“Cell phone searches are a common law enforcement tool, but up until now, the public has largely been in the dark regarding how much sensitive information the government can get with this invasive surveillance technique. A document submitted to court in connection with a drug investigation, which we recently discovered, provides a rare inventory of… Continue Reading
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Monthly Archives: February 2013
Census Report Shows 30 Percent of Adults Receiving Government Assistance Have a Disability
News release: “Among the 46.0 million adults who received income-based government assistance in 2011, 30.4 percent of them had a disability, according to a report released today from the U.S. Census Bureau. The report, Disability Characteristics of Income-Based Government Assistance Recipients in the United States: 2011, offers information about the occurrence of disabilities among people… Continue Reading
Speech – Simplicity, risk sensitivity and comparability: the regulatory balancing act
Simplicity, risk sensitivity and comparability: the regulatory balancing act (speech by Wayne Byres Secretary General Basel Committee on Banking Supervision) BCBS-EMEAP-FSI High-Level Meeting 2526 February 2013, Seoul, Korea: “But as anyone knows who has built, supervised or just tried to understand internal risk models within a bank, they are not simple. They are, of course,… Continue Reading
New GAO Reports – Border Patrol, Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, Southwest Border Security, GAO and Sequestration
Border Patrol – Goals and Measures Not Yet in Place to Inform Border Security Status and Resource Needs, http://GAO-13-330T, Feb 26, 2013 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act – Effect on Long-Term Federal Budget Outlook Largely Depends on Whether Cost Containment Sustained, GAO-13-281, Jan 31, 2013 Southwest Border Security – Data Are Limited and Concerns… Continue Reading
An Assessment of the Prospects for Inertial Fusion Energy
“The potential for using fusion energy to produce commercial electric power was first explored in the 1950s. Harnessing fusion energy offers the prospect of a nearly carbon-free energy source with a virtually unlimited supply of fuel. Unlike nuclear fission plants, appropriately designed fusion power plants would not produce the large amounts of high-level nuclear waste… Continue Reading
International debt flows before and after the financial crisis
International debt flows before and after the financial crisis by Evis Rucaj, 02-21-23 “New debt statistics show that the composition of long term debt inflows in 2011 follows pre-crisis patterns. Debt statistics are central to understanding the impact of the financial crisis; the World Bank’s International Debt Statistics provides a detailed picture of debt flows… Continue Reading
The New Microfinance Handbook: A Financial Market System Perspective
World Bank: “The New Microfinance Handbook provides a primer on financial services for the poor. It is written for a wide audience, including practitioners, facilitators, policy makers, regulators, investors, and donors working to improve the financial system, but who are relatively new to the sector. It will also be useful for telecommunication companies and other… Continue Reading
A look behind the scenes at the Google news retrieval algorithm
Frederic Filloux, guardian.co.uk: “Its official blog merely mentions “6 billion visits per month” sent to news sites and Google News claims to connect “1 billion unique users a week to news content” [see The press, Google, its algorithm, their scale]…But how exactly does Google News work? What kind of media does its algorithm favour most?… Continue Reading
USA.gov – What is Sequestration?
“Sequestration, sometimes called the sequester, is a process that automatically cuts the federal budget across most departments and agencies. Congress included the threat of sequestration in the Budget Control Act of 2011 as a way to encourage compromise on deficit reduction efforts. Congress couldnt agree on a budget by the deadline set in the Budget… Continue Reading
BIS – Benign neglect of the long-term interest rate
Benign neglect of the long-term interest rate, by Philip Turner, Working Papers No 403, February 2013 “Large-scale central bank purchases of government bonds have made the long-term interest rate key in the monetary policy debate. How central banks react to bond market movements has varied greatly from one episode to another. Driving the term premium… Continue Reading
NY Fed – The Macroeconomic Effects of Forward Guidance
The Macroeconomic Effects of Forward Guidance – Marco Del Negro, Marc Giannoni, and Christina Patterson: “In this post, we quantify the macroeconomic effects of central bank announcements about future federal funds rates, or forward guidance. We estimate that a commitment to lowering future rates below market expectations can have fairly strong effects on real economic… Continue Reading
New NOAA study estimates future loss of labor capacity as climate warms
News release: “A new NOAA study projects that heat-stress related labor capacity losses will double globally by 2050 with a warming climate. The impact will be felt the most by those who work outside or in hot environments, such as firefighters, bakery workers, farmers, construction workers, factory workers, and others who will be forced to… Continue Reading
