News Summary

• When government supplies raw material for publishable research, academia starts to look more attractive to people who might otherwise take their skills elsewhere.
• A useful dataset can do more than answer a clever research question; it can make an academic career more viable.
• The right data might give a dissertation enough traction to become a whole sequence of papers.
• The scale of the data subsidy is no longer small.
• Data.gov reports 361,525 datasets in its catalog.
• IPUMS reports 2.6 billion records, more than 2,500 datasets, and a user community above 340,000.