The Roper Center has put together a web page on public opinion regarding this and historical election issues. It's called US Presidential Election 2008 and includes charts and tables on topics such as the war in Iraq and whether people would vote for a candidate who was female of any race or an African-American man.
The Minneapolis Area Association of REALTORS® has released "Foreclosures and Short Sales in the Twin Cities Housing Market," a special new research report that attempts to answer some of the more pressing questions surrounding lender-mediated properties. Includes an analysis of current inventory, new listings, closed sales, sales prices, and the impact that the growth of lender-mediated properties is having on each trend.
The data was gathered and analyzed by MAAR staff in collaboration with Aaron Dickinson, REALTOR® member with Edina Realty, and utilizes a new data approach based upon information from the NorthstarMLS system.
To share comments or questions on this new report, please contact Jeff Allen, MAAR Research Manager, at jeffa@mplsrealtor.com or Aaron Dickinson at aarondickinson@edinarealty.com.
Thanks to our Journalism, Film and Mass Communications Librarian, Johan Oberg (oberg091 at umn dot edu), you can find sources of current and historical newspaper circulation statistics compiled at http://www.lib.umn.edu/journalism/circulation.phtml.
Minneapolis Area Association of Realtors' produced report on home sales activity in the metropolitan area over the last year. Includes summaries of 2001-present for sales, values by county, city and neighborhood and some maps. See Residential Real Estate Activity Report
Estimating Excess Mortality in Post-Invasion Iraq
From the article:
"There is no set formula for accurately tallying deaths from humanitarian crises. When a population becomes destabilized, estimation of mortality is likely to be severely challenged. In the case of a sudden traumatic event, such as a natural disaster affecting an otherwise stable population, health and human service agencies, though compromised, may well be able to facilitate an accurate assessment of deaths through the use of prospective registries of vital events."
School-Associated Student Homicides --- United States, 1992--2006
School-associated student homicide events, especially those involving multiple victims, generate considerable media attention, prompting questions regarding whether rates of school-associated violent deaths are increasing and regarding the characteristics of such events. During the 1990s, the rate of school-associated single-victim student homicides decreased significantly, whereas rates for school-associated homicides in which two or more students were killed (i.e., multiple-victim homicides) increased (1).
Additional studies of such events during the same decade documented the rarity of lethal school-associated violence (2,3). To 1) update temporal trends in rates for school-associated student homicides during July 1992--June 2006 and 2) describe the epidemiologic characteristics of school-associated student homicides that occurred during July 1999--June 2006 (the period for which the most recent data are available), CDC analyzed data from the School-Associated Violent Death (SAVD) study.
This report describes the results of that analysis, which indicated that rates of school-associated student homicides decreased during the overall period, July 1992--June 2006, but stabilized during July 1999--June 2006, when 116 students were killed in 109 school-associated homicide events. Although school-associated student homicides are rare and represent approximately 1% of homicides that occur among school-age youths, schools should expand use of comprehensive measures to prevent behaviors that often precede fatal violence.
State fact sheets provide information on population, employment, income, farm characteristics, farm financial indicators, and top commodities, exports, and counties for each state in the United States.
Bioconductor is
"an open source and open development software project for the analysis and comprehension of genomic data...Bioconductor is primarily based on the R programming language but we do accept contributions in any programming language. There are two releases of Bioconductor every year (they appear shortly after the corresponding R release). At any one time there is a release version, which corresponds to the released version of R, and a development version, which corresponds to the development version of R. Most users will find the release version appropriate for their needs. In addition there are a large number of meta-data packages available. They are mainly, but not solely oriented towards different types of microarrays...Although initial efforts focused primarily on DNA microarray data analysis, many of the software tools are general and can be used broadly for the analysis of genomic data, such as SAGE, sequence, or SNP data."
Created by Queens College, City University of New York, and partnering with the University of Minnesota's own National Historical Geographic Information System, this subscription edition of Social Explorer offers the ability to create customized maps and reports of demographic, housing, and employment patterns throughout the United States using data from the U.S. Census Bureau. Data are available by decade between 1940 and 2000 for a variety of geographical entities that are as small as the census tract for certain areas.
Quantifying the transmission potential of pandemic influenza
From the abstract:
"This article reviews quantitative methods to estimate the basic reproduction number of pandemic influenza, a key threshold quantity to help determine the intensity of interventions required to control the disease."
From Holiday-Suicide Link: Newspapers Turn the Corner:
"Newspapers are close to putting to rest the myth that the holidays increase the risk of suicide. A new study shows a dramatic drop in articles that – despite having no basis in fact – attribute the arrival of the holiday season with an uptick in suicides."
From ITNews:
"The team will use the grid to analyse the results of experiments on proteins using data collected by scientists at the Hauptman-Woodward Medical Research Institute in Buffalo, New York. The researchers estimate that this analysis would take conventional computer systems 162 years to complete. Dr Jurisica anticipates that the analysis could be finished in one to two years..."
How Global Is the Global Biodiversity Information Facility?
Abstract:
There is a concerted global effort to digitize biodiversity occurrence data from herbarium and museum collections that together offer an unparalleled archive of life on Earth over the past few centuries. The Global Biodiversity Information Facility provides the largest single gateway to these data. Since 2004 it has provided a single point of access to specimen data from databases of biological surveys and collections. Biologists now have rapid access to more than 120 million observations, for use in many biological analyses. We investigate the quality and coverage of data digitally available, from the perspective of a biologist seeking distribution data for spatial analysis on a global scale. We present an example of automatic verification of geographic data using distributions from the International Legume Database and Information Service to test empirically, issues of geographic coverage and accuracy. There are over 1/2 million records covering 31% of all Legume species, and 84% of these records pass geographic validation. These data are not yet a global biodiversity resource for all species, or all countries. A user will encounter many biases and gaps in these data which should be understood before data are used or analyzed. The data are notably deficient in many of the world's biodiversity hotspots. The deficiencies in data coverage can be resolved by an increased application of resources to digitize and publish data throughout these most diverse regions. But in the push to provide ever more data online, we should not forget that consistent data quality is of paramount importance if the data are to be useful in capturing a meaningful picture of life on Earth.