APDU Weekly

Feature

Endangered Data Week: February 26 – March 2, 2018

Endangered Data Week is a new, collaborative effort, coordinated across campuses, nonprofits, libraries, citizen science initiatives, and cultural heritage institutions, to shed light on public datasets that are in danger of being deleted, repressed, mishandled, or lost. The week’s events can promote care for endangered collections by: publicizing the availability of datasets; increasing critical engagement with them, including through visualization and analysis; and by encouraging political activism for open data policies and the fostering of data skills through workshops on curation, documentation and discovery, improved access, and preservation.

News

EIA Director Nomination Advances in Senate
The Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources held a business meeting to advance two of President Trump?s nominees for the Department of the Interior (DOI) and the Department of Energy (DOE) to the Senate floor.

Congress Passes Two-Week Stopgap Funding Bill

Congress passed a continuing resolution (CR) on the evening of December 7 to continue federal appropriations through December 22, averting a partial government shutdown. The extension of fiscal year (FY) 2017 funding levels through this CR will give Congress more time to finalize FY 2018 spending and come to agreement on raising spending caps set in place by the Budget Control Act. While the House of Representatives has finished work on all twelve of its spending bills, the Senate has yet to vote on any, referencing a lack of agreement on overall spending levels.

Recent Trends in Cyber Security Breach You Must Know

Cyber security breaches and ransom ware attacks has become very common today, which has resulted in higher payouts to criminals.

Measuring Student Outcomes in Community Colleges

The federal government recently released a new set of student outcome measures that are an improvement over traditional graduation rate metrics but still fall short of the data needed to better understand community college student progress or shape institutional improvement.

New & Updated Data Sources

2012-2016 ACS Data up on PolicyMap, Goodies Included

The 2012-2016 Census American Community Survey (ACS) 5-Year Estimates were released recently, and are now up on PolicyMap (they actually went up on Saturday, record time for us!). This is our most popular dataset, with over 2,000 indicators. A newer year of data makes it that much more accurate, and helpful to data users.

NCES updates International Data Explorer
NCES has added data from the 2015 administration of the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) and TIMSS Advanced to the International Data Explorer (IDE).

Visualization of the Week

One Nation, Under the Weight of Crushing Debt
An interactive map shows where the highest concentrations of households with unpaid bills are. In a new interactive map, researchers at the Urban Institute visualize how this massive debt burden varies by geography. The map is based on 5 million records sourced from a major credit bureau, and shows each county?s share of households that have their debt in collections. The darker the color, the higher the concentration of people who haven?t been able to pay what they owe, from credit card and medical bills, to parking tickets to child support.

Notable Data Publications

GOVERNMENT

• Bureau of Labor Statistics – Crude Oil Prices Spur Gains for U.S. Import and Export Price Indexes, Despite the Appreciating Dollar: 2016 Annual Summary
• Census Bureau – Commuting Times, Median Rents and Language other than English Use in the Home on the Rise
• National Center for Education Statistics – Reading Achievement of U.S. Fourth-Grade Students in an International Context
• National Center for Health Statistics – Characteristics of Office-based Physician Visits, 2014
• National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics – Science and Engineering State Profiles

NONPROFITS & FOUNDATIONS

• Pew Research Center – 5 Ways the U.S. Workforce has Changed, a Decade Since the Great Recession Began

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):

December 14, 2017

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