From clean water supplies to the polio vaccine, the most effective public health interventions are typically preventive interventions and policies that help stop a crisis before it starts. However, predicting the next public health crisis has historically been a challenge. Thanks to new technologies, we innovate age-old public health workflows and methods of analysis. WeRead… Read more »
On April 23, we launched our new home page design (http://www.epa.gov). Among other changes, we reworked our banners at the top. It used to look like this screen shot: To change banners, you clicked the numbers. Heat maps showed that people did use the numbers to move among the banners, and other analytics confirmed peopleRead… Read more »
Inspired by the many conversations we had at the recent GEOINT Symposium about how geospatial data can become an ideal pivot point for an entity resolution system, the time is here to transition from When and Where to Who and What –as well as the elusive Why. Eyes On the Earth Geospatial imagery abounds. ThereRead… Read more »
Reformers have promoted the notion of performance budgeting since it was introduced by the 1949 Hoover Commission. Major initiatives have been attempted and incremental progress has been achieved. But not enough has happened. A Government Accountability Office survey last year reports that the percentage of federal managers saying they used performance information in allocating resourcesRead… Read more »
In true data-geek fashion, we collected some data points about big data during a recent online training. On Thursday, April 10th, GovLoop and Cloudera hosted a virtual training session on leveraging an enterprise data hub (EDH) to solve your most complicated big data problems. An enterprise data hub has the power to place your dataRead… Read more »
When the term ‘predictive policing’ comes up, what movie immediately comes to mind? If you said The Minority Report you aren’t alone. According to Santa Cruz Deputy Chief of Policy Steve Clark, that’s a common reaction. In reality, the technology currently being tested by law enforcement today is just as fascinating as science fiction –Read… Read more »
Here’s a question. Say you are the facilities manager for a government building. How do you keep track of the operating status of all the equipment and infrastructure within the building? Would you know if a chiller was not operating at peak efficiency? Now, hold that thought… Wind the calendar back to 2008. Recognizing aRead… Read more »
Just like water, data flows from many different places and can be difficult to control. “Information is our generation’s next natural resource,” said Ginni Rometty, IBM CEO. But using analytics to uncover, capture, and mind trends in information can help agencies lower costs, maximize limited resources, and improve overall operational efficiency. To help you understandRead… Read more »
It seems events such as the Super Bowl can have the effect of bringing out the best and the worst of society. In researching for stories of government using data for the public good, I stumbled upon an article entitled, “Super Bowl Prostitution Digitally Mapped by Data Trackers.” I did a quick scan and itRead… Read more »
Data is poised to change everything we do. Just as fossil fuels transformed the global economy a century ago, data should be considered the next untapped, raw natural resource. For public agencies, this wealth of information provides enormous opportunities for greater cost efficiency, service delivery effectiveness and connectivity between the centralized operations and the widelyRead… Read more »