EFF – Cindy Cohn: “NSA Spying: Government’s Latest Delay Tactic Fails The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit today rejected the government’s latest attempt to delay consideration of whether the NSA’s tapping into the Internet backbone is legal in Jewel v. NSA, clearing the path for the first appellate court decision on… Continue Reading
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Monthly Archives: August 2015
NYC Open Data
NYC Open Data – 1300+ data sets are available – users may search by type, category, agency and source – an example as follows: “Neighborhood Tabulation Areas – data: Boundaries of Neighborhood Tabulation Areas as created by the NYC Department of City Planning using whole census tracts from the 2010 Census as building blocks. These… Continue Reading
Not Even Close: The State of Computer Security (with slides) – James Mickens
“In this bleak, relentlessly morbid talk, James Mickens will describe why making computers secure is an intrinsically impossible task. He will explain why no programming language makes it easy to write secure code. He will then discuss why cloud computing is a black hole for privacy, and only useful for people who want to fill… Continue Reading
Where has the competitive intelligence gone? No worries – Call your Librarian!
Another day, another reason why librarians are mission critical – we are the multifaceted subject matter experts with multiple expertise – this would not have slipped by colleagues in the law library/news/business sectors if Google had asked (add other expert colleagues as you will – this is not about exclusion – but a request for… Continue Reading
GAO Reports – Defense Contracts, Immigrant Investor Program, Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle
Defense Contracts: DOD’s Requests for Information from Contractors to Assess Prices, GAO-15-680: Published: Aug 12, 2015. Publicly Released: Aug 12, 2015. Immigrant Investor Program: Additional Actions Needed to Better Assess Fraud Risks and Report Economic Benefits, GAO-15-696: Published: Aug 12, 2015. Publicly Released: Aug 12, 2015 Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle: The Air Force Needs to… Continue Reading
Big data analysis of state of the union remarks
Via phys.org [thanks to Alan Rothman]: “No historical record may capture the nation’s changing political consciousness better than the president’s State of the Union address, delivered each year except one since 1790. Now, a computer analysis of this unique archive puts the start of the modern era at America’s entry into World War I, challenging… Continue Reading
t factor: A metric for measuring impact on Twitter
“Based on the definition of the well-known h index we propose a t factor for measuring the impact of publications (and other entities) on Twitter. “The new index combines tweet and retweet data in a balanced way whereby retweets are seen as data reflecting the impact of initial tweets. The t factor is defined as… Continue Reading
NY Fed – Around the World in 8,379 Foreign Entities
“The largest U.S. financial institutions conduct business around the world, maintaining a strong presence through branches and subsidiaries in foreign countries. This blog post highlights trends in their foreign ownership over the past twenty-five years, complementing recent research from the New York Fed on large and complex banks. We document a constant decline in the… Continue Reading
CRS – A Guide to U.S. Military Casualty Statistics
A Guide to U.S. Military Casualty Statistics: Operation Freedom’s Sentinel, Operation Inherent Resolve, Operation New Dawn, Operation Iraqi Freedom, and Operation Enduring Freedom. Hannah Fischer, Information Research Specialist. August 7, 2015. [As always, CRS reports via Steven Aftergood/FAS] – “This report presents statistics regarding U.S. military and civilian casualties in the active missions Operation Freedom’s… Continue Reading
ViewPoint – Great New Possibilities for the Library of Congress
Colleagues – we have worked for many years, often many decades, as members of a profession to which we have a deep and abiding commitment and through which we have, under often the most challenging of circumstances, helped to usher in the future without forsaking the past. So this snippet (the rest is behind a… Continue Reading
International report confirms: 2014 was Earth’s warmest year on record
“In 2014, the most essential indicators of Earth’s changing climate continued to reflect trends of a warming planet, with several markers such as rising land and ocean temperature, sea levels and greenhouse gases ─ setting new records. These key findings and others can be found in the State of the Climate in 2014 report released… Continue Reading
Bond markets and monetary policy dilemmas for the emerging markets
Bank for International Settlement – Bond markets and monetary policy dilemmas for the emerging markets by Jhuvesh Sobrun and Philip Turner Working Papers No 508 August 2015. “Financial conditions in the emerging markets (EMs) have become more dependent on the ‘world’ long-term interest rate, which has been driven down by monetary policies in the advanced… Continue Reading
