Sshh! Social Sciences Headlines and Highlights

Federal Census 2010 Expected to Cost $11.3 Billion

In a recent hearing before the U.S. Senate subcommittee on Federal Finanical Management, Government Information, and International Security, Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs, Brenda Farrell, acting director of strategic issues at GAO said she expects the 2010 census to be the most expensive in our nation's history, even accounting for inflation. The average cost of the census per household will be about $72, compared to a cost of $56/household for the 2000 census.

]]> A significant expense in the past has been the cost involved in following up on what the Census Bureau calls "non-respondents", those people who do not return their census forms and need to be contacted again. Farrell estimated that, had enumerators spent just one more minute at each household of a non-respondent family in the 2000 census it would have added nearly $10 million more to the total cost of the census.

To try and reduce some of these costs the Census Bureau has been testing the use of GPS enabled mobile computer devises (MCD) instead of using paper questionnaires. There have been reliability problems and other issues related to these devices, however. These issues will need to be resolved by the final dress rehearsal for the census, which will take place in 2008. If the MCDs continue to prove problematic the Census Bureau will be forced to go back to the more costly traditional paper methods of follow-up, significantly increasing the costs of this already expensive census.

10 Most Harmful Government Programs

Human Events, the conservative weekly magazine, asked 38 conservative public policy experts and scholars to name the 10 Most Harmful Government Programs. Topping the list is social security followed by Medicare, income tax withholding and McCain-Feingold. Two programs, contraceptive funding and farm subsidies, tied for 5th place. Rounding out the top ten are Medicaid, affirmative action, earmarking, and the Davis-Bacon Act.

Smithsonian Agreement with Showtime

A New York Times article describes the reaction of documentary filmmakers to Smithsonian Networks, the recently announced joint venture between the Smithsonian Institution and Showtime Networks, Inc. Filmmakers are worried because, under the agreement, the joint venture has the right to first refusal to commercial documentaries that rely on Smithsonian collections or staff. Those works would first have to be offered to Smithsonian on Demand, the cable channel that is expected to be the venture's first programming service.

Ken Burns, maker of documentaries like "Baseball" and "The Civil War" said in an interview that he believes such an arrangement would have kept him from making some of his recent works, like "Jazz", available to public television stations because they relied so heavily on Smithsonian curators and collections.

I find this deal terrifying," Mr. Burns said in a telephone interview from San Francisco, where he is filming interviews for a documentary on the history of the national parks. "It feels like the Smithsonian has essentially optioned America's attic to one company, and to have access to that attic, we would have to be signed off with, and perhaps co-opted by, that entity

It's going to take how long to get my PhD?!

The National Science Foundation has just released a report on the average time to degree differences among research doctorate recipients from U.S. universities. The report is based on data from the Survey of Earned Doctorates.

The report looks at three measures of time to degree:

total elapsed time from completion of the baccalaureate to the doctorate (total time to degree--TTD)

time in graduate school less reported periods of nonenrollment (registered time to degree--RTD)

age at receipt of doctorate

For the academic year ending in 2003, for all doctorate recipients in the social sciences, the median total time to degree (TTD) was 10.0 years; the median registered time to degree (RTD) was 7.8 years; and the median age was 33.1

Education doctorates had the highest median TTD, 18.2. Anthropologists had the highest RTD, 9.6. The median age for doctorates in chemistry was 29.6, veritable whippersnappers! In comparison, the median age for education doctorates was 43.5.

Congratulations Grace

Grace York, Coordinator of the Documents Center, has been named the recipient of the 2006 James Bennett Childs Award. This award is given to a librarian who has made a “lifetime and significant contribution to the field of documents librarianship�?. It is a very high honor that Grace has earned because of her extensive knowledge and tireless work to promote access to government information. The Government Documents Round Table of Michigan has posted the nomination letters for Grace give an indication of how valuable she is to the documents librarian community. Bravo Grace!

Sunshine Week 2006, March 12-18

Democracy works because we have an open government. According to David C. Vladeck, Associate professor, Georgetown University Law Center, in his article Freedom of Information Overview , U.S. citizens can, and should keep tabs on our government and when we’re not satisfied with the job being done, we have the right to either, 1.) vote the rascals out of office the next time or 2.) insist the U.S. court system review the situation and take necessary action to defend our laws and constitution. Either way, to make an open government work citizens need to know what’s going on. That’s where the Freedom of Information Act comes in.

This Act will be 40 years old in another few months, having been signed on the Fourth of July, 1966 by Lyndon Johnson. According to this act the government has a limit of 20 days to provide information requested by U.S. citizens but many times it takes months or years to get access to this information. Sunday’s Ann Arbor News featured an article on Freedom of Information by Rebecca Carr which addressed this logjam and mentioned one professor, William Aceves, who requested information from the government 16 years ago, as a graduate student which he still has yet to receive.

Sunday, March 12 marks the beginning of National Sunshine Week, a “celebration�? focused on the importance of an open government and the rights of U.S. citizens to access government information freely. Of course librarians have always been militant about U.S. citizens’ rights to freedom, access, and privacy. ALA celebrates Freedom of Information Day this week and offers annual awards to those who promote freedom of information and open access to government documents. They also offer a guide for using the Freedom of Information Act and they collaborated with the Sunshine Week team to create a flier promoting National Sunshine Week from a library point of view.

University of Michigan University Library and the National Commission on Libraries and Information Science presented an interesting and apropos symposium last week on U-M campus, Scholarship and Libraries in Transition: A Dialogue about the Impacts of Mass Digitization Projects. During the public policy panel session on Saturday, this blog’s own Kathleen Folger offered her concerns as a librarian about the federal government yanking web pages in the name of security. Bruce James, U.S. Public Printer, U.S. Government Printing Office, who was part of the panel, seemed to think there were fewer of these pages taken down than most people think. Interesting reading for Mr. James would be an article on the OMB Watch web site listing information removed from government agency web sites since 9/11 and an article by Susan Nevelow Mart in the January 2006 issue of Law Library Journal, “Let the People Know the Facts: Can Government Information Removed from the Internet be Reclaimed?�?

Happy Sunshine Week and to celebrate, go download the “The Open Record Blues�? from the Sunshine Week Blog.

Typical American Family Finances

The Washington Post has a wake-up call for American families

Meet the typical American family.

It has about $3,800 in the bank. No one has a retirement account, and the neighbors who do only have about $35,000 in theirs. Mutual funds? Stocks? Bonds? Nope. The house is worth $160,000, but the family owes $95,000 on it to the bank. The breadwinners make more than $43,000 a year but can't manage to pay off a $2,200 credit card balance.

The description of the typical American family is based on the Federal Reserve Board's most recent Survey of Consumer Finances

Video from the National Archives

The National Archives recently announced it is working with Google to digitize historic movies, documentaries, and other films from its collection. A number of videos are already available for viewing on the Google video site including documentaries from NASA on the history of the spaceflight program; World War II newsreels; and Department of the Interior films on a variety of topics, such as Boulder Dam, the National Park Service, the Civilian Conservation Corps, and the Tennessee Valley Authority.

Which majors are smartest?

Interesting post at Political Calculations using the results of 20 years of standardized tests to compare the intelligence of individuals in various disciplines.

Overall, the results generally follow what common sense would predict - engineers do exceptionally well in demonstrating math proficiency but below average in verbal skills (at least on the GRE!) Conversely, we see the opposite pattern for English majors on the same tests, which we would also expect! Overall, the best performances were turned in by
those with degrees in philosophy.

Majors included in the results are biology, business, chemistry, education, engineering, english, history, philosophy, political science, and sociology.

Summers Resigns as Harvard President

Lawrence Summers has resigned as president of Harvard University--he will step down at the end of the 2005/06 academic year.

His tenure at Harvard has been controversial--his comments last year that gender differences between the sexes might explain why there are fewer women n science and math resulted in a vote of no confidence from the faculty. Just this past weekend, the former dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Peter Ellison, gave an exclusive interview with the Boston Globe in which he said Summers should resign. Ellison also gave an example of other remarks made by Summers which concerned him.

Over lunch not long after Summers took over the presidency in 2001, Ellison said, Summers suggested that some funds should be moved from a sociology program to the Kennedy School, home to many economists and political scientists. ''President Summers asked me, didn't I agree that, in general, economists are smarter than political scientists, and political scientists are smarter than sociologists?" Ellison said. ''To which I laughed nervously and didn't reply."

Support the SIPP

The Budget of the United States Government for FY07 does not include funding for the Census Bureau's Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP). According to a fact sheet created by the Center for Economic Policy Research, "the SIPP is the only large-scale survey that provides information about the effectiveness of welfare reform, Medicaid, unemployment insurance and other income-support programs".

The CEPR has a sign-on Letter to researchers who are concerned about access to this data.

More information on the SIPP can be found from the Census Bureau website.

101 Most Dangerous Academics in America

An article in Inside Higher Ed covers the mixed reaction a new book by David Horowitz is receiving. The book, The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America, is intended, Horowitz says, to expose the "political corruption" of higher education. A coalition of faculty, student and civil liberty groups calling itself "Free Exchange on Campus" has released a statement condemning the list. Organizations in the coalition include the American Association of University Professors, the American Federation of Teachers, the National Education Association, the American Civil Liberties Union, Campus Progress, Center for Campus Free Speech, and the United States Student Association.

Here's a list of the 101 by college/university

The FDA and social sciences

Mark Thoma at Economist's View points to an article in today's Financial Times (available to University of Michigan affiliates via ProQuest Research Library) about the Food and Drug Administration's use of sociological methods to measure perceptions and communication risks.

The agency overseeing food, drug and medical devices is making a big push into social science, according to people familiar with the matter, with the hope of using this expertise to better measure, understand and regulate product risks and consumers’ and doctors’ responses to those risks.

]]> According to the article,

Several current and planned studies by the FDA highlight its early steps to increase use of sociological tools in regulation. The agency expects to begin a study soon on whether coupons and other free offers used for drug advertising in print media affect consumers’ perceptions of the products’ risks. ...
The FDA is also planning a study on how drug-label terminology affects the way people gauge the severity of the potential risk, and one which would assess whether risks and benefits are fairly balanced in broadcast media drug advertisements.

Web page for library statistics

I recently found out about a web page that's useful for getting statistics about libraries and to compare libraries (if someone wants to know where we stand among other academic libraries in collection size, for instance). The first time I used one of these NCES tools it was a little hard for me to figure out how it worked so I'm including a sample search as well. Here's the URL: http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/libraries/

Click on Academic Libraries.
Click on Compare Academic Libraries Tool.
Click on Begin Search.
Enter Library Name - I put in University of Michigan and then I put Ann Arbor and Michigan in the city and state boxes and hit Continue.

When the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor came up on the next page, I marked the entry and hit Continue.

On the next page I clicked on the link to choose similar libraries.

On the next page I went down to Size of Collections and chose Books, Serial Back Files, Other Paper Materials

On the next page I chose Method 1 and left the percentage at 20%. Then I clicked on Continue.

On the next page I chose the column that said # of Lib. and clicked on the number below.

Library Workshops for Social Scientists

The University Library sponsors a number of workshops on information management that might be of interest to social science researchers. For example, on March 9th there is a session on the Web of Science for Social Sciences and on February 2nd graduate students might want to attend Conducting the Literature Review in the Social Sciences. Click on over to http://www.umich.edu/~teachtec/workshops.html for a complete list of all workshops. Check listings under University Library and under the Digital Dissertation Series (for graduate students).