Friday, October 31, 2014

Albany, NY Listed in Top 10 Places for Service Members Transitioning to Civilian Life

Veterans looking for a new place to call home may want to consider Albany. The city is ranked number nine in a list by USAA, Hiring Our Heroes and Syracuse University.

See more at TWC Albany.

Read the list at USAA and click on Military Retirement.

Thursday, October 30, 2014

Survey of Income and Program Participation: Dynamics of Economic Well-Being 2009-2012

This table package traces a sample of U.S. residents and examines how many of them were poor during at least some portion of the four-year period as well as how long their poverty spells lasted. It also looks at how many entered into poverty, how many exited and how many stayed poor during the entire period. The statistics — which come from the Survey of Income and Program Participation — are presented at the national level by various demographic and socioeconomic characteristics.

Wednesday, October 29, 2014

U.S. Census Bureau Releases 2011-2013 ACS 3-Year Estimates

The Census Bureau released the 2011-2013 American Community Survey (ACS) 3-Year Estimates, the most relied-upon source for up-to-date socioeconomic information every year. The release covers a three-year period from 2011 to 2013 and more than 40 topics, such as educational attainment, income, health insurance coverage, occupation, language spoken at home, nativity, ancestry and selected monthly homeowner costs.

The statistics are available in detailed tables for the nation, all 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, every congressional district, every metropolitan area, and all counties and places with populations of 20,000 or more. 

Tuesday, October 28, 2014

Happiest Cities in New York State; YES, the list includes Albany

High incomes, a diverse population, and feeling like you’re at the center of the universe combine as just a few reasons those who live in the Empire State feel happy about where they reside. The happiest New Yorkers are those who live in certain cities, which CreditDonkey has determined give residents the most reasons to smile about. We have ranked them from 1 to 10 on our list of the happiest cities in New York.

New Yorkers wonder why they would live anywhere else. They feel like they have the world at their fingertips — from the shops and job opportunities in New York City to the wonder of Niagara Falls and the chance to get away from it all in the Adirondacks. High incomes, a diverse population, and feeling like you’re at the center of the universe combine as just a few reasons those who live in the Empire State feel happy about where they live.

Certain cities in New York give residents more reasons to be happy than others. CreditDonkey considered a range of factors to come up with the happiest cities in this state. Take a look to find your happy place.

More from Credit Donkey.

Monday, October 27, 2014

FRED, the main economic database of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis

To access data in FRED, the main economic database of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis,  go to http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2.
 
If you want to map FRED data, go to GeoFRED at http://geofred.stlouisfed.org.
 
To compare vintage data with the latest numbers, use ALFRED athttp://alfred.stlouisfed.org.
 
For data on banking competition, use CASSIDI at http://cassidi.stlouisfed.org.
 
And for data and primary source documents related to the economic history of the U.S., including the history of the Federal Reserve System, use FRASER athttps://fraser.stlouisfed.org
 
All of these services – and more – are free from the St. Louis Fed.

Sunday, October 26, 2014

Interactive Map of World Population by Point, Latitude, and Longitude

André Christoffer Andersen created this nifty interactive map that estimates world population at any coordinate. Andersen was inspired by Bill Rankin's data visualizations. According this this map, the most populous coordinate is in the Punjab region.

More from BoingBoing.

Saturday, October 25, 2014

Breast Cancer Awareness: Take Control of your Health

October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month. While the words “breast cancer” are very scary, it’s important to know that it’s normal for your breasts to change throughout your life, and not every lump is necessarily cancer.

That’s why it’s so important to do self-exams regularly, and be aware of your body and its changes-- so you can get any abnormality checked by a doctor, ASAP. If you’re a woman of 40, you should talk to your doctor about scheduling a mammogram to detect any lumps that you may not be able to feel on your own.

Find DEC Licensed Guides for boating, camping, fishing, hunting and more

The Environmental Conservation Law Section 11-0533.8 requires the Department to publish a list of guides. The information provided in the search engine fulfills that requirement. Data changes occur each business day.

Currently there are approximately 2,500 licensed guides in New York. The Search Wizard will help you find the individual or group in the specific category and location. The full list is available by selecting all counties and all categories.

Friday, October 24, 2014

What if Congress Was Like US?

Independently and in collaboration with local governments, business and not-for-profits in the Hudson Valley, the Center for Research, Regional Education and Outreach's (CRREO) research mission is to: conduct studies on topics of regional interest; bring visibility and focus to these matters; foster communities working together to better serve citizenry; and advance the public interest in our region. In addition to Regional Education, a number of well established, regionally oriented New Paltz programs and activities have been assembled under the aegis of CRREO.

This series of maps poses the question: What if Congress was like us? Our government is a representative democracy. We send our elected officials to the Senate and the House of Representatives to represent our interests. The primary way our system selects for similarity is by geographic proximity: in the case of the Senate it is based on what State we live in, and for the House, each State is divvied up into congressional districts.

To answer the question above, we took the most recent census data available and the number of seats in each state, and created a profile for the House of Representatives for each State of what characteristics our representatives would have if they were proportional to the demographics of the people of that State. - See more at the Center for Research, Regional Education and Outreach (CRREO)

New York ranks seventh most energy-efficient state

How does your state stack up when it comes to energy efficiency? The nonprofit American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE) has just issued its eighth annual State Energy Efficiency Scoreboard, which assesses states based on policies that encourage energy savings, efficiency investments and jobs in the clean energy sector. So you can look it up...

The winner for the third straight year is Massachusetts...

The study also rated cities, finding Boston to be the leader in its efforts to encourage better energy use. Portland, New York, San Francisco, Seattle, Austin, Washington, Minneapolis, Chicago and Philadelphia round out the top ten.

More from Daily Kos.

Thursday, October 23, 2014

More Cities Are Making It Illegal To Hand Out Food To The Homeless

If you don't have a place to live, getting enough to eat clearly may be a struggle. And since homelessness in the U.S. isn't going away and is even rising in some cities, more charitable groups and individuals have been stepping up the past few years to share food with these vulnerable folks in their communities.

But just as more people reach out to help, cities are biting back at those hands feeding the homeless.

According to a report released Monday by the National Coalition for the Homeless, 21 cities have passed measures aimed at restricting the people who feed the homeless since January 2013. In that same time, similar legislation was introduced in more than 10 cities. Combined, these measures represent a 47 percent increase in the number of cities that have passed or introduced legislation to restrict food sharing since the coalition last counted in 2010.

More from NPR.

ALSO:

21 US cities restrict sharing food with homeless people

8 Ways Being Poor Is Wildly Expensive in America

Wednesday, October 22, 2014

The State of Municipal Historians in New York

New York State requires every municipality to have a historian. This means every village, every town, every city, every county, and, of course, at the state level. Hamlets can ponder “should we or should we not have an historian, that is the question” but they are not legally obligated to have one. Nor are neighborhoods. That might seem self-evident outside New York City, but one should realize that the neighborhoods in the city can be substantially larger than even some cities.
Naturally, even when you are required to have a historian by state law there is no assistance from the state in support of that position. It is an unfunded mandate.
Let’s examine the state of these municipal historians.


- See more at New York History blog.

Tuesday, October 21, 2014

American cities, ranked by conservatism

A fascinating chart from Representation in Municipal Government, publishing in American Political Science Review and written by MIT political scientists Chris Tausanovitch and Christopher Warshaw. (via Bruce Sterling)
(Image: Carpintera city limit, Al Pavangkanan, CC-BY)

Via BoingBoing

Monday, October 20, 2014

Personal consumption expenditure-related employment during the recession and projections to 2022

More U.S. jobs directly or indirectly relate to consumer spending than to all other sectors of the economy combined. In 2007, which was the business cycle peak prior to the latest economic downturn, 85.1 million nonagricultural wage and salary jobs related to consumer spending; these jobs were 61.5 percent of total nonagricultural wage and salary employment in the United States. But unlike GDP, the percentage of U.S. jobs tied to consumption has fluctuated within a relatively stable range since the late 1970s because of labor-saving technologies and increased consumption of imports.

Between 1993 and 2007, consumer-related employment fluctuated between 60 and 62 percent of total employment—at the lower end of the historic range dating to the late 1970s—when the percentage of investment-related employment increased to fuel economic expansion. But in 2009, the worst year of the recession, personal consumption expenditure (PCE)-related employment increased to 63 percent of U.S. employment and then rose again in 2011 and 2012.

More from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Sunday, October 19, 2014

Ebola: Information & Resources

Ebola is all over the news right now. And with so much conflicting information and varying reports out there, it’s hard to know where to go to get the facts. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has a lot of resources available so you can be properly informed, and keep yourself and your family safe.

  • Like CDC on Facebook, or follow them on Twitter, where they post about Ebola regularly and update about current cases.
  • CDC also has a full page devoted to Ebola information on their website. It features the latest outbreak news-- and includes resources for people living or traveling abroad, healthcare workers, and airline personnel.

Saturday, October 18, 2014

Fun Halloween Facts for the Classroom and Safety Tips for Parents

Halloween is less than two weeks away. Hopefully the kids have their costumes and trick-or-treat plans are set. Here are some interesting facts about Halloween and some tips to go over with your kids to make this Halloween a safe one:

Friday, October 17, 2014

Employment Projections for New York State

Employment Prospects

Employment prospects are available for all published occupations in New York State and each of ten labor market regions. Each occupation is assigned one of four descriptors that describes the future employment prospects for that occupation.

Long-Term Occupational Employment Projections

Find the expected employment growth and annual openings for all published occupations in New York State and its ten labor market regions. These 10-year forecasts, which are updated every other year, are intended to help individuals make informed education and career decisions and assist educators and training providers in planning for future needs.

Short-Term Occupational Employment Projections

These are used for career counseling, economic development and other state and regional planning. Data are currently available for all published occupations in New York State and each of ten labor market regions.

Long-Term Industry Employment Projections

These represent valuable data sources for those interested in future employment trends. Data are currently available for approximately 90 detailed industries (at the 3-digit NAICS industry level.

Jobs in Demand Today

This is a real-time list of occupations in demand NOW. Please select a region from the down box to view data for that region. The regional lists show occupations in which hiring is occurring now. Occupations on the statewide list represent those job titles which appear on at least one regional list.



Find this from Labor Statistics from the NYS Department of Labor.

Thursday, October 16, 2014

Poverty Rate Declines, Number of Poor Unchanged, Based on Supplemental Measure of Poverty


Supplemental Measure of Poverty
The nation’s poverty rate was 15.5 percent in 2013, down from 16.0 percent in 2012, according to the supplemental poverty measure released today by the U.S. Census Bureau. The 2013 rate was higher than the official measure of 14.5 percent, but similarly declined from the corresponding rate in 2012.
Meanwhile, 48.7 million were below the poverty line in 2013 according to the supplemental poverty measure, not statistically different from the number in 2012. In 2013, 45.3 million were poor using the official definition released last month in Income and Poverty in the United States: 2013.
These findings are contained in the Census Bureau report The Supplemental Poverty Measure: 2013, released with support from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and describing research showing different ways of measuring poverty in the United States.
The supplemental poverty measure serves as an additional indicator of economic well-being and provides a deeper understanding of economic conditions and policy effects.
Unlike the official poverty rate, the supplemental poverty measure takes into account the impact of different benefits and necessary expenses on the resources available to families, as well as geographic differences in housing costs.

Wednesday, October 15, 2014

2012 Business Dynamics Statistics

The Business Dynamics Statistics provide annual statistics on establishments, firms, and job creation and job destruction from 1976 to 2012 by firm age and size. These statistics are crucial to understanding current and historical U.S. entrepreneurial activity. The statistics come from a collaboration between the Census Bureau's Center for Economic Studies, the Small Business Administration, and the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, an American nonprofit organization that focuses on entrepreneurship.

Tuesday, October 14, 2014

Congress.gov is Out of Beta with New Features

The Congress.gov site now includes the following:

New Feature:
*Congress.gov Resources - A new resources section providing an A to Z list of hundreds of links related to Congress
*An expanded list of "most viewed" bills each day, archived to July 20, 2014

New Feature: House Committee Hearing Videos
*Live streams of House Committee hearings and meetings, and an accompanying archive to January, 2012

Improvement: Advanced Search
*Support for 30 new fields, including nominations, Congressional Record and name of member

Improvement: Browse
*Days in session calendar view
*Roll Call votes
*Bill by sponsor/co-sponsor

When the Library of Congress, in collaboration with the U.S. Senate, U.S. House of Representatives and the Government Printing Office (GPO) released Congress.gov as a beta site in the fall of 2012, it included bill status and summary, member profiles and bill text from the two most recent congresses at that time – the 111th and 112th.

Since that time, Congress.gov has expanded with the additions of the Congressional Record, committee reports, direct links from bills to cost estimates from the Congressional Budget Office, legislative process videos, committee profile pages, nominations, historic access reaching back to the 103rd Congress and user accounts enabling saved personal searches.

More from the Library of Congress.

Monday, October 13, 2014

From Brazil to Uganda: What it takes to get ahead

The world may be flat these days, but the path to success differs around the globe. In some countries, education and hard work are enough. In others, connections and bribes play a big role. Pew Research surveyed people and asked them which factors are absolutely necessary to get ahead in their nation.

More from CNN.

Sunday, October 12, 2014

The Geography of NFL Fandom

The residents of Seahawks terrain—which stretches from the northernmost Alaskan tundra to the potato fields of central Idaho—won some spiritual victory against the cheeseheads of Packers territory, which consumes all of Wisconsin and some of Michigan’s upper peninsula.

We can be so precise about these geographies of fandom because the Facebook Data Science team just released its 2014 NFL American fandom map. The map shows every American county’s favorite professional football team, as judged by the NFL team that Facebook users in that county have ‘liked’ the most.

The Cowboys rule a lot of land, but they’re not unambiguously “America’s Team.”
The New York Times called the baseball version of the map “unprecedented,” arguing that, for questions like this, there’s no superior data set: “Fans may not list which team they favor on the census, but millions of them do make their preferences public on Facebook.”

Now we can examine the football version.


More from The Atlantic.

Friday, October 10, 2014

A Silent Majority Of Undereducated And Underemployed Millennials

Millennials are often mocked as Starbucks baristas with Ivy League educations.

And while they are the best-educated generation to date, data from the Pew Research Center show about two-thirds of millennials between ages 25 and 32 lack a bachelor's degree.

That majority is often ignored in conversations about millennials.

This narrative is alive and well in Boston's Harvard Square, where church bells chime as millennials sip lattes and drift out of bookstores. But take a walk down the road, and the story changes.

More from NPR.

Thursday, October 9, 2014

Some Americans Boosted Charitable Giving In Recession; The Rich Did Not

As times got tough in the recent recession, the less well-off of America's citizens became more generous when giving to charity. But at the same time, wealthy Americans cut the proportion of their incomes they donated, according to a new study that analyzed data from tax returns.

NPR's Pam Fessler reports:

"The study was done by the Chronicle of Philanthropy, which looked at IRS data showing charitable deductions in 2006 and 2012. The study found that Americans who earned $200,000 a year or more cut the share of income they gave to charity by 4.6 percent, while Americans earning less than $100,000 a year gave 4.5 percent more of their income to charity.

"Those with incomes of $25,000 or less saw the biggest increase. The share of their income that went to charity rose almost 17 percent. Low-income Americans primarily give to religious organizations."

While the wealthiest Americans cut how much of their incomes they sent to charity, the total amount of their donations rose, with the Chronicle saying their donations "increased by $4.6 billion, to hit $77.5 billion in 2012, using inflation-adjusted dollars."

More from National Public Radio

Wednesday, October 8, 2014

Living Planet Report 2014

The state of the world’s biodiversity appears worse than ever.

The Living Planet Index (LPI), which measures trends in thousands of vertebrate species populations, shows a decline of 52 per cent between 1970 and 2010 (Figure 2). In other words, the number of mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians and fish across the globe is, on average, about half the size it was 40 years ago. This is a much bigger decrease than has been reported previously, as a result of a new methodology which aims to be more representative of global biodiversity.

Biodiversity is declining in both temperate and tropical regions, but the decline is greater in the tropics. The 6,569 populations of 1,606 species in the temperate LPI declined by 36 per cent from 1970 to 2010. The tropical LPI shows a 56 per cent reduction in 3,811 populations of 1,638 species over the same period. Latin America shows the most dramatic decline – a fall of 83 per cent. Habitat loss and degradation, and exploitation through hunting and fishing, are the primary causes of decline. Climate change is the next most common primary threat, and is likely to put more pressure on populations in the future.

Links to full report and Summary from the World Wildlife Fund.



Tuesday, October 7, 2014

Statistics/demographics on school children and their parents

Answers from a BUSLIB listserv question:

You can consult publications from the NCES (National Center for Education Statistics, such as the annual (see also earlier years):  Parent and family involvement in education, from the National Household Educations Surveys Program of 2012 (NCES 2013-028) - (http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2013/2013028.pdf)

There is, a new book from Harvard University Press on this topic:  Robinson, Keith and Angel Harris. 2014. The Broken Compass: Parental Involvement with Children's Education. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press (http://crsi.nd.edu/evaluations/new-research-on-parental-involvement-in-schools/).

Parent and Family Engagement, from the U. S. Dept. of Education (http://www.ed.gov/parent-and-family-engagement)
    

 The Center for Public Education has:  Back to school: How parental involvement affects student achievement (full report) - (http://www.centerforpubliceducation.org/Main-Menu/Public-education/Parent-Involvement/Parent-Involvement.html)


There's also the National Educational Association - a search of their site yielded 238 hits (for parental involvement and after school) - (http://www.nea.org/home/37004.htm?q=parental%20involvement%20and%20after%20school )  

Monday, October 6, 2014

How the War on Drugs Damages Black Social Mobility

The social mobility of black Americans has suffered collateral damage from the “War on Drugs.” Being convicted of a crime has devastating effects on the employment prospects and incomes of ex-felons and their children... These findings are often used to motivate efforts to reduce criminal behavior. They should also motivate changes in our criminal justice system, which unfairly punishes black Americans—often for victimless crimes that whites are at least as likely to commit.

An estimated one-third of black male Americans will spend time in state or federal prison at some point in their lifetime – more than double the rate from the 1970s and over five times higher than the rate for white males.

What’s driving the imprisonment of black men? Arrest data show a striking trend: arrests of blacks have fallen for violent and property crimes, but soared for drug related crimes. As of 2011, drug crimes comprised 14 percent of all arrests and a miscellaneous category that includes “drug paraphernalia” possession comprised an additional 31 percent of all arrests. Just 6 percent and 14 percent of arrests were for violent and property crimes, respectively.

More from Brookings.

Sunday, October 5, 2014

Here's The Most Common Ancestry In Each NYC Neighborhood

From Business Insider:

We recently looked at the dominant languages in each of NYC's neighborhoods. Now, we're taking a look at New Yorkers' ancestral backgrounds.

The American Community Survey is a massive annual effort by the Census Bureau to understand the citizens of the United States. Over three million people per year are asked questions about housing, demographics, and economics.

In one of the many questions on the ACS, respondents are asked to identify their ancestry. This is a very open-ended question, and the Census Bureau provides numerous options. Here are the most common ancestries in each NYC neighborhood.



Saturday, October 4, 2014

Census Bureau Announces 2015 Site Selections for 2020 Census Tests

    During the recent 2020 Census Program Management Review webcast, Burton Reist, chief of the 2020 Census Research and Planning Office at the U.S. Census Bureau, announced there will be census tests in Maricopa County, Ariz., and the Savannah, Ga. area in 2015 to research more modern and efficient ways to count the population in the 2020 Census. The tests will explore new ways for the population to respond to the once-a-decade census, as well as more cost effective ways for census takers to follow up with households that fail to respond.
      The Savannah test will primarily focus on increasing self-response to the census by providing ways to pre-register and respond via the Internet or by phone. The Savannah area was chosen for its demographic diversity, level of computer ownership and being an area that represents a specific media market. This kind of area can help the Census Bureau test new forms of digital advertising and targeted promotion for increasing response, particularly via the Internet.

Friday, October 3, 2014

African-Born Population in U.S. Roughly Doubled Every Decade Since 1970

      The foreign-born population from Africa has grown rapidly in the United States during the last 40 years, increasing from about 80,000 in 1970 to about 1.6 million in the period from 2008 to 2012, according to a U.S. Census Bureau brief released this week. The population has roughly doubled each decade since 1970, with the largest increase happening from 2000 to 2008-2012.
      The Foreign-Born Population from Africa: 2008-2012, a brief based on American Community Survey statistics, shows that the African foreign-born population accounts for 4 percent of the total U.S. foreign-born population. No African country makes up the majority of these immigrants, but four countries — Nigeria, Ethiopia, Egypt and Ghana — make up 41 percent of the African-born total.
      “The brief — the Census Bureau’s first focusing on the African foreign-born population — highlights the size, growth, geographic distribution and educational attainment of this group,” said Christine Gambino of the Census Bureau’s Foreign-Born Population Branch, who is one of the brief’s authors. “We have found that the African-born population tends to be more educated and accounts for a relatively large proportion of the foreign-born population in some nontraditional immigrant gateway states such as Minnesota and the Dakotas.”
      The foreign-born population from Africa had a higher level of educational attainment than the overall foreign-born population

Thursday, October 2, 2014

Individual Income Tax Statistics - ZIP Code Data

From the IRS 

ZIP Code data show selected income and tax items classified by State, ZIP Code, and size of adjusted gross income. Data are based on individual income tax returns filed with the IRS and are available for Tax Years 1998, 2001, 2004 through 2012. The data include items, such as:
  • Number of returns, which approximates the number of households
  • Number of personal exemptions, which approximates the population
  • Adjusted gross income 
  • Wages and salaries
  • Dividends before exclusion
  • Interest received  
ZIP Code Data
ZIP Code Data 1998–2010
1998  2001  2004  2005  2006  2007  2008  2009  2010



Wednesday, October 1, 2014

Census Bureau Completes Release of All 364 Manufacturing Reports from Economic Census Industry Series


Manufacturing Day: Oct.3, 2014
In recognition of Manufacturing Day, the Census Bureau presents descriptions of its wide array of data products on the manufacturing sector of the economy. Additionally, statistics on all 364 industries in the manufacturing sector are now available from the 2012 Economic Census.
·         2012 Economic Census Industry Series: A complete series of national-level data files on specific manufacturing industries, including, for instance, the number of establishments, payroll, number of employees, value of product shipments and services provided by businesses. News releases are available highlighting breweriesautomobile manufacturing, household appliance manufacturing and semiconductor manufacturing. The economic census is conducted every five years.