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Reducing Respondent Contact Burden in ACS
The U.S. Census Bureau?s American Community Survey (ACS) uses a multimode data collection approach that attempts to contact selected households by mail, telephone calls and personal visits. Some respondents find the data collection strategy to be overly intrusive and are concerned with the number and type of contact attempts. So how should organizations ensure that they do not make too many contact attempts?
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John Abowd to Receive 2016 Julius Shiskin Award
John M. Abowd, Edmund Ezra Day Professor at Cornell University and currently Associate Director for Research and Methodology and Chief Scientist at the Census Bureau, has been selected to receive the 2016 Julius Shiskin Memorial Award for Economic Statistics. The award recognizes original and unusually important contributions in the development of economic statistics or in the use of statistics in interpreting the economy.
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12 Algorithms Every Data Scientist Should Know
Algorithms have become part of our daily lives and they can be found in almost any aspect of business. Gartner calls this the algorithmic business and it is changing the way we (should) run and manage our organizations. There are all kinds of algorithms and for each aspect of your business, there are different algorithms, which nowadays you can even buy at an algorithm marketplace. Algoritmia provides developers with over 800 algorithms in the fields of audio and visual processing, machine learning and computer vision, saving developers precious time and money.
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Open Data Behind WA Hospital Waiting Times App
The Western Australia government has launched a new app that displays live updates of waiting times at Perth hospitals. Patients seeking urgent medical care in Perth can now view emergency waiting times for local hospitals, thanks to a new app developed in Australia. The app, WA Emergency Waiting Times, uses existing Perth hospital emergency wait time data, and taps into mobile device geolocation, local maps, and traffic data to give people needing to go to the hospital in a non life-threatening emergency an aggregated travel and wait time.
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Why Aren?t All Students Counted in Fed Graduation Rate?
Due to a congressional ban on student-level data, the federal government is unable to reliably and consistently report the outcomes of transfer students after they transfer, and has only recently added minimal reporting for part-time students. Yet more than half of bachelor?s degree recipients in recent years attended more than one school and nearly two-thirds of community college students start part-time. Those students, among others, are not counted.
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Survey Research Today and Tomorrow
The U.S. Census Bureau conducts many surveys that involve probability samples of households and businesses using frames such as the Master Address File and the Business Register. The theoretical and practical bases for this approach to survey data collection were largely pioneered at the Census Bureau, in large part because of the work of Morris Hansen and his colleagues. With the difficulty of recruiting respondents and the rapidly rising costs of data collection, this approach now faces increasing challenges. Lower response rates threaten to bias our estimates. Rising costs threaten our ability to do surveys.
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New & Updated Data Sources
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FCC Opens its Complaint Database to Public View
People are mad about a lot of things, and now the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is helping put some numbers against the general stirrings of unrest. It is putting its complaint database online, more or less. The agency — which regulates telephone, broadcast, cable, and other communications media — launched its new online Consumer Complaint Data Center, which it says will provide “greater transparency into consumer complaints received by the Commission.”
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A Method to Download Dept of Ed College Scorecard Data
Click through for a link to a method to download Department of Education College Scorecard data using the public API. It is based on the dplyr model of piped commands to select and filter data in a single chained function call. An API key from the U.S. Department of Education is required.
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Visualization of the Week
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Mapping Every Parking Regulation in Philadelphia
Laura Ancona, a data scientist for the City of Philadelphia?s Office of Innovation and Technology, has created Parkadelphia, a data visualization mapping every parking regulation in Philadelphia. The map uses open data from the Philadelphia Parking Authority and the City of Philadelphia to make it easy for users to understand information on residential parking zones, metered parking spots for cars, motorcycles, and scooters, city parking lots, valet parking, and emergency routes for any given location throughout the city. Ancona is updating Parkadelphia as she verifies parking rules for particular streets and develops a feature illustrating the most in-demand parking spots in the city.
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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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Bureau of Labor Statistics
- Multiple Worksite Report and Report of Federal Employment and Wages (June 22, 2016)
- Survey of Occupational Injuries and Illnesses (July 18, 2016)
Bureau of Transportation Statistics
- Passenger Origin-Destination Survey Report (July 25, 2016)
Census Bureau
- Generic Clearance for Questionnaire Pretesting Research (June 22, 2016)
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
- National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) (July 22, 2016)
- National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) Longitudinal Study?Feasibility Component (July 22, 2016)
- Employment and Training Administration, Department of Labor – Unemployment Insurance Data Validation (June 22, 2016)
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