Ian Kalin, center, talks about the Energy Department’s Green Button initiative at TechCrunch Disrupt in 2012. Kalin is now the first chief data officer in Commerce Department history. (Kevin Krejci/Flickr)
Commerce Department Names First Chief Data Officer Ian Kalin, formerly a director with open data startup Socrata, will oversee data from a department that produces hundreds of terabytes a day. While at Socrata, Kalin helped governments and businesses use Socrata’s cloud-based data discovery services to create various products and services.
News
Growing Concern About Cuts to Statistics Officials at the White House and Commerce Department are publicly expressing worries that economic statistics surveys?in particular a critical survey at the Census Bureau known as the American Community Survey?face a growing risk of cuts.
Data Innovation Lessons from Europe Policymakers in the United States should look to European countries on open data, the Internet of Things, and health and science data management.
Congressional lawmakers pushed forward two proposed bills to improve healthcare delivery ? one to encourage interoperability among EHR systems and the other to promote the transparency of Medicare and Medicaid health data to fuel efficiency and cut costs.
President?s Budget to Fund Data on Poverty Measures The President?s budget proposes $632.7 million in funding for BLS, an increase of $40.5 million over our fiscal year 2015 funding, with new funding to help BLS meet some important data needs. The BLS commissioner asked David Friedman, the acting Associate Commissioner for Prices and Living Conditions, to explain their plan to use the proposed funding to improve prices and consumer spending information.
FDIC Discontinues RECON Effective March 31, 2015 the FDIC will discontinue the web application known as RECON (Regional Economic Conditions). Regional Economic Conditions (RECON) was originally designed to assist the FDIC in the examination process by providing economic information at the state, MSA (Metropolitan Statistical Area), and county levels.
Census, AEI Events on Data Programs Roundup On March 12, the Census Bureau ran a webinar on the 2016 budget and the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) held an event on the federal statistical system. The Census webinar detailed plans to develop an administrative records clearinghouse, adding two new health insurance questions to the Current Population Survey, and the introduction of cooperative agreements with researchers to assist with unstructured data. Video from the AEI event can be found at the above link.
New & Updated Data Sources
Family Farms Focus of New Agriculture Census Data The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS) reports that family-owned farms remain the backbone of the agriculture industry. The 2012 Census of Agriculture Farm Typology report is a special data series that primarily focuses on the “family farm.”
Visualization of the Week
California Drought Visualization Website The USGS interactive California Drought Visualization website is designed to provide the public with atlas-like, statewide coverage of the drought and a timeline of its impacts on water resources. The application accesses data from a variety of sources to create a useful ?toolbox? for key stakeholders to use when making tough choices about water use, presenting them with valuable water data arranged in a storyline that conveys the complexity of Western water management in a more understandable and interactive format.
Did you work on a great report that you want your colleagues to know about? Just email us and we?ll include it here.
Calls for Comment
APDU maintains a list of open calls for comment on proposed federal data collections. We periodically alert APDU members to newly added calls for comment. Over the last several weeks, calls for comment on the following proposed data collections were published in the Federal Register (with due date):
Bureau of Labor Statistics
Local Area Unemployment Statistics Program (April 13, 2015)
Census Bureau
Annual Survey of Manufactures (April 13, 2015)
National Compensation Survey (April 15, 2015)
Energy Information Administration
Annual Survey of Alternative Fueled Vehicles (May 18, 2015)
March 19, 2015
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