A paper by Shelley Metzenbaum and Robert Shea, former senior Office of Management and Budget officials in the Obama and George W. Bush administrations, respectively, traces the history of modern efforts to improve federal management. They make it clear that a major impediment to evidence-based policymaking is that it?s never really embraced by staff members.
The ability of statistics to accurately represent the world is declining. In its wake, a new age of big data controlled by private companies is taking over ? and putting democracy in peril.
The Urban Institute, in partnership with Actionable Intelligence for Social Policy, has released a notice of support availability (NoSA) to offer training and technical assistance to potential and existing pay for success projects nationwide. The specific focus of the Pay for Success Administrative Data (PFS-AD) assistance is to help improve access to and use of detailed administrative data for PFS project development.
Urban is seeking applicants from eligible organizations located in the U.S. that are actively involved with planning or implementing a PFS project addressing youth development, economic opportunity, or healthy futures. Applications must be submitted by email by 11:59 PM on February 17, 2017.
There will be an optional webinar at 2:00 PM on Tuesday, January 31 to review the NoSA and respond to questions. Click here to register for the webinar.
Even as the technology-driven march of progress continues to reshape industries from automakers to financial service providers, the forces of innovation come to a screeching halt at the doors of most schools. As the Center for Data Innovation has written in a recent report, this needs to change, and making this change will require states to bring a new level of technological sophistication to their school systems.
NCHS Confidentiality Pledge Revision National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) is announcing revisions to the confidentiality pledge(s) it provides to its respondents under the Confidential Information Protection and Statistical Efficiency Act (44 U.S.C. 3501) (CIPSEA).
The Department of Education updated some of the data on the College Scorecard. In addition to providing the latest data on postsecondary institutions that are currently operating, institutional accrediting agencies, and institutions that the Department has placed on a heightened monitoring status, we updated repayment rate data on the College Scorecard, as well as the Financial Aid Shopping Sheet Institutional Metric Data attachment from the November 14, 2016 Electronic Announcement.
The results of the 2016 presidential election are now up on PolicyMap. This adds to the county-level results we have for the 2004, 2008, and 2012 elections. Also available are the county level results to the Senate elections and the results of the congressional elections are coming soon.
Learn to Map Census Data in R “Learn to Map Census Data in R” is a free email course that will teach you how to make maps of US Census Data using the R program language. You will learn how to map key demographic statistics of US States and Counties. Visit CensusMappingCourse.com to learn more.
Visualization of the Week
Visualizing the Differences Between Inaugural Addresses Google News Lab and data visualization firm Tulp Interactive have created a series of data visualizations called ?Inaugurate? that breaks down the inaugural speeches of 12 presidents, including Abraham Lincoln, Ronald Reagan, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump, and compares their length, subject matter, emotions, and other factors. In the ?society? comparison, for example, users can see how frequently different presidents mentioned terms such as ?wealth,? ?crime,? and ?common good,? and in each visualization, users can compare the search popularity of different significant terms in each speech.
Did you work on a great report that you want your colleagues to know about? Just email us and we?ll include it here.
Federal Rulemaking and 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
