The Real World: DSSG This is the true story of 42 strangers picked to live in a dorm, work together, and have their lives taped to find out what happens when people stop being polite and start getting real. Welcome to The Real World: DSSG. Okay, so we don’t tape their lives (except for when [...]
Over 1.2 million or 7.1% high school students drop out every year. Dropping out of high school is costly for both the students and society: 30% of dropouts are unemployed, their average annual income is $20,241 (34% lower than high school graduates), and a dropout costs taxpayers an average of $292,000 over a lifetime due [...]
A crucial but often overlooked consideration when working with data is: what is the best way to organise it? The way we organise our data can change not only how we interact with it, but also our mental model of that data. A well-designed database should efficiently organise both the data that we have now, [...]
Over the past year, the nation has faced a series of highly publicized adverse interactions between the police and the public, from Ferguson to Baltimore to New York. These incidents have had dire and occasionally deadly consequences for individuals and have eroded public trust in the police, making it more difficult for the majority of [...]
What’s the problem? Hundreds of millions of tons of hazardous waste are generated every year. When this waste isn’t handled properly, the results can be disastrous. Chemical spills and explosions pose a serious threat to human health and the environment -- in 2014, there were over 20,000 spills in the US, leading to more than [...]
This year’s Knight News Challenge asks, “How might we make data work for individuals and communities?” Data Science for Social Good and its parent organization, the Center for Data Science and Public Policy, pursue answers to this question every day. We submitted four of our projects to this year’s challenge so we can develop them [...]
A college education is one of the keys to economic security and prosperity in the United States. Bachelor’s degree holders earn nearly twice as much as high school graduates, enjoy better health and hold jobs that offer a greater sense of accomplishment, independence, creativity, and social interaction (Oreopoulos and Petronijevic 2013). But there are large [...]
As data scientists, we often get lost in the techniques and methods of our trade. In doing so, we can forget to ask important questions: who will be affected by our work? How we are ensuring that by doing ‘good’ for one group, we are not inadvertently harming another? Ethical controversies have dominated recent data [...]
Many cities are working to prevent the negative impacts of vacant buildings caused by population loss. Cincinnati is one such city, with a more than 40% reduction in population since 1950 and a large stock of historic buildings. This effect coupled with the housing crisis of 2008 has produced new challenges in Cincinnati and many [...]
Are you hearing a lot of data-themed buzzwords lately? Are you wondering whether the use of data science can help a project on which you are working? Using data makes it easy to prove the efficacy of a project and inform your decisions. More simply, data science is the process of taking all the data [...]