This Friday, CSDE Regional Affiliate Amy Bailey and Allison Suppan Helmuth will co-present on ZIP code boundary changes. ZIP Codes are an important geographic identifier, frequently the best spatial measure available in spatially-referenced administrative data. As such, they represent an underutilized, potentially valuable tool allowing social scientists to embed individuals and institutions within neighborhood contexts. However, ZIP Codes frequently change, particularly in areas undergoing rapid change. Unfortunately, no tool allows researchers to account for these changes. In this presentation, Bailey and Helmuth will briefly cover the history of ZIP Codes and how the intended usage by USPS differs from the ways in which social and demographic researchers might want to use them.

The Computational Demography Working Group will meet virtually this quarter! Please join us on Thursday, April 30, at 12:00pm for a presentation and discussion of SafeGraph Mobility Data by registering through this link. Sociology graduate student Chuck Lanfear will demonstrate a digital trace data set for mobility research obtained by Adrian Dobra of UW Statistics and CS&SS. They are soliciting new project and collaborations ideas for these unique data.

CSDE is inviting applications for its 3rd annual Summer Grant Writing Program – a chance for you to learn more about NIH grant-writing and to workshop your proposal with other participants and with experienced senior faculty. Writing a grant in isolation can be mystifying—instead, we aim to create a group experience that is still hard work, but which will be supportive, fun, productive, and ultimately rewarding.  If you’ve been on the fence about writing a proposal, now is the time to dive in! Full information and the application instructions and form are at this link. 

“Can’t I please just visit one friend?” is a question that many of us have asked during social distancing. Nevertheless, in a website that visualizes social networks, CSDE Affiliates Steven Goodreau and Martina Morris demonstrate how visiting “just one friend” can undo the work of measures to mitigate the spread of COVID-19. The website depicts multiple network simulations of a 200 households community using the programming language R.

The first PAA2020-V real time sessions begin Thursday, April 23.  Click here for a list of sessions that will take place in real time.  Each link on this list will take you to the sessions’ page in the online/mobile app, and from there you can find each session’s zoom or other platform link, which are not posted directly online for security reasons. You can also click on a session in the schedule section of the online app for that information, which will also allow you to see which sessions will be asynchronous. Please note that some sessions require preregistration and some sessions require passwords.

The National Institute on Aging (NIA) and the Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research (OBSSR) are collaborating on two survey item repositories. Researchers are encouraged to use these platforms (NIH Public Health Emergency and Disaster Research Response (DR2) and PhenX Toolkit) to enhance research capacities for comparative insights and to advance knowledge more efficiently and effective.

The National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities (NIMHD) within the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has issued a Notice of Special Interest soliciting research proposals that aim to understand how the COVID-19 pandemic is affecting minority health and health disparities. In particular, the institute is interested in understanding how state and local public health policies affect health disparities, the role protective interventions may have in mitigating health disparities that COVID-19 may cause, and how behavioral or biological mechanisms may contribute to the spread of COVID-19.

On April 9, the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) Board on Higher Education and Workforce (BHEW) hosted the first event in a new virtual series discussing post-secondary responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. The discussion series, which will take place over the course of several weeks, will bring together leaders from academia, industry, government, and civil society to address new developments in COVID-19 responses in different sectors of the research community. Each virtual event will touch on a specific topic on how researchers and their institutions can help support public health efforts. The next event is April 22 and there is one each week through out the month. Sign up for the series at the Eventbrite page.

For those of you with interests in researching the economic impacts of COVID-19, you may be interested to know that the Census Bureau was granted authority from the Office of Management and Budget to add COVID-19 questions to its business surveys. The posting of this authorization is here. Questions to measure the impact of the pandemic will be added to five surveys: the Manufacturers’ Shipments, Inventories & Orders (M3) Survey; the Building Permits Survey; the Monthly Wholesale Trade Survey; the Monthly Retail Surveys; and the Quarterly Services Survey. The Census Bureau will be asking businesses whether they have temporarily closed any locations for at least one day, whether they experienced delays in their supply chains or product shipments, and whether those delays impacted revenue.