APDU Weekly

Feature

Data Journalism: How Not To Be Wrong

At the intersection of data and journalism, lots can go wrong. Taking only precautions might sometimes not be enough. ?It?s very well possible that your story is true but wrong?, New York Times data journalist Robert Gebeloff explained at the DataHarvest+ conference.

2017 APDU Data Viz Awards

Submit your most interesting data visualizations by July 7, 2017! The Data Viz Awards take pride in recognizing eye-catching and easy-to-comprehend images building on publicly-available data.

News

Data?s Critical Role in Reversing the Opioid Epidemic

An app like the one Cincinnati has created to track heroin overdoses can help first responders and others deploy their resources more effectively.

5 Q?s for Kristian Lum of Human Rights Data Analysis Group

The Center for Data Innovation spoke with Kristian Lum, lead statistician at the Human Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG), an international human rights nonprofit. Lum discussed the challenges of getting accurate data from conflict zones, as well as her concerns about predictive policing if law enforcement gets it wrong.

Transparency With Staying Power

The Department of Education appears ready to update the College Scorecard later in 2017. Department staff are taking steps to update the data feeding the College Scorecard, a tool that allows prospective students to look at measures like the debt burden of an institution’s graduates.

Program Solicitation: NEA Research Labs

In recent years, the National Endowment for the Arts? research agenda has focused on yielding new knowledge about the value and impact of the arts. Through the National Endowment for the Arts Research Labs (NEA Research Labs), NEA seeks to extend this agenda and its impact by cultivating a series of transdisciplinary research partnerships, grounded in the social and behavioral sciences, to produce and report empirical insights about the arts for the benefit of arts and non-arts sectors alike.

New & Updated Data Sources

Updates to the QuickFacts Tool

Based on user feedback, the U.S. Census Bureau recently provided updates to the QuickFacts web application on census.gov.

Facebook to Share Data with Emergency Response Orgs

Mapping and sharing data will help first responders save lives in the wake of disasters.

Malaysia Sets Open Data Targets

The Malaysian government has agreed to step up public access to official data after taking part in a World Bank program.

Visualization of the Week

The Nearly 5 Million Census Blocks With Zero Population
A Block is the smallest area unit used by the U.S. Census Bureau for tabulating statistics. As of the 2010 census, the United States consists of 11,078,300 Census Blocks. Of them, 4,871,270 blocks totaling 4.61 million square kilometers were reported to have no population living inside them. Despite having a population of more than 310 million people, 47 percent of the USA remains unoccupied.

Notable Data Publications

GOVERNMENT

• Bureau of Economic Analysis – U.S. International Transactions
• Bureau of Labor Statistics – The Cost of Care: New Insights Into Healthcare Spending Growth
• Census Bureau
  • More Than Half of School Expenditures Spent on Classroom Instruction
  • Quarterly Summary of State and Local Government Tax Revenues: First Quarter 2017
• Federal Reserve Board of Governors – Report on the Economic Well-Being of U.S. Households

NONPROFITS & FOUNDATIONS

• American Association for Public Opinion Research – An Evaluation of 2016 Election Polls in the U.S.
• State Higher Education Executive Officers Association – SHEEO Releases Reports on Effective Use of State Postsecondary Data Systems

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 published in the Federal Register (with due date):