iowa, Maryland, Nevada, New Mexico, Ohio and Oregon), campaign finance reform (Colorado, Oregon and South Dakota), and legislatures (Colorado and South Dakota).
Major tax limitation initiatives are on the ballot in Massachusetts, North Dakota and Oregon. The measures before voters in Massachusetts and Oregon this year will look familiar -- voters rejected virtually the same measures in those states in 2002 and 2000, respectively. The Massachusetts proposal would eliminate more than a third of the state's budget. Estimates are that Oregon's would cut state revenues by about 10 percent, and North Dakota's by about 15 percent.
Voters in Colorado, Oregon and California have the most measures on the ballot this year. 18 measures will be before voters in Colorado and 12 each in Oregon and California.
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To view details on the 156 measures already on the ballot, visit NCSL's Ballot Measures Database.
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Recently I have found myself cooing over visualisation maps (and heat maps) of health and well being resources. The content rich data is overlayed with mapping technologies, and some interesting themes and patterns are emerging.
A lot of the talk around social media in the last year has been around information overload. Social media has provided us with new and exciting ways to create content. But it has also meant learning new ways to manage and engage with social media tools. Are we teetering on the edge of an information overload precipice?
Information overload is a figment of your imagination. Or a failure of your filter. Or a symptom of your technological submissiveness. Depends on who you ask.
What if you had to sort through 3.5 million articles and social media posts a day and try to pull out the most relevant items for your organisation? What if you then had to cobble it all together into something readable for your top groups and executives in your organisation?
Alacra Compliance saves time by aggregating information from both free and fee-based sources and enabling users to conduct an accurate federated search across these sources (coined “simultaneous search” by Alacra).
FreePint Family
Quilting big data threads
The fallacy of information overload
Information overload: fact, fantasy or filter failure? 
