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According to Michael. A. Conte, Ph.D., RegionalOneSource's founder and CEO, "While the Internet has made statistical information abundant, it has not made it easy to find specific answers to statistical questions. USEdition puts a tremendous variety of statistical information into the hands of the everyday, non-expert user."
"The product is built around three core concepts: First, we have compiled data from many disparate sources into a single database. Second, we have developed a very sophisticated user interface that allows non-technical users to formulate complex questions without having any advance knowledge of how to use the application. Third, context-sensitive help videos are available at all stages of using the tool, so even the most computer-phobic of users will feel that they have a friendly guide at their side."
USEdition enables users to produce a broad variety of reports. They can rank counties, cities or metro areas based on a data item of interest. They can also find the top 10, 50 or 100 counties or top ten states based on a data item that they choose. Users can print professionally formatted reports and include them in their own assignments, or they can download reports to a spreadsheet and continue to work on the data.
While most statistical products offer information about targeted subject areas, RegionalOneSource takes the opposite approach. According to Conte, "USEdition captures information about any subject that can be associated with a location. No other research tool provides data on such a wide variety of topics. We don't want to be an economist's research tool, or a sociologist's research tool. We want to be everyone's research tool."
USEdition provides statistical data on topics ranging from population to income and employment; birth, fertility and child health; weather and geographic characteristics; patents and technology trends; bankruptcies; housing trends, rents and house values; foreign trade and investment; disabilities; ancestry; languages spoken and English speaking ability; library usage patterns; patterns of crime; trends in education, including high school and college costs, faculty/student ratios and educational budgets; consumer price indexes and inflation; work location and travel to work; and occupational trends.
In addition to breadth of data, USEdition offers in-depth information about each topic covered. For example, Conte noted that "you can find information on population from the Census web site, but most people aren't aware that Census publishes data on population by single years of age and four-year age groups. This is usually used by expert demographers, but USEdition makes it possible for non-technical users to find out how many persons in a particular age range live in their state or county, and how this number is changing over time. This is useful for many different purposes; for example, school planners in small counties don't have the funds to commission expensive school-age population growth studies. With a few keystrokes and mouse clicks, they can find the exact numbers that will be driving their enrollments."
USEdition provides pages on which users answer three questions: What, Where and When. Having made their selections, they then receive a report reflecting the choices that they have made. Users can then manipulate the report in many ways, including producing growth rates, ranking, and organizing by states or metropolitan areas, and can easily go back to any of the other pages to modify their previous choices and optimize their results. The report can be viewed on the screen, printed to a professionally formatted .pdf file or output to a spreadsheet for further manipulation and analysis. Context-sensitive help videos are available on each page to provide a helping hand with basic functionality … and additional videos are available to users that teach them how to perform special analyses, such as calculating product-specific inflation rates for any beginning and ending year of their choice.
Another area where USEdition offers unique, in-depth data is births and pregnancy. Statisticians at RegionalOneSource have analyzed data from over 8 million birth certificates for 1990 and 2000, and present information on the number and rates for many congenital conditions, as well as measures of wellness such as Apgar scores, rates of delivery in hospitals versus other types of birthing facilities, delivery percentages by certified midwives versus physicians, and numerous other detailed aspects of natality and natal health. This information is offered for all counties with population greater than 100,000, consistent with publication limits imposed by the Centers for Disease Control, which collects and disseminates birth and death certificate data.
USEdition is available on an annual subscription basis to university and public libraries, corporations and government agencies, and to individual researchers on monthly and annual plans. RegionalOneSource continuously updates the information in their database and regularly expands the database when new content is found, all included in the subscription price. According to Conte, "We will be working in the next few months to add morbidity and mortality from death certificates, including the specific causes of death by state and county, and health trends from federal government health surveys. We also have a policy of adding information that any user requests if we can find it and feel that other users would be interested in the same information. We want users to know that RegionalOneSource is living up to its tag line - your single source for information by region."
Ash Black, RegionalOneSource's Director of Technology, was instrumental in developing USEdition's user interface. According to Black, "Our goal was to produce something very powerful … but also easy to learn and use. The average user will be up and running inside of two or three minutes, and will be able to do things that only professional statisticians have been able to accomplish previously."
Prior to founding OneSource Technologies, Michael Conte was a university professor and director of the Regional Economic Studies Institute, which was the largest university-based economic research institute in the U.S. when he left academia in 1999. Conte served for a year and a half as president of a bankruptcy information company in Baltimore prior to founding OneSource Technologies in 2001, with the goal of "putting sophisticated statistical query power into the hands of everyday users." According to Conte, "Even when I was director of a large research institute, with scads of data in our computers, I was impressed with the difficulty and time it took to get answers to even simple questions that we would be asked by the press. It was then that I decided that there had to be a better way."
USEdition is available at RegionalOneSource's web site, www.regionalonesource.com. Interested individuals can obtain a free 72-hour trial subscription on the web site, or can contact RegionalOneSource at 800-682-2250 to obtain a free 30-day institutional trial account.