Jerzy Wieczorek, a statistician with the U.S. Census Bureau, explains why the American Community Survey is worthwhile.

Besides the direct estimates from the ACS itself, the Census Bureau uses ACS data as the backbone of several other programs. For example, the Small Area Income and Poverty Estimates program provides annual data to the Department of Education for use in allocating funds to school districts, based on local counts and rates of children in poverty. Without the ACS we would be limited to using smaller surveys (and thus less accurate information about poverty in each school district) or older data (which can become outdated within a few years, such as during the recent recession). Either way, it would hurt our ability to allocate resources fairly to schoolchildren nationwide.

Similarly, the Census Bureau uses the ACS to produce other timely small-area estimates required by Congressional legislation or requested by other agencies: the number of people with health insurance, people with disabilities, minority language speakers, etc. The legislation requires a data source like the ACS not only so that it can be carried out well, but also so its progress can be monitored.

Last month Republicans were pushing a bill to get rid of the American Community Survey, an 11-page questionnaire about housing, education, and other things. Yesterday, a bill passed to cut the survey in a 232 to 190 vote.

Republicans, acknowledging its usefulness, attacked the survey as an unconstitutional invasion of privacy, arguing that the government has no business knowing how many flush toilets someone has, for instance.

“It would seem that these questions hardly fit the scope of what was intended or required by the Constitution,” said Rep. Daniel Webster (R-Fla.), author of the amendment.

“This survey is inappropriate for taxpayer dollars,” Webster added. “It’s the definition of a breach of personal privacy. It’s the picture of what’s wrong in Washington, D.C. It’s unconstitutional.”

The ACS is the picture of what’s wrong in Washington? This is idiocy.

Thanks to the Internet Archive and CNN, thirteen years of transcripts, about a gigabyte compressed, is available to download as one file.

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]

Gay rights vary across states and by region. The Guardian US interactive team does their research and shows this variance, covering several issues, from school to marriage. Segmented concentric circles make the foundation of the interactive where each circle is an issue, and each segment is a state. The states are organized by region, so it’s easy to see where areas of the country stand.

Be sure to scroll down for regional breakdowns by issue.

Nice work from both a technical and storytelling standpoint.

The series premiere of United Stats of America (See what they did there?) on History is tonight at 10/9c.

Episodes explore the stats that help us understand how much money we make (and what we spend it on), how long we will live (and how we will die), what we do with our free time (and how to make more of it) and a whole lot more. In one episode, the Sklars explain how the deadliest animal in America is neither the snake nor the shark but rather the deer. In another, viewers learn that Americans waste 4.2 billion hours a year stuck in traffic and that, in a nation with over 3.5 million square miles of territory, 99 percent of us are crowded into only 8 percent of the land.

I watched a couple of clips and got bored quickly as they went through a bunch of numbers. It seems like a rehash of Yahoo and Huffington Post lists with jokes. I’m setting my expectations low, but maybe there’ll be more to it in the full episodes.

[Thanks, Gary]

Researchers at the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University investigate the structure of cities in Livehoods, using foursquare check-ins.

The hypothesis underlying our work is that the character of an urban area is defined not just by the the types of places found there, but also by the people who make the area part of their daily routine. To explore this hypothesis, given data from over 18 million foursquare check-ins, we introduce a model that groups nearby venues into areas based on patterns in the set of people who check-in to them. By examining patterns in these check-ins, we can learn about the different areas that comprise the city, allowing us to study the social dynamics, structure, and character of cities on a large scale.

It’s most interesting when you click on location dots. A Livehood is highlighted and a panel on the top right tells you what the neighborhood is like, related neighborhoods, and provides stats like hourly and daily pulse and a breakdown location categories (for example, food and nightlife). Does foursquare have anything like this tied into their system? They should if they don’t.

There’s only maps for San Francisco, New York City, and Pittsburgh right now, but I’m sure there are more to come.

Want more on the clustering behind the maps? Here’s the paper [pdf].

We’ve seen life expectancy at the country and state levels, but the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, a health research center at the University of Washington, recently released life expectancy data at the county level. The press release focuses on the lower life expectancy of girls born in 2009 compared to those born ten years before. However, the main takeaway from the IHME map, while interactive, is that life expectancy has improved. I wanted to see where life expectancy dropped during the decade.

Update: Brett and Jørgen in the comments make good points on caveats of small-county life expectancy. Is this just statistical noise?

Welcome to Anthropocene:

Scientific concepts like the Anthropocene, planetary boundaries and planetary stewardship have heralded a profound shift in perception of our place in the world: a growing evidence base of scientific observations show we have become the prime driver of global environmental change. These new concepts are powerful communication tools as we move towards global sustainability.

There’s also a non-narrated version, but I like the narration. It helps you better appreciate what you’re seeing. Oh yeah, and ooohh, purdy.

[via infosthetics]

I’ve never played Minecraft, but maybe this map showing live server connections means something to those who do. “A dot is a server or a client. Lines are traced from clients connecting to servers. Lone dots are local servers.” They also have raw hardware data available for download. [Thanks, Erik]