College Colors Day in Alabama

In case you’re not a sports fan, or live outside the state of Alabama, you may not know that the intercollegiate sports season is here. Here at the Capstone, we have a big football game (vs. Clemson) on Saturday, and women’s volleyball & soccer open their seasons tomorrow night, against Western Kentucky and Memphis respectively.

You may be asking, how does this tie into government documents? Well, yesterday, August 27th, Governor Riley signed a proclamation declaring Friday, August 29th (that’s tomorrow!), ‘College Colors Day’ in Alabama. Alabamians are encouraged to “wear clothing that features their favorite college or university.”

Apparently, College Colors Day is an annual event. From the web site:

College Colors Day, which coincides with both “back to school” and the kick-off of intercollegiate athletics, including football, seeks to celebrate and promote the traditions and spirit that make the college traditions great by encouraging fans, alumni and students to wear apparel of their favorite college throughout the day of Friday, August 29, 2008…The annual College Colors Day celebration is organized by The Collegiate Licensing Company (CLC), and its Consortium of colleges and universities. For more information about CLC, please visit www.clc.com

Alabama is not the only state celebrating this day – other states include Michigan, Minnesota, and Wyoming.

Alabama Health Statistics

Today’s Birmingham News includes an article on Alabama’s infant mortality rate, which “rose last year to 10 deaths per 1,000, giving the state a record for infant deaths worse than Latvia, Macedonia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, according to state and federal data.” You may be wondering where to find some of that data – either on infant mortality rates or other vital statistics.

For state data, the Alabama Center for Health Statistics is the place to start. As part of the Department of Public Health, the Center “collects and tabulates health-related statistical data and operates the vital records system for the state of Alabama.” The site includes statistics on birth/pregnancy, marriage and divorce, and mortality, as well as some information by county. Recent publications cover Hospice Use in Alabama, Induced Terminations of Pregnancy Occurring in Alabama, and a 2006 update of Alabama County Health Profiles.

The majority of information on the site is available in pdf format; however the site does have a Natality database and a Mortality database, where users can create their own tables and download the data in .csv format. Currently data is available from 1990-2005.

For additional health statistics, including how Alabama stands among the 50 states in certain health categories, the National Center for Health Statistics (part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) is your best bet.  NCHS covers the same topics as ACHS, as well as topics such as health insurance coverage, doctor visits, oral/dental health and more.  In addition to recent statistics, NCHS has also digitized older volumes of Vital Statistics of the United States – which date back to 1890.

Crime Statistics

When searching for crime statistics for the state of Alabama, the best place to start is the Criminal Justice Information Center’s Statistical Analysis Center. Currently the site includes statistics on Crime in Alabama, crime victims, drug-related crimes, domestic violent crimes – including by county – and more, some dating as far back as 1995.  The site also includes statistics on law enforcement personnel.

They have conveniently linked to other agencies and organizations that provide related statistics, such as non-death homicides (Alabama Department of Public Health, Bureau of Vital Statistics) and domestic violence and sexual assault crimes (Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault Data Resource Center).

Crime Statistics for the United States can be found in Uniform Crime Reports, a series produced by the FBI.  Those materials also go back to 1995 on the FBI web site.