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UPDATED LINK
APDU Executive Director has a new blog post on an exciting panel at the upcoming APDU Annual Conference featuring agency heads of the Census Bureau, Bureau of Labor Statistics, and the National Center for Health Statistics. These agency leaders will feature in an open-forum discussion about how public data agencies are innovating and what will likely be expected of them in the future.
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APDU?s July Job Board can now be found on the APDU website. Thank you to all who submitted job postings for this month! You can submit your job postings to info@apdu.org.
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On July 7, the House Labor, Health and Human Services and Education (Labor-HHS) Appropriations Subcommittee passed its fiscal year (FY) 2017 appropriations bill for agencies and programs under its jurisdiction, which include the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), Department of Education, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), among others. Both chambers propose flat funding for the Bureau of Labor Statistics at $609 million, 5 percent below the Administration?s request of $640.9 million.
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When it comes to data, there are few companies that have as much data stored on their servers as Google. According to at least one not so recent estimate, Google could be holding as much as 15 exabytes on their servers. That?s 15 million terrabytes of data which would be the equivalent of 30 million personal computers. Storing and managing such a humongous volume of data is no easy task and how Google handles this data is a lesson for anybody who deals with cloud and big data.
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Nearly a decade ago, a blue ribbon commission appointed by former U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings issued a clarion call for higher education reform. One of the commission?s key findings was that there were extensive data available on higher education, but that data rarely focused on outcomes and left out large numbers of students who either enrolled part-time or transferred. This finding has sparked years of fighting in Congress about whether the U.S. Department of Education should or could create a database that contains information about all students in U.S. higher education institutions.
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Data analytics enables companies and organizations to easily examine large amounts of information to find patterns and correlations previously inaccessible. While businesses in a wide range of industries are using data analytics to determine how to improve products, cut costs, and increase efficiency, up until recently, those in the legal field have been largely underutilizing the technology. One reason is that the legal profession, rooted in tradition and precedent, has been historically resistant to change. But as a new generation of attorneys, who grew up with technology, enters the workforce, the profession has become much more receptive to new technologies. Now the legal profession finds itself on the cusp of a technological revolution that has the potential to reshape the entire industry.
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Microsoft says DNA could be a better way to store data for the long term than the magnetic tape companies rely on today. The company reported that it had written roughly 200 megabytes of data, including War and Peace and 99 other literary classics, into DNA. Researchers have demonstrated that digital data can be stored in DNA before, but Microsoft says none have written so much of it into DNA at once.
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New & Updated Data Sources
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The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services on Friday released final rules covering increased access to analyses and data that will help providers, employers and others make more informed decisions about care delivery and quality improvement. The new rules, required as a provision of the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act of 2015 (MACRA), are meant to augment the Qualified Entity Program, authorized by the Affordable Care Act, which lets qualified entities confidentially share or sell analyses of Medicare and private sector claims data to providers, employers and other groups that can use the data to support improved care.
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Visualization of the Week
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Scientists at the Computational Story Laboratory have analyzed novels to identify the building blocks of all stories. Andrew Reagan at the Computational Story Lab at the University of Vermont in Burlington and partners have used sentiment analysis to map the emotional arcs of over 1,700 stories and then used data-mining techniques to reveal the most common arcs. ?We find a set of six core trajectories which form the building blocks of complex narratives,? they say.
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Notable Data Publications
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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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