Policy by the Numbers: This Week in Data: 11/9/2012

This Week in Data: 11/9/2012

Friday, November 9, 2012

Highlights from the week in data!

US Census Bureau's Acting Director Tom Mesenbourg wrote a great post yesterday about the things Census can tell us about communities impacted by Hurricane Sandy, featuring an interactive tool for crisis response called OnTheMap for Emergency Management. Tom writes:

This tool traced the path of Hurricane Sandy starting on October 22. As the predictions about the Storm’s path changed, data on potential impacts were automatically updated. This innovative tool provides information about the potentially affected population, the kinds of businesses impacted by a natural disaster, and the number and characteristics of workers, as well as where they live. You can use it to look at statistics for declared disaster areas and learn about things like the impacted industries, the ages of workers and workers’ earnings. These statistics can be used by communities to know not only how many people live in an area where there is a disaster but also how many people work in those areas.

Michael Scherer's Time piece on the data analysts working on Obama's campaign, "Inside the Secret World of the Data Crunchers Who Helped Obama Win," is worth highlighting because it is a great profile of data scientists and the use of data-mining for strategic campaign planning.

Boston.com's Michael Morisy reflects on Nate Silver, strategy, and the future societal benefits that we hope to enable via data-driven innovation. He writes, "To me, that’s the really exciting impact of big data: Not to determine whether you should end subject lines with more colons, but to determine how to transform medicine, cities, and societies."

Policy by the Numbers

This Week in Data: 11/9/2012

No comments :

Labels

Archive

Feed

Disclaimer

Company-wide

Products

Developers