Amy West

Shout outs to Amy West

seema: thanks for featuring my graph! 11 months ago

About Me

Data Services Librarian at the University of Minnesota; http://www.lib.umn.edu/data/

Featured Graphs

	3rd Quarter Mass Layoff Events Due to Disasters 1995-2007 Another view of the effects of hurricanes Katrina and Rita.
	3rd Quarter Claimants from Mass Layoffs 1995-2007 I knew Katrina and Rita had a significant impact, but hadn't realized it was this stark.

Featured Data Sets

Amy West did not select any datasets to feature.

Recent Comments

6:00 PM by Month

Amy West: Nifty graph, but the title "6:00 PM by Month" is not meaningful out of context. I get the Swivel Featured Graphs RSS, so all I see is the table itself (unless I come to Swivel to see, which really isn't optimal; the graph should be able to stand alone). I encourage you to modify the titles to include the information in the Legend so that people know what it is that is occurring at 6pm each month... (11 months ago)

brent: Hi umdatalib, thanks for your comment. You are right on here. This title is totally meaningless. This is a serious issue in the present version of Swivel. We have a new version coming out in early '08 that will solve all these issues. We've totally rewritten the graph code and interface, giving a lot more explicit control over graph types, colors, titles, legends and labels. (11 months ago)

Count of Department
by Department..

sara: This is interesting! So this means the Economics department data has been downloaded the most? Or Economics department faculty members have done the most downloads? (10 months ago)

Amy West: Possibly neither. ICPSR creates a single row for each data file w/in a study; if studies chosen by Econ have loads of files, then that should result in a distorted table. I loaded the data partly to test Swivel and partly to test the info from ICPSR...Still not always sure what ICPSR *or* Swivel is telling me :) (10 months ago)

Unidentified
Persons..

              Natalie:
              I wonder if the decrease in unidentified persons might be related to decreased crime rates or innovations in forensics that might make it easier to identify remains.
              
                (10 months ago)
              
              Amy West:
              According to BJS: "Of the 2,900 National Crime Information Center records that contained data on the manner of death, 27% were ruled homicides; 12%, accidental deaths; 7%, natural causes; and 5%, suicides."  Since we're only talking about a few hundred unidentified individuals total per year, 27% of them would be such a small number that comparisons to the crime rate would probably not be valid.   Forensics improvements *would* make sense, although I'm not aware of evidence in support of it (haven't looked either).
              
                (10 months ago)
              
              mgoodman:
              I really like the improved forensic science theory.   Wasn't DNA matching beginning to be widely used in the early 90's?

Since so many of the incidents are from Texas and California, I would have expected to see a subtle decline post 2001, as stepped up border security would have resulted in more crossers being intercepted before they had the chance to perish in the desert. 
              
                (10 months ago)