I have used County Health Rankings for years on this site to provide insight into the social ills plaguing the Alleghenies. Last year they lost their main funder, the Robert Wood Johnston Foundation. They are not doing the major data releases now, but they are updating their site as new data are released. This post […]

Exhibitors After viewing the Mine Wars Museum in Matewan, WV, Larry Blalock and I went to the 49th Appalachian Studies Association Conference at Marshall University in Huntington, WV. We were tabling for our site and took videos summarizing day 1 of the Appalachian Studies Conference. The above video summarizes the exhibitors at the conference. It […]

After a month delay, the Census bureau came out with new poverty estimates for 2024 for every state, county and school district. The Small Area Income and Poverty Estimates were probably delayed by the government shutdown. They also had to catch up on other economic statistics such as the unemployment rate. The map above shows […]

Yesterday I first heard the term 287(g). It is a program where local law enforcement agencies agree to partner with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). I was able to download a list of local agencies collaborating with ICE. Fifty-one 287(g) agencies/municipalities are collaborating with ICE. Of these 23 are in the Alleghenies. A list of […]

The last post on student homelessness in Cambria County School Districts got a huge response. The map above from the Center for Rural Pennsylvania shows that this issue is not just a Cambria phenomenon. This post will take a look at student homelessness in the Alleghenies outside Cambria County. Not all of the school districts […]

Allegheny Independent Media is now affiliated with Nonprofit Partners. It is a subsidiary of the Community Foundation for the Alleghenies. Thru the site you can donate to the website. It is essential to allow us to provide coverage to the critical issues facing the Alleghenies. You may donate to our site here. The Holidays are upon us. There […]

Last week I posted on 2 factor analyses of the health resources and services administration’s unmet need score map tool for zip codes in the Alleghenies and Pennsylvania as a whole. There were minimal differences between the regions on the two largest factors (health behaviors and mortality). For this post I am taking a look […]

I have looked at Unmet Need Scores (UNS) in Pennsylvania and the Alleghenies. The UNS is a composite of dozens of related health, social and economic variables. Teasing apart the relationships among the variables one by one is tricky. There is a method that allows for identifying clusters of highly correlated variables called factor analysis. […]

This past weekend was a weekend of fire, rain, and snow in the Alleghenies. I was walking on the James Mayer Trail in Johnstown when I saw a bunch of sparks and heard a tree fall. I got closer to see what happened. What I saw was in the video above. I called 911 to […]

It was a successful fundraiser for Allegheny Independent Media at studio 404 in Hornerstown in Johnstown. Here is an AIM fundraiser recap. More than 20 people came to the fundraiser. I started with a slideshow with some of the charts and graphs that I created for the site. Then I premiered a video montage of […]