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APDU Data Update

September 16 & 17, 2013  |  George Washington University – Marvin Center  |  Washington, DC

Full Agenda  |  Register Online or PDF  |  More Information

 

EARLY BIRD REGISTRATION ENDS TOMORROW!!! (August 16)

APDU Data Update

 

News

 

Leaders in Major Federal Statistical Agencies to Speak at APDU Annual Conference

 

The session “Innovation in a Resource-Constrained Environment: Meeting Increased User Needs While Keeping Costs Down” will explore the most critical challenges they face and how they are responding to ever-increasing demands from users.  Speaking at the session will be:

 

   Pat Hu
   Associate Administrator and Director
   Bureau of Transportation Statistics

  John (Jack) Galvin
  Deputy Commissioner
  Bureau of Labor Statistics

   Nancy Potok
   Deputy Director and Chief Operating Officer
   U.S. Census Bureau

 

 

 

Learn more here.

 

 

Toward a Vision: Official Statistics and Big Data

Every day of our lives, each of us is bombarded with data.  More recently, there has been an explosion of data, and it is nearly impossible to ignore the increasing volume of and potential use for Big Data.  The New York Times reported in February 2012 that, “In economic forecasting, research has shown that trends in increasing or decreasing volumes of housing-related search queries in Google are a more accurate predictor of house sales in the next quarter than the forecasts of real estate economists.”  Read more here.
 

 

Hackers Called Into Civic Duty

Cash-strapped cities are turning to an unusual source to improve their online services on the cheap: helpful hackers, who use city data to create tools tracking everything from real-time subway delays to where to get a free flu shot near your home and information about a contentious school-closing plan.  Hackers have been popularly portrayed as giving fits to national-security officials and credit-card companies, but the term also refers to people who like to write their own computer programs and help solve a variety of problems.  Recently, hackers have begun working with cities to find ways of building applications, or apps, that make use of data—which gets stripped of personally identifiable information—that municipalities are collecting anyway in the regular course of governance.  Read more here.
 

 

How Twitter Could Predict Elections — in One Eye-catching Study

Want to figure out who is going to win a congressional race? Find out which candidate received the lion’s share of tweets in the lead-up to Election Day.  That’s the takeaway at the core of a newly-released study conducted by four researchers at Indiana University.  The paper stands in stark contrast to other research assessing the usefulness of tweets in assessing public opinion, as well as a number of high-profile whiffs from the Twittersphere.  Read more here.
 

 

Pew Hispanic Center Renamed Pew Research Center’s Hispanic Trends Project

The Pew Hispanic Center has been renamed “Pew Research Center’s Hispanic Trends Project.”  It will be under the direction of Mark Hugo Lopez, who in July was named director of Hispanic research for the Pew Research Center.  The project, which was founded in 2001 as the Pew Hispanic Center, became a part of the Pew Research Center in 2004.  While the new name more clearly reflects the project’s identity as part of the Pew Research Center, its core mission will remain the same: to improve public understanding of the diverse Hispanic population in the United States and to chronicle Latinos’ growing impact on the nation.  Read more here.
 

 

Suburban Poverty Traverses the Red/Blue Divide

During the 2000s, major metropolitan suburbs became home to the largest and fastest-growing poor population in America.  As a result, the federal policies that were created to help people in low-income communities are no longer well matched to this new suburban geography of poverty.  Read more here.
 

 

Notable Data Publications

 

Each week, the APDU Data Update identifies recent statistical data releases of interest to APDU members.

 

 

Did you work on a great report that you want your colleagues to know about?  Just email us and we’ll include it here.

 

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):

 

Agricultural Marketing Service

  • Livestock, Poultry, Grain and Meat Market News (September 12, 2013)

Census Bureau

  • 2013 Company Organization Survey (September 8, 2013)

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

  • National Notifiable Disease Surveillance System (October 9, 2013)

General Services Administration

  • MyUSA (October 15, 2013)

National Center for Education Statistics

  • Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (September 9, 2013)

Office of Justice Programs, DOJ

  • Methodological Research to Support the National Crime Victimization Survey, Self-Report Data on Rape and Sexual Assault; Pilot Test (September 9, 2013)