John H. Thompson Appointed Executive Director of COPAFS The Board of Directors of the Council of Professional Associations on Federal Statistics (COPAFS) has announced the appointment of John H. Thompson as Executive Director, effective July 24. Thompson succeeds Katherine Smith Evans, who has served as Executive Director since October 2012.
The 2017 APDU Annual Conference agenda has been heavily influenced by the interests and activities of our membership. The conference planning committee received a big assist from the APDU members who submitted proposals to present at the event on September 13 – 14, 2017 in Arlington, VA. Breakout sessions will feature topics including data visualization, data privacy and security, the Commission on Evidence-Based Policymaking, and more.
Register today to take advantage of the reduced early bird registration rate!
Reminder: The call for submissions ends tomorrow, Friday, July 14 for the 2017 APDU Data Viz Awards to be presented at the Annual Conference.
News
Congress is One Step Closer to Making CRS Reports Public On June 29, 2017, the House Appropriations Committee scored a major victory in the decades-long fight to make Congressional Research Service (CRS) reports publicly available. The Committee passed the Fiscal Year 2018 Legislative Branch Appropriations Bill, which would direct CRS ?to make available to the public, all non-confidential reports.?
2018 End-to-End Census Test to Begin The U.S. Census Bureau announced today that the first part of the 2018 End-to-End Census Test will begin next month, as census takers take to the streets in three test sites to update local housing addresses. The address canvassing operation will take place in Pierce County, Wash.; Providence County, R.I.; and the Bluefield-Beckley-Oak Hill, W.Va., area, and will allow the Census Bureau the opportunity to conduct the process of building its 2020 Census address list across a wide area of physical geography, housing structures and residence types.
Trusting in Big Data ? Can Society Do it? The most critical aspect of Big Data and its relationship within society is trust. Without a certain level of trust, the data collection only gets more invasive.
Few Reporters Have Formal Data Training, Study Finds Data journalism is attracting a younger cohort of reporters, who have undergraduate degrees but little training in data-oriented fields like statistics and coding, a new report has found.
New & Updated Data Sources
Census Business Builder v. 2.2 The latest version of Census Business Builder ? version 2.2 ? now includes the ability for a user to upload their own data and to view it along with U.S. Census Bureau and other data. The Small Business Edition and Regional Analyst Edition of Census Business Builder allow business owners and regional planners to easily navigate and use key demographic and economic data to help guide their research into their markets and their regional economy. The Small Business Edition is built primarily for small business owners who need key data for their business plan or to better understand their potential market. The Regional Analyst Edition is built for chambers of commerce and regional planning staff who need a broad portrait of the people and businesses in their service area.
NCES has added data from the 2015 administration of the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) to the International Data Explorer (IDE). The PISA IDE now includes data from all six administrations of PISA: 2000, 2003, 2006, 2009, 2012, and 2015.
Visualization of the Week
The Most Typical City in America Data is nothing without context. How can we understand a city without first understanding the characteristics of a normal or typical city? Karl Sluis at NewCo Shift crunched the numbers on eight measures of 917 cities to learn what constitutes a typical city in America.
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):
Bureau of Justice Statistics
Supplemental Fraud Survey to the National Crime Victimization Survey 2017 (August 9, 2017)
