Home » Posts tagged 'data and statistics' (Page 2)
Tag Archives: data and statistics
LGBT Questions Removed From HHS Surveys
The Center for American Progress reports that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), has eliminated questions about lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people from two critical surveys. This policy decision will make it impossible to assess whether key programs for seniors and people with disabilities are meeting the needs of LGBT Americans.
- The Trump Administration Is Rolling Back Data Collection on LGBT Older Adults, By Sejal Singh, Laura E. Durso, and Aaron Tax, Center for American Progress (March 20, 2017, 7:00 am).
The surveys affected are the National Survey of Older Americans Act Participants and the annual Program Performance Report for Centers for Independent Living.
A War on Data
Engadget makes the case that the Trump administration is waging a "war on data." It says that, although removal and manipulation of existing data are a concern, the biggest threat to data is budgetary.
- Trump’s quiet war on data begins, by Terrence O’Brien, Engadget (Mar 20, 2017).
The administration seems focused on two avenues of attack: One, make data harder to find, and two, slash funding until collecting data becomes difficult for government agencies.
Defunding agencies and programs that collect data doesn’t just mask potential problems within the government and harm our ability to make informed decisions — it provides useful political cover for even deeper budget cuts down the road.
The article gives several examples of how the administration is damaging access to the accurate information that citizens require to evaluate government programs and that elected officials require to govern wisely.
-
In mid-February the Trump administration scrubbed open.whitehouse.gov of datasets created under the Obama administration. Although a NARA-created archive of the data exists, there is no clear link to it on whitehouse.gov, there are discrepancies between the file sizes and metadata hosted by the NARA and those pulled by third parties before the data was archived, and developer tools and APIs are broken.
-
Some of the parts of whitehouse.gov that disappeared on inauguration day still contain nothing more than a promise that they’ll be updated. The White House failed to respond to repeated requests for a timeline on those updates.
- Important staff positions, such as the CIO and chief digital officer remain unfilled and the White House has given no indication it plans to fill them any time soon (if at all). This means that "an entire data infrastructure system" is atrophying.
-
To the alarm of many career staff in the US Trade Representative’s office, the administration is considering changing how it calculates the trade deficit in a way that would make the deficit appear larger.
-
The Budget Blueprint proposes slashing funding for agencies that collect data including those that study climate change.
- The administration has not answered questions about its commitment (or lack of commitment) to open data initiatives.
Data-brarianship
For those of you who have "data" as part of your job responsibilities, here is an indispensable book.
-
Databrarianship: The Academic Data Librarian in Theory and Practice Edited by Lynda Kellam and Kristi Thompson. ACRL. 386 pages, ISBN-13: 978-0-8389-8799-5 (2016).
-
Databrarianship (website with table of contents and some sample content.
Drawing on the expertise of a diverse community of practitioners, this collection of case studies, original research, survey chapters, and theoretical explorations presents a wide-ranging look at the field of academic data librarianship.
By covering the data lifecycle from collection development to preservation, examining the challenges of working with different forms of data, and exploring service models suited to a variety of library types, this volume provides a toolbox of strategies that will allow librarians and administrators to respond creatively and effectively to the data deluge.
“In Order That They Might Rest Their Arguments on Facts”
Because the Trump Administration has questioned the accuracy of federal statistics such as the unemployment rate and because of reports that it will propose substantial cuts to government statistical agencies, the Hamilton Project and The American Enterprise Institute have released a new report about the vital importance of data collected by the federal government.
- "In Order That They Might Rest Their Arguments on Facts": The Vital Role of Government-Collected Data (PDF, 36pp) by Nicholas Eberstadt, Ryan Nunn, Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach, and Michael R. Strain. The Hamilton Project and The American Enterprise Institute. (March 2017). (Announcement).
Objective, impartial data collection by federal statistical agencies is vital to informing decisions made by businesses, policy makers, and families. These measurements make it possible to have a productive discussion about the advantages and disadvantages of particular policies, and about the state of the economy. This document demonstrates a portion of the breadth and importance of government statistics to public policy and the economy.
The quotation in the title is from James Madison. The report includes chapters on business, policy, and families, a section on "How to Strengthen Public Data," and a substantial bibliography,
See also Defending the Data by Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach, Ryan Nunn, and Megan Mumford. The Hamilton Project (March 1, 2017).
New App Will Aid Data Rescue
A custom-built app will soon make it easy for anyone check government URLs to determine if they have been archived outside of government control and, if not, submit them for archiving.
- Guerrilla archivists developed an app to save science data from the Trump administration, by Zoë Schlanger, Quartz (February 09, 2017).
The article in Quartz also reports on “data rescue events,” all-day archiving marathons, that have been held in Toronto, Philadelphia, Chicago, Indianapolis, Los Angeles, Boston, New York, and Michigan. Scientists, programmers, professors and digital librarians are meeting to “save federal data sets they thought could be altered or disappear all together under the administration of US president Donald Trump.” Jerome Whittington, a professor at NYU who organized one data rescue event, said about data on air and water pollution, contaminated soil, toxic spills, and the violation of rules against dumping harmful waste, “If you don’t have the data, you’ll be told your problem doesn’t exist. It is in a way a struggle over what we consider reality.”
Latest Comments