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Daily Archives: January 25, 2015

The Cobweb Can the Internet be archived?

Jill Lepore, The New Yorker:  “The Wayback Machine has archived more than four hundred and thirty billion Web pages. The Web is global, but, aside from the Internet Archive, a handful of fledgling commercial enterprises, and a growing number of university Web archives, most Web archives are run by national libraries. They collect chiefly what’s in their own domains (the Web Archive of the National Library of Sweden, for instance, includes every Web page that ends in “.se”). The Library of Congress has archived nine billion pages, the British Library six billion. Those collections, like the collections of most national libraries, are in one way or another dependent on the Wayback Machine; the majority also use Heritrix, the Internet Archive’s open-source code. The British Library and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France backfilled the early years of their collections by using the Internet Archive’s crawls of the .uk and .fr domains. The Library of Congress doesn’t actually do its own Web crawling; it contracts with the Internet Archive to do it instead.”

Guardian – WikiLeaks demands answers after Google hands staff emails to US government

Ed Pilkington and Dominic Rushe: “Google took almost three years to disclose to the open information group WikiLeaks that it had handed over emails and other digital data belonging to three of its staffers to the US government, under a secret search warrant issued by a federal judge. WikiLeaks has written to Google’s executive chairman,… Continue Reading

Brookings – 2014 Global Metro Monitor – An Uncertain Recovery

2014 Global Metro Monitor – Combined Change in Employment and GDP Per Capita (Index of Both Rates), 2013–2014 “With only 20 percent of the population, the world’s 300 largest metropolitan economies accounted for nearly half of global output in 2014. This interactive and report compare growth patterns in the world’s 300 largest metro economies on two… Continue Reading

Are Firm-Advisor Relationships Valuable? A Long-Term Perspective

Becher, David A. and Gordon, Rachel and Juergens, Jennifer L., Are Firm-Advisor Relationships Valuable? A Long-Term Perspective (January 24, 2015). Available for download at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2554845 “We examine long-term firm-advisor relations using an extended history of debt, equity, and merger transactions. Hard-to-value firms are more likely to maintain dedicated advisor relations (underwriters or merger advisors).… Continue Reading

Life in the Global Public Domain

Ruggie, John Gerard, Life in the Global Public Domain: Response to Commentaries on the UN Guiding Principles and the Proposed Treaty on Business and Human Rights (January 23, 2015). Available for download at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2554726 ““This paper addresses the foundational logics of the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, and comments on the… Continue Reading

The Public Library: A Photographic Love Letter to Humanity’s Greatest Sanctuary of Knowledge, Freedom, and Democracy

“A library is many things,” E.B. White once wrote in a letter to the children of a little town to inspire them to fall in love with their new library. “But particularly it is a place where books live, and where you can get in touch with other people, and other thoughts, through books… Books… Continue Reading

Currency depreciation against the dollar affects oil importers and exporters differently

EIA – “Widely traded futures contracts for North Sea Brent crude oil in global financial markets are typically priced in U.S. dollars (USD). The appreciation, or increase in value, of USD against most other currencies since last summer can either mitigate or exacerbate the effects of the recent sharp decline in USD-denominated crude oil prices,… Continue Reading

Google Search – Deep Learning Revives the Neural Net Revolution

Follow up to previous posting – Google – Still in the Search, How Google Search Dealt With Mobile – The Never Ending Search by Steven Levy, see also parts two, three and four of this series: Part 2 – Google’s Secret Study To Find Out Our Needs – To improve search, ask people what they… Continue Reading