Archival FRED Economic Data Time Travel from the St. Louis Fed’s Economic Research Division. [h/t terese mulkern, bizrefdesk] “ALFRED® allows you to retrieve vintage versions of economic data that were available on specific dates in history. In general, economic data for past observation periods are revised as more accurate estimates become available. As a result,… Continue Reading
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Monthly Archives: December 2017
Crime in 2017: A Preliminary Analysis
Crime in 2017: Updated Analysis – “This update to the Brennan Center’s September report finds that the overall crime rate, violent crime rate, and murder rate in the nation’s 30 largest cities are estimated to decline this year. Its projections directly undercut claims of a nationwide crime wave. In September, the Brennan Center analyzed available… Continue Reading
UN Special Rapporteur report on extreme poverty and human rights in US
– Statement on Visit to the USA, by Professor Philip Alston, United Nations Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, December 15, 2017. “I have spent the past two weeks visiting the United States, at the invitation of the federal government, to look at whether the persistence of extreme poverty in America undermines the… Continue Reading
Standards and Governance of Blockchain in the Legal Industry
“Without major intermediaries (cloud-based software, cloud-based document storage, etc.) to provide convenience and standards, it is necessary for industries themselves to band together to jointly develop standards and governance, thus the typically non-profit, consortium strategy. The mission of the Global Legal Blockchain Consortium is to organize and align the stakeholders in the global legal industry… Continue Reading
The Billion-Dollar Loophole
The Billion-Dollar Loophole The most generous charitable deduction in the federal tax code is being manipulated to make big profits — and there’s no sign that Congress has any intention of fixing the problem. Article by ProPublica and Fortune. “The idea seems like the perfect marriage of environmentalism and capitalism: Landowners give up their right… Continue Reading
EPA Releases Draft Risk Assessments for Glyphosate – Denies cancer risk to humans
EPA Releases Draft Risk Assessments for Glyphosate – The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is releasing for public comment the draft human health and ecological risk assessments for glyphosate, one of the most widely used agricultural pesticides in the United States. The draft human health risk assessment concludes that glyphosate is not likely to be… Continue Reading
Paper – Failure, Risk, and the Entrepreneurial Library
Failure, Risk, and the Entrepreneurial Library, Tom Wall, University Librarian, Boston College. “This past spring, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg addressed the graduates from Harvard College and said that “the greatest successes come from having the freedom to fail.”1 Likewise, in a recent letter to shareholders, Amazon’s founder Jeff Bezos made it a point to equate… Continue Reading
Paper – Metadata Provenance and Vulnerability
Metadata Provenance and Vulnerability. Timothy Robert Hart and Denise de Vries, Information Technology and Libraries (ITAL). Vol 36, No 4 (2017). doi: 10.6017/ital.v36i4.10146 “The preservation of digital objects has become an urgent task in recent years as it has been realised that digital media have a short life span. The pace of technological change makes… Continue Reading
New York State Courts Announce High-Tech Courtrooms
National Center for State Courts – “A state-of-the-art courtroom designed to speed the progress of complex commercial cases is now up and running in Westchester County Supreme Court’s Commercial Division, which serves as a forum for the resolution of complicated business disputes. The Division’s Integrated Courtroom Technology (ICT) part, located in Westchester County’s Supreme and… Continue Reading
Bank Systemic Risk Regulation: The $50 Billion Threshold in the Dodd-Frank Act
Bank Systemic Risk Regulation: The $50 Billion Threshold in the Dodd-Frank Act, December 6, 2017. The 2007-2009 financial crisis highlighted the problem of “too big to fail” financial institutions—the concept that the failure of a large financial firmc ould trigger financial instability, which in several cases prompted extraordinary federal assistance to prevent their failure. This… Continue Reading
CRS – Understanding the Speech or Debate Clause
Understanding the Speech or Debate Clause, Todd Garvey, Legislative Attorney. December 1, 2017. “The Speech or Debate Clause (Clause) of the U.S. Constitution states that “[F]or any Speech or Debate in either House, ”Members of Congress (Members)“shall not be questioned in any other Place. ”The Clause serves various purposes: principally to protect the independence and… Continue Reading
Bloomberg – How Facebook’s Political Unit Enables Dark Art of Digital Propaganda
Some of unit’s clients stifle opposition, stoke extremism. By Lauren Etter, Vernon Silver, and Sarah Frier, December 21, 2017. Bloomberg Technology. “Under fire for Facebook Inc.’s role as a platform for political propaganda, co-founder Mark Zuckerberg has punched back, saying his mission is above partisanship. “We hope to give all people a voice and create… Continue Reading
