Census Bureau Participates in Manufacturing Day

Posted on October 5, 2012 by jennifer
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Written by: Tom Mesenbourg, Acting Director

This week, we celebrate our manufacturing statistics in anticipation of not only the first-ever Manufacturing Day, but also the beginning of the 2012 Economic Census.

This month, we will begin mailing forms to millions of businesses throughout the country for the 2012 Economic Census — the official five-year measure of the American economy. This census serves as the foundation for the gross domestic product (GDP) and other indicators of economic performance, including several timely measures of manufacturing activity.

Today has been designated as the first-ever Manufacturing Day and gives us an opportunity to highlight our manufacturing statistics as we look ahead to the economic census. We are joining a group of public and private organizations in celebrating American manufacturing by highlighting our statistics.

So what do our statistics tell us about U.S. manufacturing? According to the 2010 County Business patterns:

1.      Manufacturing was the fourth largest U.S. employer among economic sectors in 2010, behind only health care and social assistance, retail trade, and accommodation and food services. The top five states in terms of manufacturing employment in 2010 were: California, Texas, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Illinois.

2.      As of March 12, 2010, there were 10.9 million manufacturing employees with an annual payroll of $550.4 billion. The average annual payroll per employee in manufacturing was $50,700 in 2010.

3.      In 25 states, manufacturing is one of the top three employers. The 141,831 manufacturing establishments in these states employ more than 6 million people with nearly $293 billion in annual payroll.

Other Census Bureau statistics tell us even more about American manufacturing – according to the 2010 Annual Survey of Manufactures, the total value of shipments was an estimated $4.9 trillion in 2010. The Profile of Exporters/Importers: 2009-2010, showed that 60 percent of the known value of U.S. exports in 2010 came from manufacturing.

While today is manufacturing day, we collect statistics year-round at the Census Bureau on the manufacturing sector of our economy. These statistics, when combined with other Census Bureau information can help manufacturers learn about their industries and communities, information that can help them grow their businesses. Check out our monthly manufacturing indicator, as well as a host of other current measures of economic activity on your Apple or Android device by downloading our new mobile app, “America’s Economy.”

You can learn more about of our manufacturing statistics by watching the archived C-SPAN’s Washington Journal “America by the Numbers” segment on manufacturing.  In addition, visit business.census.gov to learn more about the 2012 Economic Census and be sure to check out our infographic on U.S. manufacturing.

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Help Us Model Predicted Mail Return Rates by Participating in the Census Challenge

Posted on September 27, 2012 by jennifer
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Written by: Tom Mesenbourg, Acting Director

We could not produce statistics about our nation’s people, places and economy without your help. Your participation in our surveys gives us the information that tells us how we are doing as a nation. And in turn, we are able to paint a portrait of not only our nation, but your community.

census challenge

Your participation is vital to the data we collect. But we also know you have a lot of great ideas to make us a better, more efficient agency that will continue to produce high-quality statistics.

We want to tap into those great ideas and have created the first Census challenge—to find a better way to predict mail return rates for small geographic areas, like neighborhoods, based on their demographic and socioeconomic characteristics.  This prize competition is authorized under Section 105 of the America COMPETES Reauthorization Act of 2011, Public Law 111-358 (2011).

The 2010 Census achieved a return rate of 79.3 percent, which was the rate of returned forms for all occupied housing units. However, census and survey return rates vary considerably across geographic areas. For example, 2010 Census mail-form return rates ranged across states from a high of 82 percent to a low of 65 percent, with even more variation at the neighborhood or census tract level. The Census Return Rate Challenge asks participants to model these variations using predictive variables found in the updated Census Planning Database which includes information from both the 2010 Census and the American Community Survey.

During the 2010 Census, the Census Bureau saved about $85 million in operational costs for every percentage point increase in the nation’s participation rate by mail. A postage paid envelope cost taxpayers 42 cents, compared to $57 for an enumerator to visit the household. The winning model will help us develop more efficient and effective data collection strategies for both our ongoing household surveys and the 2020 Census.

We are posting the challenge on <www.kaggle.com>, an online platform for predictive modeling competitions. Already, there are 86 teams, 98 participants and 533 entries, allowing us to crowdsource the best solution for how to tackle this challenge.

There is still time to participate. The challenge ends Nov. 1, 2012. Not only do participants get to challenge themselves, they could be rewarded for it. A total of $25,000 in prize money will be awarded for the best submissions.

This challenge is just one way the Census Bureau is changing how we do business, allowing you to be an engine of innovation. I am excited about the initiatives we currently have underway that promise to transform our methods, processes, and products and I hope you will help us, by entering the competition today.

For more information, please visit the Federal Register Notice and Census Bureau Research site.

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Census Bureau Recognized at White House Innovation Event

Posted on August 24, 2012 by jennifer
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Written by: Tom Mesenbourg, Acting Director

Yesterday at the White House, U.S. Chief Information Officer Steven VanRoekel recognized the Census Bureau as a leader in the effort to make government information more easily accessible to the public. He also used the opportunity to announce that our America’s Economy mobile app is now available for iPhone and iPad.  Congratulations to everyone who made this happen.  It truly was a team effort involving staff from the Communications, Information Technology, and the Research directorates as well staff from all our program directorates.

The Census Bureau is meeting the goals of the three-month-old Federal Digital Strategy by providing faster and easier access to the statistics we produce through the recently released mobile app and our Application Programming Interface, which offers developers and users greater access to 2010 Census and American Community Survey data.

Yesterday’s ceremony, and the recognition was  very nice, but these are just two examples of how the Census Bureau is innovating every day.   You can read VanRoekel’s blog here.

Posted in About the Agency, Digital Transformation | 2 Comments

The Times, They Are a-Changin’

Posted on August 21, 2012 by jennifer
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Written by: Tom Mesenbourg, Acting Director

As you know, Census Bureau Director, Bob Groves, resigned August 11, 2012 to become Provost at Georgetown University.  Bob was an inspirational leader and it was a privilege and a joy to work closely with him the past three years.

Effective August 12, I was appointed Acting Director.  I am honored to have been asked to lead this great organization and I look forward to working closely with our stakeholders, oversight organizations, partners, data suppliers, data users, and Census Bureau staff to make the Census Bureau an ever more efficient, effective, and responsive organization.  Dr. Nancy Potok is the new Deputy Director and I could not be more pleased.

We face a challenging future.  Resources will be constrained and possibly reduced.  Getting businesses, institutions, and households to participate in surveys and censuses will become more difficult.  Policy makers, public and private decision makers, and the general public demands for relevant, timely information will grow, and users will expect information to be easily accessible and to be available for small geographic areas and small population groups.

To respond to this future we must change.  We need to change the way we collect, compile, and produce statistics. We must offer multiple response options that facilitate reporting and reduce reporting burden. We must be more attentive and responsive to data providers concerns. And finally we must find ways to integrate Census Bureau data sets with public and private data sets  to develop new low cost products. I am excited about the initiatives we currently have underway that promise to transform our methods, processes, and products and you will hear more about them in future blogs.

I have been at the Census Bureau for almost 40 years, but I am more convinced than ever that we need to continue to innovate. Our employees have demonstrated that they can be engines of innovation and over the past several years, they have submitted hundreds of great ideas that save money and improve products and processes. We also need to be attuned to the concerns of our data providers. In January 2013, we will roll out an Internet reporting option for the American Community Survey that will make reporting easier for sampled households.

We also need to make our statistics more accessible, both for every day users and those who are just discovering them. On July 26, we released our first-ever Application Programming Interface (API), allowing developers to create apps using 2010 Census and American Community Survey information. We are already seeing developers create some great apps from the API.

During the first week of August, we followed up the release of the API with our first-ever mobile app, America’s Economy. This app provides users with instant access to 16 key economic indicators from not only the Census Bureau but also the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Bureau of Economic Analysis. The economist in me finds this app a cool new tool, and I encourage all of you to check it out and tell us how we can make it even more useful.

What information is available from the America’s Economy app? Last week, we released advance monthly retail sales. The app will show you that that advance estimates of U.S. retail and food services sales for July, adjusted for seasonal variation and holiday and trading-day differences, but not for price changes, were $403.9 billion, an increase of 0.8 percent (±0.5%) from the previous month and 4.1 percent (±0.7%) above July 2011.

The API and America’s Economy app are just the beginning when it comes to making our statistics more accessible and easier to use. In the coming months, you will see two more mobile apps from the Census Bureau. These apps will highlight the breadth of our statistics and the ways people can use them. You will also see changes coming to census.gov as we transform our website to place the statistics you need at your fingertips.

Posted in About the Agency, Digital Transformation, Measuring America | 1 Comment

The Data-to-Statistics Chain

Posted on August 10, 2012 by jennifer
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Federal statistical agencies face a set of common problems about which I’ve blogged in the past (The Future of Producing Social and Economic Statistical Information, Part I) — declining response rates producing cost inflation, meeting the demand for more timely statistics on smaller and smaller groups, harnessing new technologies, integrating new data sources into traditional survey statistical processes, and doing this all with declining budgets.  I’m convinced that the talent among the Census Bureau staff and its partners is up to the task of transforming the organization to meet future challenges.

However, not all challenges are technical or scientific.  One is ubiquitous to many common-good functions in a society – we take for granted essential facilitators of our day-to-day lives.  We count on electricity to power our electronic devices; we rely on clean water coming from our faucets at home; we assume our telephone calls will go through when we make them; we expect the bridges we drive over will support our cars.

These features of our lives are so central to our daily routines that we have trouble assigning a value to them.  Without them, our lives would be incomparable to our current ones.  What’s it worth to you to have clean water?  If the bridge didn’t exist, what would you be willing to spend to build it?  How central to our lives are these common good features?  Indeed, could we live without them, as a cost-saving strategy?

I have a cousin raised in an urban area who in her youth answered the question of “Where do peas come from?”  She said, “Peas come from the can my mother opens in the kitchen.”  She was correct, of course, but ignorant about the ultimate source of the vegetables, the farmer’s field.

Statistical information is a bit like that.  Every day we see in the paper statistical information purporting to describe our world.  To many people, that paper is the can of peas.  The media provided the information.  The faucet produced the clean water.  The outlet produced the electricity.

One of the key challenges to statistical agencies is to communicate their benefits to the larger society.  However, to fulfill the challenge, they need to describe a long chain of events.  The chain begins with residents of the society, who give freely their answers to surveys and censuses trusting in a pledge of confidentiality.  It ends with them using statistical aggregates of all those answers, to make important personal, community, and national decisions.  The statistical agency starts the whole chain of events, but there are many independent intermediaries.  If you don’t know the chain, you may misjudge the value of different steps in the chain.

When people understand the chain and appreciate the statistical information it produces, better informed judgments are made about the value of agencies to the society.  Clear, plain English, simple explanations of the data-to-statistics chain are a continual challenge.  We all need to do our part.

Note: This will be the last blog I write as Census Bureau director.  I have been honored to serve as director, and I hope future appointments for this position will be made from among scientists who are committed to technical innovations in the production of statistical information.  The Census Bureau must be a scientific organization to fulfill its mission because science is devoted to innovation and continuous improvement.

Posted in About the Agency, Measuring America | 4 Comments