Fighting Indiana’s Opioid Epidemic with Data
Spurred by serious concerns about the rise of opioid use statewide — and a fascination with data — state employees combined disparate datasets to visualize and combat Indiana’s drug epidemic.
Posts Tagged: data analytics
Enable Technology-Powered Law Enforcement
It might seem counterintuitive that police departments are simultaneously trying to leverage more personal community relationships and deploying new technologies as means to decrease crime. Those two tactics seem like they would directly conflict with each other. In fact, a recent IBM report explains that investing in new technologies actually helps police departments better reachRead… Read more »
Data May be Open, but is it Secure?
“It would be false to say that people are happily sharing their data with us.” That’s how the Department of Defense’s Col. Bob Saxon explained his agency’s efforts to open up government data. For all of its potential benefits, open data also presents security risks to those providing the information. From loss of agency confidentiality,Read… Read more »
One Size Fits None – Are the Database Elephants Toast?
This past March, the Association for Computing Machinery announced that its 2014 Turing Award would go to Dr. Michael Stonebraker. As a Google V.P. put it (Google puts up the $1M cash prize that goes with the award), “The efficient and effective management of Big Data is crucial to our 21st century global economy …Read… Read more »
Google: Solving Big Data – Sharing Technology and the Value
One of the many challenges involved in architecting “Big Data” solutions is in just moving the stuff around. Sometimes it makes sense to move the work to the Data (instead of the other way around). This assumes that your Data is already in a form that is amenable to heavy-duty analytics. More typically, you’re lookingRead… Read more »
“Tool” Crazy After All These Years
We have all run into the office cliché similar to the saying “if all you use is a hammer everything looks like a nail.” Another way of saying this is that if all you see are nails, anything looks like a hammer. In both cases, the focus of misunderstanding is based on overlooking the particularsRead… Read more »
“Where Does Fed Money Go?” Using a Canonical Model to Find It
For decades, OMB and Departments have been trying to trace federal grants and loans to specific places: cities, neighborhoods, farms, enterprise zones, individual houses or stores. The complexity of community development, economic development, rural development, job creation, or just accounting have plagued how funds can be traced. The purpose of tracing the money is toRead… Read more »
Law and Order: Big Data Edition
Any fan of crime drama TV shows can tell you that serial murderers tend to have specific modus operandi’s (MO’s, as the detectives refer to them) – meaning they operate systematically, within a pattern. How better to look at patterns and cycles than with data? In fighting crime, using data analytics to examine information onRead… Read more »
Are You REDI for Diversity?
The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) recently launched a new program to drive up diversity in the federal workforce. The program is known as REDI: Recruitment, Engagement, Diversity, and Inclusion. The government is, potentially, at a turning point in terms of its diversity. In the coming years, there will be massive turnover in the governmentRead… Read more »
Leveraging Data from the Internet of Things
My dad loves his gadgets, especially when it comes to cooking. I couldn’t name half of the contraptions and devices he has bought that are now floating around the family kitchen. And each one seems to have a new electronic component, like his barbeque skewer that digitally conveys the temperature and other data about theRead… Read more »