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While bullshit may reach its apogee in the political domain, this is not a course on political bullshit. Instead, we will focus on bullshit that comes clad in the trappings of scholarly discourse. Traditionally, such highbrow nonsense has come couched in big words and fancy rhetoric, but more and more we see it presented instead in the guise of big data and fancy algorithms - and these quantitative, statistical, and computational forms of bullshit are those that we will be addressing in the present course.

About Vibrant Planet Vibrant Planet is building a global adaptive management system to accelerate natural carbon drawdown, while mitigating immediate climate change impacts. The team's initial focus is restoring Western US forests to mitigate wildfire risk while stabilizing carbon, water reliability, and biodiversity through a critically-needed data foundation and tech platform that supports better decision making at the ground level. The platform addresses other related issues, including wildland-urban interface risk mitigation and land use planning.   

The Transformation Journey Program is the result of 5 years of work, translating the outcomes of the 4 r3.0 Blueprints on Reporting, Accounting, Data, and New Business Models into a step-by-step process for all organisations of all sizes and constituencies on how to become thriveable and creating system value.

The Invest in What Works State Standard of Excellence sets a national benchmark-a "north star"-for how state governments can consistently and effectively use evidence and data in budget, policy, and management decisions to achieve better outcomes for their residents.

EJSCREEN is an environmental justice mapping and screening tool that provides EPA with a nationally consistent dataset and approach for combining environmental and demographic indicators. EJSCREEN users choose a geographic area; the tool then provides demographic and environmental information for that area. All of the EJSCREEN indicators are publicly-available data. EJSCREEN simply provides a way to display this information and includes a method for combining environmental and demographic indicators into EJ indexes. 

EPA partners with more than 50 data contributors from various government agencies, academic institutions, and other organizations to compile a key set of indicators related to the causes and effects of climate change. These indicators also provide important input to the National Climate Assessment and other efforts to understand and track the science and impacts of climate change. Explore the indicators below. 

What A Neural Network Thinks About Your Neighborhood--And Why It Matters http://ift.tt/2aT4OV2

How Crowdsourcing And Machine Learning Will Change The Way We Design Cities http://ift.tt/2aH1IjN

Gapminder is a non-profit venture - a modern "museum" on the Internet - promoting sustainable global development and achievement of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals.

The Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science (PLOTS) is a community which develops and applies open-source tools to environmental exploration and investigation. By democratizing inexpensive and accessible "Do-It-Yourself" techniques, Public Laboratory creates a collaborative network of practitioners who actively re-imagine the human relationship with the environment. The core PLOTS program is focused on "civic science" in which we research open source hardware and software tools and methods to generate knowledge and share data about community environmental health. Our goal is to increase the ability of underserved communities to identify, redress, remediate, and create awareness and accountability around environmental concerns. PLOTS achieves this by providing online and offline training, education and support, and by focusing on locally-relevant outcomes that emphasize human capacity and understanding.

My recommendation to Bloomberg and other mayors would be to open the analytics to the public so that everyone has access and can contribute solutions. Perhaps a lesser concern, keeping this type of information private gives incumbents insider information when assessing what issues voters are most concerned about.

PlaceSpeak is a location-based public engagement platform that vets citizen users to their actual addresses and connects them with proponents of relevant local issues. It informs evidence-based decision-making and public policy development by delivering verifiable data. It s customers include local governments, the property development industry, public and regulated agencies, utilities and community groups.

The Arts are key to so many things: human expression, education, economies, community development, and innovation in technology and human thought. Why is this critical component of our humanity still undervalued and under-resourced? We need to find the language and data to help society understand how cultural ecosystems work and why it must support them to ensure its own well-being and survival. At CSI, we create project partnerships to demonstrate and measure how arts operate in promoting sustainability and resiliency. Our projects always target the same outcome: empower the arts and humanity.

The Institute for Applied Economics at LAEDC performs objective research for a wide range of clients, detailing economic impact of development, business operations, and regulation, as well as providing intelligence about specific industry clusters, labor force, and workforce development issues.  The Institute's reports provide decision makers with critical information from which to make informed decisions.  In addition to providing on-demand research per client requirements, the Institute also provides foundational research to ensure LAEDC's combined programs for economic development are on target, ranging from our collaboration with workforce investment boards to major initiatives such as the L.A. County Strategic Plan for Economic Development.

Healthy City is an information + action resource that unites community voices, rigorous research and innovative technologies to solve the root causes of social inequity.

We build open source software. We help agencies open up their data. We report on urban issues. We offer technical assistance to public agencies, and we build communities around our initiatives in order to seed an open and evolving ecosystem of technology tools that further the public interest.

The Startup America Partnership is a private-sector alliance intended to dramatically increase the development, prevalence and success of innovative, high-growth U.S. firms.

The Edward Lowe Foundation has developed an interactive resource center that allows users to explore economic activity in their own regions-and across the country. YourEconomy.org (YE) provides detailed information about the performance of businesses from a national to a local perspective by following individual establishments who have a DUNS number. Of particular significance, YE depicts a dynamic journey of how business communities are evolving through time as opposed to traditional research and data sources that focus on a static moment.

U.S. Census Bureau State & County quick facts