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Daily Archives: October 1, 2014

Offline and falling behind: Barriers to Internet adoption

McKinsey – More than 60 percent of the world’s population remains offline. Without removing crucial deterrents to Internet adoption, little will change—and more than 4 billion people may be left behind.

“In a little more than a generation, the Internet has grown from a nascent technology to a tool that is transforming how people, businesses, and governments communicate and engage. The Internet’s economic impact has been massive, making significant contributions to nations’ gross domestic product (GDP) and fueling new, innovative industries. It has also generated societal change by connecting individuals and communities, providing access to information and education, and promoting greater transparency. However, not all countries have harnessed the Internet’s benefits to the same degree. In a new report, we examine the evolution of Internet adoption around the world, the factors that enable the development of a vibrant Internet ecosystem, and the barriers that are impeding more than 60 percent of the global population from getting online. Several findings emerged.”

On Front Lines of Recycling, Turning Food Waste into Biogas

Rachel Cernansky, Yale environment 360: “An increasing number of sewage treatment plants in the U.S. and Europe are processing food waste in anaerobic biodigesters, keeping more garbage out of landfills, reducing methane emissions, and producing energy to defray their operating costs. In February, trucks from Waste Management, Inc. started working new routes in Los Angeles County, California.… Continue Reading

Confronting Cognitive ‘Anchoring Effect’ and ‘Blind Spot’ Biases in Federal Sentencing

Bennett, Mark W., Confronting Cognitive ‘Anchoring Effect’ and ‘Blind Spot’ Biases in Federal Sentencing: A Modest Solution for Reforming a Fundamental Flaw (July 5, 2014). Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, Vol. 104, No. 3, p. 489, 2014. Available for download at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2503423 “Cognitive “anchoring effect” bias, especially related to numbers, like sentencing guidelines ranges,… Continue Reading

Heads Up – A Single Fire Can Cripple America’s Aging Air-Traffic System

Alex Davis – Wired: “The ground radar network dates back to the 1950s, when air traffic finally got busy enough that officials needed a new way to track aircraft on the move. Since then, the network has greatly expanded, and the radars have been upgraded, though small air traffic facilities didn’t upgrade from vacuum tube… Continue Reading

PulseNet – connecting foodborne illness cases together using DNA “fingerprinting” of the bacteria making people sick

“PulseNet connects cases of foodborne illness to potential outbreaks. PulseNet is a national laboratory network  made up of 87 laboratories−at least one in each state. PulseNet  connects foodborne illness cases together to detect and define outbreaks using DNA “fingerprinting” of the bacteria making people sick  using a standardized process called pulsed-field gel electrophoresis (PFGE). Every state has… Continue Reading

New Data Release from Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services

FCW.com: “A new government database that debuted Sept. 30 offers information on financial connections between doctors and teaching hospitals and pharmaceutical firms and medical device manufacturers. The open-data play by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services was mandated under provisions of the 2010 health care overhaul. The inaugural data dump covers $3.5 billion in payments from… Continue Reading

Reconstructing Native Language Typology from Foreign Language Usage

Proceedings of the Eighteenth Conference on Computational Language Learning, pages 21–29,. Baltimore, Maryland USA, June 26-27 2014. c 2014 Association for Computational Linguistics. Reconstructing Native Language Typology from Foreign Language Usage. Larry Hardesty | MIT News Office, July 23, 2014: “Computer scientists at MIT and Israel’s Technion have discovered an unexpected source of information about the world’s languages:… Continue Reading