Best Practices for Government Libraries - 2009 - Change: Managing It, Surviving It, and Thriving On It - "The 2009 edition includes 60 articles and other submissions provided by more than 50 contributors from librarians in government agencies, courts, and the military, as well as from professional association leaders, LexisNexis Consultants, and more." Compiled by Marie Kaddell, LexisNexis.

Brookings: Governance Matters 2009: Learning From Over a Decade of the Worldwide Governance Indicators, Daniel Kaufmann, Aart Kraay and Massimo Mastruzzi, June 29, 2009.

The Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI) project: "The six aggregate indicators and the underlying data sources can be viewed interactively on the Governance Indicators webpage of this site. To download the full dataset for all countries and indicators in Excel format, click here. Documentation of the latest update of the WGI can be found in Governance Matters VIII: Governance Indicators for 1996–2008. Further documentation and research using the WGI is available on the Resources page of this website or at www.worldbank.org/wbi/governance."

Arctic Climate Change and Security Policy Conference: Final Report and Findings, Kenneth Yalowitz, James Collins, Ross Virginia Report, June 2009

Editor & Publisher, Special Report: When There's No Print Edition, Do Readers Flock to the Web? By Jennifer Saba

News release: "The most authoritative report providing a blueprint for how communities can tackle global warming was released by the California League of Conservation Voters Education Fund and the Natural Resources Defense Council. The report is a guide to California’s Sustainable Communities and Climate Protection Act, or SB 375, the nation’s first legislation to link transportation and land use planning with global warming. The report Communities Tackle Global Warming: A Guide to California’s SB 375, highlights that locating homes closer to jobs and transportation choices creates walkable communities and can improve quality of life, reduce commute times and cut millions of tons of global warming pollution. It also features a photo simulation of how communities could come alive after mixed-use development and improved street design bring pedestrian activity into the area."

Marketing Yourself with Webinars - Attorney Wells H. Anderson recommends presenting periodic webinars as an effective, direct and efficient technique to attract new clients and professionals who refer business to you.

Secrecy News: "The rise of “the wall” between intelligence and law enforcement personnel that impeded the sharing of information within the U.S. government prior to September 11, 2001 was critically examined in a detailed monograph (pdf) that was prepared in 2004 for the 9/11 Commission. It is the only one of four staff monographs that had not previously been released. It was finally declassified and disclosed earlier this month. In April 2004, Attorney General John Ashcroft testified (pdf) that the failure to properly share threat information in the summer of 2001 could be attributed to Justice Department policy memoranda that were issued in 1995 by the Clinton Administration. That is an erroneous oversimplification, the staff monograph contends: “A review of the facts… demonstrates that the Attorney General’s testimony did not fairly and accurately reflect” the meaning or relevance of those 1995 policy documents. For one thing, those policies did not even apply to CIA and NSA information, which could have been shared with law enforcement without any procedural obstacles."

The End of Institutional Repositories & the Beginning of Social Academic Research Service: An Enhanced Role For Libraries - Stuart Basefsky advocates broadening the concept of institutional repositories (IRs) to serve as full-fledged electronic libraries and documents how they can then serve the greater purpose of collecting, disseminating, analyzing and exchanging useful digital information for academic purposes.

Mapping the Arabic Blogosphere: Politics, Culture, and Dissent - By Bruce Etling, John Kelly, Robert Faris, and John Palfrey - Internet & Democracy Case Study Series, June 2009. Berkman Center Research Publication No. 2009-06

"On 16 June the Government published The Digital Britain Report, its strategic vision for ensuring that the UK is at the leading edge of the global digital economy. The report provides actions and recommendations to promote and protect talent and innovation in our creative industries, to modernise TV and radio frameworks and support local news, and introduces policies to maximise the social and economic benefits from digital technologies."

Official Google Blog: "...Citizentube, a special YouTube blog devoted to chronicling the way that people are using video to change the world. If you've followed news and politics on YouTube, you might have noticed that we started Citizentube as a video channel on the site a few years back, but we soon realized that keeping track of all the phenomenal uses of YouTube by posting our own videos just wasn't fast enough — so now we're blogging, too. We generally focus on two types of posts: the compelling political and social uses of YouTube that we see the community bubble up every day, and our own programming initiatives and partnerships in the political, news, and nonprofit arenas."

New on LLRX.com: Bridging the DiGital Divide: Custom Search Engines Put You in Control - Law librarian, legal research expert and blogger John J. DiGilio's new column focuses on technology trends that leverage the web to achieve more efficient and effective results. Here John recommends using customized search engines to manage the sites you search.

2009 Trust, Security & Passwords Survey Research Brief: "This global "snooping" survey is the third in a series of benchmark studies focused on identifying security and privacy trends among IT workers. Results are intended to raise awareness about the risks associated with powerful, and often unmanaged, privileged users and passwords. While seemingly innocuous, these accounts provide workers with "keys to the kingdom," allowing them to access critically sensitive information, no matter where it resides."

"This Pew Internet/California HealthCare Foundation survey finds that technology is not an end, but a means to accelerate the pace of discovery, widen social networks, and sharpen the questions someone might ask when they do get to talk to a health professional. Technology can help to enable the human connection in health care and the internet is turning up the information network’s volume."

Putting Women's Health Care Disparities On The Map: Examining Racial and Ethnic Disparities at the State Level, June 10, 2009: "This Kaiser Family Foundation report documents the persistence of disparities between white women and women of color across the country. It provides a rare and comprehensive state-level look at disparities among women of different races and ethnicities on a broad range of indicators of health and well-being, including rates of diseases such as diabetes, heart disease, AIDS and cancer, and access to health insurance and health screenings."

Beth Noveck, Deputy Chief Technology Officer for Open Government: "...this initial public engagement process on open government policy will take place in three phases (brainstorming, discussion, drafting). Following this initial process, we will distill the input received here, from submissions of proposals in From the Inbox, and from government experts and develop a set of draft recommendations for both public and inter-governmental review. These recommendations will, in turn, help to guide the development of government-wide policy on transparency, participation, and collaboration."

"The purpose of Data.gov is to increase public access to high value, machine readable datasets generated by the Executive Branch of the Federal Government. As a priority Open Government Initiative for President Obama's administration, Data.gov increases the ability of the public to easily find, download, and use datasets that are generated and held by the Federal Government. Data.gov provides descriptions of the Federal datasets (metadata), information about how to access the datasets, and tools that leverage government datasets. The data catalogs will continue to grow as datasets are added. Federal, Executive Branch data are included in the first version of Data.gov."

ADP National Employment Report: "Nonfarm private employment decreased 532,000 from April to May 2009 on a seasonally adjusted basis, according to the ADP National Employment Report®. The estimated change of employment from March to April was revised by 54,000, from a decline of 491,000 to a decline of 545,000. Monthly employment losses in April and May averaged 539,000. This is a notable improvement over the first three months of the year, when monthly losses averaged 691,000. Nevertheless, despite some recent indications that economic activity is stabilizing, employment, which usually trails overall economic activity, is likely to decline for at least several more months, although perhaps not as rapidly as during the last six months. May’s ADP Report estimates nonfarm private employment in the service-providing sector fell by 265,000. Employment in the goods-producing sector declined 267,000, with employment in the manufacturing sector dropping 149,000, its thirty-ninth consecutive monthly decline."

"As the ongoing recession places new constraints on family and government budgets, the long-standing gap between Americans’ need for long-term care services and the public and private funding available to pay for them grows ever wider. Policymakers may be interested in exploring whether private long-term care insurance – which now covers only about 6 million individuals – could play a larger role in financing the country’s long-term care needs. A new policy brief, Closing the Long-Term Care Funding Gap: The Challenge of Private Long-Term Care Insurance, from the Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured examines the fundamentals of private long-term care insurance...Also available is related testimony, Filling In the Long-Term Care Gaps, from Diane Rowland, Executive Vice President of the Foundation and the Executive Director of KCMU, who testified June 3 at a U.S. Senate Special Committee on Aging hearing on the role of private insurance in long-term care."

URL shorteners, such as TinyURL, bit.ly and notlong.com allow users to share and post links in a quicker manner with less likelihood of misdirection. They also add an intermediary between the reader and the site of origin, and the risk of countless dead links if and when the business model of the respective services ceases to sustain a viable return.

"NIST announces that its working definition of cloud computing is available. Researchers worked in collaboration with industry and government to draft the definition that serves as a foundation for its research and future publication on the topic. Cloud computing is a pay-per-use model for enabling available, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction. Researchers are studying cloud architectures, economics, security and deployment strategies for the federal government."

Navigating the Enterprise 2.0 Highway: Heather Colman provides an overview of Hicks Morley's implementation of ThoughtFarmer, an Enterprise 2.0/wiki style intranet platform, one year ago. Despite a few growing pains, she describes how the application was successful at meeting the primary objectives to decentralize content updates and increase knowledge sharing and collaboration within the firm.

With Translation Technology On Their Side, Humans Can Finally Lick the Language Barrier: "...a universal translator...is being tested in Iraq by DARPA -- the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency -- the legendary research and development works in Arlington [Virginia]. The machine interprets the spoken word. You talk in English. It repeats whatever you said in spoken Iraqi Arabic. It then awaits a spoken response from the Iraqi, and talks back to you in English... Independently, Google is deploying its strikingly successful Translate project. It instantly translates text among 41 languages from Bulgarian to Hindi with surprising felicity. The big question is how soon Google will release a voice version, making the world's cellphones multilingual."

Online King Records Access (OKRA) Database: "A Joint Project of the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center at Boston University, the Martin Luther King, Jr., Research and Education Institute at Stanford University, and the Robert W.Woodruff Library at Atlanta University Center. Funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. his searchable database gives you access to thousands of King documents through the year 1958."

Follow up to previous articles on Google Book Search: "The University of Michigan today announced that it has expanded its historic agreement with Google Inc. to create digital copies of millions of U-M library books and journals. The amended agreement, which strengthens library preservation efforts and increases the public's access to books, is possible because of Google's pending settlement with a broad class of authors and publishers. The U-M library is the first in the nation to expand its partnership with Google."

News release: "Students and families may not be getting as much help as they think from commercial admission test preparation, according to a report commissioned by the National Association for College Admission Counseling (NACAC). Existing academic research suggests average gains as a result of commercial test preparation are in the neighborhood of 30 points on the SAT and less than one point on the ACT, substantially lower than gains marketed by test preparation companies. However, the research report also indicates that some colleges and universities may make inappropriate distinctions among applications based on small differences in admission test scores, making even minimal test score gains potentially important in those decisions. The report suggests more comprehensive research is needed to further understand the impact of specific types of test preparation, as distinct from other factors that may improve test scores."

"The Iwokrama International Centre for Rainforest Conservation and Development (IIC) is an autonomous non-profit institution established by Guyana and the Commonwealth. Through the dedication of 371,000 hectares (about one million acres) of intact tropical rainforest by the Government and People of Guyana to the International Community, the IIC aims to show how tropical forests can be conserved and sustainably used for ecological, social and economic benefits to local, national and international communities."

Follow up to previous postings on swine flu and A/H1N1: from the Consortium for North American Higher Education Collaboration (CONAHEC) - "The information in this site is intended to support internationally oriented higher education administrators, study abroad representatives, faculty and students by helping inform their decisions and actions affecting international academic activities stemming from concerns over the H1N1 strain of influenza...We are regularly updating basic statistics about the virus outbreak in the North American region. The information is provided by the appropriate government agencies of Mexico, the U.S. and Canada."

Harvard Business School Working Paper: An Ounce of Prevention: The Power of Public Risk Management in Stabilizing the Financial System, May 4, 2009

Sex and Science: How Professor Gender Perpetuates the Gender Gap, Scott E. Carrelly, UC Davis and NBER; Marianne E. Pagez, UC Davis and NBER; James E. Westx, USAF Academy, May 7, 2009

Follow up to previous postings, Spain Announces Superspeed Trains and Vision of High-Speed Rail in America, see Stop This Train! by Tom Vanderbilt: "There is at least one technology in America, however, that is worse now than it was in the early 20th century: the train."

The Global Food Crisis, The End of Plenty - by Joel K. Bourne Jr.

WSJ: "The best 3-year-old in the land just happens to be a filly named Rachel Alexandra. Jockey Calvin Borel all but guaranteed victory in the Preakness Stakes and, boy, did she deliver, becoming the first filly in 85 years to win the second leg of the Triple Crown."

Screencast demonstrates new engine's capabilities: Wolfram|Alpha Screencast

Progressive Librarians Guild Calls for Elsevier to End Corrupt Publishing Practices and for Library Associations to Take Advocacy Role on Behalf of Scientific Integrity

"Virtual Student Foreign Service (VSFS) Internships, announced by Secretary Clinton at the 2009 New York University commencement speech, are part of a growing effort by the State Department to harness technology and a commitment to global service among young people to facilitate new forms of diplomatic engagement. The VSFS Internships will be developed over the next year and will seek to harness the energy of a rising generation of citizen diplomats."

TheLancet.com: "The emergence in Mexico in April of a new strain of influenza A H1N1 (swine flu) capable of causing human disease and of person-to-person transmission has put health authorities around the world on alert for an influenza pandemic, and caused a storm of coverage in the mass media. Outside Mexico, the disease caused by H1N1 appears no more severe than seasonal influenza; however, the possibility that the virus might cause more severe disease as it spreads cannot be discounted. Cases of infection have now been confirmed in 33 countries on four continents. WHO is considering raising the pandemic alert level to six, which would signify the first influenza pandemic since 1968." [Gerry McKiernan]

Can Collaboration Solve Copyright Status Questions? The WorldCat Copyright Evidence Registry - As Roger V. Skalbeck documents, one of the underlying obstacles to reproducing older books is a central place to look for information about what is protected by copyright and what may have passed into the public domain is lacking. Responding to this need, OCLC recently introduced a beta service, the WorldCat Copyright Evidence Registry (CER). It could be a very valuable resource for recording and sharing copyright status information."

News release: "The National Small Business Association (NSBA) today released data showing that reliance on credit cards is growing among small businesses. Unfortunately, so, too, is the number of small-business respondents who reported worsening credit-card terms. The NSBA 2009 Small Business Credit Card Survey provides a detailed view of how small businesses are utilizing their credit cards, how their credit-card companies are treating them, and the impacts of deteriorating credit-card terms on their business."

Follow up to April 26, 2009 posting - WSJ Interactive Map - Adverse events at top 100 newspapers, 2006-2009, this New York Times op-ed by Frank Rich - The American Press on Suicide Watch: "Newspaper circulations and revenues are in free fall. Legendary brands from The Los Angeles Times to The Philadelphia Inquirer are teetering. The New York Times Company threatened to close The Boston Globe if its employees didn’t make substantial sacrifices in salaries and benefits. Other papers have died. The reporting ranks on network and local news alike are shriveling. You know it’s bad when the Senate is moved, as it was last week, to weigh in with hearings on The Future of Journalism."

Economic Policy Institute Briefing Paper - Working the Graveyard Shift, Why raising the Social Security retirement age is not the answer, by Monique Morrissey and Emily Garr: "The life expectancy of older Americans has increased by three and a half years over the past half century. In 2005, Americans who survived to age 65 could expect to live another 18.6 years, up from 15.1 years in 1955. By 2050, the Social Security Administration estimates that the average 65-year-old will live 21 years in retirement. As our golden years grow longer, we will need to work longer, work harder, or increase the share of earnings devoted to funding retirement in order to ensure a comfortable old age. The choice depends on whether we prefer to enjoy the fruits of economic growth in the form of increased leisure or increased consumption."

On May 6, 2009 the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation held the following Subcommittee on Communications, Technology, and the Internet hearing: The Future of Journalism. Witness statements:

• Marissa Mayer, Vice President, Search Products & User Experience, Google Inc.
  
• Alberto Ibargüen, President and Chief Executive Officer, John S. And James L. Knight Foundation
  
• David Simon, Author, TV Producer and Former Newspaperman
  
• Steve Coll, Former Managing Editor, The Washington Post
  
• James Moroney, Publisher/CEO, The Dallas Morning News
  
• Arianna Huffington, Co-founder and Editor-in-Chief, The Huffington Post

Press Releases by Academic Medical Centers: Not So Academic?, Steven Woloshin, MD, MS; Lisa M. Schwartz, MD, MS; Samuel L. Casella, MPH; Abigail T. Kennedy, BA; and Robin J. Larson, MD, MPH. Annals of Internal Medicine 5 May 2009 | Volume 150 Issue 9 | Pages 613-618 [full text available at no charge]

News release: "U.S. home values continued to slide for the ninth consecutive quarter, declining 14.2 percent from a year ago, and falling 21.8 percent since the market peak in 2006. Additionally, one-fifth (21.9%) of all homeowners in the United States is in negative equity, and one in five homes sold in the past 12 months was a foreclosure. Zillow Q1 Real Estate Market Reports track 161 metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) throughout the U.S., identifying market trends including, but not limited to: five and 10-year annualized change, negative equity, short sales and foreclosure transactions [includes excel, graphs and maps]."

Time: "At the new President's urging and by his example, the entire Federal Government [well, not really] has bounded into the world of social-networking. Twenty-five agencies now have YouTube channels. The Library of Congress has begun posting thousands of free historical photos on Flickr. In the past week alone, about 30 agencies, including the White House, have joined Facebook."

News release: "Recommind...search-powered information risk management (IRM) software....released the results of its recent research into the information access and search habits of UK organisations. With businesses capable of searching just 50 percent of the information that their employees need for their daily tasks, the findings indicate that legacy, one-size-fits-all ‘Enterprise Search 1.0’ systems are no longer suitable for modern enterprises that require instant, automated and highly relevant access to all kinds of information – from documents and email to fellow colleagues’ expertise and knowledge to project-specific information. The impact on businesses from this technology failure includes staff spending many hours searching fruitlessly for the information they need to do their daily jobs – with approximately a quarter of those surveyed admitting that employees typically spend more than half a day a week on this task. For a company with 1,000 employees, this equates to upwards of £50,000 worth of lost time a week or £2,600,000 a year."

May 3, 2009 - Swine Flu: First, Sow No Panic, By Elisabeth Rosenthal: "Wash your hands. I know this sounds silly, but it is far more effective at preventing flu than having a dose-pack of Tamiflu in the medicine chest. Take it from a doctor, mother and reporter who covered SARS as well as bird flu where they were most virulent."

Follow up to related postings on swine flu, news that CABI has "announced free access to its specialist Global Health database, the definitive database for public health information, to assist in the battle against swine flu."

Obama Is Nudging Views on Race, a Survey Finds: "Barack Obama’s presidency seems to be altering the public perception of race relations in the United States. Two-thirds of Americans now say race relations are generally good, and the percentage of blacks who say so has doubled since last July, according to the latest New York Times/ CBS News poll."

Managing Arab Sovereign Wealth in Turbulent Times—and Beyond, Sven Behrendt, Bassma Kodmani Carnegie Paper, April 2009

Follow up to previous postings on swine flu resources, the following news release: "Due to the recent global outbreak of Swine Influenza, EBSCO Publishing and the DynaMed Editors have made DynaMed’s information about Swine Influenza free to health care providers and institutions throughout the world. The DynaMed topic on Swine Influenza consolidates information from multiple sources for health care providers to stay current with recommendations for monitoring, diagnosing, and treating patients with flu-like illnesses during this outbreak. DynaMed Editors will continue to monitor information and update this topic as needed throughout this global crisis. Please click on this link for information regarding Swine Influenza."

Via Pia Christensen, Managing Editor/Online Services, Association of Health Care Journalists: "the Association has constantly updated resources about covering flu, pandemics and public health preparedness. We have detailed tip sheets, speaker presentations about pandemics, animal-borne diseases, emergency preparedness and public health, inks to press briefings, hearings and news conferences..."

"Air pollution continues to threaten the lives and health of millions of people in the United States despite great progress since the modern Clean Air Act was first passed in 1970. Even as the nation explores the complex challenges of global warming and energy, air pollution remains widespread and dangerous. This year marks the tenth annual American Lung Association State of the Air report and provides an excellent opportunity to look back over the changes in the past ten years. This 2009 report looks at ozone and particle pollution year round (annual average) and over short-term levels (24-hour) of particle pollution (PM2.5) found in monitoring sites across the United States in 2005, 2006, and 2007."

Follow up to Authors, Publishers, and Google Reach Landmark Settlement, from the Authors Guild: "The court overseeing Authors Guild v. Google extended the time for authors and publishers to opt out of the settlement by four months, to September 4th (Judge Chin's order). The fairness hearing will be on October 7th."

The Nation's Report Card: Long-Term Trend 2008

"U.S. News analyzed more than 12,000 graduate programs to bring you this year's rankings." The following are included:

• Business School Rankings
  
• Education School Rankings
  
• Engineering School Rankings
  
• Law School Rankings
  
• Medical School Rankings
  
• Library and Information Studies

Pressure on the Presses: "A precipitous drop in ad spending has cut profits at U.S. newspapers sharply. Some dailies are in bankruptcies, some are printing fewer papers and some have closed altogether. Thousands of reporters, editors and others have left the industry. Track events and readership at the top 50 newspapers by circulation...and in the top 100."

Environmental Defense Fund: "The urgency of the current economic and environmental crises requires solutions that have been proven to work effectively. Our report, Reinventing Transit, American communities finding smarter, cleaner, faster transportation solutions, showcases the new generation of innovative public transit already at work in communities across America, helping to create jobs while ensuring cleaner air and healthier communities. Through the report's 11 case studies, we show that cutting-edge transit can be cost effective, flexible and implemented quickly. They are concrete examples of how modern transit can be tailored to any community, providing greater mobility and access to jobs while making travel cheaper and more energy efficient."

"In 2008, OCLC conducted focus groups, administered a pop-up survey on WorldCat.org—OCLC’s freely available end user interface on the Web—and conducted a Web-based survey of librarians worldwide. The report, Online Catalogs: What Users and Librarians Want, presents findings from these research efforts in order to understand:

• The metadata elements that are most important to end users in determining if an item will meet his or her needs
  
• The enhancements end users would like to see made in online library catalogs to assist them in consistently identifying appropriate materials
  
• The enhancements librarians would recommend for online library catalogs to better assist them in their work
  
• The findings indicate, among other things, that although library catalogs are often thought of as discovery tools, the catalog’s delivery-related information is just as important to end users.

News release: "The likelihood of customers switching banks increases by up to three times after their bank merges with or is acquired by another financial institution, according to the J.D. Power and Associates 2009 Bank Mergers and Acquisitions Report...The report examines the drivers of customer satisfaction and dissatisfaction with their new banks following mergers that took place during the past three years. Using customer satisfaction scores from the J.D. Power and Associates studies on retail banking for 2007 and 2008 as benchmarks, the Bank Mergers and Acquisitions Report compares pre-merger customer satisfaction with current satisfaction levels and identifies opportunities for improvement in the merger process. The report also provides a snapshot of perceptions and attitudes of customers of Chase/WaMu; Wells Fargo/Wachovia; PNC/National City; and Capital One/Chevy Chase—which are currently undergoing mergers."

Follow up April 21, 2009 posting, Gallup Poll: Americans Increasingly Concerned About Retirement Income, this new survey, Consumer Trends in the
Current Market Environment, April 2009: "AXA Equitable Life Insurance Company...released results of a February 2009 consumer study that shows most Americans over the past year have grown increasingly worried about making ends meet. And while protecting themselves from outliving their retirement savings remains their top concern, they are slow to do anything about it. The study revisits the same financial concerns addressed in the first AXA Equitable survey conducted in April 2008, and repeated last October. In the latest survey, 65 percent of those polled said they were concerned about meeting everyday expenses, including the ability to pay their mortgage, should they lose their job – up from 54 percent a year ago."

When Did Your County's Jobs Disappear? An interactive map of vanishing employment across the country, by Chris Wilson

Financial Industry Regulatory Authority - Job Dislocation - Making Smart Financial Choices after a Job Loss: "You may not be able to control if or when your company closes a plant or lays off workers—but you can take steps to manage the financial impact of those events. This brochure contains tips on how to:

• keep your finances on the right track in the event of unemployment;
  
• protect yourself when getting financial advice during a period of job
  dislocation; and
  
• ask the right questions about your company’s benefit plans at any time."
  
• Related postings on financial system

News release: "According to a study initiated by the Christopher & Dana Reeve Foundation, there are nearly 1 in 50 people living with paralysis -- approximately 6 million people. That's the same number of people as the combined populations of Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C. And that number is nearly 40 percent higher than previous estimates showed."

Follow up to April 19, 2009 posting - 2009 Retirement Confidence Survey: Economy Drives Confidence to Record Lows, see this Gallup Poll, Americans Increasingly Concerned About Retirement Income - Expected reliance on 401(k) plans shows major drop from last year, by Frank Newport.

Gallup: "With Earth Day approaching, Americans still on balance believe the quality of the environment in the U.S. is getting worse rather than better; however, their outlook is significantly brighter now than a year ago...Americans show increased optimism about the future quality of the environment, but it will take more than just the election of an environmentally friendly president for the public to begin to perceive that the current condition of the environment is actually improving. The government is likely to take significant steps toward protecting the environment in the coming months, and in future years, Americans will judge whether those efforts have had their intended effect on environmental quality."

Corporate Misgovernance at the World Bank, Working Paper 09-108, April 20, 2009, by Ashwin Kaja and Eric Werker.

The 2009 Retirement Confidence Survey: Economy Drives Confidence to Record Lows; Many Looking to Work Longer, Employee Benefit Research Institute, April 2009

"The World Digital Library will make available on the Internet, free of charge and in multilingual format, significant primary materials from cultures around the world, including manuscripts, maps, rare books, musical scores, recordings, films, prints, photographs, architectural drawings, and other significant cultural materials. The objectives of the World Digital Library are to promote international and inter-cultural understanding and awareness, provide resources to educators, expand non-English and non-Western content on the Internet, and to contribute to scholarly research."

Follow up to previous postings on Google Book search, "The [Internet] Archive is one of many Internet content providers that have an interest in opposing the proposed [Google Book]Settlement Agreement because it effectively limits the liability for the identified uses of orphan works of one party alone, Google Inc., and provides for a Books Rights Registry, the interests of which are represented solely by identified rightsholders, to negotiate their exploitation. All other persons, including Internet content providers such as the Archive, would not be able to use orphan works broadly without being exposed to claims to infringement."

News release: "A national survey of American white collar workers found that while technology is widely embraced among working professionals, significant gaps exist among generations regarding its use and application in the workplace. The newly released Technology Gap Survey found generational differences in the effect of technology on workplace etiquette, the blurring boundaries between personal and professional tasks, and the impact of technology overload. The survey – commissioned by LexisNexis, a leading provider of content-enabled workflow solutions – examined the impact of technology in the workplace. It compared technology and software usage among generations of working professionals, including Boomer (ages 44-60), Generation X (ages 29-43) and Generation Y (ages 28 and younger)."

News release: "Despite the emphasis on homeownership and the marginalization of renters, renter households still make up fully one-third of the households in the United States — more than 36 million households. Out of Reach 2009, Persistent Problems, News Challenges for Renters, is a side-by-side comparison of wages and rents in every county, Metropolitan Area (MSAs/HMFAs), combined nonmetropolitan area and state in the United States. For each jurisdiction, the report calculates the amount of money a household must earn in order to afford a rental unit at a range of sizes (0, 1, 2, 3, and 4 bedrooms) at the area’s Fair Market Rent (FMR), based on the generally accepted affordability standard of paying no more than 30% of income for housing costs. From these calculations the hourly wage a worker must earn to afford the FMR for a two-bedroom home is derived. This figure is the Housing Wage."

"Some 74% of internet users--representing 55% of the entire adult population--went online in 2008 to get involved in the political process or to get news and information about the election. This marks the first time that a Pew Internet & American Life Project survey has found that more than half of the voting-age population used the internet to get involved in the political process during an election year. Several online activities rose to prominence in 2008. In particular, Americans were eager to share their views on the race with others and to take part in the online debate on social media sites such as blogs and social networking sites."

2009 National ADAP Monitoring Project Annual Report: "The National ADAP Monitoring Project Annual Report provides the latest data on state AIDS Drug Assistance Programs (ADAPs). ADAPs, part of the Ryan White Program, provide HIV medications to low-income people with HIV/AIDS who have limited or no prescription drug coverage. ADAPs operate in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and U.S. territories and associated jurisdictions. The 2009 report is the 13th in a series jointly authored by the Kaiser Family Foundation and the National Alliance of State and Territorial AIDS Directors."

• Report
  
• Icon Fact Sheet
  
• ADAP Formularies by State

News release: "The value of libraries in communities across the country continued to grow in 2008—and accelerated dramatically as the national economy sank and people looked for cost effective resources in a time of crisis, according to the American Library Association’s (ALA) annual State of America’s Libraries report, released today as part of National Library Week, April 12-18, 2009. U.S. libraries experienced a dramatic increase in library card registration as the public continues to turn to their local library for free services. More than 68 percent of Americans have a library card. This is the greatest number of Americans with library cards since the American Library Association (ALA) started to measure library card usage in 1990, according to a 2008 Web poll conducted by Harris Interactive. The report also says library usage soared as Americans visited their libraries nearly 1.4 billion times and checked out more than 2 billion items in the past year, an increase of more than 10 percent in both checked out items and library visits, compared to data from the last economic downturn in 2001."

News release: "Three front-to-front crash tests, each involving a microcar or minicar into a midsize model from the same manufacturer, show how extra vehicle size and weight enhance occupant protection in collisions. These Insurance Institute for Highway Safety tests are about the physics of car crashes, which dictate that very small cars generally can't protect people in crashes as well as bigger, heavier models."

Turnoff Weeks 2009: April 20th - 26th and September 20th - 26th, 2009: "Why Turn Off?: Screen Time cuts into family time and is a leading cause of obesity in both adults and children. Excessive use of screens for recreational purposes leads to a more sedentary and solitary lifestyle and that is unhealthy for all of us, both mentally and physically. In the US and other industrialized nations around the world, screen time use continue to increase every year. The average daily usage for all screens, in some countries, has reached 9 hours per day. This is for recreational use of screens and does not include work time. On average, people watch 4 hours of television and then spend another 4 plus hours with computers, games, video, iPods and cell phones. According to Nielsen, the average World of Warcraft gamer plays for 892 minutes per week! The company that owns Second Life (a virtual world) claims that its users spent over 1 million hours on line. These statistics hold true for children directed sites as well, including Webkinz and others." [via Tom Melo]

From Mass Transit to New Manufacturing - With the right policies in place, an expansion of public transportation could help reindustrialize the United States. Jonathan Michael Feldman | March 23, 2009

"The Employee Benefit Research Institute and the Investment Company Institute have been collaborating since 1996 to develop the most comprehensive database on 401(k) plan participants yet assembled. Participant data include demographic, contribution, asset allocation, and loan and withdrawal activity information. The December 2008 EBRI Issue Brief presents analysis of data collected for 2007 on more than 56,000 plans with 21.8 million participants and $1.425 trillion in assets."

News release: "Economic activity in the manufacturing sector failed to grow in March for the 14th consecutive month, and the overall economy contracted for the sixth consecutive month, say the nation's supply executives in the latest Manufacturing ISM Report On Business®...None of the 18 manufacturing industries reported growth in March. The industries reporting contraction in March — listed in order — are: Fabricated Metal Products; Textile Mills; Machinery; Chemical Products; Primary Metals; Printing & Related Support Activities; Transportation Equipment; Plastics & Rubber Products; Petroleum & Coal Products; Wood Products; Electrical Equipment, Appliances & Components; Food, Beverage & Tobacco Products; Furniture & Related Products; Nonmetallic Mineral Products; Paper Products; Miscellaneous Manufacturing; Computer & Electronic Products; and Apparel, Leather & Allied Products."

Proactive Leadership & The Role of Information: Identifying Strategic Networks of Information - Networking is supposed to be essential to successful leaders. But what is the importance of networking conceptually? People are only one form of this vital leadership resource. Stuart Basefksy explains how would one go about developing expanded networks of information and sources.

Center for Retirement Research at Boston College: Long-Term Care Costs and the National Retirement Risk Index, by Alicia H. Munnell, Anthony Webb, Francesca Golub-Sass, and Dan Muldoon April 2009

"The Rechargeable Battery Recycling Corporation (RBRC) is a non-profit, public service organization dedicated to rechargeable battery recycling. Founded by the rechargeable battery industry in 1994, RBRC’s mission is to promote the recycling of used rechargeable batteries found in many cordless electronic consumer products such as, cellular and cordless phones, laptop computers, cordless power tools, camcorders, and two-way radios. In pursuit of its mission, RBRC also collects old cell phones. RBRC's public education campaign and rechargeable battery and cell phone recycling program – Call2Recycle® – is the result of the industry's determination to conserve natural resources and prevent rechargeable batteries from entering the solid waste stream."

"Established in 1970, [the International Nuclear Information System] INIS represents the world's largest database of scientific and technical literature on a wide range of subjects from nuclear engineering, safeguards and non-proliferation to applications in agriculture, health and industry....We are pleased to announce that access to INIS database has been now opened to all Internet users around the world. Free, open and unrestricted access is available from the INIS Homepage, or directly from the following link: http://inisdb2.iaea.org . This initiative provides easy access to reliable nuclear information on the peaceful uses of nuclear science and technology, including nonconventional literature, and makes nuclear knowledge readily available worldwide. Currently, the INIS Database contains over 3 million bibliographic records and almost 200,000 full-text nonconventional documents, consisting of scientific and technical reports and other non copyrighted information."

"The Leadership and Knowledge Management system focuses on identifying and addressing agency leadership competencies so that continuity of leadership is ensured, knowledge is shared across the organization, and an environment of continuous learning is present."

• Definition
  
• Standard
  
• Critical Success Factors
  
• Applicable Merit System Principles

Science: Financial Crisis Reshaping the Life Sciences Industry, By Clifford S. Mintz, April 10, 2009

"American Journalism Review’s latest survey of the nation’s state capitols finds a dramatic decrease in the number of newspaper reporters covering state government full time. A handful of digital news outlets are springing up to fill the breach. When will these efforts be enough to compensate for the loss of the newspaper watchdogs? [Peggy Garvin]

Boston.com: "Executives from the Times Co. and Globe made the demands Thursday morning in an approximately 90-minute meeting with leaders of the newspaper's 13 unions, union officials said. The possible concessions include pay cuts, the end of pension contributions by the company, and the elimination of lifetime job guarantees now enjoyed by some veteran employees, said Daniel Totten, president of the Boston Newspaper Guild, the Globe's biggest union, which represents more than 700 editorial, advertising, and business office employees."

The Quiet Coup: "The crash has laid bare many unpleasant truths about the United States. One of the most alarming, says a former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, is that the finance industry has effectively captured our government—a state of affairs that more typically describes emerging markets, and is at the center of many emerging-market crises. If the IMF’s staff could speak freely about the U.S., it would tell us what it tells all countries in this situation: recovery will fail unless we break the financial oligarchy that is blocking essential reform. And if we are to prevent a true depression, we’re running out of time" - by Simon Johnson, May 2009 Atlantic.

Tax Department Resource Shortages: Performing Under Pressure: "In today’s economic climate, a proactive, strategic view of your tax department’s capabilities is crucial to closing the gaps between current and expected performance. Yet, finance and tax department leaders are under significant pressure to add value, with limited time to identify and implement changes within their organizations. In a new report, Deloitte discusses approaches for maintaining a high-performing team and ways of focusing and managing the tax department’s resources to address both internal and external challenges."

News release: "In this difficult economy, lawyers can get help with their careers, their practices and their well-being with just a mouse click. The American Bar Association’s new Economic Recovery Resources Web Portal offers a wide range of assistance for coping with tough times including information on job searching, personal development and career transition, law practice management tips, handling stress, and more. The resources Web site at http://new.abanet.org/economicrecovery consists of six topic areas: job search and networking, career transition, practice management, professional development, stress management and savings."

Competitive Intelligence - A Selective Resource Guide: Sabrina I. Pacifici's completely revised and updated pathfinder focuses on leveraging selected reliable, focused, free and low cost sites and sources to effectively profile and monitor companies, markets, countries, people, and issues. This guide is a "best of list" of web, database and email alert products, services and tools, as well links to content specific sources produced by governments, academia, NGOs, the media and various publishers.

For readers who access the online version of the International Herald Tribune via this link, be advised that it was merged within the scope of the greater New York Times site, and is now titled and linked as follows: International Herald Tribune The Global Edition of The New York Times.

YouTube Blog: "Earlier this week, we announced the launch of YouTube EDU, a hub for videos from over 100 of our leading university and college partners. Think campus tours, news about cutting-edge research, and lectures by professors and world-renowned thought leaders. There are also 200 full (and free!) courses, in a range of subjects, from some of the world's most prestigious universities, including IIT/IISc, MIT, Stanford, UC Berkeley, UCLA, and Yale. There are over 20,000 videos on YouTube EDU and growing."

"For the 50 most admired companies overall, FORTUNE's survey asked businesspeople to vote for the companies that they admired most, from any industry."

World's Most Admired Companies

• Full List
  
• By Location
  
• Best & Worst in Innovation
  
• No. 1s
  
• Industries

Encouraging Women into Senior Management Positions - How Coaching Can Help [Summary], Broughton A, Miller L, Research Report 462, Institute for Employment Studies, March 2009, a study on behalf of The Foundation of Coaching [via Stuart Basefsky]

"Despite long-standing anti-discrimination legislation in the US, UK and across Europe, women still remain under-represented in many occupations, most noticeably in high-level posts. This phenomenon is seen at its most extreme when the composition of company boards is considered. In the USA, women constitute on average 14.7 per cent of board members on Fortune 500 companies; in the UK, women hold 11 per cent of FTSE 100 directorships, according to the 2008 Sex and Power report published by the UK Equality and Human Rights Commission.

Encouraging women who hold senior management positions to move into board-level positions is viewed as a crucial part of the global drive to improve equality between men and women. There is likely to be a range of reasons why women in senior jobs fail to progress up to board level and issues connected with discrimination and the ‘glass ceiling’ have been well characterised. However, in some cases there may be an element of choice: some women may simply decide not to progress to board level despite being coached for and offered such positions."

Through the Labyrinth: Real Answers on How Women Become Leaders - With considerable detail and insight, Diana Philip reviews a recent book that explores whether the concept of whether the “glass ceiling” still accurately describes the challenges women face to realize leadership aspirations. The book's authors examine leadership theories developed by multiple disciplines to explain what is holding women back from becoming leaders. They provide data from various studies on employment trends as well as insight gathered from interviews with women leaders to assess how true or false these theories apply to contemporary female workers.

Health Care Costs: A Primer - "The Kaiser Family Foundation released an updated primer that examines recent trends in health care costs in the United States and the factors that contribute to their rapid rise. Prepared by Foundation staff, the primer also describes the types and sources of health care spending, the demographic factors associated with higher or lower levels of spending, and the impact of higher premiums and out-of-pocket costs on families and employers. It also discusses factors that influence health care spending growth, including the use of new medical technology, population changes, and changes in disease prevalence, and highlights some of the challenges policymakers face in efforts to slow the rise in health care costs."

New on LLRX.com - New Economy Analytics, Resources and Alerts: This guide by Marcus P. Zillman is designed to bring together the latest resources and sources on the Internet covering new economy analytics, resources and alerts.

News release: "Starting today, The eBook Store from Sony will provide access to more than a half-million public domain books from Google optimized for current models of the Reader. At Sony’s eBook store (ebookstore.sony.com), a button on the front page leads to the books from Google, which people can transfer to their PRS-505 or PRS-700 Reader at no cost. The process is seamless for Reader owners who have an account at the store. Those new to the store will need to set up an account and download Sony’s free eBook Library software. To start, people can access more than a half-million public domain books from Google, boosting the available titles from the eBook Store to more than 600,000."

MARI®Mortgage Asset Research Institute Eleventh Periodic Mortgage Fraud Case Report To: Mortgage Bankers Association, by Denise James, Jennifer Butts Michelle Donahue, March 2009

"The unprecedented bet that many banks made on mortgages, real estate development and other real estate related lending during the middle part of this decade has produced a payoff no one imagined just a few years ago -- a huge increase in loan defaults, a soaring number of foreclosures and a plunge in bank profits. And now, a new analysis of bank financial statements by the Investigative Reporting Workshop [American University School of Communication], sheds new light on just how dangerous conditions have become in many banks across the nation. We also created a search tool that permits you to check the financial health of any bank in the nation. And we have provided detailed information about the banks that have received bailout money from the federal government. This project was done in cooperation with msnbc.com. See the full story." [thanks Peggy Garvin]

• Search for a Bank
  
• Search TARP Recipients or find TARP recipients by state
  
• Methodology
  
• Related postings on financial system

• Bank Secrecy Act: Federal Agencies Should Take Action to Further Improve Coordination and Information-Sharing Efforts, GAO-09-227, February 12, 2009
• Emergency Management: Actions to Implement Select Provisions of the Post-Katrina Emergency Management Reform Act, GAO-09-433T, March 17, 2009
• Global War on Terrorism: DOD Needs to More Accurately Capture and Report the Costs of Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom, GAO-09-302, March 17, 2009
• Information Security: Securities and Exchange Commission Needs to Consistently Implement Effective Controls, GAO-09-203, March 16, 2009
• International Trade: Effective Export Programs Can Help In Achieving U.S. Economic Goals, GAO-09-480T, March 17, 2009
• Oil and Gas Leasing: Federal Oil and Gas Resource Management and Revenue Collection in Need of Comprehensive Reassessment, GAO-09-506T, March 17, 2009
• Tax Compliance: Offshore Financial Activity Creates Enforcement Issues for IRS, GAO-09-478T, March 17, 2009

"The Hearst Corp. announced Monday that it would stop publishing the 146-year old newspaper, Seattle's oldest business, and cease delivery to more than 117,600 weekday readers. The company, however, said it would maintain seattlepi.com, making it the nation's largest daily newspaper to shift to an entirely digital news product."

Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism: "The State of the News Media 2009 is the sixth edition of our annual report on the health and status of American journalism. Our goals are to take stock of the revolution occurring in how Americans get information and provide a resource for citizens, journalists and researchers to make their own assessments. To do so we gather in one place as much data as possible about all the major sectors of journalism, identify trends, mark key indicators, note areas for further inquiry."

New York Times: Times Are Tough, and Libraries Are Thriving

Two articles focused on significant changes impacting newspapers and professional journalists:

"According to the Business Roundtable Health Care Value Comparability Study, a new measure of the “value” (cost and performance) of the U.S. health care system relative to our competitors’ systems on a weighted scale, the workers and employers of the United States face a 23 percent “value gap” relative to five leading economic competitors – Canada, Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom and France (the “G-5 group”) – and a 46 percent “value gap” compared with emerging competitors Brazil, India and China (“the BIC group”). What does this “value gap“ mean for our ability to compete in the international marketplace?"

Health Care Value Comparability Study: Executive Summary - "According to the Business Roundtable Health Care Value Comparability Study [Executive Summary], a new measure of the “value” (cost and performance) of the U.S. health care system relative to our competitors’ systems on a weighted scale, the workers and employers of the United States face a 23 percent “value gap” relative to five leading economic competitors and a 46 percent “value gap” compared with emerging competitors."

"For more than two decades, Hewitt Associates' health care survey has tracked employer health care practices, benefit programs, and efforts to provide and manage workforce health benefits. This report, Challenges for Health Care in Uncertain Times, highlights employer-sponsored health care programs and other benefits including short- and long-term cost trends, strategy, and design features. In addition, it covers employers' practices, views, and perspectives regarding managing health care costs, improving workforce health and productivity, and cost prevention — allowing us to identify trends, critical business issues, and opportunities as they develop."

News release: "Despite marketing claims like “gentle” and “pure,” dozens of top-selling children’s bath products are contaminated with the cancer-causing chemicals formaldehyde and 1,4-dioxane, according to product test results released today by the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics. The chemicals were not disclosed on product labels because contaminants are exempt from labeling laws. This study is the first to document the widespread presence of both formaldehyde and 1,4-dioxane in bath products for children. Many products tested for this study contained both formaldehyde and 1,4-dioxane, including...known to cause cancer in animals and are listed as probable human carcinogens by the Environmental Protection Agency. Formaldehyde can also trigger skin rashes in some children."

• Download the report, "No More Toxic Tub"
  
• Complete list of products tested, with results
  
• Case Study: Pure and gentle? Children's products can be deceptive
  
• Testing methodology
  
• Skin Deep is a safety guide to cosmetics and personal care products brought to you by researchers at the Environmental Working Group.

Kaiser Daily Health Policy Report: "Twenty-one percent of U.S. residents reported having difficulty paying for needed medical care or medications in December 2008, up from 18% in January 2008, according to the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index, USA Today reports. The poll, conducted by Gallup and disease management company Healthways, surveyed an estimated 1,000 U.S. residents each day during 2008 about their physical, emotional and economic well-being for a total of 355,334 respondents. According to Jim Harter, Gallup's chief scientist for well-being and workplace management, each percentage point represents about 2.2 million U.S. residents (Szabo/Appleby, USA Today, 3/11)."

News release: "The World’s 50 Safest Banks 2009 were selected through a comparison of the long-term credit ratings and total assets of the 500 largest banks around the world. Ratings from Moody’s, Standard & Poor’s and Fitch were used." [Note: only two U.S. banks on this list - 26. US Bancorp and 47. JPMorgan Chase]

"Media Cloud is a system that lets you see the flow of the media. The Internet is fundamentally altering the way that news is produced and distributed, but there are few comprehensive approaches to understanding the nature of these changes. Media Cloud automatically builds an archive of news stories and blog posts from the web, applies language processing, and gives you ways to analyze and visualize the data. The system is still in early development, but we invite you to explore our current data and suggest research ideas. This is an open-source project, and we will be releasing all of the code soon. You can read more background on the project or just get started: Visualizations / What Are Your Research Ideas? / Keep Up-To-Date with Media Cloud."

GOOD [via theeconomysucks - ["a collaboration of individuals, businesses, and nonprofits pushing the world forward"]: informative, insightful, infographics on Making Sense of the Financial Mess.

International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence (ICSR): Countering Online Radicalisation: A Strategy for Action

Post-Conference Workshop on Competitive Intelligence, April 2, 2009 - 1:30 PM – 4:30 PM, Sabrina I. Pacifici, Law Librarian, & Founder/Editor/Publisher, LLRX.com and beSpacific.com

Official Google Blog: "Do you leave your fridge door open after grabbing what you need? Do you leave your vacuum cleaner running when you aren't cleaning? Of course not. The idea of doing either of these things sounds silly, yet many people don't think to turn off their computers after using them. By using power management tools on your computer and buying more efficient computers, you can save nearly half a ton of CO2 and more than $60 a year in personal energy costs. To do our part, Google co-founded the Climate Savers Computing Initiative (CSCI) to promote a smarter, greener computing future. The simple changes above can have a HUGE collective impact; our goal is to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 54 million tons per year by 2010 — the equivalent of taking 11 million cars off the road."

LLRX.com - Knowledge Discovery Resources 2009: An Internet MiniGuide Annotated Link Compilation - Marcus P. Zillman's compilation is dedicated to the latest and most reliable resources for knowledge discovery available through the Internet. This wide ranging selection of resources provides specialized tools, applications and sources relevant to researchers from many disciplines.

Washington Post and NextGov reporting President Barack Obama will appoint DC's current innovative CTO, Vivek Kundra, to the position of federal chief information officer.

Hard Times for Horses: "According to Dr. Tom Lenz, a veterinarian who is the chairman of the Unwanted Horse Coalition, although the elimination of domestic slaughterhouses has reduced the total number of horses killed, 100,000 to 150,000 are still exported for slaughter each year. “So we know they’re unwanted,” he said. “America needs a wake-up call about this issue. The general population has this love affair with the horse without realizing the costs and complications of owning horses in this economy.”

• Related, via The Memory Hole: Ag Dept releases photos/video of hideous cruelty at horse-butchering plant in Texas [Strong Warning - the photos and images associated with this posting are graphic and horrible. They do however represent the reality of what occurs. Please view with caution.
  
• Related postings on financial system

How to Know When the Economy Is Turning Up: "The economy stinks. GDP fell 3.8% last quarter and experts believe the decline this quarter will be even worse. But recessions don't last forever, and we'll be coming out of this one long before official statistics say so. That's just the way it works. Most economic data — like the quarterly GDP reading — are lagging indicators. What you need are leading indicators that will signal when we've made a turn...Here are 10 indicators to help you know when times are getting better."

"March is Women's History Month. A new analysis of data from the U.S. Religious Landscape Survey, conducted by the Pew Research Center's Forum on Religion & Public Life, finds that women are more religious than men on a variety of measures."

News release: "As economic conditions continue to worsen, the public is increasingly worried about the affordability and availability of care, with many postponing or skipping treatments due to cost in the past year and a notable minority forced into serious financial straits due to medical bills, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation’s first health care tracking poll of 2009...Slightly more than half (53%) of Americans say their household cut back on health care due to cost concerns in the past 12 months. The most common actions reported are relying on home remedies and over-the-counter drugs rather than visiting a doctor (35%) or skipping dental care (34%). Roughly one in four report putting off health care they needed (27%), one in five say they have not filled a prescription (21%), and one in six (15%) say they cut pills in half or skipped doses to make their prescription last longer."

• Key Findings: Kaiser Health Tracking Poll - February 2009
  
• Chartpack: Kaiser Health Tracking Poll - February 2009
  
• Related postings on financial system

Newspapers Face a Challenging Calculus - Online Growth, but Print Losses are Bigger, February 26, 2009: "The trend is unmistakable: Fewer Americans are reading print newspapers as more turn to the internet for their news. And while the percentage of people who read newspapers online is growing rapidly, especially among younger generations, that growth has not offset the decline in print readership."

"The Institute of Museum and Library Services is the primary source of federal support for the nation's 122,000 libraries and 17,500 museums. The Institute's mission is to create strong libraries and museums that connect people to information and ideas."

"The Civil Rights Digital Library (CRDL), a comprehensive civil rights Web site and portal hosted by the University of Georgia, saw an enormous spike in the number of hits during the week of January 19 when the nation celebrated the inauguration of President Barack Obama and the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., holiday. Among CRDL’s many video selections, users could watch a prophetic 1971 clip of civil rights activist Andrew Young predicting the election of an African American president in his lifetime, a 1962 clip of African American students turned away from the public library in Albany, Georgia, and a 1960 clip of African American first-grade girls integrating an elementary school cheered on by African Americans in New Orleans, Louisiana. The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) awarded the University of Georgia a National Leadership Grant (NLG) to create the digital library in 2005. The project was selected in part because it provides a portal for many of the nation’s civil rights collections, resulting in much greater public access and the ability to search across many collections as if they were a single collection. It also harvests metadata from the collections, which are physically scattered throughout the country, and has contributed significantly to audio-visual metadata standards." [Institute of Museum and Library Services]

"The Kaiser Family Foundation this week updated a number of its key resources on the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the United States, timed with the release of new surveillance data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Updated resources include the Foundation’s fact sheet, on the epidemic in the U.S., state-level data, on new AIDS cases, the number of people living with AIDS and other topics, and key HIV/AIDS slides, available through Kaiser Fast Facts."

The Economic Crisis and the Fiscal Crisis: 2009 and Beyond - Alan J. Auerbach, William G. Gale, February 19, 2009

Pew Research Center for the People & the Press: "Americans continue to follow news about the economic crisis closely because they feel it is directly relevant to their lives. More than eight-in-ten (85%) say even when the economic news is bad they feel better knowing what’s going on, while 77% say they need to stay on top of economic news because it matters in the financial decisions they make."

News release: "A December 2008 report by the nation's leading cancer organizations underscores the threat to women's health from this new wave of cigarette marketing to women and girls. The Annual Report to the Nation on the Status of Cancer found that while lung cancer death rates are decreasing for men – and overall cancer death rates are decreasing for both men and women – lung cancer death rates have yet to decline among all women. A key reason cited was the sharp increase in smoking initiation among young women and girls during the late 1960s and 1970s, when cigarette brands such as Philip Morris' Virginia Slims were created for and aggressively marketed to women."

Deloitte 2009 Industry Outlook: Automotive Challenging Times, Emerging Opportunities, January 2009.

News release: "According to a new study commissioned by HNTB Corporation, Americans overwhelmingly believe the nation's infrastructure is crumbling and are willing to spend more of their tax dollars to fix it. They also recognize improving infrastructure creates jobs and improves quality of life. In the nationwide survey conducted earlier this month, more than four in five (81 percent) Americans agree making sacrifices to pay for infrastructure improvements now will make the difference between a more prosperous or a more difficult future for the next generation. Almost seven in ten (68 percent) are willing to pay more taxes to support highway and bridge maintenance and new construction. In fact, the average American would part with $22 a month to reduce the time they spend in traffic by 20 percent."

Carlyle group presentation on the world financial crisis, 15 Oct 2008 [via Wikileaks - 80 pages, PDF]

E-Discovery Update: Revisiting ESI Agreements and Court Orders - Conrad J. Jacoby focuses on the new requirement that litigants must meet early in a dispute to discuss the scope of discovery work to reach agreement on how best to proceed with the discovery of potentially relevant electronically stored information (“ESI”). What happens, though, when fundamental assumptions used to reach agreement at that early stage in the case turn out to be incorrect?

Six Questions and a Strategy for Campus-wide Information Competence. At Cornell University Library (CUL) a committee was established in 2005 to address the issue of information literacy at the university. The committee did extensive research on this topic and developed an approach for seeking solutions. Stuart Basefsky presents three exhibits to accomplish this objective.

askSam: "Search the full text transcripts of more than 200 speeches by United States President and former Senator, Barack Obama. Search keywords and phrases, search by speech title, speech date, or speech location in more than 200 Obama speeches."

News release: "The Conference Board Employment Trends Index (ETI)™ fell further in January. The index now stands at 96.6, down 1.0 percent from the December revised figure of 97.5, and down 18.6 percent from a year ago. “The Employment Trends Index™ has recently been declining faster than at any time since the 1974 recession,” said Gad Levanon, Senior Economist at The Conference Board. “Such declines suggest considerable job losses will persist for several more months. It is becoming clearer that the continued worsening economic conditions are forcing many companies to make further downward adjustments to their workforce.” The 18-month-long decline in the Employment Trends Index™ is seen in all eight of its components, most notably over the past six months in temporary-help hires and part-time workers for economic reasons."

A New Perspective on "Saving" for Retirement, Research Report, February 2009: "The concepts of "saving" and "wealth" are examined in this AARP Public Policy Institute Insight on the Issues. Author John Gist explains how our standard measure of saving provides little insight into household retirement wealth accumulation and draws implications for understanding retirement preparation."

Center for Research Libraries/Global Resources Network: The Future of Newspapers: A Conversation. Alex Jones, Laurence M. Lombard Lecturer in the Press and Public Policy and Director of the Shorenstein Center, Harvard University, John Carroll, Former Editor, Los Angeles Times.

Unemployed and Uninsured in America analyzes the health coverage status of unemployed workers with low and moderate incomes, including national and state-level data. (February 2009)

Center for American Progress. Rescuing the American Economy - A Guide to How the Stimulus Works, by Michael Ettlinger | February 5, 2009.

"Nonfarm private employment decreased 522,000 from December 2008 to January 2009 on a seasonally adjusted basis, according to the ADP National Employment Report®. The estimated change of employment from November to December 2008 was revised up by 34,000, from a decline of 693,000 to a decline of 659,000. Nonfarm private employment decreased 522,000 from December 2008 to January 2009 on a seasonally adjusted basis, according to the ADP National Employment Report®. The estimated change of employment from November to December 2008 was revised up by 34,000, from a decline of 693,000 to a decline of 659,000. January’s ADP Report estimates nonfarm private employment in the service-providing sector fell by 279,000. Employment in the goods-producing sector declined 243,000, the twenty-fourth consecutive monthly decline. Employment in the manufacturing sector declined 160,000, its twenty-eighth decline over the last twenty-nine months. Large businesses, defined as those with 500 or more workers, saw employment decline 92,000, while medium-size businesses with between 50 and 499 workers declined 255,000...Sharply falling employment at medium- and small-size businesses clearly indicates that the recession continues to spread well beyond manufacturing and housing-related activities."

"A new Kaiser Family Foundation report, Health Care on a Budget: An Analysis of Spending by Medicare Households, finds that in 2006, out-of-pocket health care spending accounted for 14.1 percent of all expenditures for Medicare households – less than housing (34.1 percent) but about the same as transportation (15.0 percent) and food (13.6 percent). And, one in four Medicare households devotes more than one quarter of total household expenditures to health care. This group includes a disproportionate share of Medicare households that are low- and middle-income, have older members (age 75+), and are living in rural areas."

"Almost 150 years after Charles Darwin published his groundbreaking work On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, Americans are still fighting over evolution. If anything, the controversy has recently grown in both size and intensity. In the last five years alone, for example, debates over how evolution should be taught in public schools have been heard in school boards, town councils and legislatures in more than half the states."

News release: "While the country's 6.5 million privately held, women-owned firms generated an estimated $940 billion in sales and employed 7.1 million people in 2002, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, a Kauffman Foundation research report released today indicates that women-owned firms have relatively underperformed men-owned firms in a number of measures. The Kauffman Foundation research tracked new businesses' performance measures from 2004 to 2006 and correlated the data to gender based on primary owner characteristics, firm characteristics, industry and outcomes."

Bank Direct Magazine: "There is not much flash and glitz among this year’s crop of top-performing U.S. banks and thrifts. But given all that’s occurred in the last six months, maybe slow and steady really is the name of the game. In fact, over a recent 12-month period, as the credit and financial markets came unhinged and some of the country’s best-known depository financial institutions teetered on the brink of collapse, “steady at the helm” was the governing mantra for the highest-ranked banks. That is just one salient feature of this year’s class of top performers among banks and thrifts, according to our annual Bank Performance Scorecard. Based on measurement criteria and analysis compiled by Sandler O’Neill & Partners L.P., a New York-based investment banking firm that specializes in the financial services industry, the scorecard features the institutions that maintain top standing in good times and bad—often with recurring high scorers."

WSJ: What's Hot Off the Lots | Top 20 vehicles | The U.S. Market | Sales and Share of Total Market by Manufacturer

Ahead of the Curve: In 2009, Your Lawyers Are Your Best Knowledge Management Resource - Gretta Rusanow outlines her recommendations on why this year presents an excellent opportunity to work on those long-desired collections of models, best practice documents, sample clauses and know how files.

Follow up to previous postings on the Google Book search project, from the New York Review of Books, Google & the Future of Books, by Robert Darnton

Collaboration Through Wikis at Hicks Morley - Heather Colman explains how wikis were an ideal KM solution for her law firm. Quick and easy to set up, requiring little IT support, wikis support central data repositories and provide features including search capabilities, email, RSS, and also allow users to create a taxonomy of subject tags to classify information.

2009 Report Card for America's Infrastructure, Produced by the American Society of Civil Engineers

From Catalyst Inc. Quick Takes, this new data: Women in U.S. Management. Note: 15.7% of Fortune 500 Corporate Officer Positions are Held by Women, but Women Comprise 46.4% of the U.S. Labor Force. And another data set from Catalyst - this pyramid of Women in U.S. Information, January 2009.

The U.S. wind energy industry shattered all previous records in 2008 by installing 8,358 megawatts (MW) of new generating capacity (enough to serve over 2 million homes), the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA) said today, even as it warned of an uncertain outlook for 2009 due to the continuing financial crisis.

The massive growth in 2008 swelled the nation’s total wind power generating capacity by 50% and channeled an investment of some $17 billion into the economy, positioning wind power as one of the leading sources of new power generation in the country today along with natural gas, AWEA added. At year’s end, however, financing for new projects and orders for turbine components slowed to a trickle and layoffs began to hit the wind turbine manufacturing sector."

• State-by state installation information
• For more on the policies that are needed
• Related postings on wind energy
Permanent Link

"This report examines changes in the IT R&D ecosystem over the past decade and makes recommendations to strengthen the effectiveness and impact of federally funded information technology research; for the U.S. to remain the strongest generator of and magnet for technical talent; to reduce friction that harms the effectiveness of the U.S. IT R&D ecosystem; and to ensure that the U.S. has a communications, computing, and applications infrastructure which enables U.S. IT users and innovators to lead the world."

"Starting on January 5, 2009, DOL archived all DOL agency Web sites as they existed at that time. Please remember that this is archived material and that any guidance contained within the pages may have been superceded. The content available is no longer being updated and as a result you may encounter hyperlinks which no longer function. You should also bear in mind that this content may contain text and references which are no longer applicable as a result of changes in law, regulation and/or administration. To view the archive of a specific site, please use the links below."

• U.S. Department of Labor (contains several DOL agencies)
  
• Bureau of Labor Statistics
  
• Employment & Training Administration
  
• Mine Safety and Health Administration
  
• Occupational Health & Safety Administration
  
• Office of Administrative Law Judges
  
• Office of Inspector General
  
• GovBenefits.gov (DOL-managed Partner Web Site)
  
• HireVetsFirst.gov (DOL-managed Partner Web Site)
  
• See also - The CyberCemetery: "an archive of government websites that have ceased operation (usually websites of defunct government agencies and commissions that have issued a final report). This collection features a variety of topics indicative of the broad nature of government information. In particular, this collection features websites that cover topics supporting the university’s curriculum and particular program strengths.

"On January 15, 2009, The Group of Thirty released its latest report (fee only): Financial Reform: A Framework for Financial Stability. The report addresses flaws in the global financial system and provides 18 specific recommendations to: improve supervisory systems by redefining the scope, boundaries, and structure of prudential regulation; enhance the role of the central banks; improve governance practices and risk management; address pro-cyclicality via capital and liquidity standards; enhance accounting practices; strengthen the financial infrastructure; and increase coordination internationally. The project was led by Paul Volcker, Chairman, and Tommaso Padoa-Schioppa and Arminio Fraga Neto, Vice Chairmen."

News release: "On her first official day as Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Janet Napolitano issued five Action Directives, all centered on one of the primary missions of DHS: Protection. In the coming days, Secretary Napolitano will issue other action directives focused on other missions critical to the department: Preparedness, Response, Recovery and Immigration. The action directives Secretary Napolitano issued today on protection instruct specific offices and agencies to gather information, review existing strategies and programs, and to provide oral and written reports back to her by a time certain. The areas in which today’s action directives were issued are: critical infrastructure protection; risk analysis; state and local intelligence sharing; transportation security; and state, local and tribal integration."

CQ: "As one of his final acts as the nation’s spy chief, Michael McConnell on Friday said he would soon sign off on an intelligence information sharing policy that will result in a “staggering” increase in the amount of data available within the community. McConnell, the outgoing director of national intelligence (DNI), told reporters he would put the finishing touches on the initiative in the next few days. Retired Adm. Dennis Blair is President-elect Barack Obama’s choice to replace McConnell. McConnell said the policy would allow spy agencies to access each other’s intelligence databases much as Internet search engines such as Google allow Web users to retrieve data, with some limitations. When there is a dispute that cannot be resolved by lower-level leadership officials, the DNI would decide whether the information gets shared."

From the journal Nature, via a New York Times article, this new fee based report, Warming of the Antarctic ice-sheet surface since the 1957 International Geophysical Year, for which Figures and tables as well as Supplementary info are available to readers with no fee.

Art of Written Persuasion: Part IV - What Makes a Good Problem-Solving Model?: Following up on his commentary about how problem-solving models can help lawyers (and law students) to solve legal problems systematically and to communicate legal solutions persuasively in writing, Troy Simpson discusses what makes a good problem-solving model.

News release: "The ICC International Maritime Bureau (IMB) Piracy Reporting Centre (PRC) has today released its annual piracy report which shows an unprecedented rise in maritime hijacking in 2008. The 2008 figures surpass all figures for hijacked vessels and hostages taken recorded by the PRC since it began its worldwide reporting function in 1992. In 2008 there was a worldwide total of 293 incidents of piracy against ships, which is up more than 11% from 2007 when there were 263 incidents reported. In 2008, 49 vessels were hijacked, 889 crew taken hostage and a further 46 vessels reported being fired upon. A total of 32 crew members were injured, 11 killed and 21 missing – presumed dead. Guns were used in 139 incidents, up from 72 in 2007...2008 attacks may also be viewed on the IMB Live Piracy Map."

"The share of adult internet users who have a profile on an online social network site has more than quadrupled in the past four years -- from 8% in 2005 to 35% now, according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project's December 2008 tracking survey. While media coverage and policy attention focus heavily on how children and young adults use social network sites, adults still make up the bulk of the users of these websites. Adults make up a larger portion of the US population than teens, which is why the 35% number represents a larger number of users than the 65% of online teens who also use online social networks. Still, younger online adults are much more likely than their older counterparts to use social networks, with 75% of adults 18-24 using these networks, compared to just 7% of adults 65 and older. At its core, use of online social networks is still a phenomenon of the young."

A Visual Guide to the Financial Crisis: The Bailout by WallStats.com: "What do you do if you don’t have the money to pay a debt? If you are like most of us, you borrow. The US Government is no different. In order to pay for the $700 billion bailout, it will have to borrow more money, increasing the national debt. But who will pay for this massive bailout? If you are a US taxpayer, you will. Here is a visual guide to understanding how the bailout is funded and a couple of financial experts’ take on how it could be funded."

Pew Research Center for the People & the Press: "The internet, which emerged this year as a leading source for campaign news, has now surpassed all other media except television as an outlet for national and international news. Currently, 40% say they get most of their news about national and international issues from the internet, up from just 24% in September 2007. For the first time in a Pew survey, more people say they rely mostly on the internet for news than cite newspapers (35%). Television continues to be cited most frequently as a main source for national and international news, at 70%."

Understanding Crime Trends: Workshop Report, 2008

News release: "Oxford Analytica collaborated with Ernst & Young to produce the 2009 Business Risk Report, which has been widely picked up in the media, including The Times. The report assesses the top 10 risks to global business in 2009, as well as 15 Below the Radar threats, based on interviews with more than 100 analysts, representing 11 industrial sectors and more than 20 academic disciplines. Respondents were asked to identify and provide commentary and insight on the top risks facing leading global firms in their sector. Risks rated as having the greatest impact across the largest number of sectors were chosen as the top 10 risks for global business in 2009. Respondents unsurprisingly ranked credit crunch aftershocks and the risk of global recession as two of the most important business risks for 2009, displacing regulation and compliance from last year's top spot. Yet the survey results also show that the shifting balance of power between established and emerging markets, redundant business models and raised concerns over reputational risks have caused a significant re-ordering of the top risks since last year."

News release: "For the first time in more than 25 years, American adults are reading more literature, according to a new study by the National Endowment for the Arts. Reading on the Rise documents a definitive increase in rates and numbers of American adults who read literature, with the biggest increases among young adults, ages 18-24. This new growth reverses two decades of downward trends cited previously in NEA reports such as Reading at Risk and To Read or Not To Read."

WSJ - Big Slide in 401(k)s Spurs Calls for Change: "About 50 million Americans have 401(k) plans, which have $2.5 trillion in total assets, estimates the Employee Benefit Research Institute in Washington. In the 12 months following the stock market's peak in October 2007, more than $1 trillion worth of stock value held in 401(k)s and other "defined-contribution" plans was wiped out, according to the Boston College research center. If individual retirement accounts, which consist largely of money rolled over from 401(k)s, are taken into account, about $2 trillion of stock value evaporated."

The Upside of the Downturn – Time to Work on Your Know How: Knowhow expert Gretta Rusanow highlights content as the focus for law firm knowledge management plans this year.

"The Sustainable Sites Initiative is an interdisciplinary effort by the American Society of Landscape Architects, the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center and the United States Botanic Garden to create voluntary national guidelines and performance benchmarks for sustainable land design, construction and maintenance practices."

"The Global state of information security survey 2008 is a worldwide security survey by PricewaterhouseCoopers, CIO Magazine and CSO Magazine. It was conducted online from March 25 to June 26, 2008. Readers of CIO and CSO Magazines and clients of PricewaterhouseCoopers from around the globe were invited via email to take the survey. The results discussed in this report are based on the responses of more than 7,000 CEOs, CFOs, CIOs, CSOs, vice presidents and directors of IT and information security from 119 countries. Thirty-nine percent (39%) of respondents were from North America, twenty-seven percent (27%) from Europe, seventeen percent (17%) from Asia, fifteen percent (15%) from South America, and two percent (2%) from the Middle East and South Africa."

Brookings: Assessing the 110th Congress, Anticipating the 111th, Sarah A. Binder, Thomas E. Mann, Norman J. Ornstein and Molly Reynolds.

News release: "Online advertised job vacancies declined 507,000 to 3,861,000 in December, according to The Conference Board’s Help-Wanted Online Data Series (HWOL)™ released today. The December loss brought the monthly total of online advertised vacancies below 4 million for the first time since July 2006, two and one-half years ago. In 2008, there were on average 170,000 fewer ads each month than in 2007. “The sharp December drop in online advertised vacancies is another indication that the economy has not reached bottom,” said Gad Levanon, Senior Economist at The Conference Board. “The widespread nature of the decline in employers’ demand for workers – both across geographies and across occupations – does not bode well for an employment upturn in the first half of 2009.”

The State of American Business 2009: "The nation is in a recession. Credit remains tight, jobs are scarce, and confidence is low. Basic industries, such as housing and autos, have yet to find the bottom of their downward spirals. Some stability has been restored to our financial system, but it remains in precarious health. The global economic slowdown has begun to shrink our export markets while helping fan the flames of isolationism both at home and abroad. While there is every reason for concern, there is no cause for despair. Americans have an opportunity to emerge from these difficulties with a more prosperous economy, a stronger nation, and a renewed reputation as a global leader...This means immediately enacting an economic stimulus package followed by significantly reforming our financial regulations, overhauling our public schools and workforce training programs, fixing our broken legal culture, and making major investments in infrastructure, energy, and technology."

"JobsRated.com offers help for uncertain job seekers by analyzing 200 different jobs according to 5 vital criteria: Stress, Work Environment, Physical Demands, Income and Outlook. In every area each job receives a specific score [Librarian is rated Number 43], and data is mined to provide the most detailed information possible -- for example, rather than listing average incomes, our rankings combine each job's mid-level salary with its outlook score, which eliminates data from employees making too much or too little to provide a more accurate result (for complete details on how we score, visit the JobsRated.com Methodology Page)

Metadata - What Is It and What Are My Ethical Duties?: Jim Calloway explains why every lawyer needs to understand a few basic things about metadata. He contends that the legal ethics implications of metadata “mining” are no longer just of interest to the lawyers processing electronic discovery, or the ethics mavens.

States of the Union Before and After Bush, by Jodie T. Allen, Senior Editor, Pew Research Center, January 5, 2009

"The benchmark 30-year fixed-rate mortgage fell 20 basis points, to 5.64 percent, according to the Bankrate.com national survey of large lenders. A basis point is one-hundredth of 1 percentage point. The mortgages in this week's survey had an average total of 0.39 discount and origination points. One year ago, the mortgage index was 6.14 percent; four weeks ago, it was 5.92 percent. The benchmark 15-year fixed-rate mortgage fell 30 basis points, to 5.16 percent. The benchmark 5/1 adjustable-rate mortgage fell 9 basis points, to 5.86 percent."

Several sources are reporting the current price tag for the bailout of the financial system. According to the Washington Post's Binyamin Appelbaum, "...the Treasury Department has now spent or committed more money than Congress has allocated to its financial rescue program, effectively making more promises than it can afford to keep. The scorecard: Congress gave Treasury $350 billion; Treasury has allocated $354.4 billion." Another perspective, on total expenditures of $8.5 trillion, comes from Barry Ritholtz's blog posting, Calculating the Total Bailout Costs, inclusive of a handy spreadsheet.

"The Secure World Foundation (SWF) spotlights progress in 2008 on several fronts:

• The work underway by the Association of Space Explorers, which has flagged the danger to the planet from incoming asteroids, organizing a series of workshops to identify possible institutional mechanisms for dealing with this problem. In 2008 they presented their findings to numerous international bodies including the United Nation’s (UN) Security Council.
  
• Consideration by the European Union of a Code of Conduct for outer space activities. Recognizing that a first step for space will be an international agreement on a Code of Conduct for space activities, both the European Union and a group of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) headed by the Stimson Center spent much of 2008 diligently addressing model Codes of Conduct. These models are being taken to the larger international community.
  
• The incoming U.S. Obama administration recognizes the importance of international approaches to global issues, offering new possibilities for moving forward on related space issues in 2009. SWF partners have contributed White Papers on matters related to space governance, which were presented to the Obama transition team and to space-related staff members in the White House Office of Science of Technology Policy and the Department of State.
  
• France has convened an informal working group of space experts, governments and industry to develop a set of practical “Best Practices” for the term “sustainability of outer space.”
  
• Space situational awareness and space traffic management became more visible topics as the satellite industry, military and governments explore better options for keeping their satellites safe from Earth orbiting debris. Representatives from these groups came together this year in Rome where the commercial satellite industry and the Center for Space Standards and Innovation discussed their embryonic effort to create a data center to share satellite tracking data…possibly the beginning of true international civil space situational awareness."

News release: "The Conference Board Consumer Confidence Index™, which had increased moderately in November, declined to a new all-time low in December. The Index now stands at 38.0 (1985=100), down from 44.7 in November. The Present Situation Index plummeted to 29.4 from 42.3 last month. The Expectations Index decreased to 43.8 from 46.2 in November."

News release: "Data through October 2008, released today by Standard & Poor’s for its S&P/Case-Shiller1 Home Price Indices, the leading measure of U.S. home prices, shows continued broad based declines in the prices of existing single family homes across the United States, with 14 of the 20 metro areas showing record rates of annual decline and 14 now reporting declines in excess of 10% versus October 2007."

Those Active in the Obama Campaign Expect to be Involved in Promoting the Administration, by Aaron Smith, Research Specialist, Pew Internet & American Life Project, December 30, 2008: "Voters expect that the level of public engagement they experienced with Barack Obama during the campaign, much of it occurring online, will continue into the early period of his new administration. A majority of Obama voters expect to carry on efforts to support his policies and try to persuade others to back his initiatives in the coming year; a substantial number expect to hear directly from Obama and his team; and a notable cohort say they have followed the transition online."

Center for American Progress Action Fund, Lifetime Losses: The Career Wage Gap, by Jessica Arons: "Unfortunately, even in the absence of intentional discrimination, most women in this country also are likely to lose substantial amounts of income due to something we at the Center for American Progress Action Fund have termed the “career wage gap.” The more commonly known gender wage gap is the annual difference in median wages between men and women who are employed full-time. The career wage gap looks at how the current annual gender wage gap accumulates over a 40-year period. It thus provides us with an estimate for lost wages over a lifetime of work."

"Information technology (IT) and broadband are major drivers of research, innovation, economic growth and social change. The 2008 edition of the OECD Information Technology Outlook analyses recent developments in the IT goods and services industries, and suggests that the outlook is for continued long-term growth, constrained by the currently very uncertain macroeconomic environment in OECD countries. Cross-border investment, trade, and mergers and acquisitions remain high, and ICTs drive globalisation in general. The industry is rapidly restructuring, and China and India are major suppliers of information and communications technology (ICT)-related goods and services."

Deep Web Research 2009: Marcus P. Zillman's guide includes links to: articles, papers, forums, audios and videos, cross database articles, search services and search tools, peer to peer, file sharing, grid/matrix search engines, presentations, resources on deep web research, semantic web research, and bot research resources and sites.

• The Clean Coal Smoke Screen by Daniel J. Weiss, Nick Kong, Sam Schiller, Alexandra Kougentakis | December 22, 2008.
• Data Analysis for Clean Coal Smoke Screen, by Daniel J. Weiss, Nick Kong, Sam Schiller, Alexandra Kougentakis | December 22, 2008

"A series of feel-good ads this year showcased a variety of people straight from central casting: the feisty grandma, the hip-looking teacher, the salt-of-the earth farmer. They all communicated the same message: “I believe in…” the future, technology, American ingenuity. Only at the end do we learn what they all believe in: “Clean Coal. America’s Power."

These ads were sponsored by the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, an industry group comprised of 48 coal and utility companies. ACCCE spent at least $45 million on advertising this year to convince Americans that “clean coal” is the solution to global warming. The ACCCE companies claim that they “are committed to making coal a clean energy source.” Yet the coal mining and electric utility industries spent over $125 million combined in the first nine months of 2008 to lobby Congress to delay global warming pollution reductions until clean coal technology is ready.

Despite the ads’ claims, an analysis by the Center of American Progress determined that ACCCE’s companies spend relatively few dollars conducting research on carbon capture and storage, the most promising clean coal technology to reduce global warming pollution from coal-fired power plants. This technology would allow power plants to capture 85 percent or more of their carbon dioxide emissions and permanently store them underground in geological formations.

NPR: "...The past couple of years have been incredibly good to wastepaper exporters. Demand from Asia is huge, and speaking just in terms of volume, wastepaper is one of America's top exports...So, what happened? Well, hundreds of thousands of people didn't buy the TVs they wanted. Millions more didn't buy kitchen appliances, dolls or shoes. That means factories in China started making fewer cheap electronics and dolls and shoes and needed fewer boxes to put all that stuff in."

Comprehensive Collection of Kissinger "Telcons" Provides Inside View of Government Decision-Making; Reveals Candid talks with Presidents, Foreign Leaders, Journalists, and Power-brokers during Nixon-Ford Years, National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 263 - Part 1, Edited by William Burr

News release: "Existing-home sales weakened against a backdrop of an eroding economy, according to the National Association of Realtors®. Existing-home sales – including single-family, townhomes, condominiums and co-ops – fell 8.6 percent to a seasonally adjusted annual rate¹ of 4.49 million units in November from a downwardly revised level of 4.91 million in October, and are 10.6 percent below the 5.02 million-unit pace in November 2007...According to Freddie Mac, the national average commitment rate for a 30-year, conventional, fixed-rate mortgage fell to 6.09 percent in November from 6.20 percent in October; the rate was 6.21 percent in November 2007. Last week, Freddie Mac reported the 30-year rate fell to 5.19 percent – the lowest on record since the series began in 1971."

"The U.S. Department of Justice’s Global Justice Information Sharing Initiative (Global) has released a booklet highlighting key efforts supported by Global, including the vigilant preservation of privacy and civil liberties; fusion center partnerships; securing exchanged data and networks; and harnessing the power of the latest innovations so that new technology and standardized languages knock down barriers to information sharing."

News release: "The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) has published the ARL Statistics 2006–2007, the latest in a series of annual publications that describe the collections, staffing, expenditures, and service activities of ARL’s 123 member libraries. Of these member libraries, 113 are university libraries (14 in Canada, 99 in the US); the remaining 10 are public, governmental, and private research libraries (2 in Canada, 8 in the US)."

A Guide for the Perplexed: Libraries and the Google Library Project Settlement: Jonathan Band's article outlines the settlement’s provisions, with special emphasis on the provisions that apply directly to libraries. The settlement is extremely complex (over 200 pages long, including attachments), so this paper of necessity simplifies many of its details.

Vandenbergh, Michael P. , Barkenbus, Jack and Gilligan, Jonathan M.,Individual Carbon Emissions: The Low-Hanging Fruit (July 16, 2008). UCLA Law Review, Vol. 55, 2008; Vanderbilt Public Law Research Paper No. 08-36. Available at SSRN.

Most Companies Step Up Communication to Ease Workers' Recession-Related Stress: "As economic uncertainties raise anxiety levels among workers across all industries, employers are making changes in their communication programs. They are increasing communication about organizational performance and solvency, as well as pay and benefits. Using a variety of traditional communication channels, as well as social media, senior leaders are hoping to allay employees’ fears and increase trust levels. However, in many cases front-line managers are not reinforcing and interpreting these messages for specific work groups. Nevertheless, most employers who are measuring communication effectiveness feel that taking the initiative to communicate during these challenging times is improving employee engagement and productivity."

News release: "The Conference Board Employment Trends Index (ETI)™ declined further in November. The index fell to 102.9, down 1.6 percent from the October revised figure of 104.5, and down over 13 percent from a year ago. “Thus far, the U.S. economy has lost 1.9 million jobs and the declines in the ETI suggest job losses could very well surpass 3 million by mid 2009,” said Gad Levanon, Senior Economist at The Conference Board. “The continued deterioration in the labor market will exert significant downward pressure on wages.”

"The transformation of the media world is well underway, facilitated by the spread of digital tools. A myriad of innovative new media organizations have sprung up to take advantage of the opportunities that stem from low-cost distribution networks. Meanwhile the economic base of many of the large media companies continues to erode. Despite the demonstrated success of many new media enterprises, the euphoria over the rise of participatory media has been tempered by concerns over the quality and credibility of online media, the possible fragmentation of audiences, a decline in editorial standards and the persistent challenge of effectively reporting the news. Over the past year, researchers at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society have reached out to a broad range of media experts to help in this assessment of the changes in new media over the past several years and to take a sober look at the successes and ongoing challenges.

Press Release: William J. Clinton Foundation Publishes Names of All Contributors on Foundation Website

Best Careers, 2009: "U.S. News profiles 30 careers that offer strong outlooks and high job satisfaction. Here's what's new in 2009...as well as a look at 13 cutting-edge careers, viable now and poised for future growth. They stem from megatrends like globalization, digitization, and the wave of environmentalism sweeping the world." See the entry for Librarian.

E-Discovery Update: My E-Discovery Holiday Wish List - Conrad J. Jacoby's holiday wish is for the legal community to finally develop one or more judicially accepted standards that can be used to craft consistent ways of requesting and producing information. With baseline procedures in place, both producing and requesting parties, as well as judges, will be able to make more informed decisions about the need for discovery and the way in which such discovery should be conducted.

"For the past two decades the United States has been transforming distressed public housing communities, with three ambitious goals: replace distressed developments with healthy mixed-income communities; help residents relocate to affordable housing, often in the private market; and empower former public housing families toward economic self-sufficiency. The transformation has focused on deconcentrating poverty, but not on the underlying role of racial segregation in creating these distressed communities. In Public Housing and the Legacy of Segregation, scholars and public housing officials assess whether—and how—public housing policies can simultaneously address the problems of poverty and racial discrimination."

"The Cingranelli-Richards (CIRI) Human Rights Dataset contains standards-based quantitative information on government respect for 15 internationally recognized human rights for 195 countries, annually from 1981-2007. It is designed for use by scholars and students who seek to test theories about the causes and consequences of human rights violations, as well as policy makers and analysts who seek to estimate the human rights effects of a wide variety of institutional changes and public policies including democratization, economic aid, military aid, structural adjustment, and humanitarian intervention."

"As policymakers in Washington consider health reform, the care and coverage of the nation’s children is certain to be part of the debate. During the campaign President-elect Barack Obama said that he would require that all children have health coverage. Moreover, Congress is expected to take up reauthorization of the popular State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) before the program’s funding expires at the end of March.

The Kaiser Family Foundation has several resources that explain the state of children’s health and health care coverage and can serve as helpful reference guides in understanding the policy debate. The materials include state level data on children’s coverage and overviews of the role of Medicaid and SCHIP, which together provide coverage for more than one in four children."

Kaiser Women's Health Policy Program: Health Insurance Coverage of Women Ages 18 to 64, by State, 2006-2007

News release: "While progress is being made, consumer and technology companies still have more to do in confronting the business challenges posed by climate change, according to a report issued today by the Ceres investor coalition and authored by RiskMetrics Group that analyzes climate change governance practices at 63 of the world's largest retail, pharmaceutical, technology, apparel and other consumer-facing companies...The report uses a "Climate Change Governance Framework" to evaluate how 48 US companies and 15 non-US companies are addressing climate change through board of director oversight, management execution, public disclosure, GHG emissions accounting and strategic planning and performance. Some of the largest global companies in 11 consumer and technology sectors were evaluated using a 100-point scoring system based on this framework."

"The Center for American Progress Action Fund, along with New Democracy Project, presents Change for America: A Progressive Blueprint for the 44th President [Download 10 chapters free here], to help guide the presidential transition process and steer the government in a new, more progressive direction."

Official Google Search Blog: "Today, we're announcing an initiative to help bring more magazine archives and current magazines online, partnering with publishers to begin digitizing millions of articles from titles as diverse as New York Magazine, Popular Mechanics, and Ebony...You can search for magazines through Google Book Search...you'll find magazine articles alongside books results. Magazine articles are tagged with the keyword "Magazine" on the search snippet."

Risk Steering Committee, DHS Risk Lexicon, September 2008: "The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is in the process of building an Integrated Risk Management Framework to improve its capability to make risk-informed strategic decisions using systematic and structured assessments of homeland security risk. The Integrated Risk Management Framework includes processes and tools that allow DHS to gather, integrate, analyze, and communicate information about risk such that it can be used to strategically prioritize efforts and resources throughout the DHS enterprise. The DHS Risk Lexicon supports the Integrated Risk Management Framework by defining a single language for DHS risk management. Clear and unambiguous communication amongst risk practitioners, decision makers, and homeland security stakeholders is a key aspect the Departments integrated risk management capability. The DHS Risk Lexicon represents a significant step forward by making available an official set of definitions for risk-related terms for the Department."

Center for Strategic and International Studies - Special Brief: Homeland Security in an Obama Administration, By David Heyman and Ethan Wais, November 28, 2008

Follow up to December 5, 2008 posting, Bureau of Labor Statistics: Employment Situation, November 2008, from the Wall Street Journal blog, Real Time Economics: Fourth Quarter Layoffs: Selection of Job Cuts by Major Companies - "Layoff announcements have been a common occurrence this quarter as the financial crisis weighs on companies in every sector of the economy. The following chart is a selection of some announcements of job cuts since October. Some numbers are estimates. The chart can be sorted by company name, date of announcement, number of job cuts and percent of work force eliminated."

News release: "The Ecology Center today released the 2nd annual consumer guide to toxic chemicals in toys. Researchers tested over 1,500 new, popular children's toys for lead, arsenic, mercury and other harmful chemicals. The Ecology Center determined that one-third of the toys they tested had "high" or "medium" levels of chemicals of concern this year. Lead was found in 20 percent of the toys tested, including 54 products (3.5 percent) that exceeded the 600 parts per million (ppm) state legal limit set last year and 164 (10.7 percent) above the American Academy of Pediatrics recommended ceiling of 40 ppm. Children's jewelry remains the most contaminated product category."

Google's gatekeepers, by Jeffrey Rosen, IHT: "For the past two years, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft, along with other international Internet companies, have been meeting regularly with human rights and civil-liberties advocacy groups to agree on voluntary standards for resisting worldwide censorship requests. At the end of October, the Internet companies and the advocacy groups announced the Global Network Initiative, a series of principles for protecting global free expression and privacy.

Voluntary self-regulation means that, for the foreseeable future, Wong [Nicole Wong, the deputy general counsel of Google] and her colleagues will continue to exercise extraordinary power over global speech online. Which raises a perennial but increasingly urgent question: Can we trust a corporation to be good - even a corporation whose informal motto is "Don't be evil"?"

You’re Leaving a Digital Trail. What About Privacy? by John Markoff: "Propelled by new technologies and the Internet’s steady incursion into every nook and cranny of life, collective intelligence offers powerful capabilities, from improving the efficiency of advertising to giving community groups new ways to organize. But even its practitioners acknowledge that, if misused, collective intelligence tools could create an Orwellian future on a level Big Brother could only dream of. Collective intelligence could make it possible for insurance companies, for example, to use behavioral data to covertly identify people suffering from a particular disease and deny them insurance coverage. Similarly, the government or law enforcement agencies could identify members of a protest group by tracking social networks revealed by the new technology."

News release: "A long history of terrorism in India precedes the latest, coordinated attacks in Mumbai. The Global Terrorism Database (GTD), maintained by the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START) based at the University of Maryland. For example, 12,539 terrorist-related fatalities in India between 1970 and 2004 - an average of almost 360 fatalities per year from terrorism in India."

How to Publish Without Perishing, by James Gleick: "As a technology, the book is like a hammer. That is to say, it is perfect: a tool ideally suited to its task. Hammers can be tweaked and varied but will never go obsolete. Even when builders pound nails by the thousand with pneumatic nail guns, every household needs a hammer. Likewise, the bicycle is alive and well. It was invented in a world without automobiles, and for speed and range it was quickly surpassed by motorcycles and all kinds of powered scooters. But there is nothing quaint about bicycles. They outsell cars...Go back to an old-fashioned idea: that a book, printed in ink on durable paper, acid-free for longevity, is a thing of beauty. Make it as well as you can. People want to cherish it."

100 Notable Books of 2008 - New York Times: "The Book Review has selected this list from books reviewed since Dec. 2, 2007, when we published our previous Notables list." Includes Fiction and Poetry, and Nonfiction.

Clean Energy 2030 Google's Proposal for reducing U.S. dependence on fossil fuels, by Jeffery Greenblatt, Climate and Energy Technology Manager: 'The energy team at Google has been analyzing how we could greatly reduce fossil fuel use by 2030. Our proposal - "Clean Energy 2030" - provides a potential path to weaning the U.S. off of coal and oil for electricity generation by 2030 (with some remaining use of natural gas as well as nuclear), and cutting oil use for cars by 44%."

Electronic Publication and the Narrowing of Science and Scholarship, James A. Evans, Published 18 July 2008, Science 321, 395 (2008) [Subscription only - Supporting Online Material available free]

Paper Cuts, by Erica Smith - tracks number of buyouts/layoffs, geographical location and newspaper [thanks Darlene Fichter]:

News release: "Recently released findings from a study initiated by a grant from The Nature Conservancy and conducted by scientists at Biodiversity Research Institute and the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation reveal elevated mercury levels in Bald Eagles nesting in the Catskill region of New York. Findings from this research effort provide evidence that the Catskill region is a "biological mercury hotspot" and support the need for a more comprehensive mercury monitoring and assement plan."

• Mercury in New York State Bald Eagles - Summary of a recent study conducted by BioDiversity Research Institute & NYSDEC, September 2008
  
• Full Report: Assessing Mercury Exposure and Spatial Patterns in Adult Nestling Bald Eagles in New York State, With an Emphasis on the Catskill Region (Report BRI 2008-06), March 27, 2008.
  
• View bald eagle photo gallery
  
• A report released earlier this year by The Nature Conservancy and the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies, Threats From Above: Air Pollution Impacts on Ecosystems and Biological Diversity in the Eastern United States, found that no ecosystem in the eastern United States is free of the effects of air pollution."

Health News Coverage in the U.S. Media, January 2007 – June 2008 - A Report by The Kaiser Family Foundation and The Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, December 2008

Improving Government Interoperability: A capability framework for government managers, Theresa A. Pardo, G. Brian Burke, Center for Technology in Government, University at Albany, SUNY. October 2008.

Toolkit for Foundations and Individual Investors: Harnessing Your Investments to Help Solve the Climate Crisis, November 2008

New York Times: "The flailing auto industry is important here, but so is furniture building, tourism, the retail trade and construction — pieces of the economy long buffered from the downturn in Detroit. Now waves of layoffs are sweeping towns around here in wine country and elsewhere across the state, swelling the ranks of the unemployed just as tens of thousands of those already of out of work fear running out of unemployment benefits."

The Fast-Food Information Age: We Are What We Read, Michael Ross - November 10, 2008

• Approaches to Mitigate Freight Congestion, GAO-09-163R, November 20, 2008
• Department of Homeland Security: Billions Invested in Major Programs Lack Appropriate Oversight, GAO-09-29, November 18, 2008
• Contract Management: DOD Developed Draft Guidance for Operational Contract Support but Has Not Met All Legislative Requirements, GAO-09-114R, November 20, 2008
• Health Information Technology: More Detailed Plans Needed for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Redesigned BioSense Program, GAO-09-100, November 20, 2008
• International Environmental Oversight: U.S. Agencies Follow Certain Procedures Required by Law, but Have Limited Impact, GAO-09-99, November 20, 2008

News release: "Working as part of a NASA-wide team, engineers from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., used software called Disruption-Tolerant Networking, or DTN, to transmit dozens of space images to and from a NASA science spacecraft located about 20 million miles from Earth. "This is the first step in creating a totally new space communications capability, an interplanetary Internet," said Adrian Hooke, team lead and manager of space-networking architecture, technology and standards at NASA Headquarters in Washington. NASA and Vint Cerf, a vice president at Google Inc., in Mountain View, Calif., partnered 10 years ago to develop this software protocol. The DTN sends information using a method that differs from the normal Internet's Transmission-Control Protocol/Internet Protocol, or TCP/IP, communication suite, which Cerf co-designed."

"Search millions of photographs from the LIFE photo archive, stretching from the 1750s to today. Most were never published and are now available for the first time through the joint work of LIFE and Google."

News release: "Detainees released from U.S. detention in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba and Afghanistan live shattered lives as a result of U.S. policies in the “war on terror,” according to a new report by human rights experts at the University of California, Berkeley done in partnership with the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR). The report, Guantánamo and Its Aftermath: U.S. Detention and Interrogation Practices and Their Impact on Detainees, based on a two-year study, reveals in graphic detail the cumulative effect of Bush Administration policies on the lives of 62 released detainees. Many of the prisoners were sold into captivity and subjected to brutal treatment in U.S. prison camps. Once in Guantánamo, prisoners were denied access to civilian courts to challenge the legality of their detention. Almost two-thirds of the former detainees interviewed reported having psychological problems since leaving Guantánamo."

DOJ OIG: Top Management and Performance Challenges in the Department of Justice - 2008, released November 14, 2008

The Global Gender Gap 2008: "Norway (1) leads the world in closing the gender gap between men and women, according to the overall ranking in the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report 2008 released today. Three other Nordic countries – Finland (2), Sweden (3) and Iceland (4) – also top the Report’s Gender Gap Index. Previously higher ranking countries such as Germany (11), United Kingdom (13) and Spain (17) slipped down the Index but stayed in the top 20, while Netherlands (9), Latvia (10), Sri Lanka (12) and France (15) made significant gains. The United States (27) made progress this year and closed gender gaps in estimated earned income and perceived income gaps for similar work. The United States also made strides in political empowerment, driven by increased participation of women in political decision-making positions. Switzerland’s (14) advancement up the rankings was based on large increases in the percentage of women in parliament and those in ministerial-level positions. France (15) improved significantly for the third consecutive year, thanks to gains in both economic participation and political empowerment."

News release: "An update of the widely-cited manufacturing “cost study” released today by the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), The Manufacturing Institute and the Manufacturers Alliance/MAPI shows that U.S. manufacturing is making progress in reducing its cost disadvantage against nine major foreign competitors but that high corporate tax rates now account for more than half of the burden."

News release: "The Internet will be the catalyst for advancement of programs promoting social justice over the next decade, according to new research from Harvard Professor Elaine C. Kamarck, PhD. The research paper, titled Transforming the Fight Against Poverty: The Internet & Anti-Poverty Strategies, addresses how the Internet has enhanced productivity in government run anti-poverty programs and bridged physical and market isolation gaps prevalent in poor populations."

Official Google Blog: "...we have launched Google Flu Trends, where you can find up-to-date influenza-related activity estimates for each of the 50 states in the U.S...It turns out that traditional flu surveillance systems take 1-2 weeks to collect and release surveillance data, but Google search queries can be automatically counted very quickly. By making our flu estimates available each day, Google Flu Trends may provide an early-warning system for outbreaks of influenza...For epidemiologists, this is an exciting development, because early detection of a disease outbreak can reduce the number of people affected."

"Since 1997, the White House Transition Project has combined the efforts of scholars, universities, and policy institutions to smooth out the American presidential transition. WHTP bridges the gaps between the partisan forces engaged in settling elections and the decision processes essential to governing by providing non-partisan information about the challenges of the American presidential transition and the strategies for overcoming those challenges. It provides these and other resources to presidential campaigns, to the president-elect, and to the new administration. These resources include three seperate report series providing a White House institutional memory, perspectives on past transitions, and advanced reserach covering special aspects of transitions and governing. The WHTP also provides unique analysis of the appointments process and a clearinghouse on other transition resources."

Background Paper prepared by the World Bank Group, G20 Summit on Financial Markets and the World Economy, Washington, D.C. - November 15, 2008 - World Bank: Global Financial Crisis - Responding Today, Securing Tomorrow

Worldwide Infrastructure Security Report, Volume III: "Arbor Networks®, Inc., in cooperation with the Internet security operations community, has completed the third edition of an ongoing series of annual operational security surveys. This survey, covering a 12-month period from July 2006 through June 2007, is designed to provide data useful to network operators so that they can make informed decisions about their use of network security technology to protect their mission-critical infrastructures. It is also meant to serve as a general resource for the Internet operations and engineering community, recording information on trends and employment of various infrastructure security techniques."

Dan Farber, CNET News: "Obama will appoint the nation's first Chief Technology Officer (CTO) to ensure that our government and all its agencies have the right infrastructure, policies and services for the 21st century. The CTO will ensure the safety of our networks and will lead an interagency effort, working with chief technology and chief information officers of each of the federal agencies, to ensure that they use best-in-class technologies and share best practices."

News release: "The 2,000-strong community of Census of Marine Life scientists from 82 nations today announced astonishing examples of recent new finds from the world’s ocean depths. As more than 700 delegates gather for the World Conference on Marine Biodiversity (Valencia, Spain Nov. 11-15), organized by the Census’s European affiliate program on Marine Biodiversity and Ecosystem Functioning, the report details major progress towards the first ever marine life census, for release in October, 2010."

Washington Post: "Transition advisers to President-elect Barack Obama have compiled a list of about 200 Bush administration actions and executive orders that could be swiftly undone to reverse White House policies on climate change, stem cell research, reproductive rights and other issues, according to congressional Democrats, campaign aides and experts working with the transition team."

Impending collapse of bluefin tuna in the northeast Atlantic and Mediterranean, Brian R. MacKenzie, Henrik Mosegaard, Andrew A. Rosenberg, Conservation Letters, 2008

Hull D, Pettifer SR, Kell DB 2008 Defrosting the Digital Library: Bibliographic Tools for the Next Generation Web. PLoS Computational Biology 4(10): e1000204 doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1000204 [Gerry McKiernan]

"Nearly 180 organizations representing the business, education and scientific communities have urged the next president to appoint a White House science adviser by January 20—Inauguration Day—and give the adviser cabinet rank."

Center for Automotive Research (CAR) - The Impact of the U.S. Economy of a Major Contraction of the Detroit Three Automakers, by David Cole, Ph.D., Chairman, Sean McAlinden, Ph.D., Vice President for Research, Kristin Dziczek, Senior Project Manager, Debra Maranger Menk, Project Manager, November 4, 2008

Pew Hispanic Survey: "Hispanics voted for Sens. Barack Obama and Joe Biden over Sen. John McCain and Gov. Sarah Palin by a margin of more than two-to-one in the 2008 presidential election, 66% versus 32%, according to an analysis by the Pew Hispanic Center of exit polls from Edison Media Research as published by CNN. The Center's analysis also finds that 8% of the electorate was Latino, as indicated by the national exit poll. This is unchanged from 2004."

The Place We Live, the Health We Have - A Multi-Level, Life Course Perspective on the Effects of Residential Segregation and Neighborhood Poverty on Health and Racial Health Disparities, by D. Phuong Do, Rand Dissertation

Newseum - "Today's Front Pages, Wednesday, November 05, 2008: front pages from countries around the world. The Newseum displays these daily newspaper front pages in their original, unedited form. Some front pages may contain material that is objectionable to some visitors. Viewer discretion is advised."

Stock Market Fluctuations and Retiree Incomes: An Update - by Gary Burtless, The Brookings Institution

National Association for Business Economics Industry Survey: A Significant Downshift - October 2008 - Summary

• "Demand for goods and services increased at 30% of respondents’ firms and fell at 35%, the first time since 2001 that more respondents reported declines than increases. This is consistent with other evidence that the U.S. economy fell into a recession in the third quarter. Weakness was especially pronounced in the goods-producing sector, where only 6% of firms reported increased demand while 61% reported declining demand.
  
• Respondents to the October survey were significantly more pessimistic about the macroeconomic outlook than they were in the July survey. A full 38% of respondents expect U.S. real GDP to be lower in 2009 than in 2008, and 79% expect growth of less than 1%. Only one respondent expects growth of more than 3% in 2009. Ninety percent of survey panelists said their forecast for 2009 became more pessimistic between July and October, compared to only 2% who said they became more optimistic. Thirty-eight percent became significantly more pessimistic, reflecting the deterioration in financial markets that occurred in September and October."
  
• Tight credit market conditions appear to be having a growing impact on the economy. Forty-eight percent of respondents indicated that the tightening credit conditions had had a moderate or severe negative impact on their businesses, while 71% reported that credit conditions had had a moderate or negative impact on their customers. Slightly more than one-third of respondents stated that actions by the Federal Reserve of either lowering interest rates or liberalizing credit access had a positive effect on their business, with the finance sector experiencing the greatest impact."
  
• Related postings on financial system

Follow up to October 28, 2008 posting, Authors, Publishers, and Google Reach Landmark Settlement, from the Harvard Crimson: "Harvard University Library will not take part in Google’s book scanning project for in-copyright works after finding the terms of its landmark $125 million settlement regarding copyrighted materials unsatisfactory, University officials said yesterday."

Don't Have a Cow, Give a Cow Instead

News release: "With only a few days remaining before Election Day, researchers from Harvard School of Public Health and the Kaiser Family Foundation, writing for the November 6, 2008, New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), find that seven in ten registered voters say major changes are needed in the U.S. health care system.

The article, written by Robert J. Blendon, Sc.D., Professor of Health Policy and Political Analysis at the Harvard School of Public Health, Drew E. Altman, Ph.D., President of the Kaiser Family Foundation and five co-authors, is the second in a series of reports published in NEJM examining how the election can provide insights about future health policy. The article [free] examines the public’s perceptions of the state of the American health care system, the role of health care as a 2008 election issue, and the contrasting health policy views of registered voters who intend to vote for Senator McCain and Senator Obama. The findings are based on a Kaiser/Harvard survey of registered voters in September, as well as other surveys this year and historical Election Day exit polls.

"This document, Cisco Visual Networking Index Pulse Survey: Online Video and Political Engagement Highlights, presents some of the initial high-level findings of a new study assessing the influence of online video and other social media applications on Americans' political engagement. The study was conducted by Compete and sponsored by Cisco. Many eligible American voters are using video, social networking, and collaborative applications to follow the 2008 U.S. presidential election, shape their opinions, and express their views on current issues and events. This survey was designed to gain a better understanding of how registered U.S. voters are using online technologies and their impact on the political decision-making process."

How Can Leaders Channel the Creative Potential of Individualistic Groups?: According to Prof. Jack Goncalo, one of the challenges that leaders face is how to foster creative potential. His research supports the position that how leaders maintain momentum and make sure their organizations are dynamic and creative is determined by where they fall on the continuum from individualism to collectivism.

Leadership & The Role Of Information: Making The Creatively Informed Questioner - Stuart Basefsky supports the concept that the quintessential leader is an informed leader. However, effectively communicating and leveraging the power of information, in leadership roles, is subject to a range of interpretations that he discusses in this forward thinking series.

E-Discovery Update: Pushing Back Against Hardcopy ESI Productions - Conrad J. Jacoby addresses how critical technology issues related to document authenticity and document-associated metadata have left fewer lawyers willing to accept e-mail messages and other electronic documents in print format. He argues that litigants choosing to produce electronically stored information in hardcopy format should be prepared to provide more complete electronic copies of their production, even when it isn’t initially requested by opposing counsel.

As print media decline, so does the amount of available information, by David Carr, IHT: "It has been an especially rotten few days for people who type on deadline. Just Tuesday, The Christian Science Monitor announced that, after a century, it would cease publishing a weekday paper. Time Inc., the Olympian home of Time magazine, Fortune, People and Sports Illustrated, announced that it was cutting 600 jobs and reorganizing its staff. And Gannett, the largest newspaper publisher in the country, compounded the grimness by announcing it was laying off 10 percent of its work force - as many as 3,000 people...The paradox of all these announcements is that newspapers and magazines do not have an audience problem - newspaper Web sites are a vital source of news and growing - but they do have a consumer problem."

The Changing Prospects for Building Home Equity: An Updated Analysis of Rents and the Price of Housing in 100 Metropolitan Areas, October 2008, Hye Jin Rho, Danilo Pelletiere, and Dean Baker

The United Nations Office of Legal Affairs launched the Audiovisual Library of International Law. [Lorraine Pellicano Waitman]

"Today a diverse coalition of leading Internet companies, major human rights and free press organizations, investors and academics launched the Global Network Initiative to protect and advance freedom of expression and privacy in information and communications technologies. CDT and Business for Social Responsibility co-facilitated an 18-month effort by these groups to craft the key documents underlying this effort. The documents provide guidance for companies, NGOs, investors, academics and others working together to resist efforts by governments that seek to enlist companies in acts of censorship and surveillance that violate international standards. The documents also provide specific implementation commitments and outline a framework for accountability and learning."

News release: "The Authors Guild, the Association of American Publishers (AAP), and Google today announced a groundbreaking settlement agreement on behalf of a broad class of authors and publishers worldwide that would expand online access to millions of in-copyright books and other written materials in the U.S. from the collections of a number of major U.S. libraries participating in Google Book Search...Under the agreement, Google will make payments totaling $125 million. The money will be used to establish the Book Rights Registry, to resolve existing claims by authors and publishers and to cover legal fees. The settlement agreement resolves Authors Guild v. Google, a class-action suit filed on September 20, 2005 by the Authors Guild and certain authors, and a suit filed on October 19, 2005 by five major publisher-members of the Association of American Publishers: The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.; Pearson Education, Inc. and Penguin Group (USA) Inc., both part of Pearson; John Wiley & Sons, Inc.; and Simon & Schuster, Inc. part of CBS Corporation. These lawsuits challenged Google’s plan to digitize, search and show snippets of in-copyright books and to share digital copies with libraries without the explicit permission of the copyright owner."

"The final Kaiser Health Tracking Poll: Election 2008 finds more people are reporting problems with health care bills, and paying for health care retains a solid hold on the public’s list of their top economic concerns. About one in three Americans now report their family has had problems paying medical bills in the past year, up from about a quarter saying the same two years ago. Almost one in five (18%) of Americans report household problems with medical bills amounting to more than $1,000 in the past year.

Nearly half (47%) of the public reports someone in their family skipping pills, postponing or cutting back on medical care they said they needed in the past year due to the cost of care. For example, just over one-third say they or a family member put off or postponed needed care and three in ten say they skipped a recommended test or treatment – increases of seven percentage points from last April’s tracking poll which asks the same question."

• Gartner Says Citizen Social Networks Will Complement, and May Replace, Some Government Functions, Egham, UK, October 23, 2008 — "By 2011, 70 per cent of social computing deployments in government that achieve business benefits will do so in unplanned or unexpected ways, according to Gartner, Inc. Government organisations around the world are showing great interest in social computing, yet deployment so far is relatively limited...Today, the primary role of social networks for governments is to facilitate the exchange of information and to establish novel collaboration patterns, often across organisational boundaries."
• Nielsen Online Media Alert - Fastest Growing Social Networks for September 2008: Twitter.com, Tagged.com and Ning Lead in Year-Over Year Audience Growth
  • U.S. Department of State: Major Programs of the Office of eDiplomacy: "Diplopedia wiki - Launched in September 2006, Diplopedia is the State Department's internal unclassified online encyclopedia. Just as people create and edit articles on public wikis on the Internet, Department personnel are using Diplopedia to create a broad, informative and expanding reference tool for knowledge-sharing about the Department, its programs and offices, and other international affairs subjects."

Latinos Account for Half of U.S. Population Growth Since 2000, by Richard Fry, Senior Research Associate, Pew Hispanic Center, October 23, 2008

Official Google Blog: "Today we are pleased to announce the launch of a 5-year quotes index. This expanded coverage lets you explore what Governor Palin said before she was a VP nominee, or Senator Obama before he was a presidential candidate. The InQuotes lab page is also much improved and now provides comparisons over time on issues like the economy or the war in Iraq."

"The financial interdependence that sovereign wealth funds (SWFs) created between the West and the Arab world could help stabilize multilateral relations and promote economic development and political stability in the Middle East, concludes a new paper from the Carnegie Middle East Center."

"The 2008 Update on Consumers' Views of Patient Safety and Quality Information finds that three in 10 (30%) Americans say they have seen health care quality comparisons of health insurance plans, hospitals, or doctors in the past year. Not all people make health care choices or decisions in a given year that would call for the use of quality information, but this is a downward trend from surveys in 2006 (36%) and 2004 (35%) and roughly equivalent to the level in 2000 (27%). Further, just one in seven (14%) Americans report that they "saw" and "used" comparative health quality information for health insurance plans, hospitals, or doctors in the past year, again down from roughly one in five in both 2006 (20%) and 2004 (19%)."

Behaviorally Informed Financial Services Regulation, By Eldar Shafir, Michael Barr, Sendhil Mullainathan, New America Foundation, October 14, 2008

Review of CiteGenie - Automatic Bluebook citations when using Westlaw: Attorney Marc Hershovitz reviews CiteGenie, a new extension for the Firefox web browser that, as its website promises, "automagically" creates Bluebook formatted pinpoint citations when copying from Westlaw.

CIA FOIA Electronic Reading Room: "The automatic declassification provisions of Executive Order 12958, as amended, require the declassification of nonexempt historically-valuable records 25 years old or older. By 31 December 2006 all agencies were to have completed the review of all hardcopy documents determined to be historically valuable (designated as "permanent" by the agency and the National Archives) and exclusively containing their equities. As the deadline pertains to CIA, it covers the span of relevant documents originally dating from the establishment of the CIA after WWII through 1981.

CIA has deployed an electronic full-text searchable system it has named CREST (the CIA Records Search Tool), which has been operational since 2000 and is located at NARA II in College Park Maryland. On this Agency site, researchers can now use an on-line CREST Finding Aid to research the availability of CIA documents declassified and loaded onto CREST through 2002. Data for the remaining years up to the present (CREST deliveries have been ongoing) will be placed on this site at later dates.

Search the CREST web database here. Note: it does not contain actual images of the documents as the regular Electronic Reading Room search does. Rather, it contains details on the files to speed FOIA requests."

Intelligence Community Directive Number 704, Personnel Security Standards and Procedures Governing Eligibility for Access to Sensitive Compartmented Information and Other Controlled Access Program Information (Effective 01 October 2008): "This Intelligence Community Directive (lCD) establishes Director of National Intelligence (DNI) personnel security policy governing eligibility for access to Sensitive Compartmented Information (SCI) and information protected within other controlled access programs. This directive also documents the responsibility of the DNI for overseeing the program producing these eligibility determinations. It directs application of uniform personnel security standards and procedures to facilitate effective initial vetting, continuing personnel security evaluation, and reciprocity throughout the Intelligence Community (IC)."

Federal Computer Week: "The FBI is testing a new collaborative internal Web site, or wiki, called Bureaupedia that officials say will enable users to create an encyclopedia of lessons learned, best practices and subject-matter expertise. Officials see Bureaupedia as a knowledge management tool that will let agents and analysts share their experiences to ensure that their accumulated insight remains after they retire. The project is a collaborative effort between FBI’s chief knowledge officer and chief technology officer."

New York Times: "The United States is failing to develop the math skills of both girls and boys, especially among those who could excel at the highest levels, a new study asserts, and girls who do succeed in the field are almost all immigrants or the daughters of immigrants from countries where mathematics is more highly valued.

The study suggests that while many girls have exceptional talent in math — the talent to become top math researchers, scientists and engineers — they are rarely identified in the United States. A major reason, according to the study, is that American culture does not highly value talent in math, and so discourages girls — and boys, for that matter — from excelling in the field. The study will be published Friday in Notices of the American Mathematical Society.

Women's Health and Election 2008: "Women consistently cite health care as one of the top issues they want the Presidential candidates to address, reflecting their experiences with the health care system as patients, mothers, and caregivers for frail and disabled family members. Women’s priorities for health care reform cut across many critical topics, including health insurance coverage and affordability, the cornerstones of the candidates’ health proposals, as well as long-term care, delivery system issues, and reproductive health. This brief discusses each of these issue areas from a women’s perspective and summarizes the presidential candidates’ stated positions on these topics."

News release: "The United States tops the overall ranking in The Global Competitiveness Report 2008-2009, released today by the World Economic Forum. Switzerland is in second position followed by Denmark, Sweden and Singapore. European economies continue to prevail in the top 10 with Finland, Germany and the Netherlands following suit. The United Kingdom, while remaining very competitive, has dropped by three places and out of the top 10, mainly attributable to a weakening of its financial markets. The People’s Republic of China continues to lead the way among large developing economies, improving by four places this year and joining the top 30. All of the BRIC economies figure in the top half of the ranking, with China followed by India, Russia and Brazil.Several Asian economies perform strongly with Japan, Hong Kong SAR, Republic of Korea and Taiwan, China in the top 20. In Latin America, Chile is the highest ranked country, followed by Panama, Costa Rica and Mexico."

International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources: "The most comprehensive assessment of the world’s mammals has confirmed an extinction crisis, with almost one in four at risk of disappearing forever, according to The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species™, revealed at the IUCN World Conservation Congress in Barcelona. The new study to assess the world’s mammals shows at least 1,141 of the 5,487 mammals on Earth are known to be threatened with extinction. At least 76 mammals have become extinct since 1500. But the results also show conservation can bring species back from the brink of extinction, with five percent of currently threatened mammals showing signs of recovery in the wild."

• The Review of the 2008 Red List of Threatened Species
  The IUCN Red List a key conservation tool
  
• The IUCN Red List a key conservation tool factsheet

Cambridge, UK: BirdLife International: "...our data show that the state of the world’s biodiversity, as reflected by its 9,856 living bird species, continues to get worse, and that, if anything, this deterioration is accelerating, not slowing. Moreover, while governments have made copious verbal commitments to conserving biodiversity and safeguarding the environment, the resources available for this have scarcely grown in ten years and still fall far short of what is needed. Alarm calls from the world’s birds are becoming ever louder and more urgent. It’s time to listen properly to what the birds are telling us, and start making changes that are positive and significant."

From NextGov: "Members of the House will be permitted to use third-party Web sites like YouTube to communicate with constituents as long as the content is for official purposes, and not personal, commercial or campaign communication, according to rules adopted Thursday by the House Administration Committee."

Systemic Banking Crises: A New Database, September 2008, by Luc Laeven and Fabian Valencia

• "This paper presents a new database on the timing of systemic banking crises and policy responses to resolve them. The database covers the universe of systemic banking crises for the period 1970-2007, with detailed data on crisis containment and resolution policies for 42 crisis episodes, and also includes data on the timing of currency crises and sovereign debt crises. The database extends and builds on the Caprio, Klingebiel, Laeven, and Noguera (2005) banking crisis database, and is the most complete and detailed database on banking crises to date."
  
• Related postings on the financial system

Global Climate Change and Extreme Weather Events: Understanding the Contributions to Infectious Disease Emergence: Workshop Summary, 2008.

• "Long before the germ theory of disease was described, late in the nineteenth century, humans knew that climatic conditions influence the appearance and spread of epidemic diseases. Ancient notions about the effects of weather and climate on disease remain embedded in our collective consciousness through expressions such as cold for rhinovirus infections; malaria, derived from the Latin for bad air; and the common complaint of feeling under the weather.
  Today, evidence is mounting that earth s climate is changing at a faster rate than previously appreciated, leading researchers to view the longstanding relationships between climate and disease with new urgency and from a global perspective. On December 4 and 5, 2007, the Forum on Microbial Threats hosted a public workshop, summarized in this book, to consider the possible infectious disease impacts of global climate change and extreme weather events on human, animal, and plant health, as well as their expected implications for global and national security."
  
• Related postings on climate change

"The Kaiser Family Foundation released, Medicare Now And In The Future, the second in a series of 2008 election briefs on key health policy issues. This brief provides an overview of Medicare, the nation’s federal health insurance program that covers nearly 45 million people, explaining who the program covers, what services are provided, how elderly and disabled care is delivered and what issues and challenges face Medicare in the future. Medicare’s long-term financing challenges, the role of private plans in Medicare, potential changes to the outpatient prescription drug benefit, and the adequacy of current benefits are highlighted."

Trends in Unauthorized Immigration: Undocumented Inflow Now Trails Legal Inflow by Jeffrey Passel, Senior Demographer, Pew Hispanic Center and D'Vera Cohn, Senior Writer, Pew Research Center, October 2, 2008
"There were 11.9 million unauthorized immigrants living in the United States in March 2008, according to new Pew Hispanic Center estimates. The size of the unauthorized population appears to have declined since 2007, but this finding is inconclusive because of the margin of error in these estimates. However, it is clear from the estimates that the unauthorized immigrant population grew more slowly in the period from 2005 to 2008 than it did earlier in the decade. It also is clear that from 2005 to 2008, the inflow of immigrants who are undocumented fell below that of immigrants who are legal permanent residents. That reverses a trend that began a decade ago. The turnaround appears to have occurred in 2007."

From Google Labs, "the In Quotes feature allows you to find quotes from stories linked to from Google News. These quotations are a valuable resource for understanding where people in the news stand on various issues. Much of the published reporting about people is based on the interpretation of a journalist. Direct quotes, on the other hand, are concrete units of information that describe how newsmakers represent themselves. Google News compiles these quotations from online news stories and sorts them into browsable groups based on who is being quoted." [Note - also currently includes comparisons of topical quotes from PM candidates in Canada, UK and India. Thanks TM]

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Johnson, T. J., Kaye, B. K., Bichard, S. L., & Wong, w. J. (2007). Every blog has its day: Politically-interested Internet users' perceptions of blog credibility. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 13(1), article 6.

Pro Publica: "With the flurry of recent government bailouts, we decided to try to put them in perspective. The circles below represent the size of U.S. government bailout, calculated in 2008 dollars. They are also in chronological order. Our chart focuses on U.S. government bailouts of U.S. corporations (and one city). We have not included instances where the U.S. government aided other nations. Check out how the Treasury did in the end after initial government outlays."

A National Strategy for Energy Security: Recommendations to the Nation on reducing U.S. Oil Dependence, September 2008

News release: "Premiums for employer-sponsored health insurance rose to $12,680 annually for family coverage this year – with employees on average paying $3,354 out of their paychecks to cover their share of the cost – and the scope of that coverage has changed, with many more workers now enrolled in high-deductible plans, according to the 2008 Employer Health Benefits Survey released by the Kaiser Family Foundation and the Health Research & Educational Trust (HRET). Key findings from the benchmark annual survey of small and large employers were also published today as a Web Exclusive in the journal Health Affairs."

"Health care has been an important issue in this year's presidential campaign and the candidates have staked out positions on key health care issues. Both major party candidates have developed comprehensive health care reform proposals addressing health coverage and access, rising health care costs and health care quality. A side-by-side comparison of these proposals has been prepared and is available here.

The side-by-side comparison below focuses on important health care issues not necessarily addressed in the candidates' health care reform proposals. This interactive tool, prepared by the Kaiser Family Foundation with the assistance of Health Policy Alternatives, Inc., allows users to compare the candidates proposals and positions on a range of health care issues. The comparisons are based on information compiled from the candidates' Web sites, speeches and campaign debates. When we were unable to find a public statement from a candidate on a particular issue, we indicated this with "campaign has not addressed." Prior to posting, the campaigns were given the opportunity to review and comment on the content of this side-by-side.

The site now features a new compilation of video clips of the candidates speaking about various aspects of health reform including expanding coverage, employer-sponsored coverage, costs of coverage, the government's role in health care, the insurance market, preventive care and tax subsidies for health insurance. The clips are drawn from health08.org's extensive webcast library."

Preformatted PDF Comparison of Both Candidates | Preformatted PDF of Sen. John McCain | Preformatted PDF of Sen. Barack Obama

"Energy Policy of Presidential Candidates reviews key oil and gas tax policy differences of the presidential candidates. It focuses predominantly on the issues and political positions that are most relevant to the oil and gas industry from a tax perspective. Few industries have the impact on global economic livelihood, societal functioning and quality of life as significantly as the energy industry, and few industries face as many challenges."

The Government Domain: Political Fact-Checking Websites - Peggy Garvin's well-timed article identifies and evaluates key websites that monitor the accuracy of statements and representations made by political candidates and their respective campaigns.

News release: "A new national survey shows that 62% of adults who are currently employed use the internet or email at work and they have mixed views about the impact of technology on their work lives. On the one hand, they cite the benefits of increased connectivity and flexibility that the internet and all of their various gadgets afford them at work. On the other hand, many workers say these tools have added stress and new demands to their lives."

"Freshwater Ecoregions of the World, (FEOW) provides a new global biogeographic regionalization of the Earth's freshwater biodiversity. Covering virtually all freshwater habitats on Earth, this first-ever ecoregion map, together with associated species data, is a useful tool for underpinning global and regional conservation planning efforts, particularly to identify outstanding and imperiled freshwater systems; for serving as a logical framework for large-scale conservation strategies; and for providing a global-scale knowledge base for increasing freshwater biogeographic literacy."

Researching Medical Literature on the Internet - 2008: Medical journals, dictionaries, textbooks, indexes, rankings, images – all can be found on the Net, and much of it is available free. Sources include publishers, government agencies, professional organizations, health libraries and commercial entities. Gloria Miccioli's completely updated and revised topical guide expertly focuses on what she identifies as the best, content-rich databases and services for researchers.

2008 National Survey of Latinos: Hispanics See Their Situation in U.S. Deteriorating; Oppose Key Immigration Enforcement Measures, September 18, 2008

"The importance of research in solving many of our national challenges, including economic ones, was emphasized today in a new report titled Science and Technology for America's Progress: Ensuring the Best Presidential Appointments in the New Administration. The report, sent to John McCain and Barack Obama with guidance for whomever is elected president in November, provides suggestions on filling key science appointments after the election. Issued by the independent and nonpartisan National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and Institute of Medicine, the report lists approximately 80 high-level science and technology appointees who will be crucial in advising the new president on issues that range from energy to health care to economic growth. It also urges members of the scientific community to serve in these positions, and suggests ways to make it more attractive for well-qualified people to do so."

Journal of the American Medical Association - JAMA. Published online September 16, 2008 (free articles as follows):

• Association of Urinary Bisphenol A Concentration With Medical Disorders and Laboratory Abnormalities in Adults - "Using data representative of the adult US population, we found that higher urinary concentrations of BPA were associated with an increased prevalence of cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and liver-enzyme abnormalities. These findings add to the evidence suggesting adverse effects of low-dose BPA in animals. Independent replication and follow-up studies are needed to confirm these findings and to provide evidence on whether the associations are causal."
  
• Bisphenol A and Risk of Metabolic Disorders: "Based on this background information, the study by Lang et al, while preliminary with regard to these diseases in humans, should spur US regulatory agencies to follow the recent action taken by Canadian regulatory agencies, which have declared BPA a "toxic chemical" requiring aggressive action to limit human and environmental exposures. Alternatively, Congressional action could follow the precedent set with the recent passage of federal legislation designed to limit exposures to another family of compounds, phthalates, also used in plastic. Like BPA, phthalates are detectable in virtually everyone in the United States. This bill moves US policy closer to the European model, in which industry must provide data on the safety of a chemical before it can be used in products."
  
• Related postings on Bisphenol A

Arctic sea ice settles at second-lowest, underscores accelerating decline: "The Arctic sea ice cover appears to have reached its minimum extent for the year, the second-lowest extent recorded since the dawn of the satellite era. While above the record minimum set on September 16, 2007, this year further reinforces the strong negative trend in summertime ice extent observed over the past thirty years. With the minimum behind us, we will continue to analyze ice conditions as we head into the crucial period of the ice growth season during the months to come."

"Some 69% of online Americans use webmail services, store data online, or use software programs such as word processing applications whose functionality is located on the web. Online users who take advantage of cloud applications say they like the convenience of having access to data and applications from any Web-connected device. However, their message to providers of such services is: Let's keep the data between us."

"Welcome to TobaccoWiki, the online research project to which anyone can contribute. We need your help to mine the millions of pages of previously-secret, internal tobacco industry documents now posted on the Internet. The purpose of Tobaccowiki is to make it easier to find information about tobacco industry behavior, and to reveal what has been learned about the industry through its documents. Like Wikipedia, the collaborative, online, free encyclopedia, Tobaccowiki is also a collaborative project. We need you to help us search through the tobacco industry documents now available online and enter information here about what you find. We welcome participation from everyone: students, journalists, smokers and non-smokers, food service workers, public health workers, tobacco control advocates, musicians, scientists, researchers and just plain curious folks. Everyone is invited to join in this project to facilitate access to information in the tobacco industry documents."

Giving a Voice to Open Source Stakeholders: A Survey of State, Local and Tribal Law Enforcement, Majority Staff Report, September 2008.

Sovereign Wealth and Sovereign Power - The Strategic Consequences of American Indebtedness, Brad W. Setser, Fellow for Geoeconomics, Council on Foreign Relations Press, September 2008

"The problems associated with U.S. indebtedness cannot be addressed overnight. But the report proposes ways for the United States to guard against the effects of a disruption in foreign financing, such as consulting with allies who hold dollars and encouraging other creditor countries to spend and invest surpluses instead of accumulating reserves. It also suggests measures to reduce the need for financing in the first place, such as working to balance the U.S. budget and, most importantly, taking steps to reduce U.S. oil imports.

Sovereign Wealth and Sovereign Power raises the potential strategic implications of U.S. indebtedness, challenging the sanguine view that global economic interdependence guarantees prudence. The report is a significant contribution to the debate on America’s political and economic position in an age of globalization."

Securing Pakistan's Tribal Belt, by Daniel Markey, Senior Fellow for India, Pakistan, and South Asia, Council on Foreign Relations Press, July/August 2008

"What is at stake is considerable by any measure. Pakistan is the world’s second-most-populous Muslim-majority country, with nearly 170 million people. It shares borders with Afghanistan, where U.S. and allied forces are struggling to promote stability amid a continuing insurgency, and India, with which it has fought a series of conflicts. Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal and history of abetting proliferation put it in a position to dilute global efforts to stem the spread of nuclear materials and weapons. And it is host to local extremist groups, the Taliban, and global terrorist organizations, most notably al-Qaeda.

The relationship between the United States and Pakistan has long been characterized by cooperation and recrimination alike. Pakistan is a strategic friend of the United States, but one that often appears unable or unwilling to address a number of vexing security concerns. Political disarray has further hampered Islamabad’s capacity for strong and united action. The result in Washington is often frustration mixed with uncertainty about what to do about it."

News release: "The first beam in the Large Hadron Collider at CERN [the European Organization for Nuclear Research, is the world's leading laboratory for particle physics] was successfully steered around the full 27 kilometres of the world’s most powerful particle accelerator at 10h28 this morning. This historic event marks a key moment in the transition from over two decades of preparation to a new era of scientific discovery...Experiments at the LHC will allow physicists to complete a journey that started with Newton's description of gravity. Gravity acts on mass, but so far science is unable to explain the mechanism that generates mass. Experiments at the LHC will provide the answer. LHC experiments will also try to probe the mysterious dark matter of the universe – visible matter seems to account for just 5% of what must exist, while about a quarter is believed to be dark matter. They will investigate the reason for nature's preference for matter over antimatter, and they will probe matter as it existed at the very beginning of time."

Advisory Board members and former 9/11 Commissioners Lee Hamilton and Slade Gorton announce Partnership for a Secure America's new WMD Terror Report Card: "A nuclear, chemical or biological
weapon in the hands of terrorists remains the single greatest threat to our nation."

• To view the full WMD Report Card click here.
  
• To view the Nuclear report click here.
  
• To view the Biological report click here.
  
• To view the Chemical report click here.

Via Secrecy News: Knowledge Management Section, U.S. Army Field Manual 6-01.1, August 29, 2008

Official Google Blog: "Today, we're launching an initiative to make more old newspapers accessible and searchable online by partnering with newspaper publishers to digitize millions of pages of news archives...Not only will you be able to search these newspapers, you'll also be able to browse through them exactly as they were printed -- photographs, headlines, articles, advertisements and all...You’ll be able to explore this historical treasure trove by searching the Google News Archive or by using the timeline feature after searching Google News. Not every search will trigger this new content.."

News release: "The (ITN) International Telecommunication Union launched its key Telecommunication/ICT Indicators Report for the Asia-Pacific region at ITU TELECOM ASIA 2008...The Report (for purchase) focuses on broadband connectivity as a vehicle for content to drive development and build a knowledge-based information society. While some Asia-Pacific economies are world leaders in information and communication technologies (ICT) where broadband access is ultra-high speed, affordable and close to ubiquitous, in most of the region’s poorer countries Internet access remains limited and predominantly low-speed. The Report finds evidence that ICTs and broadband uptake foster growth and development, but the question remains as to the optimal speed that should be targeted in view of limited resources."

World Wildlife Fund - Increasing Vulnerability to Hurricanes: Global Warming’s Wake-Up Call for the U.S. Gulf and Atlantic Coasts

• "The destructive potential of tropical storms in the North Atlantic has increased by about 50 percent since the 1970s. This increase, which primarily reflects longer storm lifetimes and greater storm intensities, is correlated with an increase of 0.9 to
  1.3 degrees fahrenheit in sea-surface temperatures in the main development area for tropical storms in the North Atlantic. In addition, the heights of big waves—those higher than about 10 feet
  that are likely to be present during strong storms—have increased by 20 percent along the eastern United States during hurricane season since the late 1970s, augmenting the overall storm-related hazards for coastal communities and habitats."
  
• Related postings on global warming

University of Florida News: "Permafrost blanketing the northern hemisphere contains more than twice the amount of carbon in the atmosphere, making it a potentially mammoth contributor to global climate change depending on how quickly it thaws. So concludes a group of nearly two dozen scientists in a paper appearing this week in the journal Bioscience. The lead author is Ted Schuur, an associate professor of ecology at the University of Florida. Previous studies by Schuur and his colleagues elsewhere have estimated the carbon contained in permafrost in northeast Siberia. The new research expands that estimate to the rest of the permafrost-covered northern latitudes of Russia, Europe, Greenland and North America. The estimated 1,672 billion metric tons of carbon locked up in the permafrost is more than double the 780 billion tons in the atmosphere today."

• Vulnerability of Permafrost Carbon to Climate Change: Implications for the Global Carbon Cycle, September 2008 / Vol. 58 No. 8 • BioScience 701
  
• Related postings on global warming

Permanent Link

The Case of the Vanishing Oaks, By Virginia Morell, ScienceNOW Daily News

CNN: "The program is called A-Space, and it's a social-networking site for analysts within the 16 U.S. intelligence agencies...The new A-Space site has been undergoing testing for months and launches officially for the nation's entire intelligence community September 22..."

E-Discovery Update: Producing Spreadsheets in Discovery – 2008

Early responses to Mercer's annual survey indicate cost will rise 5.7 percent next year, September 4, 2008: "After three years of double-digit growth in the first half of the decade, annual health benefit cost increases slowed to about 6 percent in 2005 and have stayed there ever since. Preliminary survey findings released today by Mercer indicate that cost growth is likely to slow a little further in 2009, to 5.7 percent – which would be the lowest increase in more than 10 years. Last year, Mercer’s annual survey found that average health benefit cost per employee rose 6.1 percent in 2007."

"Moscow is the world’s most expensive city for expatriates for the third consecutive year, according to the latest Cost of Living Survey from Mercer. Tokyo is in second position climbing two places since last year, where as London drops one place to rank third. Oslo climbs six places to 4th place and is followed by Seoul in 5th. Asunción in Paraguay is the least expensive city in the ranking for the sixth year running.

With New York as the base city scoring 100 points, Moscow scores 142.4 and is close to three times costlier than Asunción which has an index of 52.5. Contrary to the trend observed last year the gap between the world’s most and least expensive cities now seems to be widening.

Mercer’s survey covers 143 cities across six continents and measures the comparative cost of over 200 items in each location, including housing, transport, food, clothing, household goods and entertainment. It is the world’s most comprehensive cost of living survey and is used to help multinational companies and governments determine compensation allowances for their expatriate employees."

Government Transition 2009 Wiki: "As Senators John McCain and Barack Obama forge their Presidential election strategies, a different kind of race is brewing: A race to put forth new ideas, lessons learned, and specific recommendations for managing the next administration by a wide array of agencies, trade groups and others with a vested interested in the transition. This public service Wiki site seeks to be a repository of those ideas and recommendations from knowledgable organizations and experts--and provide a forum for elaboration and discussion. In particular, this site will focus on transition ideas pertaining to Program Execution, Performance Management, Procurement and Acquisition, the use of Information Technology, and the management of Human Capital in government." [thanks TM]

News release: "Extending more than 50 years of supercomputing leadership, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and its National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) announced today that they have finalized their contract with IBM to build the world's first sustained petascale computational system dedicated to open scientific research. This leadership-class project, called Blue Waters, is supported by a $208 million grant from the National Science Foundation and will come online in 2011...The system will deliver sustained performance of more than one petaflop on many real-world scientific and engineering applications. A petaflop is computing parlance for 1 quadrillion calculations per second...More than 200,000 processor cores will make that performance possible. They will be coupled to more than a petabyte of memory and more than 10 petabytes of disk storage. All of that memory and storage will be globally addressable, meaning that processors will be able to share data from a single pool exceptionally quickly."

USP's Drug Error Finder - Look–alike/Sound–alike Drug Names: "As a service to healthcare practitioners, industry, consumers, and others, USP has developed a free tool for accessing drug names that have been identified with a medication error. USP's Drug Error Finder allows a user to search more than 1,400 drugs involved in look–alike and/or sound–alike errors. It not only lists the other drugs involved in a mix–up, but also designates the severity of the error where at least one report was received through USP's Reporting Programs."

News release: "A new study clearly finds that America’s public libraries are breaking through traditional brick-and-mortar walls to serve more people online and in person. America’s 16,543 public library buildings are leveraging technology to help children succeed in school and support lifelong learning. More than 83 percent now offer online homework resources, including live tutors and collections of reliable Web sources – up 15 percent in one year, according to Libraries Connect Communities: Public Library Funding & Technology Access Study 2007-2008...The study, conducted by the American Library Association (ALA) and the Information Use Management and Policy Institute at Florida State University (FSU), shows today’s libraries are partners in learning – providing free access to expensive online resources that would otherwise be out of reach for most families..."

The Art of Written Persuasion: The Problem with the Case Method and the Case for the Problem Method: In this second article in the series, Troy Simpson suggests that the ‘case method’ of teaching law may help to explain why lawyers write badly. He then outlines some of the advantages of the ‘problem method’ of teaching law.

The Future Actions Series - International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence (ICSR): Seven Years After 9/11: Al-Qaida’s Strengths and Vulnerabilities, Richard Barrett, September 2008.

American Institute for Contemporary German Studies Policy Report #34: Overcoming the Lethargy: Climate Change, Energy Security, and the Case for a Third Industrial Revolution, by Alexander Ochs, August 2008.

"The North Pole has become an island for the first time in human history as climate change has made it possible to circumnavigate the Arctic ice cap. The historic development was revealed by satellite images taken last week showing that both the north-west and north-east passages have been opened by melting ice. Prof Mark Serreze, a sea ice specialist at the National Snow and Ice Data Centre (NSIDC) in the US said the images suggested the Arctic may have entered a "death spiral" caused by global warming."

Being Wired or Being Tired: 10 Ways to Cope with Information Overload: "Sarah Houghton-Jan explores different strategies for managing and coping with various types of informational overload." Ariadne, Issue 56 July 2008.

News release: "The World Bank said improved economic estimates showed there were more poor people around the world than previously thought while also revealing big successes in the fight to overcome extreme poverty.

The new estimates, which reflect improvements in internationally comparable price data, offer a much more accurate picture of the cost of living in developing countries and set a new poverty line of US$1.25 a day. They are based on the results of the 2005 International Comparison Program (ICP), released earlier this year.

In a new paper, The developing world is poorer than we thought but no less successful in the fight against poverty, Martin Ravallion and Shaohua Chen revise estimates of poverty since 1981, finding that 1.4 billion people (one in four) in the developing world were living below US$1.25 a day in 2005, down from 1.9 billion (one in two) in 1981.

News release: "The National Archives announces publication of World War II: Guide to Records Relating to U.S. Military Participation compiled by retired staff archivist and subject specialist Timothy P. Mulligan. Dr. Mulligan has prepared eight previous guides and other finding aids to captured German and related records and is the author of three books, as well as more than 15 articles on World War II subjects. Published in two volumes, this important new guide represents the most comprehensive and detailed finding aid to World War II source materials in the custody of the National Archives of the United States."

Center for Studying Health System Change: Striking Jump in Consumers Seeking Health Care Information, Tracking Report No. 20, August 2008, Ha T. Tu, Genna Cohen

Pew Internet and American Life Project - Podcast Downloading 2008, 8/28/2008, Mary Madden Sydney Jones

News release: "While health plans are developing tools to help consumers compare price and quality information across hospitals and physicians, the tools' pervasiveness and usefulness are limited, according to a study released today by the Center for Studying Health System Change (HSC).

Responding to large employers' interest in greater health care price and quality transparency, health plans generally provide some price information on inpatient and outpatient procedures and services, according to the study. However, the information often lacks specificity about individual providers, and its availability is often limited to enrollees in specific geographic areas. Likewise, few plans provide price information on services in physicians' offices.

When providing quality information, health plans generally rely on third-party sources to package publicly available information instead of using information from their own claims, the study found.

Great .gov Web sites, by Joab Jackson: "These 10 sites show agencies putting the power of the Web to work. Government agencies are finally catching on to the World Wide Web. Ten years ago, most government executives saw the Web as a sort of electronic brochure. Now they have come to realize that the Web can be the primary form of interaction with constituents."

The National Snow and Ice Data Center: "Sea ice extent has fallen below the 2005 minimum, previously the second-lowest extent recorded since the dawn of the satellite era. Will 2008 also break the standing record low, set in 2007? We will know in the next several weeks, when the melt season comes to a close. The bottom line, however, is that the strong negative trend in summertime ice extent characterizing the past decade continues.

With several weeks left in the melt season, sea ice extent dipped below the 2005 minimum to stand as the second-lowest in the satellite record. The 2005 minimum, at 5.32 million square kilometers (2.05 million square miles), held the record-low minimum until last year.

Recent ice retreat primarily reflects melt in the Chukchi Sea off the Alaskan coast and the East Siberian Seas off the coast of eastern Russia.

Woodstock Institute - Foreclosure Fallout: An Analysis of Foreclosure Auctions in the Chicago Region: Huge inventory of foreclosed properties and fewer bidders means lenders on the hook for billions in Chicago region, says new report.

News release: "Most companies do not have a plan to manage and transfer knowledge and even fewer factor cross-generational challenges into business strategy, says a new report from The Conference Board...

"As the Baby Boom generation of corporate leaders and experts approaches retirement, businesses in the U.S., Canada, and many European nations face the loss of experience and knowledge on an unprecedented scale," says Diane Piktialis, Mature Workforce Program Leader at The Conference Board and co-author of the report with Kent Greenes, Program Director, Learning & Knowledge Management Council, The Conference Board. "Younger workers can't be counted on to fill the void, as they lack the experience that builds deep expertise. They also tend to change jobs frequently, taking their technological savvy and any knowledge they've gained with them."

The result can be a significant drain of business wisdom that decreases innovation, lowers growth capacity, and reduces efficiency in the organization. The Conference Board report - Bridging the Gaps: How to Transfer Knowledge in Today's Multigenerational Workplace (available for purchase only) - is based on a Research Working Group on Multigenerational Knowledge Transfer that explored the topic with a special emphasis on knowledge-retention challenges that organizations face due to shifting demographics and the shortage of new talent in the pipeline.

Fiscal Policy Institute: "Despite several years of moderate economic growth, New York did not gain any ground in key areas of poverty and family incomes. New Yorkers were just as likely to be poor in 2007 as they were when the last recession in 2001, according to Census Bureau data released today. Also, the income of the typical New York working-age household was no higher in 2007 than in 2001, after adjusting for inflation. The number and percentage of New Yorkers lacking health insurance decreased significantly from 2000 to 2007. Now that the economy is weakening, incomes are likely to fall further before they improve, according to analysts at the Fiscal Policy Institute." [Stuart Basefsky]

• U.S. Census Bureau, August 26, 2008: Household Income Rises, Poverty Rate Unchanged, Number of Uninsured Down - "These findings are contained in the report Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2007 [PDF]. The data were compiled from information collected in the 2008 Current Population Survey (CPS) Annual Social and Economic Supplement (ASEC)."
  
• U.S. Census Bureau, August 26, 2008: Income, Earnings, and Poverty Data From the 2007 American Community Survey
  
• American Community Survey Data Sets

Executive Excess 2008 - How Average Taxpayers Subsidize Runaway Pay - 15th Annual CEO Compensation Survey, August 25, 2008

Google 2008 U.S. Election Coverage: See the latest news, videos, blog posts, and pictures from the conventions.

Pew Research Center - Men or Women: Who's the Better Leader? A Paradox in Public Attitudes, August 25, 2008

"Americans believe women have the right stuff to be political leaders. When it comes to honesty, intelligence and a handful of other character traits they value highly in leaders, the public rates women superior to men, according to a new nationwide Pew Research Center Social and Demographic Trends survey.

Nevertheless, a mere 6% of respondents in this survey of 2,250 adults say that, overall, women make better political leaders than men. About one-in-five (21%) say men make the better leaders, while the vast majority -- 69% -- say men and women make equally good leaders.

The paradox embedded in these survey findings is part of a wider paradox in modern society on the subject of gender and leadership. In an era when women have made sweeping strides in educational attainment and workforce participation, relatively few have made the journey all the way to the highest levels of political or corporate leadership.

Why not? In the survey, the public cites gender discrimination, resistance to change, and a self-serving "old boys club" as reasons for the relative scarcity of women at the top. In somewhat smaller numbers, respondents also say that women's family responsibilities and their shortage of experience hold them back from the upper ranks of politics and business.

What the public does not say is that women inherently lack what it takes to be leaders. To the contrary, on seven of eight leadership traits measured in this survey, the public rates women either better than or equal to men."

The Kindle for Professional Researchers: DC based journalist Cheryl Miller offers seven good reasons to buy this gadget seemingly tailor-made for dedicated readers, but she also provides caveats worth your attention.

Urban Institute: "U.S. public policy has increasingly been conceived, debated, and evaluated through the lenses of politics and ideology. The fundamental question—Will the policy work?—too often gets short shrift or even ignored. A remedy is evidence-based policy—a rigourous approach that draws on careful data collection, experimentation, and both quantitative and qualitative analysis to determine what the problem is, which ways it can be addressed, and the probable impacts of each of these ways. Examples of how evidence informs good policy and lack of evidence can invite bad include health insurance coverage, education, sentencing policy, and redress for housing discrimination."

"Gannett News Service compiled 2002 data from the National Center for Education Statistics on more than 9,000 public library systems nationwide. To make a five-year comparison, GNS also obtained 2006 data from each state and the District of Columbia that were not available from NCES.

The federal government requires states to report library information in a number of categories. GNS focused on four key yardsticks: visits, circulation (number of items checked out), operating expenses and number of public computers with Internet access.

"Each year, more than 1 billion people visit libraries to borrow books or videos, log onto the Internet or participate in various community programs." Link to databases and related resources on the right sidebar of this page

• Library spending across the U.S.
• Public library systems with the highest circulation per capita
• Public library systems with the most Internet-capable public computers per capita
• Public library systems with the largest operating expenses per capita

"Poynter Online's Links to the News column compiles Web resources on current and previous news topics. This page, Republican & Democratic Convention History (1856-2008) [author -
David Shedden], links to resources about the history of the Republican and Democratic national political conventions." [via Kitty Bennett]

News release: "The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) has published Social Software in Libraries, SPEC Kit 304, which provides an overview of ARL libraries’ implementation of software that people use to connect with one another online...In the last few years, the use of social software has grown enormously. While a growing number of libraries have adopted social software as a way to further interact with library patrons and library staff, many things are unclear about the use of social software in ARL member libraries. This SPEC survey was designed to discover how many libraries and library staff are using social software and for what purposes, how those activities are organized and managed, and the benefits and challenges of using social software, among other questions.

For this study, social software was broadly defined as software that enables people to connect with one another online. The survey asked about 10 types of applications: (1) social-networking sites; (2) media-sharing sites; (3) social-bookmarking or tagging sites; (4) wikis; (5) blogs; (6) sites that use RSS to syndicate and broadcast content; (7) chat or instant messaging services; (8) VoIP (Voice-over-Internet Protocol) services; (9) virtual worlds; and (10) widgets."

The table of contents and executive summary from this SPEC Kit are available online at http://www.arl.org/bm~doc/spec304web.pdf.

New Scientist: "A new study suggests that rice bran, the shavings left over after brown rice is polished to produce white rice grains, contains "inappropriate" levels of arsenic. Andrew Meharg at the University of Aberdeen, UK, and colleagues found that the levels of arsenic in rice bran products available on the internet and used in food-aid programmes funded by the US government would be illegal in China – the only country in the world to have standards for how much arsenic is permissible in food."

News release: "AARP announced today that it has added four new health tools to its Web site, to help consumers get trusted, reliable online health information. These tools will enable people to do everything from choose an excellent doctor or hospital, to better understand and evaluate their own health symptoms, conditions and medicines."
The tools, which can be found here, include the following:

• Symptom Search provided by Healthline Networks: This highly regarded clinical application from Healthline Networks leverages Medically Guided™ search technology to analyze user symptoms and produce a ranked list of likely causes. Healthline Symptom Search features ten times more coverage than other online symptom checkers, with a relational database of more than one million diseases, symptoms and their synonyms, and easy-to-use personalization options so users can narrow or refine their searches for greater accuracy.
  
• Health Illustrated Encyclopedia provided by A.D.A.M. (NASDAQ: ADAM): Viewed by many as one of the best in the industry, this knowledgebase is continually updated, very comprehensive, and includes over 3,600 articles and 2,000 images spanning categories such as diseases & conditions; injuries; symptoms; nutrition; surgeries; tests; poisoning; and special topics. Readable and easy-to-use, the encyclopedia will clarify many aspects of health care for countless 50+ Americans.
  
• Doctor and Hospital Finder provided by HealthGrades: This tool, from a leading healthcare ratings organization, has been specially customized to AARP’s demographic, enabling individuals to easily research doctors and compare the quality ratings of hospitals by specific location and medical condition or specialty. It includes a “map it” feature powered by MapQuest, which shows how many miles the doctor’s office or hospital is from the patient, and a “patient experience” feature, allowing users to view patient ratings on doctors and provide their own.
  
• Drug Database & Interaction Checker provided by Gold Standard: This high quality, user-friendly database offers people continuously fresh information about prescription drugs, over-the-counter products, and alternative medicines. It also includes the MedCounselor Drug Interaction Alert, which reveals and ranks interactions between prescription medications, over-the-counter, herbal, and nutritional products, as well as lifestyle factors like caffeine, tobacco and grapefruit juice. Gold Standard’s Drug Database has been ranked #1 in the nation by two independent school of pharmacy studies."

"The National Cancer Institute presents this 19th monograph in the Tobacco Control Monograph Series, The Role of the Media in Promoting and Reducing Tobacco Use. Monograph 19 provides a critical, scientific review and synthesis of the current evidence regarding the power of the media, both to encourage and to discourage tobacco use. It is the most current and comprehensive summary of the scientific literature on media communication in tobacco promotion and tobacco control. Research included in the review comes from the disciplines of marketing, psychology, communication, statistics, epidemiology, and public health. All are vital to understanding how exposure to the media influences tobacco use."

"The Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings provide a globally recognised forum for the exchange of knowledge between Nobel Laureates and young researchers. The original idea of the meetings goes back to the two Lindau physicians Dr. Franz Karl Hein und Professor Dr. Gustav Parade and Count Lennart Bernadotte af Wisborg, a member of the Swedish royal family who quickly became the spiritus rector behind the Meetings. It was he who envisioned the Meetings as a “window to the world” for the international scientific elite of today and tomorrow."

News release: "The demographic divide — the inequality in the population and health profiles of rich and poor countries — is widening. Two sharply different patterns of population growth are evident: Little growth or even decline in most wealthy countries and continued rapid population growth in the world’s poorest countries.

In 2008, world population is 6.7 billion: 1.2 billion people live in regions classified as more developed by the United Nations; 5.5 billion people reside in less developed regions. "We will likely see the 7 billion mark passed within four years," said Carl Haub, PRB senior demographer and co-author of this year's Data Sheet. "And by 2050, global population is projected to rise to 9.3 billion. Between now and mid-century, these diverging growth patterns will boost the population share living in today’s less developed countries from 82 percent to 86 percent."

• 2008 World Population Data Sheet
• Population Bulletin: "World Population Highlights: Key Findings from the 2008 World Population Data Sheet"
• 2008 World Population Clock
• PowerPoint presentations from the press briefing (PPT)

Technology Tools for Information Management - Roger V. Skalbeck and Barbara Fullerton's share a fast paced presentation of 19 practical, low cost and innovative tech tools they respectively use on a regular basis. So if you are looking for ideas to improve your use of Outlook, RSS, Adobe, and enhance your presentations and collaborative goals, this article is a must read.

News release: "Investors engaging with U.S. companies on the financial risks and opportunities from climate change achieved breakthrough results during the 2008 proxy season. A record 57 climate-related shareholder resolutions were filed with U.S. companies, of which nearly half were withdrawn after the companies agreed to positive climate-related commitments. Remaining resolutions that went to a vote received record high average voting support of 23.5 percent, including 39.6 percent support for a resolution filed with coal company CONSOL Energy, the highest vote ever on a global warming shareholder resolution.

The ’08 proxy season was marked by several major victories, including Ford Motor Co.’s detailed plan for reducing greenhouse gas emissions from its vehicles by 30 percent. Two major homebuilders, Centex and KB Home, also announced major commitments to increase the energy efficiency of the homes they build beginning in 2009. These actions will dramatically reduce direct and indirect greenhouse gas emissions from the millions of vehicles and homes that the three companies make each year."

Tracking the Economic Slowdown, August 18, 2008: "The troubled U.S. economy has been a complex story for journalists to report and tell. How did the media cover the slump? Was that coverage timely? And to what it extent did it influence public attitudes about the state of the economy? A new PEJ study examines those questions."

Project will preserve Bush administration Web sites, By Jill R. Aitoro: "More than 100 million Web pages from President Bush's second term will be preserved for historians, researchers and the public, thanks to a joint effort announced on Thursday of government agencies and non-profit libraries. The Library of Congress and Government Printing Office, in partnership with the California Digital Library, University of North Texas Libraries and Internet Archive, will harvest and archive all Web sites that could change under a new presidential administration. The total amount of data in the collection, which will focus on executive and legislative branch sites, is expected to reach 10 to 12 terabytes."

News release: "CQ Politics will release individual 2008 Election Forecasts for all 50 states. Each forecast analyzes a state’s political landscape, providing CQ’s signature race ratings (safe, favored, leans or no clear favorite) for the presidential race, the number of electoral votes at stake, and insight into which candidate is likely to prevail in November. The forecasts also profile all the competitive congressional races in the state and rate each one as well. The 2008 Election Forecasts are located here."

News release: "The Reason Foundation's 17th Annual Report on the Performance of State Highway Systems measures the performance of all state-owned roads and highways from 1984 to 2006. The study calculates the effectiveness and performance of each state in 12 different categories, including traffic fatalities, congestion, pavement condition, bridge condition, highway maintenance costs, and administrative costs."

• Full Study: Reason Foundation Galvin Project to End Congestion 17th Annual Report on the Performance of State Highway Systems (1984–2006), By David T. Hartgen, Ph.D., P.E. and Ravi K. Karanam.
  
• Overall Rankings: State-by-State Comparison of This Year and Last Year
  
• Urban Congestion Rankings
  
• Deficient Bridges Rankings
  
• Traffic Fatalities Rankings
  
• Google Map with State-by-State Data
  
• Full Tables (Excel)
  
• Last Year's Study: 16th Annual Report on the Performance of State Highway Systems (1984-2005)

News release: "On the back of three years of consistent growth, the US wind market is poised for a record-breaking surge with cumulative installed wind capacity to surpass 150 gigawatts (GW) by 2020, according to a recent market study from Emerging Energy Research. With 5,329 MW of new wind capacity installed in 2007, the US wind power market was responsible for installing more than 27% of newly added global wind capacity this past year, securing the US' position as the largest wind growth market by annual installations for the third straight year. 2008 is poised to set another record for annual installations in the US, with over 8 GW of wind projects currently under construction scheduled for operation by year's end, according to EER."

Scientific American: "The amount of solar photovoltaics harnessing electricity from sunshine in the U.S. will more than double by 2013, thanks to plans to build 800 megawatts worth in California. The two vast solar farms—covering more than 12 square miles—will be among the largest ever built in the world and dwarf the current U.S. record holder: Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada with 14 megawatts. In fact, the total amount of solar photovoltaics connected to the grid in the entire U.S. is just 473 megawatts at present."

Council on Library and Information Resources, pub 142 - No Brief Candle: Reconceiving Research Libraries for the 21st Century, August, 2008 (74 pages, PDF)

Fostering Learning in the Networked World: The Cyberlearning Opportunity and Challenge - A 21st Century Agenda for the National Science Foundation. Report of the National Science Foundation Task Force on Cyberlearning, June 24, 2008. [Gerry McKiernan]

News release: "A global study led by Virginia Institute of Marine Science Professor Robert Diaz shows that the number of “dead zones”—areas of seafloor with too little oxygen for most marine life—has increased by a third between 1995 and 2007. Diaz and collaborator Rutger Rosenberg of the University of Gothenburg in Sweden say that dead zones are now “the key stressor on marine ecosystems” and “rank with over-fishing, habitat loss, and harmful algal blooms as global environmental problems.”

The study, which appears in the August 15 issue of the journal Science, tallies 405 dead zones in coastal waters worldwide, affecting an area of 95,000 square miles, about the size of New Zealand. The largest dead zone in the U.S., at the mouth of the Mississippi, covers more than 8,500 square miles, roughly the size of New Jersey. A dead zone also underlies much of the main-stem of Chesapeake Bay, each summer occupying about 40% of its area and up to 5% of its volume."

Web Resources
• Dead Zones in Google Maps
• Dead Zones in Google Earth
• Dead Zones animation (.mov)
• Dissolved Oxygen
• Virginia Estuarine & Coastal Observing System - VECOS
• Gulf Hypoxia (LUMCON)
• Gulf Hypoxia (NOS)

Five Basic Facts on the Uninsured, August 2008: "The number of uninsured is continuing to increase and reversing that trend has become a focus of policy efforts at the state and national levels. This brief provides basic facts that explain why 47 million people in the U.S. lack health insurance and how this affects their health and financial security."

"The Kaiser Family Foundation released the results of its second major survey tracking the views and experiences of New Orleans residents amid the ongoing challenges facing the community nearly three years after Hurricane Katrina hit on August 29, 2005. Designed and analyzed by Kaiser researchers, the comprehensive survey offers an in-depth look at the struggles of life in New Orleans nearly three years after Katrina hit and the city’s levees were breached. The survey results provide a detailed assessment of how people currently living in New Orleans assess the recovery effort, the ongoing disruptions in their lives, their priorities for rebuilding and their views on the city’s struggles, including perceptions about divisions within the city based on income and race. The study also looks at the mental and physical health challenges facing residents, as well as their access to health care services. Fielded house to house and by telephone in the spring among 1,294 residents of Orleans Parish, the survey is the second of at least three that the Foundation will conduct to track residents’ experiences and views as the city rebuilds after Hurricane Katrina. By providing an over-time assessment of residents’ experiences, priorities, goals, and concerns, the Foundation hopes to give people a continuing chance to report on how the recovery effort is affecting them, to inform leaders of the public’s priorities and to maintain national attention on the efforts to rebuild New Orleans."

News release: "RealtyTrac®, the leading online marketplace for foreclosure properties, today released its July 2008 U.S. Foreclosure Market Report™, which shows foreclosure filings — default notices, auction sale notices and bank repossessions — were reported on 272,171 U.S. properties during the month, an 8 percent increase from the previous month and a 55 percent increase from July 2007. The report also shows one in every 464 U.S. households received a foreclosure filing during the month.

"...Bank repossessions, or REOs, continued to be the fastest growing segment of foreclosure activity in July, posting a 184 percent year-over-year increase — compared to a 53 percent year-over-year increase in default notices and an 11 percent year-over-year increase in auction notices,” said James J. Saccacio, chief executive officer of RealtyTrac. “The sharp rise in REOs, combined with slow sales, has resulted in a bloated inventory of bank-owned properties for sale. RealtyTrac now has more than three quarters of a million properties in its active REO database, a number that represents approximately 17 percent of the inventory of existing homes for sale reported in June by the National Association of Realtors."

Immigration to the United States and World-Wide Greenhouse Gas Emissions, by Steven Camarota, Leon Kolankiewicz, August 2008

• "The findings of this study indicate that future levels of immigration will have a significant impact on efforts to reduce global CO2 emissions. Immigration to the United States significantly increases world-wide CO2 emissions because it transfers population from lower-polluting parts of the world to the United States, which is a higher-polluting country. On average immigrants increase their emissions four-fold by coming to America."
  
• Related postings on climate change

Reversal of Fortune: A New Look at Concentrated Poverty in the 2000s - Concentrated Poverty, Working Poor, Earned Income Tax Credit, U.S. Poverty, Inequality, August 8, 2008.

News release: "To save money, many Americans are cutting back on medical care — potentially putting their health at risk — according to new research from the National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC). A national survey of 686 consumers, fielded in July, found that 22 percent of U.S. consumers say they have reduced the number of times they see the doctor as a result of today’s economy. Furthermore, 11 percent of consumers say they have cut back the number of prescription drugs they take or the dosage of those medications to make the prescription last longer."

Center for American Progress - A Global Imperative - A Progressive Approach to U.S.-China Relations in the 21st Century, August 2008

"The next four years offer a critical window of opportunity to forge an innovative, durable, pragmatic, and effective approach to U.S.-China relations. A progressive China policy will safeguard U.S. national security interests, encourage the emergence of a China that meets its responsibilities both to the international community and to its own people, and ensure that Americans as well as Chinese are able to enjoy a rising standard of living.

The ultimate goal of our China policy is the emergence of a China that adopts a cooperative and mutually beneficial relationship with the United States, and fulfills its responsibilities as a stakeholder in the global system by addressing the most urgent global challenges, such as tackling climate change, fighting weapons proliferation, and promoting global prosperity. Our China policy aims to encourage a China that develops over time a stable, equitable, and open domestic system—one that guarantees universal human rights, including social, political, economic, labor, and religious rights."

Challenges for Nuclear Power Expansion, Toni Johnson, Staff Writer, August 11, 2008.

Appointed Policy Makers in State Government - Glass Ceiling In Gubernatorial Appointments, 1997-2007. Center for Women in Government and Civil Society, University at Albany, State University of New York, Summer 2008. [Peggy Garvin]

• "The percentage of top-ranking executive leadership positions held by women has increased, but not by much. By 2007, women held 35% of executive posts, compared to 28% in 1997.
  
• Between 1997 and 2007, governors appointed substantially more women as department heads (9 percentage points more), but only 2.4 percentage points more women as their closest staff advisors. Women remain underrepresented at the helm of executive agencies and in governors’ executive offices."

Google Still Not Indexing Hidden Web URLs, by Kat Hagedorn
Metadata Harvesting Librarian, Digital Library Production Service, University of Michigan Libraries, Ann Arbor, MI and Joshua Santelli
Applications Programmer, Digital Library Production Service, University of Michigan Libraries, Ann Arbor, MI. D-Lib Magazine, July/August 2008, Volume 14 Number 7/8.

News release: " A comprehensive new Kaiser Family Foundation survey of the experiences of New Orleans residents – the second since Hurricane Katrina – reveals a still-struggling population that gives very mixed reviews in key areas of the recovery efforts. Most residents feel forgotten by the nation and its leaders, yet are still optimistic about their city’s future.

In two critical areas, housing (72 percent) and crime (71 percent), the vast majority of city residents see little or no progress. In other key areas – medical facilities, public schools, jobs, and rebuilding neighborhoods – reviews are more mixed, but with majorities seeing little or no progress. Only in one area, levee repair, does a majority (60 percent) see progress."

• New Orleans Three Years After the Storm: The Second Kaiser Post-Katrina Survey, 2008 - Executive Summary and Full Report
• Chartpack
• Related postings on Katrina

ABC News/Planet Green/Stanford University Poll Finds Concern for Environment, Support for Drilling

"Fuelly is a site that lets you track, share, and compare your gas mileage. Simply sign up, add a car, and begin tracking your mileage. By recording and analyzing your mileage, you can see how much money you can save with small driving changes. You can also see how your mileage compares with EPA estimates and the mileage of other drivers using Fuelly. Tips and a discussion forum also offer ways to save. The site is free to use, so sign up to start tracking your miles today." [via Andy Baio]