The Appropriations Bill eliminates the Economic Census, which measures the health of our economy. It terminates the American Community Survey, which produces the social and demographic information that monitors the impact of economic trends on communities throughout the country. It halts crucial development of ways to save money on the next decennial census. In the last three years the Census Bureau has reacted to budget and technological challenges by mounting aggressive operational efficiency programs to make these key statistical cornerstones of the country more cost efficient. Eliminating them halts all the progress to build 21st century statistical tools through those innovations. This bill thus devastates the nation’s statistical information about the status of the economy and the larger society.

A lot of the negative comments following the post are from people who have never used Census data, or any substantial amount of data for that matter, and have no clue how a dataset can feed into a model to make other estimates. Then there's the people who don't want to answer questions about their toilets. I wonder what their Facebook profiles look like.

For over a decade, CNN (Cable News Network) has been providing transcripts of shows, events and newscasts from its broadcasts. The archive has been maintained and the text transcripts have been dependably available at transcripts.cnn.com. This is a just-in-case grab of the years of transcripts for later study and historical research.

Changes in news coverage and CNN's focus over the years, anyone?

[via @A_L]

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The 72-year mark has arrived, and the United States Census released individual records from 1940 yesterday. So you can now, for example, see that J.D. Salinger lived at 1133 Park Avenue.

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I got the numbers straight from the Bits post, but you can download the full report from 11mark for all the demographics. You have to register though, and I didn't want to be the guy who creates an online account to just read a report on what people do while they make dooty. I have standards.

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Facebook logs and saves a lot of data about you and what you do on their site. This shouldn't be surprising given the more time people spend on Facebook, the greater the cash flow, but just how much data do they store? Austrian law student Max Schrems, because European law states that citizens can do this, requested all the data Facebook had about him. He got back a CD with 1,222 PDF files.

There was his log ins (above). There was message activity:

And geolocation for pics from his trip to Vienna:

But again, it's not surprising. People use Facebook, a free service, to upload pictures, update statuses, and share links with their own free will. It's more surprising that people are surprised by this — or that Facebook used a CD to transfer Schrems' data.

[taz via infosthetics]

Mostly because of the popularity of smartphones, location data is all the rage nowadays. You're almost always connected no matter where you are. Rich location data can help provide you a new sense of place, and at the same time, this sort of data can paint an interesting picture of what's going on in your country or around the world. Hence, Infochimps, the one-stop shop for data folk and developers, just announced their new Geo API.

The API lets you easily access location data from a variety of sources, such as Geonames, the American Community Survey, and Wikipedia, all through a single API, meaning you don't have to fuss around with multiple APIs run by a bunch of different groups with their own rules and syntax.

In addition to letting you query for records, the API also makes it easier to query across regions. For example, when you're looking at a map and you have thousands of locations across a country, or even just hundreds within a small location, the map is pretty useless. You've probably seen these sort of maps, piled high with pushpins and running slow as mollasses.

The good maps out there aggregate and process the data as you zoom out and in. The good thing is that the Infochimps API will handle that for you.

Above is a map that clusters over 100,000 schools in the United States. Try to build an interactive map that shows all 100,000 points, and you'll get an unusable application.

Bottom line: the API should make it a lot easier to get the data how you want it, which let's you get to the fun part sooner.

[Infochimps Geo API]

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[census.ire.org via @bryanboyer]

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Jonathan's Card is an experiment in social sharing of physical goods using digital currency on mobile phones. I stumbled on the idea while doing research for a blog post about Broadcasting Mobile Currency.

Based on the similarity to the "take a penny, leave a penny" trays at convenience stores in the US, I've adopted a similar "get a coffee, give a coffee" terminology for Jonathan's Card.

Simply save the picture of Jonathan's Starbucks card onto your smartphone and use it to buy your coffee. If you like, add money to the card so that someone else can buy a coffee.

The best part is that Stark provides a simple API that returns the balance on the card every minute. When do people buy coffee? How do people give and take? Are people more likely to give when there's a large balance or when there's nothing left? Lots of fun things to look at.

[Jonathan's Card via @kn0thing]

Our raw data, previously posted only as SPSS files, is now available in comma-delimited (.csv) format for all reports going back to 2003. We hope that making our data available in this open-source format will make analysis easier for researchers who don’t own a copy of SPSS to analyze our data.

This should be fun. Recent datasets include the social side of the Internet, health tracking habits, and reputation management.

[Pew Research via @kzickhur]

Researchers Alasdair Allan and Pete Warden have found that the iPhone records cell tower access, and hence your location, in an easy-to-read file that is transferred as you switch devices. And they do this whether you like it or not.

The more fundamental problem is that Apple are collecting this information at all. Cell-phone providers collect similar data almost inevitably as part of their operations, but it’s kept behind their firewall. It normally requires a court order to gain access to it, whereas this is available to anyone who can get their hands on your phone or computer.

Allan and Warden provide an open-source application, iPhone Tracker, that maps that data. The good news is that the data doesn't seem go to be anywhere other than your own backups and devices. Privacy concerns aside, this kind of makes me wish I had an iPhone; although I suspect my map would be painfully boring.

[iPhone Tracker via Marco]

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