While this blog has been a lot of fun, I'm starting a new job next week and will no longer be posting here or making any updates over at New Jersey by the Numbers. In the newspaper industry, the type of work I do is called "computer-assisted reporting," or CAR, [...]
A special legislative committee on local government consolidation in 2006 suggested that New Jersey towns would require a "big stick" approach, as opposed to incentives (aka a "carrot"). Gov. Corzine's proposed cuts in state aid were presented as such an approach. However, after running the town-by-town numbers yesterday, my impression [...]
If Gov. Corzine's plan to slash municipal aid seems like harsh medicine, consider this: It's already been a tough fiscal decade for the state's municipalities. When adjusted for inflation, the years of aid "freezes" become years of aid decreases, and as you'll see, the result has been a steady rise [...]
Governor Corzine's stark budget message today picked up on old theme: New Jersey has too many municipalities, let's start merging towns. The governor used 10,000 population as a benchmark, and proposed creating financial incentives for towns smaller than 10K to consolidate, along the lines of merge or lose state aid. [...]
A colleague from a newspaper in Dallas recently invited me to address her staff about the use of data analysis in journalism. She was only half joking. "Why me?" I said. "You know more about this stuff than I do." "Maybe," she said. "But you'd be coming in from the [...]
Our mission as a news organization is ever-expanding, and in recent weeks, we've stepped up our coverage in several key areas. Such as the local bar scene. Some may call this type of coverage "fluff." But here at Stat Attack, we fully appreciate the significance of bar beat, and in [...]
Average Passing Rates: School Brookdale Oak View Language 94.4 96.2 Mathematics 96.4 96.0 Science 90.7 97.0 It was bound to happen. Every year, as part of our coverage of the annual New Jersey School Report Card, we analyze the test results and award stars to the state's highest achieving schools [...]
They're talking government consolidation up here in Bergen County. Almost everybody in New Jersey seems to believe that our property tax woes are tied to our over-abundance of local government agencies, and that combining some of the smaller units into larger, more efficient entities would ease the pain.
But there's [...]
The annual New Jersey School Report Card is coming out later this week, but state officials have already let us have at the test scores.
Reporting these scores has become increasingly challenging for the newspaper, mainly because there are so many of them. Until recently, New Jersey tested just 4th, 8th [...]
You've probably seen what the exits polls had to say about Clinton v. Obama in the Garden State. Here's another take.
We have town-by-town vote totals for 555 towns -- we're still waiting for Hudson County, as of Friday morning. I took these totals, divided towns into three groups, and [...]
As previously mentioned, our elves have been busy wandering the state, gathering town-by-town results from Tuesday's presidential primary.
We're almost done, and in addition to being able to view the results on the nj.com election page, colleague Andrew Garcia Phillips has developed a neat interactive map of the results.
[...]Our statistical elves have been hard at work this week preparing two new interactive Web sites.
Over on the nj.com elections page, we've put together a town-by-town results page. You can see how your community voted on both the Democratic and Republican side. The local returns are still coming [...]
Since it's an election day, we here at Stat Attack are ready to make a vow: If elected, we'll be tough on crime -- in a statistical sense, of course.
Here's some facts and figures I turned up this morning while frolicking @ the Bureau of Justice Statistics.
Click [...] 
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We usually like to stay high above the fads, just so we're in position to swoop down for some analytical deconstruction.
But we have to admit, over the past few days we've abandoned our usual pursuits -- taxation, demographics, news you can use -- and plunged right [...]
Yesterday I happened to catch Mitt Romney on TV, delivering a stump speech in South Florida, clad in a shiny white guayabera.
Ok, I promise in this blog I won't stoop to discussing anything out of my element, such as politics or hair styles.
But when Candidate Romney told the crowd he [...]
Click to EnlargeSuper-duper preliminary numbers....
Not to be a tease, but when that question comes up, I have to admit: I don't know for sure. Pin me down, I'd say "probably." By how much? That gets tricky.
But it's certainly a question on everybody's mind, and it's become a [...]
Whenever the Super Bowl comes around, I'm reminded of a study from long ago that found an increase of domestic violence on Super Bowl Sunday.
It was one of those findings that was so sensational, it just stuck in my mind, even though I can't remember exactly when I first [...]
Source: IRS enforcement data
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Thanks to wide wire service distribution, an IRS press release last week touting stricter tax enforcement of millionaire filers is getting wide play.
And, yes, the premise is true, at least over the four years for which the IRS actually provides [...]
The Giants run to the Super Bowl comes as a big surprise to most observers, not so much because the team was unspectacular in most regular season victories, but because the squad looked generally horrible during some of their losses.
In fact, after getting thumped by the Packers in week 2, [...]
New Jersey school enrollment has been growing faster than then the general population growth rate. But the general population growth rate has slowed to a trickle, and the Feds are projecting school enrollment in New Jersey to follow suit.
Here's what the National Center for Education Statistics is forecasting [...]
Source: Texas Transportation Institute
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So massive toll hikes being pushed as a salve to the state's debt woes may or may not be the medicine New Jersey needs. But one things for sure, the shock treatment has folks shocked.
Well cheer up for some [...]
Source: betterbet.comBetter Than Polling?Impeccable [...]
Our news neighbors to the north, The Journal News of lower New York State, has a project going that looks at school performance in the context of school taxes.
Some things we've learned here in New Jersey after many, many, many School Report Cards:
-- If you start comparing test scores [...]
Source: nj.com/news/bythenumbers/
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Gov. Jon Corzine's proposal to attack New Jersey's massive debt problem by putting increased highway tolls on the front lines has certainly sparked a buzz.
By now some of you might be wondering -- When's somebody going to build an interactive online [...]
We don't read the Sunday comics anymore. There's nothing in there that appeals to our analytical sense of humor.
In fact, I assigned our Research Bureau (Division of Demographics and the Popular Culture) to find that last time an American comic strip included the Census Bureau as a major plot line. [...]
A reader from Oceanport writes:
Has the Star Ledger ever done any numbers of the increase cost of utilities over the past 7-10 years with the major utility companies? I just got hit with another electric increase by GPU. My costs on utilities have increased almost 40% in the past decade. [...]
Source: realclearpolitics.com
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Here at Stat Attack, we detest the horse race. We believe presidential politics should be all about where the candidates stand on issues, not about where they stand in the polls.
Oh, forget about it. We cannot tell a lie. We love politics [...]
A new consultant's report for COAH today finds that New Jersey will need to add more than 115,000 affordable housing units by 2018.
How to pay for it all? According to an article in The Star-Ledger today:
State Community Affairs Commissioner Joseph V. Doria confirmed yesterday one proposal under serious consideration [...]
Source: Census CPS
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As the Iowa caucuses kick off the 2008 presidential campaign, for real, today, we were reminded of the morning 20 years ago when Stat Attack was based in Wisconsin and invited onto a radio show to comment on the Wisconsin primary.
Alas, our analytical powers [...]
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A reader passes on the following observation and questions:
I always look at the obits. I commented to my wife that in the last week there seem to be more obits than usual. She noted that there are some theories that people who are near death try [...]
| Projected Change in House Seats, 2010 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| State | 2006 projection |
2007 projection |
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| Arizona | 2 | 2 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Florida | 2 | 1 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Georgia | 1 | 1 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Illinois | -1 | -1 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Iowa | -1 | -1 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Louisiana | -2 | -1 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Massachusetts | -1 | -1 | [...]
| New Jersey Population | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Population | Native | Foreign Born | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| 2006 | 8,724,560 | 6,970,307 | 1,754,186 | 20.1% | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| 2000 | 8,414,350 | 6,938,023 | 1,476,327 | 17.5% | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| 1990 | 7,730,188 | 6,763,578 | 966,610 [...]
Does Video Game Violence Impact Children Off-screen?Enclosure: [download] Source: Journal of Adolescent Health
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Off the top of our heads, we would assert that the excessive time Jr. spends in front of the tube, watching passively or interacting via video console(s), could lead to two potential side-effects: illiteracy and obesity.
Snow and The Early PrimaryEnclosure: [download]
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State pols moved the New Jersey presidential primaries up to Feb. 5 this year, hoping that New Jersey voters would have more of a say in the process.
But according to The Record of Hackensack, the move could backfire. The lead story in Monday's paper reported [...] The Globalization of Anti-Immigrant SentimentEnclosure: [download] Source: Pew Global Attitudes Project
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2007 might be remembered in New Jersey as the year in which immigration emerged as an explosive local issue. But here's some perspective from the folks at the Pew Global Attitudes Project: Immigration is unpopular throughout the globe. [...] If You Must Count Calories...As a man of hard data, I have a bit of a problem with calorie counting. Not that there's anything wrong with keeping track of what you eat. It's just that I have little confidence that most people can produce accurate data about their own intake. I mean, first of all, [...] For Perspective, Our New AROD-OMETERThat sure was a heart-warming story about how newly crowned AL MVP Alex Rodriguez, through his own personal magnanimity, ended his contract impasse with the Yankees. Here at Stat Attack, we try not to let the facts get in the way of a good story, but alas, we're [...] The Ever Elusive Average Tax Bill
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source: http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/
Some quality time?
Confession: I'm young enough to have grown up with video games. But old enough to have played the Atari 2600 and it's one-button joystick.
With the college bowls and NFL playoffs approaching, 'tis the season for law enforcement to smash gambling rings. The 
Stat Attack is heading down to 
You've probably seen a Web site's audience size quantified in "hits." In recent years, this measure has been refined to the counting of unique visitors to a site and the number of pages each visitor views.
source: http://pewsocialtrends.org/
Here at Stat Attack, we provide a mixture of our own research with interesting studies by others we come across.
What are the odds?
"I want you to know this," a loyal reader wrote yesterday. "Thirty-one people have been killed in wood chipper accidents between 1992 and 2002, according to a 2005 Journal of the American Medical Assn. report."
Courtesy: Molly Wald, bestfriends.orgWe at Stat Attack have expressed 
The Star-Ledger ran a story in July about a couple of local brothers who were going on a reality TV show because they invented a new kind of golf practice net that returned balls automatically.
Maybe this is one of those times where if you have to ask, you don't want to know.
