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Daily Archives: June 1, 2016

Social Explorer in NY Times article on Murder in Chicago

“While murder rates in Los Angeles and New York continue to decline each year, Chicago’s has increased by 62 percent. In The New York Times feature Chicago’s Murder Problem,” Ford Fessenden and Haeyoun Park investigate the issues from homicide rates to gun violence to gang activity to segregation. They visualize their findings in maps and charts that include demographic and crime data from Social Explorer. There was a time when it looked as if Chicago would follow New York and Los Angeles into a kind of sustained peace. Then progress stalled in 2004, and the city has been through some harrowing years leading up to another alarming spike in homicides this year. Read the full NY Times article here, and dig into crime and arrest data nationwide and in your neighborhood with Social Explorer’s maps and reports. Learn more about our Uniform Crime Report and FBI data here.”

Beige Book – Summary of Commentary on Current Economic Conditions by Federal Reserve District – June 1, 2016

Summary of Commentary on Current Economic Conditions by Federal Reserve District Prepared at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis and based on information collected before May 23, 2016. This document summarizes comments received from business and other contacts outside the Federal Reserve System and is not a commentary on the views of Federal Reserve officials.… Continue Reading

Set your data free and reap the rewards

“…Make data available. So what do you do? Many disciplines, universities, and federal agencies have started to build repositories, slowly filling caverns of data to mine. The best ones allow for easy uploading and a pathway to making these observations machine-readable, with provenance information and metadata inseparable from the pudding that is your data. Well-known… Continue Reading

Toxic Crops and Zoonotic Disease: UNEP Identifies the Emerging Environmental Issues of Our Time

Via United Nations Environment Programme – “From the worrying rise in zoonotic diseases around the world to an examination of how climate change is increasing the toxicity of crops, a UNEP report out today seeks to highlight a number of the world’s key emerging environmental issues. UNEP’s Frontiers report identifies, highlights and offers solutions to… Continue Reading

Mobile Advertising: Economics, Evolution and Policy

Evans, David S., Mobile Advertising: Economics, Evolution and Policy (June 1, 2016). Available for download at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2786123 “Consumers have shifted their consumption of online content dramatically from websites that they browse from a personal computer to apps that they use on mobile devices. Marketers have moved with the eyeballs, particularly since people use their… Continue Reading

Animation shows how the Earth has warmed up since 1850

Via World Economic Forum: “It is difficult to really visualize global warming, but a new animation vividly illustrates how much global temperatures have risen since 1850. Constructed using data from the UK’s Met Office, the animation shows global warming rapidly gathering pace in recent years. What’s different about it? Ed Hawkins, a climate scientist at… Continue Reading

citizenscience.gov – helping federal agencies accelerate innovation

“Citizenscience.gov is an official government website designed to accelerate the use of crowdsourcing and citizen science across the U.S. government. The site provides a portal to three key assets for federal practitioners: a searchable catalog of federally supported citizen science projects, a toolkit to assist with designing and maintaining projects, and a gateway to a… Continue Reading

Federal Appellate Court Strikes Potential Death Blow to Privacy in New Cell Site Location Information Case

Via EFF – “This week, the full Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals—in a decision that impacts residents in Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia and West Virginia—held that you have no expectation of privacy in historical location data generated by your cell phone. This decision, which follows decisions from four other federal appellate courts, means… Continue Reading