2007

12/27/2007 07-057 Staff Announcement on Walter Kydd
12/27/2007 07-056 Updated SOP 3040
07/05/2007 07-042 Update on LED Partnership
07/03/2007 07-041 2007Q2 QWI Production Summary Report
07/02/2007 07-040 Forty two (42) States in OnTheMap Version 2
07/02/2007 07-039 New Q and A Section for OnTheMap Version 2
06/23/2007 07-038 Change in URL and Email Addresses
06/21/2007 07-037 Public Key for PGP Encryption
06/21/2007 07-036 OnTheMap Data Available for Download
06/18/2007 07-035 Selection of the New Census Bureau Director, Steve Murdock
06/16/2007 07-032 QWI Production Update
06/15/2007 07-031 Older Worker Reports
06/08/2007 07-030 Call for Geo Changes from State Partners
06/04/2007 07-029 LEHD Program Update
06/04/2007 07-028 Revised Release Schedule of OnTheMap version 2
06/04/2007 07-027 LED User Group Website Launches with Demo and Chat with John Carpenter on June 14

Staff Announcement - Walter Kydd (DID, Branch Chief)

From the Desk of Howard Hogan, Associate Director for Demographic Programs......

I am pleased to announce the selection of Walter Kydd as Chief of the Production Branch, Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics Program, Data Integration Division, effective Sunday, October 28, 2007.

Walter began his Census Bureau career in 1998 in the UNIX Systems Administration section of the Technologies Management Office, supporting UNIX servers in the FLD Directorate Regional Census Centers. He moved to the Demographic Directorate in 2001 when he was selected as section chief of the UNIX technical support staff, in the Computer Software and Technical Support Branch of the Demographic Statistical Methods Division. He supported production IT systems running the American Community Survey and the 2000 Sample Redesign.

In 2004, Walter was assigned to the Storage Area Network (SAN) Team in the Computer Services Division of the IT directorate. The SAN Team is responsible for the heterogeneous network of storage devices that support the Census Bureau IT enterprise. He began in the role of storage administrator and was ultimately appointed team leader.

Walter is a veteran with experience in the fields of accounting, electronics, and computer programming. His assignments have ranged from the Pentagon to the Persian Gulf, with stints in Europe and Asia. He has a M.S. in Information Systems and has also completed the MBA program at Strayer University. Walter resides with his family in Clinton, Maryland.

posted: Thursday, November 29, 2007

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Attached is updated Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) 3040 that clarifies how many copies of the PGP encryption software the Census Bureau will supply to the state partners at no cost. The description is in the Notes section. In brief, it is at least one and at most 4.

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All 45 LED partner states are now under either Experimental (3) or Regular (42) Production. Ohio and South Dakota are going through the Census Bureau clearance to join. Attached is the latest status of the Local Employment Dynamics partnership [PDF; File Size: 12KB] .

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2007Q2 QWI Production Summary Report [PDF; File Size: 52KB]

1. There were 45 states under QWI production - 1 under regular annual production (CA), 39 under regular quarterly production, and 5 under experimental production (AZ, DC, MI, NY, and WY).

2. Among the 39 regular quarterly production states, 23 (59%) delivered files on time, 14 (36%) were late, and 2 (5%) did not deliver.

3. Census Bureau completed 31 states (89%) on time and has a backlog of 4 states (11% - FL, IN, NC, and TX). Three of these states were late in file delivery.

4. Two states (MO and MS) had varying data quality issues.

5. The mean number of processing days for the 31 completed states was 64 days, and the median was 66 days. They represent sizable increases over the previous three quarters.

6. More than 6,900 hours of processing time were logged for the quarter despite more than 2 weeks of downtime due to the addition of a storage device.

7. Among the 5 experimental production states this past quarter, Michigan and Wyoming have decided to make their QWI public and join regular production in this quarter.

8. For the 2007Q3 quarter, we will

a. Address data quality issues identified for CA, MN, MO, MS, and NC, as well as AZ, DC, and NY.

b. Add 3 system boards to expand the current processing system to 36 CPU and 240GB RAM; acquire a solid state SAN to resolve I/O bottlenecks and processing issues; and begin system migration plans for completion in 2009.

c. Cease to produce SIC-based QWI.

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I am pleased to inform you that there will be 42 states in the final release of OnTheMap version 2. A total of 16 states are already available at http://lehd.did.census.gov.

Seventeen (17) more states will be introduced for the first time in OnTheMap version 2.2, scheduled to be released at the end of this month. Another 8 states - Alaska, Louisiana, Michigan, Mississippi, North Dakota, Rhode Island, Utah, and Wyoming - will be released in OnTheMap version 2.3 by the end of September.

The release of California in OnTheMap version 2 will be determined at a later time.

Visit http://lehd.did.census.gov/led/datatools/onthemap2.html if you wish to obtain more information. Thank you.

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Some of the more frequent questions and answers are being posted on the LED website at http://lehd.did.census.gov. In particular, the following are presently available at http://lehd.did.census.gov/led/datatools/onthemap2.html. If you have questions or wish to post additional answers, please make use of the listserv or the email address CES.Local.Employment.Dynamics@census.gov. We shall continue to post additional information as appropriate.

Q. What seems to be incorrect with the cross-state commute map? (posted 07/02/2007)
Q. How do I access OnTheMap data? (posted 06/21/2007)
Q. Whom should I contact if I have a question about geographic data sources or definitions? (posted 06/12/2007)
Q. What is a "Unit of Geography" in OnTheMap? (posted 06/10/2007)
Q. How are thermals generated? (posted 06/10/2007)
Q. What does "All Other Locations" in the shed reports mean? (posted 06/10/2007)

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Under a recent reorganization, the Local Employment Dynamics (LED) partnership was moved from the Demographic Surveys Division to the Data Integration Division.
Effective on Monday, June 25, our website will have a new URL at http://lehd.did.census.gov. Please bookmark accordingly.
Visitors using the old URL will be redirected to the new site by clicking a "bypass" button or after a 5-second message. The old URL will remain an alias until around August 1.
The change should be transparent to visitors using the http://www.census.gov and the selection of Local Employment Dynamics as the entry point.
Group email addresses will also be changed to:
CES.Local.Employment.Dynamics@census.gov
did.longitudinal.employer.household.dynamics@census.gov
did.lehd.production.staff@census.gov

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In accordance with Standard Operating Procedures 3040, Secured Electronic File Transfer by FTP and HTTP (located at http://lehd.did.census.gov/led/partnersonly/sop.html), a public key is renewed every year before the third production quarter for use with the PGP encryption package.

The 2007-2008 public key has been generated and posted at http://lehd.did.census.gov/led/partnersonly/pgp.html.

Please disseminate this information to all LED state partners. We will also send the same information to the State Information Technology Contacts (SITCON's).

Thank you.

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Multi-year OnTheMap data are now available for public download from http://vrdc.ciser.cornell.edu/onthemap/doc/index.html . Access to the data files can be obtained by registering with virtualrdc@cornell.edu. Login procedures will be provided after registration.

There are four types of data sets associated with OnTheMap data: origin-destination (OD) matrix, residence area characteristics (RAC), workplace area characteristics, and workforce indicators. Comprehensive documentation about the data files is available on the website. Three (3) implicates (independent draws from the synthesizing algorithm) of each OD and RAC file are available for the following states:

OnTheMap Version 2 (Years: 2002-2004)
Alabama, Colorado, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, and Virginia.

OnTheMap Version 1 (Years: 2002-2003)
Florida, Texas, and Washington

Users should be aware that these files can be quite large. Version 1 data will be withdrawn and replaced by Version 2 data as the latter become available without further notice. Maintenance releases will also be issued periodically in the future.

Users are encouraged to share their research findings and analytical insights for future versions of OnTheMap and synthetic data development in general at this listserv: lehd-onthemap@lists.census.gov. General questions about the LEHD program and LED partnership should be sent to CES.Local.Employment.Dynamics@census.gov, or visit http://lehd.did.census.gov for more information.

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From the Desk of Charles Louis Kincannon, Director of the US Census Bureau....

I wanted to let everyone at the Bureau know that the President has today nominated Steve Murdock, Chairman of the Demography and Organization Studies of the University of Texas at San Antonio, to be the new director of the Census Bureau. As many of you know, Dr. Murdock is the Director of the Texas State Data Center.

Dr. Murdock served as the State's chief expert on Census issues for the 1980, 1990 and 2000 censuses. He has advised five Texas governors, five Lieutenant Governors and four Speakers from both parties in Texas on the importance of Census participation and the uses of the economic, demographic, and social data for decision making.

If confirmed by the Senate, Dr. Murdock will work to ensure the best count possible and is committed to working with communities and businesses on how census data can be sued to inform decisions that enhance economic opportunities. He also understands the importance of reaching out to hard to count communities to encourage response and is a long-time supporter of the re-engineered census.

I have worked with Steve Murdock for 25 years in his capacity as head of the Texas State Data Center; as an active member of the Population Association of America; and most recently in his current capacity at the University of Texas, San Antonio. He is an outstanding and effective collaborator in our mission, and he will make a superb director as we move into the final stages of preparation for the 2010 census.

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We are in the last 2 weeks of the current QWI production cycle.

LED received data from 37 state partners under quarterly Regular Production (CA is under annual production at this time) - 24 were on time and 13 late. Two states did not deliver.

There have been two downtimes to introduce the new storage device, causing initially an unexpected delay of almost 3 weeks. This has been reduced to about 5 days at this time. Performance of the new device has not yet met our expectations, but efforts are continuing to make it perform better.

We still managed to log 5,400 hours of computer processing time so far. It is projected that between 2 and 6 states will not complete production due to data quality and coding issues and about 2 to 4 states will be late for QWI delivery.

Five (5) new states are under Experimental Production. Two have experimental QWI posted in the State Only section for state review. Response from the two states are expected by the end of this month.

A summary report will be sent after the end of the production quarter on June 30.

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Per our discussion in the monthly conference call, the Older Worker Profile Report for Iowa will be formally released on Monday, June 18. It will be announced by the Census Bureau and posted on the LED website at http://lehd.did.census.gov with downloadable "camera-ready" copy and data. Attached is a preview version [PDF; File Size: 1.22MB]. Since it is a template report, the others will look quite similar. We will be publicizing this series of reports to congressional committees, NIA, AARP, and interested organizations. We also invite joint activities with interested state partners. Thanks.

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The start of the third production quarter is usually the one where LED implements geographic changes such as the definitions of Workforce Investment Board (WIB) areas (See http://148.129.75.164/led/partnersonly/doc/SOP3030.pdf [PDF; File Size: 16KB] for more details). This is a call to all partner states about any such changes. The deadline for us to receive these changes is COB Monday, June 18.

In the long run, we plan to adopt the use of the American Service Locator system so that the information can be updated without making these calls.

our kind dissemination of this message to all partner states is greatly appreciated.

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The following message was distributed widely in the Census Bureau today. There are a number of acronyms that are internal to the Census Bureau - my apologies for not providing further descriptions about them. I hope the update is comprehensive and informative. Please let me know if you have questions or comments.

Jeremy

OnTheMap version 2.1 was released in the afternoon of Friday, June 1. One-day tracking statistics showed 86,000 hits, 350 unique visitors, and 150GB of traffic for that application alone - more than triple the previous daily averages. Since we are only at the half-way point of the phased release of OnTheMap version 2, we expect continuing increase in web traffic as new states are added and the word spreads.

The attached sample [PDF; File Size: 212KB] shows the flexibility and ease of using OnTheMap to respond to a user question of "How many people work in the city of Portland, Oregon and live across the Columbia River in Clark County, Washington?" It takes 10 simple steps and less than 2 minutes to complete both map and report.

LEHD is working with MSO and the Employment and Training Administration (ETA) to market OnTheMap and the Community Economic Development HotReports developed by the DataFerrett staff, including two workshops in the Workforce Innovation Conference in July, launching a LED User Group website in two weeks, and active participation in the Congressional Fair this week.

In securing a reliable and stable web environment, we are working closely with CSVD, ISSRO, SSD, ITSO, and others to migrate the current test and production web configuration to 3 Egenera blade servers. The current project plan anticipates the completion of the migration around the end of July when OnTheMap version 2.2 will be released to add another 17 states to the application.

With the recent addition of New York, the voluntary federal-state partnership known as Local Employment Dynamics (LED) has grown to 45 state partners including the District of Columbia, covering more than 90 percent of the nation?s population. Half of the remaining 6 states have already committed to join LED. We will be in active discussions with the 3 remaining states, and are reasonably optimistic that LEHD will become a national program in the next year or two.

During the last year, the LED Steering Committee developed a plan to ensure the future of the partnership by setting 5 goals: making the program national, expanding the user base, providing training, addressing data quality issues, and maintaining a culture of innovation.

The LED state partners supply more than 100 million new records each quarter to the Census Bureau. We presently spend about 6,500 hours of computing to (a) integrate them with other Census Bureau data sources and produce the flagship product known as Quarterly Workforce Indicators (QWI), and (b) update the LEHD integrated data infrastructure, which currently has more than 6 billion records.

To ensure timely production and delivery of results, LEHD strives for a viable and stable production environment by continuously fine-tuning hardware, software, and computer codes; streamlining workload; adding human and computing resources; and accelerating the migration of the current production system to blade servers as early as 2008. The recent successful deployment of a Storage Area Network provides 75TB of usable storage space. Thanks to ACSO, the LEHD production processing capacity will be able to upgrade to 36 CPU and 240GB RAM around the beginning of July. In addition, justification for the acquisition of a 512GB Solid State RAM Disk is being prepared.

In safeguarding its strategic asset of data, LEHD exercises strict data stewardship by adhering to sound policies and best practices, implementing physical and structural firewall restrictions, and applying state-of-the-art statistical methods. The LEHD computing system is among the first in the Census Bureau to receive certification and accreditation in April 2007 under the new federal information technology security requirements.

OnTheMap and the imminent release of SIPP Synthetic BETA are pioneering partial synthetic data products developed by LEHD. They will significantly advance the study and use of this innovative and emerging approach to make analytically valid data available for public use while strictly protecting the confidentiality of the respondents to the original data. Professor Donald Rubin of Harvard University will chair an invited session organized by LEHD in the upcoming Joint Statistical Meetings - a short 14 years after he proposed the use of synthetic data in response to a report by the Panel on the Confidentiality and Data Access.

The advance of integrated and synthetic data is a tribute to the vision and continuing support of the Census Bureau, which launched the LEHD program in 1998. Since the inception of the program, the leadership and expertise of the Senior Research Fellows - Professor John Abowd of Cornell University, Professor John Haltiwanger of University of Maryland, and earlier Dr. Julia Lane of Urban Institute ? have helped to build a solid foundation and propel the program forward to its current state.

In turn, their efforts also helped to recruit, develop, utilize, and retain a talented and top quality LEHD staff. For example, through the Student Temporary Employment Program (STEP), interns spend at least 2 years with LEHD, make significant contributions to the LEHD program, and complete their thesis work with major use of LEHD data. To date, LEHD has maintained a perfect record ? 12 out of 12 STEP interns have graduated with doctorate degrees. Three (3) of them are retained by the Census Bureau; 2 in other parts of the federal government; 2 in academia; and 5 in private industry.

The continuing collaboration with the CES, especially in making extracts of LEHD restricted use data available through the Census Research Data Centers, will also be instrumental in supporting the research community as well as deriving Title 13 benefits for the Census Bureau.

I am proud to share these fruits of your dedicated efforts with you, and look forward to additional innovative developments and accomplishments in the coming years. Please let me know if you have questions or comments. Thank you.

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Attached is a revised release schedule [PDF; File Size: 16KB] for OnTheMap version 2. It shows that

1. Release of version 2.1 occurred on June 1 instead of the original May 31.

2. California has been postponed indefinitely at this time due to data issues.

3. New states have been identified for version 2.3 with 2 states (Michigan and Wyoming) still pending at this time.

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An independent LED User Group website located at http://www.skilledwork.org/ledusers.html will be launched on June 14, 2007. John Carpenter, the lead designer of the online mapping and application tool OnTheMap, will give a live demonstration of the latest version and chat with interested participants from 2:00 to 3:30 pm, Eastern Time. The session is open to all interested parties. There is no charge to join. It is an excellent opportunity to find out more about the popular tool and its new features first hand. In order to participate, go to http://www.skilledwork.org/led_presentations.html and follow the detailed instructions. The LED User Group website is not affiliated with the Census Bureau.

Please diseeminate to all state LMI offices and interested parties. Thanks.

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