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APDU Weekly

Feature

 

 

2014 Budget Calls for Cuts to Bureau of Labor Statistics
On Friday, January 17, 2014, President Obama signed into law the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2014 providing $592.2 million in funding to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) for the fiscal year (FY) 2014 that began October 1, 2013. This funding level is $21.6 million below the FY 2014 President’s Budget. For the second year in a row, BLS is forced to cut its statistical efforts. BLS will discontinue production and publication of its Export Price Indexes and will reduce the extent to which it validates and updates NAICS codes for establishments in the federal-state Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages (QCEW).

The QCEW is the most comprehensive jobs data program and the basis for many national, state, and local economic indicators. The estimated value of the QCEW reduction is $4.8 million, of which $3.3 million will come out of grants to states. According to APDU member Andrew Reamer at George Washington University, while the QCEW cut is not likely to reduce the reliability of national estimates, it may have a negative impact on data reliability for smaller geographic areas.

APDU is joining the Council of Professional Associations on Federal Statistics (COPAFS) and other groups in a letter to the Senate Committee on Appropriations protesting the cuts.

 

News

 

Census Bureau: Noncitizens Under Age 35: 2010-2012
More than three out of five noncitizens under age 35 have been in the U.S. for five years or more, with a majority coming before they were 18 years old, according to a new brief released today from the U.S. Census Bureau.

 

IBM Uses Big Data to Prevent Mining Equipment Failures
IBM’s announcement that it can predict mining equipment failure using big data is a case of using supercomputing power and sensors from the “Internet of Things” to solve a huge financial headache for industrial companies.

 

Better Data: Better Education Online & in Lecture Halls
Teachers can only gather insights into how engaged students really are with the material and how well they’re understanding it if they’re using a platform designed specifically to capture that data.

 

College Tuition as a Loss Leader…
Who would have guessed that even the full sticker price of tuition doesn’t always cover the average cost of an undergraduate student?

 

NOAA Calls on  US Companies to Help Unleash “Big Data”

NOAA is the quintessential big data agency. Each day, NOAA collects, analyzes, and generates over 20 terabytes of data – twice the amount of data than what is in the United States Library of Congress’ entire printed collection.

 

New & Updated Data Sources

 

Hate Crime Victimization, 2004–2012 – Statistical Tables
Presents counts and rates of hate crime victimization in 2012, the tables show change in the number and rate of hate crime victimizations since 2011 and during the 10-year period since 2003.

 

Most Paychecks Spent on Housing? See Where
Steep housing costs pose a major burden in some areas, with expenses consuming more than half of what households take in.

 

Vegetables and Pulses Data
Vegetable and Pulses Data integrates data from the ERS market outlook program with data collected by different Federal and international statistical agencies to facilitate analyses of economic performance over time, and across domestic and foreign markets.

 

Food Price Outlook
The Consumer Price Index (CPI) for food is probably the most widely used indicator of changes in retail food prices. ERS regularly updates food price forecasts for the short-term period.

 

Visualization of the Week

 

Interactive Map: Do City Residents Live Longer?

While average life expectancy for many cities far outstrips the non-urban regions of their country, there are others such as Johannesburg where it comes in way below. This interactive map uses a mixture of data from LSE Cities and the World Health Organisation to compare the national average with that of specific cities.

 

Notable Data Publications

 

GOVERNMENT

NON-PROFIT & FOUNDATIONS

OTHER

 

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):

 

Corporation for National and Community Service

Bureau of Labor Statistics

Agricultural Marketing Service

Internal Revenue Service

February 27, 2014