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Daily Archives: August 7, 2014

Mesa: Geo-Replicated, Near Real-Time, Scalable Data Warehousing

Research at Google – “Mesa is a highly scalable analytic data warehousing system that stores critical measurement data related to Google’s Internet advertising business. Mesa is designed to satisfy a complex and challenging set of user and systems requirements, including near real-time data ingestion and queryability, as well as high availability, reliability, fault tolerance, and scalability for large data and query volumes. Specifically, Mesa handles petabytes of data, processes millions of row updates per second, and serves billions of queries that fetch trillions of rows per day. Mesa is geo-replicated across multiple datacenters and provides consistent and repeatable query answers at low latency, even when an entire datacenter fails. This paper presents the Mesa system and reports the performance and scale that it achieves.”

Saving the Arctic

The Urgent Need to Cut Black Carbon Emissions and Slow Climate Change – Rebecca Lefton and Cathleen Kelly, August 2014. “The Arctic is warming at a rate twice as fast as the rest of the world, in part because of the harsh effects of black carbon pollution on the region, which is made up mostly of snow… Continue Reading

Student Debt Linked to Worse Health and Less Wealth – Gallup

“College graduates who carry a high amount of student debt appear to face long-term challenges that stretch beyond just their finances. A new analysis of Americans who graduated college between 1990 and 2014 shows that graduates who took on the highest amounts of student debt, $50,000 or more, are less likely than their fellow graduates… Continue Reading

Veterans’ Disability Compensation: Trends and Policy Options

CBO Report, August 7, 2014: “The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) oversees a disability program that makes payments through the Veterans Benefits Administration (VBA) to compensate U.S. veterans for medical conditions or injuries that are incurred or aggravated during active duty in the military, although not necessarily during the performance of military duties. Compensable service-connected… Continue Reading

Report on the Economic Well-Being of U.S. Households

“In its new Report on the Economic Well-Being of U.S. Households, the Federal Reserve Board provides a snapshot of the self-perceived financial and economic well-being of U.S. households and the issues they face, based on responses to the Board’s 2013 Survey of Household Economics and Decisionmaking. The report provides insight into numerous topics of current relevance to… Continue Reading

Billion-Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters

“On August 6, NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center released updated information on 2013 Billion-Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters and several new tools to assist users in analyzing the data. These new features allow users to better explore the type, frequency and cost of U.S. billion-dollar events by state and year, from 1980 to 2013.  Based on updated… Continue Reading

Command & Control: Understanding, denying, detecting

UK Centre for the Protection of National Infrastructure report: “Modern computer usage has seen an ever-increasing use of the Internet. More and more business is being conducted on or over the Internet, communication via the Internet is the norm for many transactions, and many people now socialise via sites on the Internet. This is generally… Continue Reading

New GAO Reports – Contractor Performance, School Meal Programs

CONTRACTOR PERFORMANCE: Actions Taken to Improve Reporting of Past Performance Information, GAO-14-707: Published: Aug 7, 2014. Publicly Released: Aug 7, 2014: “ SCHOOL MEAL PROGRAMS: Implications of Adjusting Income Eligibility Thresholds and Reimbursement Rates by Geographic Differences, GAO-14-557: Published: Jul 8, 2014. Publicly Released: Aug 7, 2014. Continue Reading

New York Times Launches Enhanced Archive Search and @NYTArchives Twitter Account

PressRun: “Today The New York Times launches search on its interactive digital archive: TimesMachine.  With this newly-developed search technology, users can now use both free text and subject headings from the Times Index to search the 11,298,320 Times articles published across 46,592 issues between September 18, 1851 and December 31, 1980. Unlike previous iterations of search… Continue Reading