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Daily Archives: May 8, 2015

Energy Report – Home Idle Load

Natural Resources Defense Council – Devices Wasting Huge Amounts of Electricity When Not in Active Use

  • “Always-on” energy use by inactive appliances, electronics and miscellaneous electrical devices translates to $19 billion a year — about $165 per U.S. household on average.
  • The average always-on load uses the same amount of electricity as brewing 234 cups of coffee every single day for a year — more than 85,000 cups of coffee.
  • If all homes in the United States reduced their always-on load for inactive devices to the level of the 25 percent most efficient household in our survey, it could save consumers $8 billion on their annual utility bills and prevent 44 million metric tons of carbon dioxide pollution.

“There has been a veritable explosion in the number of electronics, appliances, and other miscellaneous devices plugged into, or permanently connected to, America’s homes. Most are consuming electricity around-the-clock, even when the owners are not using them or think they have been turned off. This always-on energy use by inactive devices translates to $19 billion a year — about $165 per U.S. household on average — and approximately 50 large (500-megawatt) power plants’ worth of electricity.”

Information Processing of Foreign Exchange News

Feuerriegel, Stefan and Wolff, Georg and Neumann, Dirk, Information Processing of Foreign Exchange News: Extending the Overshooting Model to Include Qualitative Information from News Sentiment (May 6, 2015). Available for download at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2603435 “In a globalized world, the volume of international trade is based on both import and export prices, thereby making a country’s… Continue Reading

DOJ Summary of Annual FOIA Reports – 2014

DOJ Summary of Annual FOIA Reports For Fiscal Year 2014 – “In FY 2014, the federal government overall received 714,231 FOIA requests, continuing a four year trend of surpassing the record high number of requests received during a fiscal year. The additional 9,837 requests received is a 1.4% increase from the previous record high number… Continue Reading

NASA – Cloudy Earth

NASA Earth Observatory – “Decades of satellite observations and astronaut photographs show that clouds dominate space-based views of Earth. One study based on nearly a decade of satellite data estimated that about 67 percent of Earth’s surface is typically covered by clouds. This is especially the case over the oceans, where other research shows less… Continue Reading

Website About Endangered Species and the Efforts to Save Them

“Over the last 18 years, Bagheera has been visited by millions of people who have requested tens of millions of pages of information on endangered species. Bagheera was created by Endangered Species Journalist Craig Kasnoff in 1996 as part of Microsoft’s Schoolhouse Project. It is the first of many endangered species websites created by Craig to… Continue Reading

Antitrust: EU Commission launches e-commerce sector inquiry

News release: “The European Commission has today launched an antitrust competition inquiry into the e-commerce sector in the European Union. The inquiry, as announced by Commissioner Vestager in March, will allow the Commission to identify possible competition concerns affecting European e-commerce markets. It complements actions launched within the framework of the Digital Single Market Strategy… Continue Reading

Report – Millennial Childbearing and the Recession

Urban Institute – Millennial Childbearing and the Recession. Nan Marie Astone; Steven Martin; H. Elizabeth Peters. April 28, 2015 “This brief is part of an Urban Institute study of the Millennial generation, those born between 1980 and 1995, exploring its diversity, demographics, and policy implications. Between 2007 and 2012, birth rates among twenty-something women declined… Continue Reading