Explore Government Subsidies Data by State

 From the New York Times:

The New York Times spent 10 months investigating business incentives awarded by hundreds of cities, counties and states. Since there is no nationwide accounting of these incentives, The Times put together a database.

 Explore Government Subsidies Data by State

UNESCO Freedom of Expression Toolkit

From the Summary:

The Freedom of Expression Toolkit builds on the premise that freedom of expression, as well as press freedom and freedom of information, are indispensable elements in the attainment of all human rights. Throughout this Toolkit there will be an emphasis on the four key elements of Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, namely the right to hold opinions without interference, the right to seek information, the right to receive information and the right to impart information to others.

 Source: United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)

Download pdf of UNESCO Freedom of Expression Toolkit

New Resource from Census Bureau uses ACS Data

 The Census Bureau updated its popular QuickFacts site with the new American Community Survey statistics, making it even easier for people to find information about a town, county or state.

The American Community Survey (ACS) data released includes the combined years from 2007 to 2011, providing the only statistics down to the neighborhood level on school enrollment, jobs, housing and many other measures.

These estimates are ideal for measuring trends for areas with populations of less than 20,000. The Census Bureau has also launched "Easy Stats," a tool that allows users to build their own tables by selecting a desired topic and geography. Early next year, the Census Bureau will release "Dwellr," a mobile app designed to put Census Bureau statistics directly in the hands of new users in an engaging way.

QuickFacts: http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/index.html 

Easy Stats: http://www.census.gov/easystats/

Overview of substance use disorders and incarceration of African American males

Abstract:

Incarceration affects the lives of many African American men and often leads to poverty, ill health, violence, and a decreased quality of life. There has been an unprecedented increase in incarceration among African American males since 1970. In 2009, the incarceration rate among black males was 6.7 times that of white males and 2.6 times of Hispanic males. Substance abuse in African American males leads to higher mortality rates, high rates of alcohol-related problems, more likely to be victims of crimes, and HIV/AIDS. African Americans comprised only 14% of the U.S. population but comprised 38% of the jail population. The cost of incarcerating persons involved in substance related crimes has increased considerably over the past two decades in the U.S. A reduction in the incarceration rate for non-violent offences would save an estimated $17 billion per year. Substance use disorder makes the individual more prone to polysubstance use and leads to impulse control problems, selling drugs, and other crimes. The high rate of incarceration in U.S. may adversely affect health care, the economy of the country, and will become a burden on society. Implementation of good mental health care, treatment of addiction during and after incarceration will help to decrease the chances of reoffending. Therapeutic community programs with prison-based and specialized treatment facilities, cognitive behavioral therapy treatment for 91–180 days, and 12-step orientation with staff specialized in substance abuse can be helpful. It is essential for health care professionals to increase public awareness of substance abuse and find ways to decrease the high rates of incarceration.

Source: doi: 10.3389/fpsyt.2012.00098 Frontiers in Forensic Psychiatry

Read:  Overview of substance use disorders and incarceration of African American males

Human Performance Modification: Review of Worldwide Research with a View to the Future

From the Summary: 

The development of technologies to modify natural human physical and cognitive performance is one of increasing interest and concern, especially among military services that may be called on to defeat foreign powers with enhanced warfighter capabilities. Human performance modification (HPM) is a general term that can encompass actions ranging from the use of “natural” materials, such as caffeine or khat as a stimulant, to the application of nanotechnology as a drug delivery mechanism or in an invasive brain implant. Although the literature on HPM typically addresses methods that enhance performance, another possible focus is methods that degrade performance or negatively affect a military force’s ability to fight.

Advances in medicine, biology, electronics, and computation have enabled an increasingly sophisticated ability to modify the human body, and such innovations will undoubtedly be adopted by military forces, with potential consequences for both sides of the battle lines. Although some innovations may be developed for purely military applications, they are increasingly unlikely to remain exclusively in that sphere because of the globalization and internationalization of the commercial research base.
Based on its review of the literature, the presentations it received, and on its own expertise, the Committee on Assessing Foreign Technology Development in Human Performance Modification chose to focus on three general areas of HPM:

• Human cognitive modification as a computational problem (Chapter 2), 
• Human performance modification as a biological problem (Chapter 3), and 
• Human performance modification as a function of the brain-computer interface (Chapter 4).

 Source: Committee on Assessing Foreign Technology Development in Human Performance Modification, Board on Behavioral, Cognitive, and Sensory Sciences, Division on Engineering and Physical Sciences, Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education, National Research Council.

Read: Human Performance Modification: Review of Worldwide Research with a View to the Future

Nielsen Social Media Report 2012: Social Media Comes of Age

Introduction:

Social media and social networking are no longer in their infancy. Social media continues to grow rapidly, offering global consumers new and meaningful ways to engage with the people, events and brands that matter to them. According to Nielsen and NM Incite’s latest Social Media Report, consumers continue to spend more time on social networks than on any other category of sites—roughly 20 percent of their total time online via personal computer (PC), and 30 percent of total time online via mobile. Additionally, total time spent on social media in the U.S. across PCs and mobile devices increased 37 percent to 121 billion minutes in July 2012, compared to 88 billion in July 2011. The recent proliferation of mobile devices and connectivity helped fuel the continued growth of social media. While the computer remains as the predominant device for social media access, consumers’ time spent with social media on mobile apps and the mobile web has increased 63 percent in 2012, compared to the same period last year.

 Source: NielsenWire

View Nielsen Social Media Report 2012: Social Media Comes of Age online

Congressional Salaries and Allowances

From the Summary:

This report provides basic information on congressional salaries and allowances.

First, the report briefly summarizes the current salary of Members of Congress, limits on their outside earned income and honoraria, available life and health insurance, and retirement benefits.

Second, the report provides information on allowances available to Representatives and Senators to support them in their official and representational duties. These allowances cover official office expenses, including staff, mail, travel between a Member’s district or state and Washington, DC, and other goods and services.

Third, the report lists the salaries of Members, House and Senate officers and officials, and salary limits for committee staff.

Source: Congressional Research Service, Library of Congress (Prepared for Members and Committees of Congress)

Download full pdf report: Congressional Salaries and Allowances

Addressing the Long-Run Budget Deficit: A Comparison of Approaches

From the Summary:

A small share of federal spending is for direct provision of domestic government services, which many people may think of when considering federal spending. Since this spending is normally about 10% of total federal spending and about 2% of GDP and deficits excluding interest are projected to be as much as 7.7% of GDP by 2037, cutting this type of spending can make only a limited contribution. Transfers and payments to persons and state and local governments constitute most of federal spending, about 70%. Defense spending, currently accounting for about 20% of spending, has declined over the past 35 years, but also tends to vary depending, in part, on the presence and magnitude of international conflicts.

Source: Congressional Research Service, Library of Congress (Prepared for Members and Committees of Congress

Download full pdf report: Addressing the Long-Run Budget Deficit: A Comparison of Approaches by Jane G. Gravelle, Senior Specialist in Economic Policy

Predicting Violent Behavior

From the "Background and Context" section:
 

Following the tragic mass shooting at the Fort Hood Soldier Readiness Center on 5 November 2009, then-Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates established the Department of Defense Independent Review Related to Fort Hood, led by Admiral Vern Clark, U.S. Navy (Ret), and the Honorable Togo West. Two months after an attack that claimed thirteen lives and wounded forty-three others, the Independent Review Panel issued its report, Protecting the Force: Lessons from Fort Hood.1 

The findings and recommendations of the Independent Review Panel addressed four key issue areas relevant to preventing future mass-casualty attacks within the DoD community, including personnel policies, force protection procedures, emergency response plans, and mental health care support. Significantly, the panel’s findings provided an overarching framework to guide numerous follow-on studies, reviews, and assessments conducted in the wake of the Fort Hood tragedy.

Source: Defense Science Board, United States Department of Defense
Download pdf publication:  Predicting Violent Behavior

Understanding Peer Effects in Financial Decisions

Abstract:

Using a high-stakes field experiment conducted in partnership with a large financial brokerage in Brazil, we attempt to disentangle channels through which a person's financial decisions affect his peers'. When someone purchases an asset, his peers may want to purchase it as well, both because they learn from his choice (“social learning") and because his possession of the asset affects others' utility of owning the same asset (“social utility"). We randomize whether one member of a peer pair is allowed to possess an asset that he chose to purchase. Then, we randomize whether the second member of the pair 1) receives no information about the first member, or 2) is informed of the first member's desire to own the assetandthe result of the randomization that determined possession. This allows us to estimate the effects of (a) learning plus possession, and (b) learning alone, relative to a control group, allowing us to separately identify effects of the “social learning" and “social utility" channels. In the control (no information) group, 42% of individuals purchased the asset; this increases to 71% in the “social learning only" group; and, it increases to 93% in the “social learning and social utility" group. We find thatboth“social learning" and “social utility" channels are quantitatively important, and have independent, statistically significant effects on the decision to purchase the asset.

Source: CEGA Working Papers, Center for Effective Global Action, UC Berkeley [via eScholarship repository]

Download pdf of Understanding Peer Effects in Financial Decisions

CRS Report: Government Transparency and Secrecy: An Examination of Meaning and Its Use in the Executive Branch

From the Summary:

This report subsequently examines the statutes, initiatives, requirements, and other actions that make information more available to the public or protect it from public release. It also examines transparency and secrecy from the standpoint of how the public accesses government information, and whether the release of government data and information may make operation of the federal government more or, counter-intuitively, less transparent. Finally, this report analyzes whether existing transparency initiatives are effective in reaching their stated goals. 

 Source: Congressional Research Service, via FAS Secrecy Blog

Download pdf report: CRS Report: Government Transparency and Secrecy: An Examination of Meaning and Its Use in the Executive Branch

2012 Election Data and Stats

If the Five-Thirty-Eight Blog wasn't enough for you, here are a couple more resources for 2012 election statistics:

Wolfram Alpha's blog post shows a bunch of ways to crunch their data

Pew Research for People and the Press has a election section with their reports, and you can view the actual questionnaires if you want a closer look.

No doubt Latino voters were a very important segment of the population: Pew Hispanic Center has a new report on the Latino Voters in the 2012 election. The appendix includes selected state results.

The Transformation of Mortgage Finance and the Industrial Roots of the Mortgage Meltdown

Abstract:

The 2007-2009 financial crisis was centered on the mortgage industry. This paper develops a distinctly sociological explanation of that crisis based on Fligstein’s (1996) markets as politics approach and the sociology of finance. We use archival and secondary sources to show that the industry became dominated by an “industrial” conception of control whereby financial firms vertically integrated in order to capture profits in all phases of the mortgage industry including the production of financial products. The results of multivariate regression analyses show that the “industrial” model drove the deterioration in the quality of securities that firms issued and significantly contributed to the eventual failure of the firms that pursued the strategy. We show that large global banks which were more involved in the industrial production of U.S. mortgage securities also experienced greater investment losses. The findings challenge existing conventional accounts of the crisis and provide important theoretical linkages to the sociology of finance.

Source: 
Fligstein, Neil (CASBS Fellow 1995); & Goldstein, Adam. (2012). The Transformation of Mortgage Finance and the Industrial Roots of the Mortgage Meltdown. UC Berkeley: Institute for Research on Labor and Employment. Retrieved from: http://escholarship.org/uc/item/2zx8r7fb

Download full pdf publication: The Transformation of Mortgage Finance and the Industrial Roots of the Mortgage Meltdown

FBI Report: Crime in the United States, 2011

...the estimated number of violent crimes reported to law enforcement (1,203,564) decreased for the fifth year in a row, while the estimated number of property crimes reported to law enforcement (9,063,173) decreased for the ninth year in a row.

The full report is available in multiple formats:

Download Crime in the United States, 2011 in a zipped file of pdf documents.
View various sections online and download individually

Using Science as Evidence in Public Policy

From The National Academies Press:

Using Science as Evidence in Public Policy encourages scientists to think differently about the use of scientific evidence in policy making. This report investigates why scientific evidence is important to policy making and argues that an extensive body of research on knowledge utilization has not led to any widely accepted explanation of what it means to use science in public policy. Using Science as Evidence in Public Policy identifies the gaps in our understanding and develops a framework for a new field of research to fill those gaps.

For social scientists in a number of specialized fields, whether established scholars or Ph.D. students, Using Science as Evidence in Public Policy shows how to bring their expertise to bear on the study of using science to inform public policy. More generally, this report will be of special interest to scientists who want to see their research used in policy making, offering guidance on what is required beyond producing quality research, beyond translating results into more understandable terms, and beyond brokering the results through intermediaries, such as think tanks, lobbyists, and advocacy groups. For administrators and faculty in public policy programs and schools, Using Science as Evidence in Public Policy identifies critical elements of instruction that will better equip graduates to promote the use of science in policy making.

Full eBook available online:  Using Science as Evidence in Public Policy

Trickle-Down Anxiety: Study Examines Parental Behaviors that Create Anxious Children

Parents with social anxiety disorder are more likely than parents with other forms of anxiety to engage in behaviors that put their children at high risk for developing angst of their own, according to a small study of parent-child pairs conducted at Johns Hopkins Children’s Center. 

...

Specifically, the Johns Hopkins researchers identified a subset of behaviors in parents with social anxiety disorder — the most prevalent type of anxiety — and in doing so clarified some of the confusion that has shrouded the trickle-down anxiety often seen in parent-child pairs.

Source: Johns Hopkins Children's Center

Read entire article online:  Trickle-Down Anxiety: Study Examines Parental Behaviors that Create Anxious Children

How Teens Do Research in the Digital World

Overview

The teachers who instruct the most advanced American secondary school students render mixed verdicts about students’ research habits and the impact of technology on their studies.
Some 77% of advanced placement (AP) and National Writing Project (NWP) teachers surveyed say that the internet and digital search tools have had a “mostly positive” impact on their students’ research work. But 87% say these technologies are creating an “easily distracted generation with short attention spans” and 64% say today’s digital technologies “do more to distract students than to help them academically.”

According to this survey of teachers, conducted by the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project in collaboration with the College Board and the National Writing Project, the internet has opened up a vast world of information for today’s students, yet students’ digital literacy skills have yet to catch up...

Source: Pew Internet and American Life Project


Read Full PDF Report:  How Teens Do Research in the Digital World
Read Survey Questions (PDF)

Mind over chatter: Brainwave training boosts network for cognitive control and affects mind-wandering

From the Press Release:

A breakthrough study conducted in Canada has found that training of the well-known brainwave in humans, the alpha rhythm, enhances a brain network responsible for cognitive-control. The training technique, termed neurofeedback, is being considered as a promising new method for restoring brain function in mental disorders. Using several neuroimaging methods, a team of researchers at the Western University and the Lawson Health Research Institute have now uncovered that functional changes within a key brain network occur directly after a 30-minute session of noninvasive, neural-based training. Dysfunction of this cognitive-control network has previously been implicated in a range of brain disorders including attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, schizophrenia, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder.

During neurofeedback, users learn to control their own brain activity with the help of a brain-computer interface. In the simplest case, this consists of a computer that records brainwaves through surface sensors on the scalp, known as an EEG (electroencephalogram). The system is then able to process and simultaneously represent a user's real-time brain activity, displayed from moment-to-moment during a training game on a computer. This setup is known as a neurofeedback loop, because information of brain activity is continually fed-back to a user reflecting their level of control. Such real-time feedback allows users to reproduce distinct brain states under physiologically-normal conditions, promising to be an innovative way to foster brain changes without adverse effects. This is possible because of neuroplasticity, a natural property of the brain that enables it to reorganise after continual training, resulting from adjustments to its own activity.

The research study, Mind over chatter: Plastic up-regulation of the fMRI salience network directly after EEG neurofeedback, has been published in the online issue of Neuroimage and is freely available through open access.

A Record 24 Million Latinos Are Eligible to Vote, But Turnout Rate Has Lagged That of Whites, Blacks

From the overview:

A record 23.7 million Latinos are eligible to vote in the 2012 presidential election, according to an analysis of Census Bureau data by the Pew Hispanic Center, a project of the Pew Research Center. This is up by more than 4 million, or 22%, since 2008, when 19.5 million Latinos were eligible to vote.¹
Due to their ongoing  population growth, Latinos comprise a greater share of the nation’s eligible voters than they did just a few years ago—11.0% this year, up from 9.5% in 2008 and 8.2% in 2004 (Lopez and Taylor, 2009).

Source: Pew Hispanic Center

Download complete pdf report: Trends in Latino Voter Participation
Also available: State Fact Sheets | The importance of the Latino Vote in 2012

Newly Relesed: American Community Survey Estimates Now Available

From the Press Release:

The survey provides a wide range of important statistics about our nation's people, housing and economy for all communities in the country. The results are used by everyone from retailers, homebuilders and police departments, to town and city planners. The survey is the only source of local estimates for most of the 40 topics it covers, such as educational attainment, occupation, language spoken at home, nativity, ancestry and selected monthly homeowner costs down to the smallest communities. On Sept. 12, the Census Bureau released national statistics on 2011 income, poverty and health insurance coverage from the Current Population Survey. The American Community Survey includes 2011 statistics for states, cities and smaller areas. "The American Community Survey provides reliable, local statistics about our nation's people, housing and economy that are indispensable to anyone who has to make decisions about the future," Census Bureau Acting Director Thomas Mesenbourg said. "Businesses rely on it to plan and expand into new products or communities. Towns and cities use it to locate schools and firehouses." Since the first census in 1790, conducted under the direction of Thomas Jefferson, census questions have collected information on the demographic characteristics of the nation's population. The estimates released today are available in detailed tables for the nation, all 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, every congressional district, every metropolitan area, and all counties and places with populations of 65,000 or more. See the Census Bureau's American FactFinder database to find statistics for your area.

 Link to Census Bureau ACS