Daylight Saving Time, Beth Cook, Information Research Specialist. March 9, 2016: “Daylight Saving Time (DST) is a period of the year between spring and fall when clocks in the United States are set one hour ahead of standard time. DST is currently observed in the United States from 2:00 a.m. on the second Sunday in… Continue Reading
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Monthly Archives: March 2016
Your Gateway to an Interactive Virtual Earth
GPlates Portal – [via The university of Sydney] 3D Visualisation of Geophysical and Geological Data – Interactive Plate Tectonic Reconstructions – Interactive Surface Dynamic Topography – PyGPlates Reconstruction Services “The EarthByte Group in the School of Geosciences of The University of Sydney is one of the world’s leading research groups for global and regional plate… Continue Reading
Human Survival, Risk, and Law: Considering Risk Filters to Replace Cost-Benefit Analysis
Draper, John William, Human Survival, Risk, and Law: Considering Risk Filters to Replace Cost-Benefit Analysis (January 30, 2016). Fordham Environmental Law Journal, Vol. 27, 2016 Forthcoming. Available for download at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2745520 “Selfish utilitarianism, neo-classical economics, the directive of short-term income maximization, and the decision tool of cost-benefit analysis fail to protect our species from… Continue Reading
Cornucopia Yogurt Buyer’s Guide
Cornucopia Yogurt Buyer’s Guide – “This buyer’s guide is based on information from ingredient labels, testing and, in the case of organic brands, the score brands achieved on Cornucopia’s organic dairy scorecard. This buyer’s guide rates brands as a whole, not individual products or flavors. Updated 12/11/2015. Continue Reading
Paper – Can Government Demand Stimulate Private Investment?
International Monetary Fund – Shafik Hebous; Tom Zimmermann, March 10, 2016: Can Government Demand Stimulate Private Investment? Evidence from U.S. Federal Procurement. Summary: “We study the effects of federal purchases on firms’ investment using a novel panel dataset that combines federal procurement contracts in the United States with key financial firm-level information. We find that… Continue Reading
Measuring income and wealth at the top using administrative and survey data
Brookings – Jesse Bricker, Alice Henriques, Jacob Krimmel and John Sabelhaus: “Most available estimates of US wealth and income concentration indicate that top shares are high and rising in recent decades, but there is some disagreement about specific levels and trends. Household surveys are the traditional data source used to measure top shares, but recent… Continue Reading
“The Secrets of Surveillance Capitalism”
von Shoshana Zuboff, March 3, 2016: “Governmental control is nothing compared to what Google is up to. The company is creating a wholly new genus of capitalism, a systemic coherent new logic of accumulation we should call surveillance capitalism. Is there nothing we can do?…Google is ground zero for a wholly new subspecies of capitalism… Continue Reading
Design marvels abound on floors throughout Barcelona
“If you walk around Barcelona, don’t forget to look down from time to time: you may be standing on a marvel of design. The City of Marvels is how writer Eduardo Mendoza called the coolest city of the Mediterranean in one of his novels. The book is set at the turn of the 20th century,… Continue Reading
LA Times – Newly discovered bacteria can eat plastic bottles
March 11, 2016 by Deborah Netburn, Los Angeles Times – “A team of Japanese scientists has found a species of bacteria that eats the type of plastic found in most disposable water bottles. The discovery, published Thursday in the journal Science, could lead to new methods to manage the more than 50 million tons of… Continue Reading
Toxic coal ash pollution impacts residents in hundreds of communities
Via Mother Jones – Weird Ailments, Toxic Water, Dismissive Officials—and No, This Isn’t Flint – The environmental justice disaster you’ve never heard of, by Julia Lurie “…coal ash—a toxic byproduct of burning coal that has quietly become one of America’s worst environmental justice problems. The ashes are often laden with arsenic, lead, mercury, and other… Continue Reading
Test Your Knowledge with Census Bureau’s Population Bracketology
“Test your knowledge of the relative populations of different geographic areas by participating in the Census Bureau’s version of “March Madness.” The Census Bureau’s Population Bracketology is an interactive data visualization allowing you to fill out your own bracket based on comparisons of state and metro area population. The objective is to pick the larger… Continue Reading
BBC – The Museum of Lost Objects – Monumental Destruction of History
“One year ago a man took a pneumatic drill to the statue of a winged bull at the gates of the ancient city of Nineveh, near Mosul in modern Iraq. It’s one of countless treasures destroyed by vandals, militants or military action in the region in the past 15 years. This is the first of… Continue Reading
