APDU Weekly

Feature

• At the final session of the APDU Annual Conference, Lisa Blumerman will discuss planning for the 2020 Census, changes to data.census.gov, and updates to the ACS. 
• Nancy Potok, Chief Statistician of the United States, will provide a keynote speech on the current priorities of the federal statistical system. 
• Sarah Cohen of the New York Times will follow up on her excellent presentation at the 2016 Conference to speak on the use of data in journalism.
• Peter Aiken and Gary Yakimov will discuss their efforts to build a network of federal agency Chief Data Officers.

Blog Post: CEP Deputy Executive Director Lucas Hitt
The upcoming APDU Annual Conference will be one of the first opportunities to hear from the Commission on Evidence-based Policymaking?s Chair Katharine G. Abraham and Co-Chair Ron Haskins following the September release of the Commission’s report. Former Census Bureau Director John Thompson, now at COPAFS, and Sandy Davis of the Bipartisan Policy Center will be on hand to discuss the data user community?s response to the report. Lucas Hitt, Deputy Executive Director of the CEP, writes about this session at the conference in this APDU blog post.

News

Webinar Training on Public Data for Hill Staff
Dr. Marty Romitti, a Senior Fellow at CREC, delivered the webinar training, “Understanding Your District?s Economy and Workforce Using Federal Statistics Data,” to U.S. Congressional staffers on August 15, 2017. The American Statistical Association and the Association of Public Data Users partnered with the Congressional Management Foundation to sponsor this webinar. The webinar covered data and web tools available from the Census Bureau, Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) and Bureau of Economic Analysis that help participants learn to find key economic information about their states, districts, and cities.

Census Bureau: Address Canvassing Operation Begins

The U.S. Census Bureau began the Address Canvassing operation for the 2018 End-to-End Census Test across three test sites. The operation will use mobile technology to verify and update our housing unit address list and will allow the Census Bureau to test procedures in building its 2020 Census address list across a wide area of physical geography, housing structures and residence types.

Quantifying the Advantage for Legacy Applicants

New data show — across national sample — legacy applicants are admitted at much higher rates than other applicants. But the vast majority also fit or exceed the academic profile of colleges to which they are admitted.

New & Updated Data Sources

New Demographic Data Available From Census

These tables from the 2014 Current Population Survey include detailed social and economic statistics for age groups, and the Hispanic, black, Asian and foreign-born populations. The Foreign-born table package highlights characteristics of the foreign-born population by nativity and U.S. citizenship status, as well as year of entry. The tables also include information on the characteristics of the foreign-born population by world region of birth and of the foreign-born by generation.

Visualization of the Week

Analyzing Trends for Top-Grossing Films From Past 50 Years

This is a story about how film plots mirror (or shape) historical events. The Pudding analyzed a database of several million user-submitted keywords that describe a film?s plot, everything from ?full-frontal male nudity? to ?exploding car.? For every year since 1966, they grouped plot keywords from the top 200 films (by box office) into cultural themes, such as LGBT, civil rights, religion, and technology.

Notable Data Publications

GOVERNMENT

• Bureau of Labor Statistics – Work Injuries in the Heat in 2015
• Census Bureau – Hispanic Student Enrollment Doubles in Last 20 Years
• IRS Statistics of Income – Personal Wealth Statistics
• National Center for Health Statistics ? Condom Use During Sexual Intercourse Among Women and Men Aged 15?44 in the United States: 2011?2015 National Survey of Family Growth
• National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics – Business R&D Performed in the United States Reached $356 Billion in 2015

MEDIA

• New York Times – Even With Affirmative Action, Blacks and Hispanics Are More Underrepresented at Top Colleges Than 35 Years Ago

NONPROFITS & FOUNDATIONS

• Center on Budget and Policy Priorities – A Lost Decade in Higher Education Funding State Cuts Have Driven Up Tuition and Reduced Quality

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):

August 31, 2017

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