Numbers

As the IRS scandal grows, the Department of Health and Human Services today published a blog post titled "Health Datapalooza IV Tops Off a Huge Year in Data Liberation":

Health Datapalooza IV wrapped up last week with over 1900 attendees and 80 companies, this was the biggest ‘palooza’ yet. Kicked off by Secretary Sebelius for the second year in a row, this year’s event was a tremendous display of health data in action...

At HHS, we have evolved and improved how we make health data available to the public. Last year, we launched a new version of healthdata.gov and made it significantly easier for our internal publishers to get their datasets listed, both manually and through an application programming interface (API)...

Although the data that the HHS is "liberating" is not linked to personal individual health information, the government will soon be in possession of new datasets of just such personal information once the Affordable Care Act kicks in on January 1, 2014, and individuals are required to prove via the IRS that they have health insurance.

Disappointing first time claims numbers as Reuters reports:

You could almost feel the tension in the digital universe this morning, prior to 8:30 EST, at which time the Bureau or Labor Statistics would be releasing the employment number for April. The suspense—oh, the excruciating suspense! Would the number for new hires match expectations? Would the overall number of unemployed drift downward again toward what has lately become the magic threshold number of 8.0 percent?  Would the White House find, in the numbers, another ball to spike?