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What’s Wrong with Open-Data Sites/How Do We Fix Them?
Vast amounts of useful information can be found on government Web sites, but it’s often impossible to make sense of it. The design of most open data sites follows a throwing-spaghetti-against-the-wall strategy, where opening more data, instead of opening data better, has been the driving force.
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Commerce Works to Improve Digital Economy Metrics
Recently, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) and the Economics and Statistics Administration (ESA) convened a roundtable to discuss what data is needed to better measure the economic importance of the cross-border information flows that connect people and businesses across the globe. Representatives from the government, private sector, academia, and public interest community spent the morning going through existing resources, identifying gaps, and evaluating what the Commerce Department could be doing to improve its digital economy metrics.
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Digital Badges Motivate Scientists to Share Data
A simple signal may incentivize researchers to make data and materials publicly available. A data-sharing campaign that involves awarding colourful badges is a surprisingly powerful incentive to get scientists to publicly share the data behind their research, according to the results of a 17-month experiment.
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Data Scientists Spend Most of Their Time Cleaning Data
A new survey of data scientists found that they spend most of their time massaging data rather than mining or modeling data. Still, most are happy with having the sexiest job of the 21st century. The survey of about 80 data scientists was conducted for the second year in a row by CrowdFlower, provider of a ?data enrichment? platform for data scientists.
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Improving Data to Better Serve Low-Income Students
Earlier this year, the U.S. Department of Education proposed an important new addition to its annual data collection from institutions of higher education: graduation rates of federal Pell Grant recipients. These data will allow students, colleges, and policymakers to see how student outcomes vary by institution and how well institutions are serving the needs of low-income students. While this is a necessary and welcome development, the way in which the data would be collected and reported must be improved.
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The Ignored Graduates
In federal graduation rates, part-time students and transfers aren?t counted. #CountAllStudents wants to tell those graduates? stories.
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Which Colleges? Students Use IDR Plans?
Given the rising cost of Income-Driven Repayment programs, it would be useful to know which colleges encourage their students to enroll in income-driven plans or provide assistance to help navigate an often-complex process to annually certify their income. And it would be even more helpful to get this information broken down for undergraduate and graduate students, as the types of students enrolled in IDR likely differ across these two groups.
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Visualization of the Week
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Mapping the Declining State of Bridges in the United States
Jonah Adkins, a cartographer and geographic information systems consultant, has created Bridges of America, a data visualization illustrating the usage and structural health of the 600,000 bridges in the United States. Bridges of America uses data from the Federal Highway Administration?s National Bridge Inventory, which logs bridge conditions dating back to 1992, and allows users to examine bridges by daily traffic count and their health, as broken down into the categories: ?ok,? ?functionally obsolete? (meaning the bridge does not meet modern standards but may be in good health), and ?structurally deficient? (meaning the bridge requires significant repair or even replacement). As of 2013, this data shows that 10 percent of U.S. bridges qualify as ?structurally deficient.?
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Notable Data Publications
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GOVERNMENT
NONPROFITS & FOUNDATIONS
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Did you work on a great report that you want your colleagues to know about? Just email us and we?ll include it here.
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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):
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Census Bureau
- 2017 Economic Census Industry Classification Report (June 15, 2016)
Department of Education
- National Student Loan Data System (June 13, 2016)
Employment and Training Administration, Department of Labor
- Occupational Code Assignment (June 13, 2016)
National Center for Education Statistics
- 2018 Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS 2018) Main Study Recruitment and Field Test (July 18, 2016)
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