NIH News release: “More intensive management of high blood pressure, below a commonly recommended blood pressure target, significantly reduces rates of cardiovascular disease, and lowers risk of death in a group of adults 50 years and older with high blood pressure. This is according to the initial results of a landmark clinical trial sponsored by… Continue Reading
Accurate, Focused Research on Law, Technology and Knowledge Discovery Since 2002
Monthly Archives: September 2015
Bing Translator
“Microsoft Translator is built on more than a decade of natural-language research at Microsoft. Rather than writing hand-crafted rules to translate between languages, modern translation systems approach translation as a problem of learning the transformation of text between languages from existing human translations and leveraging recent advances in applied statistics and machine learning. So-called “parallel… Continue Reading
IEA releases Oil Market Report for September
News release 11 September 2015 “The latest tumble in the price of oil, which hit a six-year low in August, is expected to cut non-OPEC supply in 2016 by nearly 0.5 million barrels per day (mb/d) – the biggest decline in more than two decades, the IEA Oil Market Report for September informed subscribers. Lower output in the United… Continue Reading
Former CBO Director on Dynamic Scoring and Budget Estimates
“Dynamic scoring”: Why and how to include macroeconomic effects in budget estimates for legislative proposals by: Douglas W. Elmendorf “Including macroeconomic effects in budget estimates for certain legislative proposals would improve the accuracy of those estimates and would provide important information about the economic effects of those proposals. Moreover, if certain key conditions were satisfied,… Continue Reading
Paper – Crisis in Student Loans
A crisis in student loans? How changes in the characteristics of borrowers and in the institutions they attended contributed to rising loan defaults. Adam Looney, U.S. Treasury Department; Constantine Yannelis, Stanford University, September 2015. “This paper examines the rise in student loan delinquency and default drawing on a unique set of administrative data on federal… Continue Reading
Household Food Security in the United States in 2014
Household Food Security in the United States in 2014 by Alisha Coleman-Jensen, Matthew Rabbitt, Christian Gregory, and Anita Singh, USDA, Economic Research Report No. (ERR-194) 43 pp, September 2015 “An estimated 14.0 percent of American households were food insecure at least some time during the year in 2014, meaning they lacked access to enough food… Continue Reading
Report – An Economy Doing Half its Job
“In 2013–14, Harvard Business School (HBS) conducted its third alumni survey on U.S. competitiveness. Our report on the findings focuses on a troubling divergence in the American economy: large and midsize firms have rallied strongly from the Great Recession, and highly skilled individuals are prospering. But middle- and working-class citizens are struggling, as are small… Continue Reading
OECD Development Co-operation Report 2015
“With the adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals, the question of how to finance, implement and monitor these goals moves to the centre of the debate. Today, international development co-operation takes place in an increasingly complex environment, with an ever growing number of actors, policies and instruments involved. This complexity raises the stakes for achieving… Continue Reading
Migration Policy – Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals
Migration Policy Institute: “About the Data Hub – The Data Hub showcases the most current national and state-level demographic, social, and economic facts about immigrants to the U.S.; as well as stock, flow, citizenship, net migration, and historical data for countries in Europe, North America, and beyond. ” Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) Profiles… Continue Reading
Living Wage Calculator
Via MIT – “In many American communities, families working in low-wage jobs make insufficient income to live locally given the local cost of living. Recently, in a number of high-cost communities, community organizers and citizens have successfully argued that the prevailing wage offered by the public sector and key businesses should reflect a wage rate… Continue Reading
DOJ – New Policy on Individual Liability in Matters of Corporate Wrongdoing
DOJ Memo – Individual Accountability for Corporate Wrongdoing, September 10, 2015: “…we’re taking six specific steps to hold individual corporate wrongdoers accountable. These steps are the subject of a memo that I issued yesterday to all of the department’s prosecutors and civil litigators…Some of these policies are new and some are already being practiced at… Continue Reading
Pew – Americans Concerns about China
Pew Research Center: “As the White House prepares to host Chinese President Xi Jinping for his first state visit to the United States later this month, the American public continues to see a number of issues related to China and its rising power as major concerns. In particular, economic issues loom large. China’s growth rate… Continue Reading
