What's New — January 2001



SITE OF THE MONTH: American FactFinder

Want to see the future of data access on the web? Want to see it now? If you haven't already been there, visit the Census Bureau's American Fact Finder, our January 2001 Site of the Month. As a regular EconData.Net User, you already know what drudgery you endure for most data access: point-click, cut-paste, and then use your favorite spreadsheet or database to hammer the data into shape. Increasingly, you're going to be able to use the web to do the heavy lifting of finding, parsing, analyzing and even displaying key data. America FactFinder lets you build tables and maps of Decennial Census and Economic Census data. It's easy and quick. Take it for a test spin, today.
http://factfinder.census.gov


NEW LINKS ADDED

We've recently added a number of new links to the site, including:

-Science and Engineering. The National Science Foundation has two useful sets of data. The first provides academic institutional profiles in science and engineering, for 579 universities. See 
http://www.nsf.gov/sbe/srs/profiles/toc.htm
The second provides access to microdata on 100,000 scientists and engineers
http://srsstats.sbe.nsf.gov/

-Best Cities. Inc. Magazine published its annual list of the best cities to start and grow a company. (EconData.Net's West Coast home--Portland,
Oregon--came in first!) See how your town ranks in the eye's of Inc's editors:
http://www.inc.com/incmagazine/article/1,,ART21110_CNT53,00.html

-Census Tract data. To get a really close-up view of Census data, you'll want to download data for individual census tracts. A new website, operated by the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council lets you quickly find income, housing and minority population data for different census tracts by drilling down through states, metropolitan areas and counties.
http://www.ffiec.gov/Dynamo_Census/ffieccensus.htm

-Minority businesses. There are an estimated 3.25 million minority-owned businesses in the US. The Milliken Institute and the Minority Business
Development Administration, using Dun and Bradstreet data, have estimated the share of businesses in each state owned by Asian, Black, Hispanic and Native American entrepreneurs.
http://www.mbda.gov/Emerging_Markets/democratizing.pdf (page 10)

-Dot.com domain registrations. Want to track the geography of Internet adoption? Network Solutions, the leading domain name registrar, has produced a clickable map of state level data on domain name registrations.
http://www.dotcom.com/facts/usmap.html

FIRST 2000 CENSUS DATA AVAILABLE

At last, the first release of data from the 2000 Census is available. You can find state level population totals and a good graphic analysis of changes in population by state over the past decade by visiting the Census 2000 Webpage:
http://www.census.gov/population/www/cen2000/respop.html

A priority use of the new Census data will be the reapportionment of seats in the U.S. House of Representatives and the re-districting of state legislatures. You can see the state level reapportionment data at:
http://www.census.gov/population/www/censusdata/apportionment.html

Another interesting series is overseas population by state. This can be a useful resource for gauging how internationally connected your state is (or estimating the number of overseas absentee ballots to expect in the next election). These data are available as an Excel spreadsheet at:
http://www.census.gov/population/cen2000/tab03.xls

The complete schedule for the release of data from Census 2000 can be found at:
http://factfinder.census.gov/home/en/releaseschedule.html

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