Pacific Standard March-April 2013 Cover

From Appearance to Identity: How Census Data Collection Changed Race in America

May 8, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
race-in-america

Publicizing the release of the 1940 U.S. census data, LIFE magazine released photographs of census enumerators collecting data from household members. Yep, census enumerators. For almost 200 years the U.S. counted people and recorded information about them in person by sending out a representative of the U.S. government to evaluate them directly. By 1970 the government was collecting census data by mail-in survey. The shift to a survey had dramatic effects on at least one census category: race. Before the shift, census enumerators categorized people into racial groups based on their ... Read More

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The Background on Your Bytes

March 9, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

A large blue diagram fills the computer monitor in James Frew's office at the University of California, Santa Barbara; it’s a graphical representation of the life history of data used to create a map of ocean color around the world. Several tightly spaced vertical lines run down the left side of the screen, illustrating the flow of information toward the end product. As he scrolls down, small boxes containing data source labels come into view on the right side. Horizontal lines lead from the boxes to the vertical lines on the left, mapping how each boxed element, or data source, feeds into ... Read More

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In ‘Open Government Data,’ What’s Really Open?

March 6, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
Acceptable Data / Transparency Graphic

In the fall, the United States joined seven other countries — with hopefully more to come — in forming the Open Government Partnership, an international initiative designed to hold countries on a global stage to a commitment to open government and its close relative, “open government data.” These terms, though, have created a bit of philosophical and grammatical confusion. “Eventually it became clear to us that it was really the word ‘open’ that caused problems,” said Harlan Yu, a doctoral candidate in computer science at Princeton University, who has written a new working ... Read More

More like this: Politics, The Idea Lobby
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Protein Data Bank Deposits Are Life’s Building Blocks

February 13, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

Biology’s newest knowledge, fused with the special effects of The Hobbit or Harry Potter films — that’s what’s in store from a stunning new cinematic field of biomedical animation. Catch a glimpse in this video — The Inner Life of a Cell — that might have made biologists of us all had we seen it earlier in our lives. It offers an unprecedented, scientifically accurate dramatization of how cells function, sense their surroundings and respond to external stimuli in mind-blowing moving imagery. It is part of a continuing animation series created by Xvivo, a Connecticut scientific ... Read More

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EarthScope: A Seismic Shift in Data Gathering

February 7, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
Earthscope: What Lies Beneath

On Feb. 7, 1812, a magnitude 7.7 earthquake pummeled the Mississippi River town of New Madrid. The quake, which was then the largest in U.S. history, was the fourth temblor to hit the region in a three-month span, and newspapers reported that people as far away as New York and Charleston, S.C. felt the vibrations. In one account, the shaking centered in the Louisiana Territory, about 150 miles south of St. Louis, caused bells to toll out of turn in Boston. Even though hundreds of smaller quakes occur annually in the New Madrid Seismic Zone, scientists are at a loss to explain when and how ... Read More

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Solving Eco-challenges With Today’s Data

August 16, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

New academic centers usually bring the promise of spanking-new research, but a new entity at the University of Maryland promises to take undervalued existing research and synthesize it into answers for pressing environmental challenges. The Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center, headed by entomologist Margaret Palmer, will focus entirely on the processing and better utilization of existing information. The center's goal is to fill gaps between scholarship and public policy, and between environmental science and social science. As Palmer explained to Miller-McCune, "The idea is that ... Read More

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U.S. Seeking LGBT Health Data in Future Surveys

July 6, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

The Department of Health and Human Services last week announced a seemingly small change in the way it will collect population health data going forward. If you’ve ever participated in some of the government’s extensive efforts to track the nation’s health, such as the National Health Interview Survey, you’ve probably answered a question or checked a box about your race and gender. Come 2013, government surveys will begin asking for the first time about another characteristic: sexual orientation. And for researchers and advocates of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered ... Read More

More like this: Health, The Idea Lobby
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Digital Disappearance

February 25, 2010 • By • 6 Comments

Once upon a time, news stories were entombed in newspaper "morgues" and rarely saw the dusty light of day. Now the news never dies. Millions of people can search the archives online — an amazing benefit unless, perhaps, you're someone who was actually in the news. In a recent survey of 110 news organizations, the Toronto Star found that increasingly, publishers are fielding regular requests from anxious and embarrassed readers to "unpublish" information, sometimes months or years after it first appeared online. Some readers don't want their marital status or the price of their home ... Read More

More like this: CAROUSEL, Culture, Culture & Society, Media
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Ladling Data at a Government Info Soup Kitchen

December 14, 2009 • By • Leave a Comment

The sprawling new offices of the Sunlight Foundation in Washington were filled this weekend with a couple dozen developers, each sacked out on a corner couch or around the main conference room table with a laptop and a muffin. The open-government advocacy group was hosting a Great American Hackathon, which sounds more menacing than it actually is: The point wasn't to extract data officials don't want us to see, but to convert already-public information into civic-minded applications that might make us better-informed voters and make our government more accountable in the process. About ... Read More

More like this: BLOGS, Politics, The Idea Lobby
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Monster Mashups Shine Light on Government

October 30, 2009 • By • 1 Comment

Clay Johnson pulled out his iPhone to illustrate the kind of mashup that's possible when coders get their hands on data churned out by government, whole reams of transactions on where federal money is spent, who gets it and how it's used. On the screen was a live view up 19th Street in northwest Washington, the moving picture overlaid with small bubbles representing projects on this very block paid for by the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act. "It blows your mind, right?" Johnson asked. "This is the tip of the iceberg." What if, he suggests, an application could track all ... Read More

More like this: Politics, The Idea Lobby
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