Government Efficiency and Effectiveness: Opportunities to Reduce Fragmentation, Overlap, and Duplication and Achieve Other Financial Benefits. GAO-18-498T: Published: Apr 26, 2018. Publicly Released: Apr 26, 2018. “Every year, we identify and report on federal agencies, programs, and initiatives with fragmented, overlapping, or duplicative goals or activities; and ways to reduce costs or enhance revenue. The… Continue Reading
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Monthly Archives: May 2018
What are the ten most cited sources on Wikipedia? Let’s ask the data.
Wikimedia: “Citations are the foundation of Wikipedia’s reliability: they trace the connection between content added by our community of volunteer contributors and its sources. For readers, citations provide a mechanism to validate and check for themselves that what Wikipedia says is sound and trustworthy: they act as a gateway towards a broader ecosystem of reliable… Continue Reading
What Extremely Warm Winters Mean for the Future of the Arctic
“In an interview with Yale Environment 360, polar scientist Mark Serreze talks about the rapid changes he has witnessed over more than three decades of working in the Arctic and the future stability of the region if temperatures continue to climb…Serreze discusses how he and his colleagues gradually began to accept that human carbon emissions… Continue Reading
Survey – LA and Washington D.C. Commuters Log Most Hours on the Road
“Are you a cranky commuter or do you use your time behind the wheel to zen out? Cars.com™ conducted a survey of commuters nationwide and zeroed in on motorist behaviors in five major metropolitan areas. The survey reveals commuter behavior on the road. With the average commuting time totaling 21-23 minutes nationwide, which is even… Continue Reading
OCLC Research’s Merrilee Proffitt Shows How Libraries Can Leverage Wikipedia
OCLC: “In Leveraging Wikipedia: Connecting Communities of Knowledge, published by ALA Editions, Merrilee Proffitt of OCLC Research shows how libraries can contribute to Wikipedia to improve content quality and make library services more visible. The vision statement of the Wikimedia Foundation states, “Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the… Continue Reading
Google Duplex: An AI System for Accomplishing Real-World Tasks Over the Phone
Google AI Blog: “A long-standing goal of human-computer interaction has been to enable people to have a natural conversation with computers, as they would with each other. In recent years, we have witnessed a revolution in the ability of computers to understand and to generate natural speech, especially with the application of deep neural networks… Continue Reading
Paper – Support Your Data: A Research Data Management Guide for Researchers
Support Your Data: A Research Data Management Guide for Researchers. John A Borghi, Stephen Abrams, Daniella Lowenberg, Stephanie Simms, John Chodacki. Research Ideas and Outcomes 4: e26439 doi: 10.3897/rio.4.e26439. Received: 04 May 2018 | Published: 09 May 2018. “Researchers are faced with rapidly evolving expectations about how they should manage and share their data, code,… Continue Reading
Good News – Life gets better after 50: why age tends to work in favour of happiness
The Guardian – Jonathan Rauch, author of The Happiness Curve, was relieved to find an explanation for his gloom – academics say adulthood happiness is U-shaped “Academics have found increasing evidence that happiness through adulthood is U-shaped – life satisfaction falls in our 20s and 30s, then hits a trough in our late 40s before… Continue Reading
New research – successful entrepreneurship is not the sole domain of the young
Age and High-Growth Entrepreneurship. Pierre Azoulay, MIT and NBER; Benjamin F. Jones, Northwestern University and NBER; J. Daniel Kim, MIT; Javier Miranda, U.S. Census Bureau. March 23, 2018 “Abstract – Many observers, and many investors, believe that young people are especially likely to produce the most successful new firms. We use administrative data at the… Continue Reading
Advocacy Groups Push Tech Companies To Be More Transparent and Accountable About Censoring User Content
“EFF, ACLU of Northern California, Center for Democracy & Technology, New America’s Open Technology Institute, and a group of academic experts and free expression advocates today released the Santa Clara Principles, a set of minimum standards for tech companies to augment and strengthen their content moderation policies. The plain language, detailed guidelines call for disclosing… Continue Reading
ProPublica – investigative report on Defense Environmental Restoration Program Sites
ProPublica – Abrahm Lustgarten: “For much of the past two years I’ve been digging into a vast, $70 billion environmental cleanup program run by the U.S. Department of Defense that tracks tens of thousands of polluted sites across the United States. In some places, old missiles and munitions were left buried beneath school grounds. In… Continue Reading
Wikipedia Founder – Internet Users Are Adrift In The ‘Fake News’ Era
NPR – “At any given moment, volunteers and paid workers are writing fictional narratives that they present online as news stories, and some of those will get picked up and shared — perhaps thousands of times — on social media. Hoaxes are presented as fact, conspiracy theories are offered as truth, and some of them… Continue Reading
