APDU Weekly

Features

Job Board January 2016
Happy New Year! APDU is back with a new edition of the Job Board. Thanks for your warm support of the Job Board?s launch – if you have any feedback, please email Brendan Buff. Members are invited to submit job postings at their organization; the Board will also include a collection of public data-related positions (research, projections, etc.) from a variety of Federal, nonprofit, and private sources. You can submit your job postings to Brendan Buff or info@apdu.org.

News

Wyoming Makes Citizen Scientists? Data Collection Illegal
Citizen scientists?members of the public that donate their time and talents to collect and analyze data on behalf of the government?are a valuable resource for government agencies limited in their ability to carry out scientific research due to technical or budgetary constraints. Curiously, the Wyoming state legislature passed two statutes in 2015 that make it a crime for members of the public to collect ?resource data??data relating to land or land use, ranging from geology, to archeology, to air quality?if they intend to share the data with a government entity.

Solution to the Question “What is Data Science?”
Data science is about collecting, cleaning, analyzing and reporting data. But is it data science or just or a “sexed up term” for Statistics?

New & Updated Data Sources

NCES Updates Int’l Data Explorers with New Capabilities
NCES has added two new features, gap analysis and regression, to the TIMSS, PISA and PIAAC International Data Explorers (IDE). The IDE is an online, interactive tool that allows users to explore international assessment data and create customized tables, charts, maps and analyses.

Census Releases New Research Tool

A new Web application, Census Business Builder: Regional Analyst Edition is now available in beta, allowing users to easily explore data from Census Bureau economic programs and the American Community Survey for a user-defined economic region built from one or more counties. This second edition of Census Business Builder follows the successful launch of Census Business Builder: Small Business Edition, which provides statistics for a single type of business and area on the same demographic and economic characteristics as the new edition.

Visualization of the Week

Navigating the Green Book
The Green Book was a travel guide published between 1936 and 1966 that listed hotels, restaurants, bars, gas stations, etc. where African-American travelers would be welcome. NYPL Labs is in the process of extracting the data from the Green Books themselves and welcomes you to explore its contents in new ways.

Notable Data Publications

GOVERNMENT

Bureau of Justice Statistics – Census of Jails: Population Changes, 1999?2013
Bureau of Labor Statistics – Number of Paid Sick Leave Days in 2015 Varies by Length of Service & Establishment Size
Bureau of Transportation Statistics – 2016 Pocket Guide to Transportation
National Center for Education Statistics
- Graduation Rates for Selected Cohorts, 2006-11; Student Financial Aid in Postsecondary Institutions, Academic Year 2013-14; & Admissions in Postsecondary Institutions, Fall 2014: First Look (Provisional Data)
- Sleep Duration, Quality of Sleep, & Use of Sleep Medication, by Sex & Family Type, 2013?2014

HIGHER EDUCATION

Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce – Six Million Missing Jobs: The Lingering Pain of the Great Recession

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):

Census Bureau