“This report on Big Data is the first MeriTalk Beacon, a new series of reports designed to shed light and provide direction on far reaching issues in government and technology. Since Beacons are designed to tackle broad concepts, each Beacon report relies on insight from a small number of big thinkers in the topic area.… Continue Reading
Accurate, Focused Research on Law, Technology and Knowledge Discovery Since 2002
Monthly Archives: April 2013
Get Grandpas FBI File.com Website Now Makes Getting FBI Files Easy
News release: “The process for obtaining FBI files about family members who may have been the subject of a federal investigation has just become much simpler with the help of a step-by-step consumer website: GetGrandpasFBIfile.com established by Virginia-based Meme Transmission Enterprises…The Federal Bureau of Investigation maintains billions of pages of records and millions of files… Continue Reading
Report – Financial Implications and Strategic Responses to a Changing Retail Electric Business
Disruptive Challenges: Financial Implications and Strategic Responses to a Changing Retail Electric Business. Prepared by: Peter Kind Energy Infrastructure Advocates for Edison Electric Institute, January 2013 “Recent technological and economic changes are expected to challenge and transform the electric utility industry. These changes (or disruptive challenges) arise due to a convergence of factors, including: falling… Continue Reading
Agencies Provide Additional Instructions for Submission of Some Resolution Plans
News release: “The Federal Reserve Board (Board) and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) on Monday announced the release of additional guidance, clarification and direction for the first group of institutions filing their resolutions plans pursuant to the Dodd-Frank Act. These 11 institutions filed their initial resolution plans with the Federal Reserve Board and the… Continue Reading
New GAO Reports – Corporate Tax Expenditures, President's Emergency Plan For Aids Relief
Corporate Tax Expenditures – Information on Estimated Revenue Losses and Related Federal Spending Programs, GAO-13-339, Mar 18, 2013 President’s Emergency Plan For AIDS Relief – Per-Patient Costs Have Declined Substantially, but Better Cost Data Would Help Efforts to Expand Treatment, GAO-13-345, Mar 15, 2013 Continue Reading
Report – Google vs. Bing: Search Engines Deliver Infected Websites as Their Top Results
Markus Selinger: “A detailed AV-TEST study recently revealed that although search engine operators such as Google and Bing make a lot of effort to avoid doing so, they sometimes deliver websites infected with Trojans and similar malware among their top search results. Other search engines do an even worse job. Malware developers are now putting… Continue Reading
EIA – Annual Energy Outlook 2013
“The projections in the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s (EIA’s) Annual Energy Outlook 2013 (AEO2012) focus on the factors that shape the U.S. energy system over the long term. Under the assumption that current laws and regulations remain unchanged throughout the projections, the AEO2013 Reference case provides the basis for examination and discussion of energy production,… Continue Reading
Next Stop, Innovation: Whats Ahead for Urban Mobility?
Next Stop, Innovation: Whats Ahead for Urban Mobility? “Transportation in the 21st century is entering a robust phase that mirrors the early years of the automobile, when gasoline, steam and electric technology vied for market share. Although electric cars led for a while, the internal-combustion engine reached dominance by 1920, with profound effects on American… Continue Reading
April 2013 Update to TIGER: Tracking Indices for the Global Economic Recovery
Eswar Prasad and Karim Foda: “The global economic recovery remains stuck below takeoff speed, unable to achieve liftoff and facing the risk of stalling. Half-hearted fiscal austerity measures are proving to be a drag on growth, and monetary policy continues to shoulder the burden of limiting downside risks. The Brookings-FT TIGER index shows that growth… Continue Reading
EUA Report on Global University Rankings in 2012
Global University Rankings and Their Impact II, published by the European University Association “New multi-indicator tools for profiling, classifying or benchmarking higher education institutions offered by the rankings providers are proliferating. These increase the pressure on and the risk of overburdening universities, obliged to collect ever more data in order to maintain as high a… Continue Reading
Reauthorizing the Secure Rural Schools and Community Self-Determination Act of 2000
CRS – Reauthorizing the Secure Rural Schools and Community Self-Determination Act of 2000, Katie Hoover, Analyst in Natural Resources Policy. February 26, 2013 “Many counties are compensated for the tax-exempt status of federal lands. Counties with national forest lands and with certain Bureau of Land Management lands have historically received a percentage of agency revenues,… Continue Reading
Intervention-Driven Changes in Social Networks and Their Effects on Household Outcomes
Comola, Margherita and Prina, Silvia, Intervention-Driven Changes in Social Networks and Their Effects on Household Outcomes (April 14, 2013). Available at SSRN “We study how social networks change as a result of an exogenous expansion in formal financial access and show how to estimate the effects of these changes on household outcomes. We use a… Continue Reading
