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Daily Archives: May 25, 2014

Average retail gasoline price is $3.67 per gallon heading into Memorial Day weekend

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EIA: “Memorial Day weekend is the traditional start of the summer driving season. Leading up to this year’s holiday, the national average retail price for regular gasoline is $3.67 per gallon (gal), as it was this time last year. After increasing 42 cents/gal from early February to $3.71/gal in late April, gasoline prices have fallen modestly in recent weeks as increasing refinery crude oil throughput and higher imports have added supplies to the market.”

VA National Gravesite Locator Tool

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“The database of burial information is updated each day. Search for burial locations of veterans and their family members in VA National Cemeteries, state veterans cemeteries, various other military and Department of Interior cemeteries, and for veterans buried in private cemeteries when the grave is marked with a government grave marker. The Nationwide Gravesite Locator includes burial… Continue Reading

Online and social media data as a flawed continuous panel survey – Microsoft

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“There is a large body of research on utilizing online activity to predict various real world outcomes, ranging from outbreaks of influenza to outcomes of elections. There is considerably less work, however, on using this data to understand topic-specific interest and opinion amongst the general population and specific demographic subgroups, as currently measured by relatively… Continue Reading

The Transparency Reports Database – Government Requests for Users Data

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Silk Transparency Project – “An increasing number of Internet and telecommunication companies are publishing reports detailing the number of government requests for user interaction data the companies have received in a given period of time. Technology and telecommunications companies store data on all user interactions. This includes “non-content data” (also called metadata). Metadata consists of login times, user location and… Continue Reading

Debt Market Friction, Knowledge Capital Accumulation and Macroeconomic Implications

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Wang, Yicheng, Debt Market Friction, Knowledge Capital Accumulation and Macroeconomic Implications (May 17, 2014). Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2438330 “This paper studies accumulation of firm-specific knowledge capital with the presence of debt market frictions at individual firm level and explores its macroeconomic implications in the aggregate. We propose a new mechanism and a quantitative model to explain… Continue Reading

GEF Countries Meet with a Strong Mandate for Environmental Action

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“The Global Environment Facility (GEF) Operations Council and Assembly meet this week with a new record level of pledges to support developing countries in their work to prevent environmental degradation. A new publication, When Foundational Acts Generate Significant Impacts, looks at GEF projects channeled through the World Bank Group, from support for low-carbon cities and renewable energy sources to… Continue Reading

Paper – Skills, education, and the rise of earnings inequality among the “other 99 percent”

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Science 23 May 2014: Vol. 344 no. 6186 pp. 843-851. DOI: 10.1126/science.1251868. David H. Autor. Skills, education, and the rise of earnings inequality among the “other 99 percent” “The singular focus of public debate on the “top 1 percent” of households overlooks the component of earnings inequality that is arguably most consequential for the “other 99 percent” of citizens: the dramatic growth… Continue Reading

New Paper – The (Non) Finality of Supreme Court Opinions

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Adam Liptak, New York Times: “The Supreme Court has been quietly revising its decisions years after they were issued, altering the law of the land without public notice. The revisions include “truly substantive changes in factual statements and legal reasoning,” said Richard J. Lazarus, a law professor at Harvard and the author of a new study examining the phenomenon. The court… Continue Reading

Truth in Lending rule now available in easier-to-navigate format – CFPB

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“The public, industry, and the government all benefit from regulations that are easier to find, read, and understand. That is why last year we launched our eRegulations tool which combines important information that can often be difficult to navigate or is spread throughout a regulation, often separated by dozens or even hundreds of pages. Ideally, using eRegulations… Continue Reading

Searching Social Media – Googling Facebook, Searching Twitter

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 Stosh Jonjak, Part 1, | Part 2 “Have you experienced an increase in social media search requests? As attorneys become more likely to turn to social media during their informal discovery processes, I have found an uptick in questions like: “could you please do a social media background check on this person?” This is a growing information need I believe law librarians… Continue Reading

Chinese agencies announce open-access policies – Nature

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“China has officially joined the international push to make research papers free to read. On 15 May, the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC), one of the country’s major basic-science funding agencies, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), which funds and conducts research at more than 100 institutions, announced that researchers they support… Continue Reading