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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

• These resources are also available in Spanish.

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:

• Five Tips to Keep Your Halloween Safe - written just for kids

• Five Tips to Keep Your Halloween Safe - for parents 
• Halloween Facts from Census
• Halloween Health and Safety Tips
• Novelty Makeup - safety tips for using face paint
• Today in History

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.

Poverty Rate Declines, Number of Poor Unchanged, Based on 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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)

    

Child Trends: http://www.childtrends.org/?indicators=parental-involvement-in-schools#sthash.s0sLCfPN.dpuf

 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 )