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Monthly Archives: January 2013

Bank of England – The Financial Policy Committee’s powers to supplement capital requirements

The Financial Policy Committee’s powers to supplement capital requirements – A Draft Policy Statement, January 14, 2013 “The interim Financial Policy Committee (FPC) is today publishing a draft Policy Statement explaining the planned powers for the FPC to give directions setting extra capital requirements for the purposes of financial stability. The statutory FPC will be… Continue Reading

2013 Inauguration Event Resources

Via National Endowment for the Humanities: 2013 Inauguration Event Resources The 57th Presidential Inaugural Ceremonies. Monday, January 21, 2013. Guide for Producers and Correspondents To The Inaugural Ceremonies And Capitol Hill Events. Produced by The Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies, January 2013. Continue Reading

Hydrocracking is an important source of diesel and jet fuel

EIA: “A hydrocracking unit, or hydrocracker, takes gas oil, which is heavier and has a higher boiling range than distillate fuel oil, and cracks the heavy molecules into distillate and gasoline in the presence of hydrogen and a catalyst. The hydrocracker upgrades low-quality heavy gas oils from the atmospheric or vacuum distillation tower, the fluid… Continue Reading

South Africa has one of the world's largest synthetic fuels industries

EIA, South Africa, January 17, 2013: “South Africa’s energy sector is critical to the economy as the country relies heavily on its large-scale, energy-intensive mining industry. South Africa has only small deposits of conventional oil and natural gas and uses its large coal deposits for most of its energy needs, particularly in the electricity sector.… Continue Reading

U.S. CIO – Increased focus on providing citizens with access to government data sets

Via DataInformed, Tam Harbert: “The White House has undertaken two major cloud and data initiatives to open up its data troves, Steven L. VanRoekel, U.S. federal CIO said: Through its “cloud-first policy,” the Administration is encouraging agencies to move more aggressively to using the cloud. Through the Federal Risk Authorization and Management Program (Fed RAMP)… Continue Reading

EFF – How to Protect Your Privacy from Facebook's Graph Search

EFF news release: “Earlier this week, Facebook launched a new feature—Graph Search—that raised some privacy concerns with us. Graph Search allows users to make structured searches to filter through friends, friends of friends, and strangers. This feature relies on your profile information being made widely or publicly available, yet there are some Likes, photos, or… Continue Reading

Nature – Mathematicians aim to take publishers out of publishing

Episciences Project to launch series of community-run, open-access journals, by Richard Van Noorden “Mathematicians plan to launch a series of free open-access journals that will host their peer-reviewed articles on the preprint server arXiv. The project was publicly revealed [January 16, 2013] in a blog post by Tim Gowers, a Fields Medal winner and mathematician… Continue Reading

Comments received on the CPSS-IOSCO consultative document "Recovery and resolution of financial market infrastructures"

“In July 2012, the CPSS and IOSCO released their consultative document “Recovery and resolution of financial market infrastructures” with a request that any comments be provided by 28 September 2012. These comments, in PDF format, are available here. The committees thank those who took the time and effort to express their views.” Related postings on… Continue Reading

Bureau of Justice Statistics – Prisoners in 2011

Prisoners in 2011. E. Ann Carson, Ph.D., William J. Sabol, Ph.D. December 17, 2012 – NCJ 239808 “Presents data on prisoners under the jurisdiction of federal and state correctional authorities on December 31, 2011, collected from the National Prisoner Statistics series. The report compares changes in the prison population during 2011 to changes from yearend… Continue Reading

EPA’s 2011 Toxics Release Inventory Shows Air Pollutants Continue to Decline

News release: “Total toxic air releases in 2011 declined 8 percent from 2010, mostly because of decreases in hazardous air pollutant (HAP) emissions, even while total releases of toxic chemicals increased for the second year in a row, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) annual Toxics Release Inventory (TRI) report published January 16,… Continue Reading

NYT Document Release Chronicles Federal Reserve's 2007 Deliberations

Days Before Housing Bust, Fed Doubted Need to Act, by Binyamin Appelbaum: “The Federal Reserve has released the full record of its discussions in 2007, when the housing market, the financial system and the economy took a fateful turn.” DOCUMENT: Annotating the Fed’s 2007 Deliberations INTERACTIVE: Timeline: The Fed’s 2007 Discussions Transcripts Revive a Tiff… Continue Reading

Space Data and Information Transfer Systems — Audit and Certification of Trustworthy Digital Repositories

Via OCLC – SO 16363:2012. Space Data and Information Transfer Systems (see authors link)— Audit and Certification of Trustworthy Digital Repositories outlines actions a repository can take to be considered trustworthy, but research examining whether the repository’s designated community of users associates such actions with trustworthiness has been limited. Drawing from this ISO document and… Continue Reading