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Daily Archives: October 3, 2016

Brookings – October 2016 Update to TIGER: Tracking Indexes for the Global Economic Recovery

“The latest update of the Brookings-FT Tiger index presents a picture of general despondency in the global economy that more than offsets isolated signs of strength in some economic indicators in a few countries. Click a country name below the Overall Growth Index to view charts for the main TIGER indexes by country and charts for the indicators that make up the indexes, which are broken down by real activity, financial and confidence indicators.”

IMF Releases the 2016 Financial Access Survey, A Key Tool to Foster Financial Inclusion

“The International Monetary Fund (IMF) released today the results of the seventh annual Financial Access Survey (FAS). The FAS is a key source of data on financial inclusion, providing insights on the availability and use of financial products such as deposit accounts, loans, and insurance policies by individuals and firms across the globe. The information… Continue Reading

TRAC – New York Times Publication of Trump’s 1995 Tax Records Underlines High End Audit Challenge

“This weekend, The New York Times published the tax returns that Donald Trump had filed with New York, New Jersey and Connecticut where the Republican candidate for president claimed nearly a billion dollar business loss for that year. Although the Times said the experts it had consulted did not believe the records suggested anything improper,… Continue Reading

Paper – Assistance Animals in the Library: How One Academic Library Developed Best Practices

Marrall, R. M. (2016). Assistance animals in the library: How one academic library developed Best Practices. Reference & User Services Quarterly, 56(1), pp. 8-13.  (Peer/Editor Reviewed) “Effectively addressing concerns about assistance animals in any library setting is often problematic due to a lack of awareness about assistance animals in general, which then leads to uncertainty… Continue Reading

Paper – The Effects of Experience and Knowledge on Investor Behavior

Bazley, William J. and Korniotis, George M. and Samanez-Larkin, Gregory R., Better Together: The Effects of Experience and Knowledge on Investor Behavior (September 7, 2016). Available for download at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2846504 “We examine the dynamics of financial knowledge and investment experience on the equity portfolio decisions of U.S. investors. We find that prior portfolio choices… Continue Reading

Paper – Do “Brain-Training” Programs Work?

Psychological Science in the Public Interest, Do “Brain-Training” Programs Work? doi: 10.1177/1529100616661983,Psychological Science in the Public Interest, October 2016 vol. 17 no. 3 103-186 “In 2014, two groups of scientists published open letters on the efficacy of brain-training interventions, or “brain games,” for improving cognition. The first letter, a consensus statement from an international group… Continue Reading

FOIA Wiki Launches in Beta

Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press: “Welcome to the FOIA Wiki! This free and collaborative resource on the U.S. Freedom of Information Act, 5 U.S.C. § 552, is provided by the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, with contributions from The FOIA Project at TRAC, MuckRock, FOIA Mapper, and users like you. →… Continue Reading

Forbes – Top 25 Public Colleges 2016

Fobes: “The best public schools in the country are not just limited to those on the nation’s coasts. They can be found all across the country, and five schools from the heartland of the country make this year’s cut: University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (No. 7), University of Wisconsin, Madison (No. 10) University of Illinois,… Continue Reading

Paper – Google’s Neural Machine Translation System

Google’s Neural Machine Translation System: Bridging the Gap between Human and Machine Translation (Submitted on 26 Sep 2016) arXiv:1609.08144v1 [cs.CL] for this version) Neural Machine Translation (NMT) is an end-to-end learning approach for automated translation, with the potential to overcome many of the weaknesses of conventional phrase-based translation systems. Unfortunately, NMT systems are known to… Continue Reading

Paper – Learning Distributed Representations of Institutions and Their Legal Text

Gov2Vec: Learning Distributed Representations of Institutions and Their Legal Text – John J. Nay (Submitted on 21 Sep 2016 (v1), last revised 25 Sep 2016 (this version, v2)) “We compare policy differences across institutions by embedding representations of the entire legal corpus of each institution and the vocabulary shared across all corpora into a continuous… Continue Reading

GAO – Data and Analytics Innovation: Emerging Opportunities and Challenges

Highlights of a Forum: Data and Analytics Innovation: Emerging Opportunities and Challenges, GAO-16-659SP: Published: Sep 20, 2016. Publicly Released: Sep 20, 2016. “Forum discussions considered the implications of new data-related technologies and developments that are revolutionizing the basic three-step innovation process in the figure below. As massive amounts of varied data become available in many… Continue Reading