database

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No silver bullet?

Byuclafaculty

From the LA Times: Californians will get the first chance to comment on President Obama’s proposals to make college more affordable during a public forum this week at Cal State Dominguez Hills, officials said. The Wednesday event is the first in a series of four public sessions held around the country — and the only one in California — to gather input on the president’s recently announced agenda to develop a college ratings system to help students select schools with the best bang for their buck… The ratings score card would be developed for the 2015 school year using such…

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It does no good but we’ll say it again…

Byuclafaculty

From time to time, we have complained about newspapers that feel compelled to print public payrolls – pay and names – on the grounds that the information is available.  We have noted that with some exceptions for top executives, such publication is an invasion of privacy and invites identity theft.  The newspaper answer is always some combination of a constitutional right – freedom of the press, etc. – plus the fact that the info is public.  Yes, the info has been public all along but before the internet came along, it was de facto private in that you had to…

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More on Posting of All UC Salaries

Byuclafaculty

In an August 8th op ed entitled “Our Next Governor Must Weigh in on State’s Right to Shield Personal Data” in the Sacramento Bee, senior editor Dan Morain reports on attempts to protect Internet privacy. Basically, the piece notes that high-tech firms take the position that the state should not get into the business of providing regulatory protection. Instead it should be left to the federal government so that there will not be 50 different regulatory schemes. You can read the op ed at http://www.sacbee.com/2010/08/08/2943054/dan-morain-our-next-governor-must.html Morain takes a sympathetic view of the need for privacy and notes that the California…

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Posting Salaries

Byuclafaculty

As is well known, state salaries are posted on websites available from such sources as the Sacramento Bee. You can go to the Bee website and find salary by name of a particular employee, including UC employees. Last October, I wrote an op ed for UCLA Today asking why the Bee thought it was a good idea to publish state salaries by name which could encourage identity theft or other abuse. The Bee could have alternatively provided the basic information using just job titles, pay distribution charts, etc., that would not identify individuals. See http://www.anderson.ucla.edu/documents/areas/fac/hrob/bee-post.pdf I asked the Bee why…

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Database on Higher Ed Including UCLA

Byuclafaculty

The database described below should get an award for being user-unfriendly. However, it does include UCLA and I did succeed (somewhat) in obtaining some data from it. I invite anyone with more patience to see what might be uncovered. Follow the directions as best you can. The database is at: http://www.tcs-online.org/Reports/Report.aspx An excerpt from a description from Inside Higher Ed:Follow the Money July 9, 2010 In a sea of often bewildering data about college spending practices, a small island of clarity is emerging. In conjunction with its third annual “Trends in College Spending” report, released today, the Delta Project on…