Wired Campus by Josh Fischman: "Elsevier, the global publishing company, is responsible for The Lancet, Cell, and about 2,000 other important journals; the iconic reference work Gray’s Anatomy, along with 20,000 other books—and one fed-up, award-winning mathematician. Timothy Gowers of the University of Cambridge, who won the Fields Medal for his research, has organized a boycott of Elsevier because, he says, its pricing and policies restrict access to work that should be much more easily available. He asked for a boycott in a blog post on January 21, and as of Monday evening, on the boycott’s Web site The Cost of Knowledge, nearly 1,900 scientists have signed up, pledging not to publish, referee, or do editorial work for any Elsevier journal. The company has sinned in three areas, according to the boycotters: It charges too much for its journals; it bundles subscriptions to lesser journals together with valuable ones, forcing libraries to spend money to buy things they don’t want in order to get a few things they do want; and, most recently, it has supported a proposed federal law (called the Research Works Act) that would prevent agencies like the National Institutes of Health from making all articles written by its grant recipients freely available."

Open Access to Scientific Information, Published 25 January 2012 | POST Notes 397, by Chandrika Nath

"A study, Lower-Income Households and the Auto Insurance Marketplace: Challenges and Opportunities, released today by the Consumer Federation of America (CFA) concludes that the auto insurance marketplace denies important economic opportunities, especially those related to employment, to low- and moderate-income (LMI) households. The study also explains how state insurance regulators could ensure that mandated auto insurance coverage is fairly priced and affordable for these families so that they have greater access to car ownership and jobs. The research, undertaken by CFA Executive Director Stephen Brobeck and Director of Insurance J. Robert Hunter with support from The Ford Foundation, reveals that:

• For the large majority of LMI households, automobile ownership greatly increases economic opportunities, particularly access to jobs.
  
• These households cannot legally own a car without purchasing auto insurance, whose premiums often exceed $700 and sometimes cost thousands of dollars.
  
• These premiums reflect not only considerable disparate impacts but also some discriminatory treatment, such as being charged more for less liability coverage when all other factors are held constant.
  
• In large part because of high costs and disparate impacts, a significant minority -- perhaps one-quarter to one-third -- of LMI drivers do not carry auto insurance and are driving illegally.
  
• State-based policies and programs -- especially reduced mandatory coverages, programs offering lower premiums to safe drivers, and more vigorous efforts to eliminate disparate treatment and reduce disparate impacts -- have the potential to equitably reduce auto insurance costs for responsible LMI drivers."

American Bankers Association And State Bankers Associations Regulatory Feedback Initiative, Banker Reports on Recent Bank Examination Experiences For the Calendar Year 2011, Summary Report. January 25, 2012

via 5 things I learned today: Stop Motion Animation Starring Books

How College Students Manage Technology While in the Library during Crunch Time, Alison J. Head and Michael B. Eisenberg, Project Information Literacy Research Report, University of Washington's Information School, October 12, 2011

Via LLRX.com - SharePoint Blogging with Permission - Lorette S.J. Weldon continues to share her guides on how librarians in various sectors can effectively leverage SharePoint within the enterprise, in groups, and with individuals outside the organization. She refers to her 2010 survey, "How is SharePoint used in Libraries?" that found 16 out of 54 participants used SharePoint's site features, such as the blog. Lorette provides insights and associated documentation on this application's limitations, features, and operational structure.

2011 Global Go To Think Tank Index, January 2012

Clear Direction in a Complex World - How Top Companies Create Clarity, Confidence and Community to Build Sustainable Performance. "In a challenging and dynamic business world,
success depends on establishing a clear path to navigate through complexity. Organizations and their leaders — wherever they are around the world and whatever business environment they face — must be able to chart the right course and deliver results. Organizations that are doing this best have leaders, managers, communication and change practices that create:

• Clarity: Conveying to employees the direction of the
  business along with ways they can contribute to the enterprise
  
• Confidence: Supporting development of leaders and managers to better deliver confidence, and using a disciplined process to ensure effective use of change and communication resources
  
• Community: Building a shared experience, a sense that employees and leaders are in it together — sharing both the challenges and rewards of working This report describes what the companies that communicate and manage change effectively are doing, and how practices compare globally. Read on to find the steps you can take to create a clear direction for your organization."

"The NICE Cybersecurity Workforce Framework offers a working taxonomy and common lexicon that can be overlaid onto any organization's existing occupational structure. Although much work has gone into this framework, we need to ensure that it can be adopted and used across the nation. We are actively seeking to refine this framework with input from every sector of our nation's cybersecurity stakeholders. You are an integral part of this process. NICE requests that you please contribute your expertise in the field of cybersecurity by reviewing the NICE Cybersecurity Workforce Framework document and providing your public comments using the comments template."

• Interactive Cybersecurity Workforce Framework
  
• Summary of Cybersecurity Framework
  
• Cybersecurity Framework Comments Template

Forensic Bibliometrics: Information Quality Assurance in Scientific Literature: Everyone is familiar with the "corrections" columns in newspapers and the errata pages in the backs of books. But those corrigenda are a far cry from identifying the problems created when authors deliberately offer for publication fraudulent results. Research misconduct and the publication of fraudulent results in scholarly publications and news media has become a growing concern in many disciplines. Ken Strutin has researched, annotated and compiled core documents that address the causes of misconduct, spotting faked data, and repairing the damage to the information stream.

Via LLRX - Deep Web Research 2012: Marcus P. Zillman's extensive research over the years into the "invisible" or "deep" web indicates that it covers somewhere in the vicinity of 1 trillion plus pages of information located throughout the Internet in various files and formats that current search engines either cannot locate, or have difficulty accessing. The current search engines find hundreds of billions of pages at the time of this publication. His guide provides extensive and targeted resources to facilitate both a better understanding of the history of deep web research as well to effectively and productively search for and locate these often undiscovered but critical documents.

Twenty top predictions for life 100 years from now: "Last week we asked readers for their predictions of life in 100 years time. Inspired by ten 100-year predictions made by American civil engineer John Elfreth Watkins in 1900, many of you wrote in with your vision of the world in 2112. Many of the "strange, almost impossible" predictions made by Watkins came true. Here is what futurologists Ian Pearson (IP) and Patrick Tucker (PT) think of your ideas."

News release: "This report analyzes the results from a social metadata survey that focused on the motivations for creating a website, moderation policies, staffing and site management, technologies used, and criteria for assessing success. Metadata helps users locate resources that meet their specific needs. But metadata also helps us to understand the data we find and helps us to evaluate what we should spend our time on. Traditionally, staff at libraries, archives, and museums (LAMs) create metadata for the content they manage. However, social metadata—content contributed by users—is evolving as a way to both augment and recontexutalize the content and metadata created by LAMs...In our first report, Social Metadata for Libraries, Archives, and Museums, Part 1: Site Reviews, the 21-member RLG Partners Social Metadata Working Group reviewed 76 sites relevant to libraries, archives, and museums that supported such social media features as tagging, comments, reviews, images, videos, ratings, recommendations, lists, links to related articles, etc. Social Metadata for Libraries, Archives, and Museums. Part 2: Survey Analysis is the second report in a series of three. The analyzed survey results that are presented in this second report were from a survey conducted in October-November 2009. Forty percent of the responses came from outside the United States. More than 70 percent had been offering social media features for two years or less. Engaging new or existing audiences is used as a success criteria more frequently than any other criteria, and the vast majority of respondents considered their sites to be successful. The survey results indicate that engagement is best measured by quality, not quantity."

Susan H. Hildreth, Director of the Institute of Museum and Library Services: "People depend on libraries now more than ever. Not only do visits and circulation continue to rise, the role of public libraries in providing Internet resources to the public continues to increase as well. Public libraries have also increased their program offerings to meet greater demand and provide more targeted services. In the business world, such demand for an industry's services would mean big profits for that sector. But despite the demonstrated ability of libraries to adjust to meet the growing needs of the public, many libraries across the country face severe budget cuts. There is no doubt that the future success of libraries depends on their ability to change and evolve to meet the changing ways that people access and use information. As director of the Institute of Museums and Library Services, the federal voice for library and museum service in the U.S. -- I see three big goals for libraries: provide engaging learning experiences, become community anchors, and provide access to content even as the devices for accessing that content change rapidly."

Programmable Web Services Directory of over 100 government [local, state and federal] APIs released in 2011.

• Over 2,000 APIs Added in 2011: Social, Telephony, Open Government
  
• See also How the Internet of Things Is Turning Cities Into Living Organisms - "When city services can autonomously go online and digest information from the cloud, they can reach a level of performance never before seen." December 6, 2011

News release: "Standard & Poor's Ratings Services today announced its rating actions on 16 members of the European Economic and Monetary Union (EMU or eurozone) following completion of its review. We have lowered the long-term ratings on Cyprus, Italy, Portugal, and Spain by two notches; lowered the long-term ratings on Austria, France, Malta, Slovakia, and Slovenia, by one notch; and affirmed the long-term ratings on Belgium, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Ireland, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands. All ratings have been removed from CreditWatch, where they were placed with negative implications on Dec. 5, 2011 (except for Cyprus, which was first placed on CreditWatch on Aug. 12, 2011)."

Ari LeVaux: "Chinese researchers have found small pieces of ribonucleic acid (RNA) in the blood and organs of humans who eat rice. The Nanjing University-based team showed that this genetic material will bind to proteins in human liver cells and influence the uptake of cholesterol from the blood. The type of RNA in question is called microRNA, due to its small size. MicroRNAs have been studied extensively since their discovery ten years ago, and have been linked to human diseases including cancer, Alzheimer's, and diabetes. The Chinese research provides the first example of ingested plant microRNA surviving digestion and influencing human cell function. Should the research survive scientific scrutiny, it could prove a game changer in many fields. It would mean that we're eating not just vitamins, protein, and fuel, but information as well."

News release: "...we are launching code.nasa.gov, the latest member of the open NASA web family. Through this website, we will continue, unify, and expand NASA’s open source activities. The site will serve to surface existing projects, provide a forum for discussing projects and processes, and guide internal and external groups in open development, release, and contribution. In our initial release, we are focusing on providing a home for the current state of open source at the Agency. This includes guidance on how to engage the open source process, points of contact, and a directory of existing projects. By elucidating the process, we hope to lower the barriers to building open technology in partnership with the public. Phase two will concentrate on providing a robust forum for ongoing discussion of open source concepts, policies, and projects at the Agency. In our third phase, we will turn to the tools and mechanisms development projects generally need to be successful, such as distributed version control, issue tracking, continuous integration, documentation, communication, and planning/management. During this phase, we will create and host a tool, service, and process chain to further lower the burden to going open. Ultimately, our goal is to create a highly visible community hub that will imbue open concepts into the formulation stages of new hardware and software projects, and help existing projects transition to open modes of development and operation."

News release: "The Potomac Conservancy released its fifth annual State of the Nation’s River report, scoring the rivers’ health at a barely passing “D” grade, a downgrade from the group’s previous D+ in 2007. The report points to reasons for the low grade: growing population and poor land use practices are the primary culprits for a polluted and degraded Potomac River. The report also focuses on the two worlds of the Potomac, the rural farms and mountains to the west and the urban cityscape in the south. These “two worlds” pose different challenges to the Nation’s River. According to the report, upstream, forestry and farming practices play a big role in influencing the river’s health; downstream, sprawling building projects and sewage treatment challenges loom large."

What the Great Recession Wrought: The State of the U.S. in 3 Years of Polls

News release: "Unemployment figures show the jobless rate for recent college graduates with Bachelor’s Degrees has been running at an unacceptable 8.9 percent. But, a new study, Hard Times, College Majors, Unemployment and Earnings: Not All College Degrees Are Created Equal, from the Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce finds that unemployment among job seekers with no better than a high school diploma is a catastrophic 22.9 percent – and an almost unthinkable 31.5 percent among high school dropouts. So, is college still worth it? A major conclusion of the new report is that it all depends on your major. And while a college degree gives job seekers a formidable advantage over those without, the study points out, not all degrees are created equal, and there are a number of factors that prospective students should consider before sending off their college applications."

Competitive Intelligence - A Selective Resource Guide - Completely Updated - December 2011: Sabrina I. Pacifici's comprehensive, current awareness guide focuses on leveraging a wide but selected range of reliable, focused, predominantly free websites and resources to effectively track, monitor, analyze, background and review current and historical data, news, reports, and profiles on companies, markets, countries, people, and issues, from a global perspective. Sabrina's guide is a "best of" web resource that encompasses search engines, databases, alerts, publisher specific services and tools, along with links to content targeted sources produced by leading media organizations, governments, academia, NGOs and independent researchers.

"Wordnik is a new way to discover meaning. This page will give you a quick overview of what you can do, learn, and share with Wordnik. Wordnik shows definitions from multiple sources, so you can see as many different takes on a word's meaning as possible. For more information about the sources of our dictionary definitions, please see the Colophon page."

"Now in its 30th year, The Industry Report is recognized as the training industry’s most trusted source of data on budgets, staffing, and programs. This year, the study was conducted by an outside research firm in May/June 2011, when members from the Training magazine database were e-mailed an invitation to participate in an online survey. Only U.S.-based corporations and educational institutions with 100 or more employees were included in the analysis. Agencies of the state, local, and federal government were not included in the analysis. The data represents a cross-section of industries and company sizes...The economic roller coaster ride continues, but training appears to be on an upswing: Total 2011 U.S. training expenditures—including payroll and spending on external products and services—jumped 13 percent to $59.7 billion. Some 32 percent of respondents reported that their training budget increased—up from 24 percent last year. Likewise, training payroll increased substantially, from $25.7 billion to $31.3 billion, and spending on outside products and services jumped more than $2 billion to $9.1 billion."

News release: "Americans who have health insurance have higher Healthy Behaviors Index scores than the uninsured at any age in the 18 to 64 cohort. This holds true even after controlling for age, gender, education, ethnicity, employment, and income. Overall, 80% of American adults younger than 65 report having health insurance coverage. This analysis is based on about 200,000 interviews conducted between January and October 2011 as part of the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index, which includes the Healthy Behaviors Index as a sub-component. Specifically, respondents are asked to report on whether they smoke, on how many days in the last week they exercised for at least 30 minutes, if they ate healthy all day "yesterday," and on how many days they consumed five or more servings of fruits and vegetables in the last seven days."

Print libraries, book collections, book shops - targets of fiscal austerity, the growing impact and power of e-books, social media, pay walls, e-commerce structures, and changing values about print media itself - are increasing disappearing. Regardless of the application of specific determining factors, the results are increased thresholds to open access to "knowledge." There is also a corresponding assault on the lifespan of websites, blogs, databases, metadata and web enabled content such as documents and emails, as users with no notice discover information simply going offline. There is however a cadre of official and unofficial guardians of the written word, photos, databases and other archival materials. This article by Matt Schwartz, with reporting by Eva Talmadge, in Technology Review, provides insight into the work of some individuals with a mission is to salvage the "intellectual" property of millions of web users whose terabytes of words, work and documents are disappearing despite quick, creative and technologically adroit efforts to save what can be called modern internet "history" on a global scale. This article documents some of the challenges in the struggle to manage massive data loss, the folks who are data defenders, and how truly valuable libraries collections are in serious danger. Variable associated with digitizing collections (copyright, cost, shear volume of the task, and global conflict to name just a few), continue to impact this dynamic problem.

Gallup news release, by Jeffrey M. Jones: "Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and President Barack Obama continue to be named by Americans as the Most Admired Woman and Most Admired Man living today in any part of the world. Clinton has been the Most Admired Woman each of the last 10 years, and Obama has been the Most Admired Man four years in a row. Oprah Winfrey, Michelle Obama, Sarah Palin, and Condoleezza Rice round out the top five Most Admired women, while the top five Most Admired men also include George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, Billy Graham, and Warren Buffett."

Enhancing Personnel Reliability among Individuals with Access to Select Agents, Report of the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB), December 2011

"This is the second edition of the World Giving Index, the largest study into charitable behaviour across the globe involving 153 countries in total. Using data from Gallup's Worldview World Poll, the report is based on three measures of giving behaviour - giving money, volunteering time and helping a stranger. The results show that the USA is officially the most charitable nation in the world, moving from fifth place last year to first place this year. Ireland is the second most charitable country and Australia the third. Overall the World Giving Index, demonstrates that the world has become a more charitable place over the last 12 months - with a 2% increase in the global population 'helping a stranger' and a 1% increase in people volunteering. The analysis includes: the global view; changes in the three giving behaviours; regional comparisons; comparisons between 2010 and 2011 data."

It’s a Social World: Top 10 Need-to-Knows About Social Networking and Where It’s Headed, December 21, 2011

via Nature: "Even though an elephant’s leg looks like a solid column, it actually stands on tip-toe like a horse or a dog. Its heel rests on a large pad of fat that gives it a flat-footed appearance. The pad hides a sixth toe — a backward-pointing strut that evolved from one of their sesamoids, a set of small tendon-anchoring bones in the animal's ankle. This extra digit, between 5 and 10 centimetres long, had been dismissed as an irrelevant piece of cartilage. Almost 300 years after it was first described, Hutchinson finally confirmed that it is a true bone that supports the squishy back of the elephant’s foot. The ones on the hindfeet even seem to have joints." The full-text is available to subscribers, Hutchinson, J. R. et al. Science 334, 1699–1703(2011)."

"Welcome to the Beta version of MyFCC, a new tool that lets you create a customized FCC online experience, with quick access to the tools and information that you need...Personalization options built into MyFCC make it possible to easily create, save and manage a customized page, or “dashboard.” Choose from a menu of “widgets” featuring a wide variety of the FCC’s most frequently used tools and services by simply dragging and dropping your selections onto your screen. MyFCC also makes it possible for you to share your MyFCC selections with colleagues or on the Web, either as a customized dashboard or by embedding individual widgets on a website or blog."

Via LLRX.com - Using tablet computers, e-libraries, and family literacy initiatives to encourage young children to read: David H. Rotham continues to articulate and comprehensively document the case that a public national digital library system should serve people of all income levels and all ages, centenarians included. In this article he focuses on how books for young, disadvantaged children are one area where it could make a special difference, and how better-off families would benefit along the way.

"As the country struggles to recover from the impact of the Great Recession, one much discussed and analyzed economic measure has been the number of Americans who are unemployed. NPR News and the Kaiser Family Foundation partnered on the Long-Term Unemployed Survey to better describe the experiences and views of two groups of individuals: the long-term unemployed (those who have been out of work for a year or more and would prefer to be working) and the long-term underemployed (those who are working part-time and have been without full-time work for over one year, but are interested in full-time employment)."

• See also Brookings - Hamilton Project: What is Happening to America's Less-Skilled Workers? The Importance of Education and training in Today's Economy, December 2011
  
• Related postings on financial system

The Revolutions Were Tweeted: Information Flows During the 2011 Tunisian and Egyptian Revolutions, International Journal of Communication 5 (2011), Feature 1375–1405 1932–8036/2011FEA1375 [via gigaom]

State of the Federal Web Report, December 16, 2011. Produced by the .gov Reform Task Force

Chimpanzees in Biomedical and Behavioral Research: Assessing the Necessity, December 15, 2011. Institute of Medicine of the National Academies.

"GMI’s CEO Pay Survey 2011, one of the largest surveys of CEO compensation in North America, is based on analysis of the Russell 3000 and S&P 500 companies. Only 2,132 CEOs were in the job for the whole of the last two fiscal years, so it is on this smaller sample that changes in CEO compensation were calculated. This is a survey of annual and realized compensation paid to CEOs in 2011 for fiscal year 2010. Key findings of the survey include:

• Total Realized Compensation in the S&P 500 rose by about 36 percent.
  
• Total Realized Compensation in the Russell 1000 rose by more than 38 percent.
  
• Total Realized Compensation in the Russell 3000 rose by 27 percent.
  
• Total Annual Compensation in the Russell 3000 increased by 13 percent.
  
• Three of the 10 highest-paid CEOs of 2010 are from the Health Care Providers & Services industry, including the top two.
  
• Four of the 10 highest-paid CEOs of 2010 were retired or terminated executives receiving exit packages.
  
• Perks in the S&P 500 rose 11 percent from 2009 to 2010.
  
• Three of the five highest-paid CEOs of 2010 received single-year pension and deferred compensation increases of roughly $14 million."

Follow up to previous postings on the 2010 Japan Earthquake and Tsunami, see Japan: Before and After the Earthquake and Tsunami Pre- and post-disaster imagery in Google Street View

Pew Research Center: Barely Half of U.S. Adults Are Married – A Record Low, New Marriages Down 5% from 2009 to 2010, by D’Vera Cohn, Jeffrey Passel and Wendy Wang

The Protester, by Kurt Andersen: "It's remarkable how much the protest vanguards share. Everywhere they are disproportionately young, middle class and educated. Almost all the protests this year began as independent affairs, without much encouragement from or endorsement by existing political parties or opposition bigwigs. All over the world, the protesters of 2011 share a belief that their countries' political systems and economies have grown dysfunctional and corrupt — sham democracies rigged to favor the rich and powerful and prevent significant change. They are fervent small-d democrats. Two decades after the final failure and abandonment of communism, they believe they're experiencing the failure of hell-bent megascaled crony hypercapitalism and pine for some third way, a new social contract."

"The Academic Libraries: 2010 First Look summarizes services, staff, collections, and expenditures of academic libraries in 2- and 4-year, degree-granting postsecondary institutions in the 50 states and the District of Columbia."

"Cambridge University Library holds the largest and most important collection of the scientific works of Isaac Newton (1642-1727). We present here an initial selection of Newton's manuscripts, concentrating on his mathematical work in the 1660s. Over the next few months we will be adding further works until the majority of our Newton Papers are available on this site."

• Overview of Newton Papers held at Cambridge University Library (from Manuscripts Department website)
  
• History of Isaac Newton's Papers (from Newton Project website)

News release: "United Health Foundation’s 2011 America’s Heath Rankings® finds that troubling increases in obesity, diabetes and children in poverty are offsetting improvements in smoking cessation, preventable hospitalizations and cardiovascular deaths. The report finds that the country’s overall health did not improve between 2010 and 2011 – a drop from the 0.5 percent average annual rate of improvement between 2000 and 2010 and the 1.6 percent average annual rate of improvement seen in the 1990s."

Predicting the Future of Computing: "Since no supercomputer can yet predict the future, we need your help. Readers are invited to make predictions and collaboratively edit this timeline, which is divided into three sections: a sampling of past advances, future predictions that you can push forward or backward in time (but not, of course, into the past), and a form for making and voting on predictions. The most prescient prophet might receive an iPad 2 in 2050. But if the past is any guide, this prediction will almost surely be wrong."

Twitter and the Campaign - How the Discussion on Twitter Varies from Blogs and News Coverage And Ron Paul’s Twitter Triumph, December 8, 2011

The Future of the Electric Grid: "For well over a century, electricity has made vital contributions to the growth of the U.S. economy and the quality of American life. The U.S. electric grid is a remarkable achievement, linking electric generation units reliably and efficiently to millions of residential, commercial, and industrial users of electricity through more than six million miles of lines and associated equipment that are designed and managed by more than 3,000 organizations, many of which are in turn regulated by both federal and state agencies. While this remarkable system of systems will continue to serve us well, it will face serious challenges in the next two decades that will demand the intelligent use of new technologies and the adoption of more appropriate regulatory policies. This report aims to provide a comprehensive, objective portrait of the U.S. electric grid and the challenges and opportunities it is likely to face over the next two decades. It also highlights a number of areas in which policy changes, focused research and demonstration, and the collection and sharing of important data can facilitate meeting the challenges and seizing the opportunities that the grid will face. This study is the sixth in the MIT Energy Initiative's "Future of" series. Its predecessors have shed light on a range of complex and important issues involving energy and the environment. While the previous studies have focused on particular technologies and energy supply, our study of the grid necessarily considers many technologies and multiple overlapping physical and regulatory systems. Because of this breadth, our efforts were focused on integrating and evaluating existing knowledge rather than performing original research and analysis. In addition, this study's predecessors focused on implications of national policies limiting carbon emissions, while we do not make assumptions regarding future carbon policy initiatives. Instead, we mainly consider the implications of a set of ongoing trends and existing policies."

North American Energy Inventory December 2011, Institute for Energy Research (IER)

A mandate to preserve - Assessing the inaugural Newspaper Archive Summit, by Victoria McCargar

William Pannapacker is an associate professor of English at Hope College, in Holland, Mich: "Contrary to many futuristic projections—even from bibliophiles who, as a group, enjoy melancholy reveries—the recent technological revolution has only deepened the affection that many scholars have for books and libraries, and highlighted the need for the preservation, study, and cherishing of both."

"Cloud computing is a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction. This cloud model promotes availability and is composed of five essential characteristics (On-demand self-service, Broad network access, Resource pooling, Rapid elasticity, Measured Service); three service models (Cloud Software as a Service (SaaS), Cloud Platform as a Service (PaaS), Cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)); and, four deployment models (Private cloud, Community cloud, Public cloud, Hybrid cloud). Key enabling technologies include: (1) fast wide-area networks, (2) powerful, inexpensive server computers, and (3) high-performance virtualization for commodity hardware." Draft Documents as follows:

• NIST Special Publication 500-293, US Government Cloud Computing Technology Roadmap, Release 1.0 (Draft), Volume I High-Priority Requirements to Further USG Agency Cloud Computing Adoption
  
• NIST Special Publication 500-293, US Government Cloud Computing Technology Roadmap, Release 1.0 (Draft), Volume II Useful Information for Cloud Adopters

"The following op-ed by Harvard Law School Professor Jonathan Zittrain appeared in the Nov. 30 edition of the Technology Review - The PC is dead. Rising numbers of mobile, lightweight, cloud-centric devices don't merely represent a change in form factor. Rather, we're seeing an unprecedented shift of power from end users and software developers on the one hand, to operating system vendors on the other—and even those who keep their PCs are being swept along. This is a little for the better, and much for the worse. The transformation is one from product to service. The platforms we used to purchase every few years—like operating systems—have become ongoing relationships with vendors, both for end users and software developers. I wrote about this impending shift, driven by a desire for better security and more convenience, in my 2008 book The Future of the Internet—and How to Stop It."

"The Forbes 400 is the definitive list of wealth in America, profiling and ranking the country's richest citizens by their estimated net worths."

Does the Cold Make You Sick? Busting Common Health Myths, The Daily Muse. Glad to know it is ok to eat after 8pm and that walking every day in the cold weather will not make me sick. Hasn't stopped me yet!

"Expedia’s Vacation Deprivation study is an annual analysis of vacation habits across multiple countries and continents. The 2011 study spans North America, Europe, Asia, South America and Australia. It reveals who gets – and takes – the most vacation time, as well as attitudes toward vacation. Common themes impacting how and where respondents vacation include money, romance and disapproving bosses."

"The University of Pittsburgh is fortunate to own one of the rare, complete sets of John James Audubon’s Birds of America. It is considered to be the single most valuable set of volumes in the collections of the University Library System (ULS). Indeed, only 120 complete sets are known to exist. While Audubon was creating Birds of America, he was also working on a companion publication, namely, his Ornithological Biography. Both of these sets were acquired by William M. Darlington in the mid-nineteenth century and later donated, as part of his extensive library, to the University of Pittsburgh. Recognizing that the Darlington Library includes significant historical materials, such as rare books, maps, atlases, illustrations, and manuscripts, the ULS charted an ambitious course to digitize a large portion of Mr. Darlington’s collection, including the Birds of America. We are pleased to present our complete double elephant folio set of Audubon’s Birds of America, accompanied by his Ornithological Biography, through this Web site. Together these sets constitute an unprecedented online combination."

News release via Andrea Titus: "Two big updates from Center for Disease Dynamics, Economics & Policy's [CDDEP] Extending the Cure project... First, ResistanceMap has released its first ever interactive visualizations on antibiotic use. The new maps show trends in outpatient prescribing across the United States over time, and viewers can sort data by geography (at the state level) and/or antibiotic class. You can check out the new visualizations in the "antibiotic use" module found here. The second is the introduction of the Drug Resistance Index (DRI). Termed a "Dow Jones for Drug Resistance" by Science magazine, the DRI aggregates resistance and antibiotic use patterns to assess and communicate overall trends in antibiotic resistance over time. Head over to BMJ Open for a demonstration of the tool...The CDC estimates that $1.1 billion is spent annually on unnecessary antibiotic prescriptions for adult upper respiratory infections alone. These prescriptions also speed the development of resistance to important antibiotic therapies."

"The Renewable Energy Country Attractiveness Indices track and rank 40 countries' renewable energy markets across a selection of technologies each quarter. As policy-makers scramble to stop recession tightening its grip on major economies, demographic changes and growth in emerging markets appear to be driving renewable energy investment. Developed countries are focused on slowing demand and cutting costs, while rapid growth markets have a huge appetite for energy. A revolution is underway, and the renewable energy industry is adapting to a changed world."

"The Fish Barcode of Life Initiative (FISH-BOL), is a global effort to coordinate an assembly of a standardised reference sequence library for all fish species, one that is derived from voucher specimens with authoritative taxonomic identifications. The benefits of barcoding fishes include facilitating species identification for all potential users, including taxonomists; highlighting specimens that represent a range expansion of known species; flagging previously unrecognized species; and perhaps most importantly, enabling identifications where traditional methods are not applicable. The Fish Barcode of Life effort is creating a valuable public resource in the form of an electronic database containing DNA barcodes, images, and geospatial coordinates of examined specimens. The database contains linkages to voucher specimens, information on species distributions, nomenclature, authoritative taxonomic information, collateral natural history information and literature citations. FISH-BOL thus complements and enhances existing information resources, including FishBase and various genomics databases."

"The November 2011 McKinsey report, Resource Revolution: Meeting the world’s energy, materials, food, and water needs shows that the resource challenge can be met through a combination of expanding the supply of resources and a step change in the way they are extracted, converted, and used. Such resource productivity improvements, using existing technology, could satisfy nearly 30 percent of demand in 2030. Just 15 areas, from more energy-efficient buildings to improved irrigation, could deliver 75 percent of the potential for higher resource productivity. Meeting the resource-supply and productivity challenges will be far from easy—only 20 percent of the potential is readily achievable and 40 percent will be hard to capture. There are many barriers, including the fact that the capital needed each year to create a resource revolution will rise from roughly $2 trillion today to more than $3 trillion, with additional capital requirements to pursue climate change and universal-energy-access agendas. The benefits could be as high as $3.7 trillion a year, however, if carbon had a price of $30 per metric ton and if governments removed substantial resource subsidies and taxes."

Simon Rogers: "US road accident casualties: every one mapped across America - 369,629 people died on America's roads between 2001 and 2009. Following its analysis of UK casualties last week, transport data mapping experts ITO World have taken the official data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration - and produced this powerful map using OpenStreetMap. You can zoom around the map using the controls on the left or search for your town using the box on the right - and the key is on the top left. Each dot represents a life."

Follow up to previous postings on The Digital Dead Sea Scrolls project, via NYT - "When the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, home to the Dead Sea Scrolls, reopened last year after an extensive renovation, it attracted a million visitors in the first 12 months. When the museum opened an enhanced Web site with newly digitized versions of the scrolls in September, it drew a million virtual visitors in three and a half days. The scrolls, scanned with ultrahigh-resolution imaging technology, have been viewed on the Web from 210 countries — including some, like Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq and Syria, that provide few real-world visitors to the Israel Museum...Previous Google cultural programs have also been incorporated into the center, including the Google Art Project, a digital repository of pictures from museums like the National Gallery in London, the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin and the Uffizi Gallery in Florence."

"Our fifth annual survey on the way organizations use social tools and technologies finds that they continue to seep into many organizations, transforming business processes and raising performance". November 2011 • Jacques Bughin, Angela Hung Byers, and Michael Chui, McKinsey Global Institute

Reading Lists Aim to Promote Personal, Professional Growth, By Donna Miles
American Forces Press Service: "Legend has it that Alexander the Great slept with a copy of The Iliad, Homer's epic tale set during the Trojan War, under his pillow. Almost 2,500 years later, professional reading remains an important part of the military culture. Every service, most professional military schools and an increasing number of geographic and combatant commands offer up reading programs and reading lists as part of their professional development efforts. In fact, many have multiple reading lists, aimed at different groups within the military at different ranks and stages of their careers. Navy Adm. James G. Stavridis, commander of U.S. European Command and NATO's supreme allied commander for Europe, recently took this initiative to a new level with an online video encouraging all of his command to check out the Eucom reading list. The list is divided into sections with books about different phases of European history, culture and languages, as well as works of literary fiction that provide insight into European culture."

• Army Professional Reading Program
  
• Marine Corps Professional Reading List
  
• Sgt. Maj. of the Marine Corps Library
  
• Navy Professional Reading Program
  
• Air Force Professional Reading Program
  
• Joint Forces Staff College Commandant's Professional Reading List
  
• U.S. Pacific Command Reading List

Google Scholar Blog: "A few months ago, we introduced a limited release of Google Scholar Citations, a simple way for authors to compute their citation metrics and track them over time. Today, we’re delighted to make this service available to everyone! Click here and follow the instructions to get started. Here’s how it works. You can quickly identify which articles are yours, by selecting one or more groups of articles that are computed statistically. Then, we collect citations to your articles, graph them over time, and compute your citation metrics - the widely used h-index; the i-10 index, which is simply the number of articles with at least ten citations; and, of course, the total number of citations to your articles. Each metric is computed over all citations and also over citations in articles published in the last five years."

"Based on thousands of citation records from Thomson Reuters, this chart shows the scholarly influence of "Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision Under Risk," written by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, and published in Econometrica in 1979. The theory has turned up as a reference for an increasing number of journal articles and book chapters (nearly 8,000 items in all), and it has spread into a diverse range of disciplines. Thomson Reuters makes an effort to classify the major scholarship within journals and books into 280 categories; this representation of the paper’s influence condenses these classifications even further."

"For decades, natural gas has played an important role in electricity generation, industrial uses, and heating in the United States—and with recent improvements in horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) of shale formations, drillers can now access a vastly greater amount of gas at lower cost than in the past. The rapid growth in drilling and extraction, however, has resulted in tensions—from the community level to the federal policy level. Questions about the risks and safety of shale gas development continue, even as industry has improved disclosure, shared best practices, and assured the public that hydraulic fracturing techniques are safe. Given these challenges, this year RFF’s Center for Energy Economics and Policy (CEEP) launched an initiative to identify the priority risks associated with shale gas development and recommend strategies for responsible development."

• Shale Gas: Policy Context - Resources for the Future’s, Center for Energy Economics and Policy (CEEP), Dr. Alan Krupnick, CEEP Director
  
• Managing the Risks of Shale Gas: Identifying a Pathway toward Responsible Development, Sheila M. Olmstead, Fellow, Resources for the Future
  
• Fracing: Basics and Concerns Towards a Responsible Policy for the Development of Unconventional Oil and Gas Resources, Prof. Mukul M. Sharma
  Department of Petroleum and Geosystems Engineering, University of Texas at Austin
  
• Identifying the Sources of Fugitive Methane Associated with Shale Gas Development - Karlis Muehlenbachs, Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, University of Alberta Edmonton, Canada
  
• Water Quality Issues Associated with Shale-Gas Development, Jim Saiers, Professor of Hydrology and Associate Dean of Academic Affairs, Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies

Corporate Governance of Political Expenditures: 2011 Benchmark Report on S&P 500 Companies, By Heidi Welsh and Robin Young, November 2011 "This study takes a close look at the nature and extent of the voluntary governance reforms companies have made, using a broad definition of “political spending,” to see how these practices affect key disclosure and accountability concerns raised by critics. We examined:

• Direct contributions to state-level candidates, party committees and ballot initiative committees;
  
• Direct contributions to political committees registered with the Federal Election Commission
  (FEC), known as “527 committees” for their tax code designation;
  
• Direct federal lobbying expenditures; and
  
• Available information on indirect contributions made through trade associations and other nonprofit groups."

The New, Convoluted Life Cycle Of A Newspaper Story, by Lauren Rabaino

First Joint Session of Working Groups I and II IPCC SREX Summary for Policymakers, November 18, 2011

The Top 25 US Public Libraries' Collective Collection, as Represented in WorldCat "characterizes the combined collections of the top 25 US public libraries, as represented in the WorldCat database. These libraries account for more than 34 million holdings in WorldCat across 13.5 million distinct publications. The report considers overlap vs. uniqueness of holdings for these libraries, and compares their collective collection with the collective holdings of the rest of the US public libraries whose holdings are represented in WorldCat. It also compares their collective collection to the collective WorldCat holdings of ARL member libraries, and to all US academic libraries represented in WorldCat.">The Top 25 US Public Libraries' Collective Collection, as Represented in WorldCat characterizes the combined collections of the top 25 US public libraries, as represented in the WorldCat database. These libraries account for more than 34 million holdings in WorldCat across 13.5 million distinct publications. The report considers overlap vs. uniqueness of holdings for these libraries, and compares their collective collection with the collective holdings of the rest of the US public libraries whose holdings are represented in WorldCat. It also compares their collective collection to the collective WorldCat holdings of ARL member libraries, and to all US academic libraries represented in WorldCat."

News release: "Demonstrating the increasing role of the network in people's lives, an international workforce study announced today by Cisco revealed that one in three college students and young professionals considers the Internet to be as important as fundamental human resources like air, water, food and shelter. The 2011 Cisco Connected World Technology Report also found that more than half of the study's respondents say they could not live without the Internet and cite it as an "integral part of their lives" – in some cases more integral than cars, dating, and partying. These and numerous other findings provide insight into the mindset, expectations, and behavior of the world's next generation of workers and how they will influence everything from business communications and mobile lifestyles to hiring, corporate security, and companies' abilities to compete."

How Much Time College Students Spend Studying Varies By Major and Corresponds to Faculty Expectations, Survey Finds: "Findings released today show that on average, full-time college students study 15 hours a week. However, study time differed by academic majors, with seniors in engineering averaging about 19 hours per week, while their peers in the social sciences and business averaged five fewer hours per week. Faculty expectations for study time by field corresponded closely to what students reported, but there were exceptions. Social sciences faculty, for example, expected four more
hours per week than the average social sciences senior reported. Students who devoted at least 20 hours per week to studying did not always attend class fully prepared. These findings, released by the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE), raise questions about areas where a mismatch may exist between the work asked of students and what they believe necessary to succeed, and also whether faculty expectations for study time
may need to be recalibrated. The survey also documents a variety of student approaches to studying and learning. Taking careful notes during class was widespread, but only two out of three students frequently reviewed their notes after class. Only half said they frequently outlined major topics and ideas from course materials or discussed effective study strategies with faculty or students. All of the effective learning strategies were positively related to other measures."

Strength through Global Leadership and Engagement: U.S. Higher Education in the 21st Century November 2011

"This webinar featured innovative ways to increase access to special collectons. The report, Rapid Capture: Faster Throughput in Digitization of Special Collections, focused on the actual moment of digitization of non-book materials and on innovative ways to speed things up. But speeding things up in one part of the process often uncovers bottlenecks in other parts. In this webinar, experts from special collections and archives offered up creative ways to speed up other parts of the process to provide greater access to special collections..."

How Mainstream Media Outlets Use Twitter Content Analysis Shows an Evolving Relationship - November 14, 2011

What are the world's biggest sources of renewable energy and where are they located?: "Efforts to tackle climate change include heavy investment in renewable sources of electricity around the world. Solar power saw the biggest leap in 2010, with the installed base jumping 70% compared with 2009 to 40 gigawatts. Wind power also grew strongly, adding 24% of generating capacity. Yet the biggest source of renewable electricity, hydropower, and the smallest, geothermal, both only added 3% to capacity. Finding usable sources of either is becoming increasingly hard or costly. The region that saw the biggest growth in renewable energy projects was power-hungry Asia. Investment in renewables also saw the biggest leap since 2007, with $243 billion spent, a 30% increase over 2009."

Jennifer Howard, Wired Campus: "Impact, not ideology, was the watchword at the Berlin 9 Open Access Conference, held...at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute {Betheda, MD, November 9-10, 2011] The 260 high-level researchers, fund providers, and open-access advocates who attended didn’t waste time bashing publishers who keep research behind paywalls. (Some commercial publishers, including Elsevier, attended.) Instead they focused on the benefits of putting research—in the humanities and social sciences as well as in the sciences—quickly and freely into the hands of scholars, students, innovators, and the general public."

Teach.gov: "Teaching is a rewarding and challenging profession where you can make a lasting impact. You can have a positive influence on students, schools, and communities now and into the future. Schools across the nation are in need of a diverse set of talented teachers, especially in our big cities and rural areas, and especially in the areas of Math, Science, Technology, Special Education, and English Language Learning. The TEACH campaign is an initiative of the United States Department of Education designed to raise awareness of the teaching profession and get a new generation of teachers to join the ones who are already making a difference in the classroom. At TEACH.gov you can learn what it’s really like to be a teacher and get the tools you need to launch your own career in education. Are you ready to make a difference? Discover your path to teaching and get started today."

"Northwest Government Information Network Handouts: Fall 2011, updated November 3, 2011. Fall 2011 featured Linda Clark, Seattle Regional Office, U.S. Census Bureau as our main speaker. She came to provide us with some training on how to use the newly revamped American Factfinder 2. Below are the handouts she used for her presentation.

• 2010 Census Products at a Glance
  
• 2010 Standard Data Products -- Descriptions
  
• American Community Survey Data Release Timetable
  
• American Community Survey Topics Table Codes
  
• American Factfinder 2: Search and Navigation Tips
  
• Are You in a Survey or Census?
  
• Census Geography Hierarchy (with 2010 Statistical Area Criteria)
  
• Comparison: Census Bureau Demographic Programs
  
• I Didn't Know the Census Bureau Did That! Mining for Data Linked to the Census Bureau's Home Page
  
• The New American Factfinder (AFF2)
  
• U.S. Census Bureau: Three Demographic Programs

An Analysis of Faculty Instructional and Grant-based Productivity at The University of Texas at Austin - Marc A. Musick, Associate Dean for Student Affairs,, College of Liberal Arts, Professor of Sociology, November 2011: "As a university of the first class, UT Austin boasts rankings that put it among the best public research universities in the nation and among the best universities in the world. Generations of people in Texas have spent decades of tireless work to create this institution, and it has served the state with distinction by conferring hundreds of thousands of degrees, generating billions in research funding, training generations of Texas leaders, and, in general, being one of the major intellectual incubators in the state.
Unsurprisingly, because of the stature of the university, it has faced many questions about its quality and productivity over the course of its history. Such questions are important for the university as they force administrators, faculty, staff and students to think critically about the school and how it fulfills its important mission to the State of Texas.
Those conversations on quality and productivity persist even today. But, unlike the discussions that occurred in previous generations, today the university can bring to bear large amounts of data to examine both productivity and quality. This past spring, the University of Texas System helped in that endeavor by releasing a large data set meant to measure faculty productivity at UT Austin and other system universities. These data fed into the conversation of productivity at the university, but, to date, no thorough analysis has been conducted to determine what they really tell us about the current state of faculty productivity at the university. This report is an effort to conduct such an examination of the data. It finds, in general, that the 1,988 tenured and tenure track professors at the University of Texas at Austin work very hard for their students and provide an incredible return on investment for the state. Specifically, the findings show:

• Professors taught over 2.5 million weighted semester credit hours in 2009-2010 with an average of over 1,300 per professor;
  
• The weighted semester credit hours produced by professors translates into approximately $161 million in revenue to the university from the state;
  
• About 860 professors (43 percent) generated external research funding for a total of almost $400 million, or about $460,000 for each professor generating funds;
  
• Combining teaching and external sources, professors produced about $558 million in revenue;
  
• Professors were paid about $257 million in state funds;
  
• Based on these numbers, UT Austin professors generated over twice their compensation from those revenue sources.

What's the Fallout for Dogs Near Fukushima? by Jenny Marder

• "The dogs and cats spotted in Katsurao were were among thousands of pets abandoned after residents were forced to quickly evacuate areas around the Fukushima plant, after the tsunami damaged the facility, causing equipment failures and a release of radioactive materials...Upon visiting the area after the earthquake, [the International Fund for Animal Welfare] found that many local Japanese groups were eager to help with animal rescue efforts, but there was confusion as to whether the animals in the radiation hot spots were safe to handle and how they should be tested for contamination. (As one of our readers pointed out, the Hachiko Coalition is an organization that has done a great deal of animal rescue work in the Fukushima radiation zone.)
  
• Report - Nuclear Accidents and the Impact on Animals: "A committee of Subject Matter Experts (Appendix A) from Japan and the United States was convened May 2-3, 2011 to discuss animal issues resulting from the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant accident.
Permanent Link

The Rising Age Gap in Economic Well-Being, The Old Prosper Relative to the Young, November 7, 2011

News release: "U.S. colleges and universities have historically set the benchmark for excellence in higher education, but these institutions will have to adapt and collaborate with their peers abroad in the coming years to remain competitive. Assisting institutions in addressing these challenges is the centerpiece of a report issued today by the American Council on Education (ACE) which charts a new agenda for global engagement in higher education. Strength through Global Leadership and Engagement: U.S. Higher Education in the 21st Century is the result of the year-long work of ACE's Blue Ribbon Panel on Global Engagement, chaired by New York University President John Sexton and involving leaders of institutions from around the world."

'Thinking' in a Deweyan Perspective: The Law School Exam as a Case Study for Thinking in Lawyering, Donald J. Kochan, Chapman University School of Law, November 4, 2011, Nevada Law Journal, Forthcoming

"The Global Open Access Portal (GOAP) presents a snapshot of the status of Open Access (OA) to scientific information around the world. For countries that have been more successful in implementing Open Access, the portal highlights critical success factors and aspects of the enabling environment. For countries and regions that are still in the early stages of Open Access development, the portal identifies key players, potential barriers and opportunities. The portal has country reports from over 148 countries with weblinks to over 2000 initiatives/projects in Member States. The portal is supported by an existing Community of Practice (CoP) on Open Access on the WSIS Knowledge Communities Platform that has over 1400 members."

Brookings/Hamilton Project - Unemployment and Earnings Losses: The Long-Term Impacts of The Great Recession, November 2011

24 Hours at Fukushima - A blow-by-blow account of the worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl, By Eliza Strickland / November 2011 [Editor's Note: This is part of the IEEE Spectrum special report: Fukushima and the Future of Nuclear Power].

Charles M. Vest, National Academy of Engineering: The Next Generation Do we need more engineers?

News release: "Two-thirds of college seniors graduated with loans in 2010, and they carried an average of $25,250 in debt. They also faced the highest unemployment rate for young college graduates in recent history at 9.1%. Our new report, Student Debt and the Class of 2010, includes average debt levels for the 50 states and District of Columbia and for more than 1,000 U.S. colleges and universities."

Credit Ratings across Asset Classes: A ≡ A?. Jess Cornaggia, Indiana University Bloomington - Kelley School of Business, Kimberly Rodgers Cornaggia, American University - Kogod School of Business, John Hund, Rice University - Jesse H. Jones School of Management. October 30, 2011

Nothing Ventured: The Crisis in Clean Tech Investment, by Joshua Freed and Mae Stevens, November 2011

The Atlantic - World War II in Photos - Alan Taylor

Half of adult cell phone owners have apps on their phones - The percent who download apps nearly doubles in two years, but just 46% of downloaders have paid for an app...The growth in apps downloading is a reflection of the broader trend toward mobile devices the Pew Internet Project has identified over the past decade. Americans have embraced mobile connectivity in the form of laptops, smartphones, tablet computers, and e-readers, while desktop computers have become less popular over time." Kristen Purcell, Associate Director for Research, Pew Internet Project, November 2, 2011

Library Publishing Services: Strategies for Success, Research Report Version 1.0. James L. Mullins, Catherine Murray-Rust, Joyce Ogburn, Raym Crow, October Ivins, Allyson Mower, Mark P. Newton, Daureen Nesdill, Julie Speer, and Charles Watkinson. Libraries Research Publications. Paper 136.

A Bibliographic Framework for the Digital Age (October 31, 2011)

The Role of Colleges and Universities in Building Local Human Capital, Jaison R. Abel and Richard Deitz, Federal Reserve Bank of New York, October 2011

"The most important indicator of global warming, by far, is the land and sea surface temperature record. This has been criticized in several ways, including the choice of stations and the methods for correcting systematic errors. The Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature study sets out to to do a new analysis of the surface temperature record in a rigorous manner that addresses this criticism. We are using over 39,000 unique stations, which is more than five times the 7,280 stations found in the Global Historical Climatology Network Monthly data set (GHCN-M) that has served as the focus of many climate studies. Our aim is to resolve current criticism of the former temperature analyses, and to prepare an open record that will allow rapid response to further criticism or suggestions. Our results include not only our best estimate for the global temperature change, but estimates of the uncertainties in the record."

News release: "It is difficult to measure accurately each nation’s contribution of carbon dioxide to the Earth’s atmosphere. Carbon is extracted out of the ground as coal, gas, and oil, and these fuels are often exported to other countries where they are burned to generate the energy that is used to make products. In turn, these products may be traded to still other countries where they are consumed. A team led by Carnegie’s Steven Davis, and including Ken Caldeira, tracked and quantified this supply chain of global carbon dioxide emissions... Traditionally, the carbon dioxide emitted by burning fossil fuels is attributed to the country where the fuels were burned. But until now, there has not yet been a full accounting of emissions taking into consideration the entire supply chain, from where fuels originate all the way to where products made using the fuels are ultimately consumed...They found that regulating the fossil fuels extracted in China, the US, the Middle East, Russia, Canada, Australia, India, and Norway would cover 67% of global carbon dioxide emissions. The incentive to participate would be the threat of missing out on revenues from carbon-linked tariffs imposed further down the supply chain. Incorporating gross domestic product into these analyses highlights which countries’ economies are most reliant on domestic resources of fossil energy and which economies are most dependent on traded fuels. To look at the data, visit here."

Neighborhoods, Obesity, and Diabetes — A Randomized Social Experiment - Jens Ludwig, Ph.D., Lisa Sanbonmatsu, Ph.D., Lisa Gennetian, Ph.D., Emma Adam, Ph.D., Greg J. Duncan, Ph.D., Lawrence F. Katz, Ph.D., Ronald C. Kessler, Ph.D., Jeffrey R. Kling, Ph.D., Stacy Tessler Lindau, M.D., Robert C. Whitaker, M.D., M.P.H., and Thomas W. McDade, Ph.D.. N Engl J Med 2011; 365:1509-1519. October 20, 2011

All Your Clouds are Be­long to us – Se­cu­ri­ty Ana­ly­sis of Cloud Ma­nage­ment In­ter­faces - Juraj So­mo­rovs­ky, Mario Hei­de­rich, Meiko Jen­sen, Jörg Schwenk, Nils Grusch­ka, Luigi Lo Ia­co­no. In Pro­cee­dings of the ACM Cloud Com­pu­ting Se­cu­ri­ty Work­shop (CCSW), 2011.

"The International Comparative Performance of the UK Research Base 2011 report was compiled by Elsevier and published by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills. It shows that UK research attracts more citations per pound spent in overall research and development than any other country. It has also found that the UK research base is highly mobile, internationally competitive and diverse...The UK also has more articles per researcher, more citations per researcher, and more usage per article authored than researchers in US, China, Japan and Germany."

News release: "Congressional websites are getting better, according to an analysis by the Congressional Management Foundation (CMF). The nonprofit organization graded 618 congressional websites and found the most common grade moved from an F in the 111th Congress to a B in the 112th Congress. CMF has been grading congressional websites since 2001 and issues biannual Congressional Gold Mouse Awards for the best websites on Capitol Hill for each Congress. CMF conducted its analysis from June to September 2011...see the latest report - 112th Congress Gold Mouse Awards: Best Practices in Online Communications on Capitol Hill, [which] identified recent trends related to online communications in Congress, including:

• A significant number of House and Senate Member websites lacked basic educational and transparency features including: links to bills sponsored and cosponsored, voting records, and basic information on how a bill becomes a law.
  
• House Members taking office in January 2011 had significantly better websites than Senators taking office in January 2011, with 61% of new House Members receiving an A or B grade, compared to 31% of new Senators receiving a similar grade. Nearly half (46%) of new Senators received a grade of D or F, compared to 17% of new House Members.
  
• While there was general parity overall in quality of websites between Democrats and Republican Member websites, the best websites tended to be Democratic Members.
  
• View the full list of the 112th Congress Gold Mouse Award Winners

News release: "Customer experience analytics firm ForeSee today released its report on the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) Quarterly E-Government Satisfaction Index, including an analysis of the state of social media in the federal government. ForeSee’s audit of social media activity in the federal government identified clear themes and best practices, showing that the public sector is learning to communicate with citizens in ways that are not usually associated with government services. ForeSee conducted an expert usability review of the 15 executive department websites in order to gauge how many participate in social media and how they do it. All are participating in the three most popular social platforms—Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube—and many are using other new media and communications tools, from Flickr and podcasts to email newsletters and RSS feeds."

News release: "The third quarter of 2011 saw over 1,200 megawatts (MW) of wind power capacity installed, bringing installations through the first three quarters of the year to 3,360 MW. The U.S. wind industry now totals 43,461 MW of cumulative wind capacity through the end of September 2011. The U.S. wind industry has added over 35% of all new generating capacity over the past 4 years, second only to natural gas, and more than nuclear and coal combined. Today, U.S. wind power capacity represents more than 20% of the world's installed wind power. Today, the U.S. wind industry represents not only a large market for wind power capacity installations, but also a growing market for American manufacturing. Over 400 manufacturing facilities across the U.S. make components for wind turbines, and dedicated wind facilities that manufacture major components such as towers, blades and assembled nacelles can be found in every region. The most recent U.S. wind industry statistics can be found below and are available through the:

• AWEA Quarterly Market Reports
  
• AWEA U.S. Wind Industry Annual Market Reports
  
• AWEA U.S. State Fact Sheets
  
• AWEA Wind Energy Fact Sheets

"The goal of the Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) project is to help educators and policymakers identify and support good teaching by improving the quality of information available about teacher practice. With funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, independent education researchers, in partnership with school districts, principals, teachers, and unions, will work to develop fair and reliable measures of effective teaching."

News release: "CoreLogic...announced that CoreLogic SafeRent®, provider of the nation's leading suite of screening and risk management services designed for the multifamily housing industry, released its third quarter 2011 multifamily applicant risk statistics. Despite anemic job growth in the weak economy, credit quality among rental applicants improved slightly in the third quarter 2011 over third quarter 2010.

• Multifamily Applicant Risk Index (MAR Index) - Third Quarter 2011
  
• Multifamily Applicant Risk Index (MAR Index) - Second Quarter 2011
  
• Multifamily Applicant Risk Index (MAR Index) - First Quarter 2011
  
• Related postings on financial system

"Lee Rainie, Director of the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project, spoke about As learning goes mobile at the Educause 2011 annual conference. He described the Project’s latest findings about how people (especially young adults) use mobile devices, including smartphones and tablet computers. He discussed how the mobile revolution has combined with the social networking revolution to produce new kinds of learning and knowledge-sharing environments and described the challenges and opportunities this presents to colleges and teachers. Technology has enabled students to become different kinds of learners and Lee will explore what that means."

Technology and the Innovation Economy, Darrell M. West, Vice President and Director, Governance Studies. October 19, 2011.

News release: "Even in the face of uncertainty about climate and energy policies, forward-thinking companies are developing innovative technologies and solutions that reduce greenhouse gas emissions and provide growth opportunities. A new report, The Business of Innovating: Bringing Low-Carbon Solutions to Market, released today by the Pew Center on Global Climate Change finds that leading companies are strategically pursuing low-carbon innovations to hedge risks, capture new business, and stay competitive with emerging markets and technologies...Written by Andrew Hargadon, Professor of Technology Management at the Graduate School of Management, University of California, Davis, the report provides a set of practical lessons for companies pursuing low-carbon innovations...The report is organized in four main sections that examine the motives and opportunities for pursuing low-carbon innovation; the unique characteristics distinguishing low-carbon innovation from other types of business innovation; seven keys to success in pursuing low-carbon innovation; and case studies of eight low-carbon solutions by four leading companies: Alstom SA, Daimler AG, HP and Johnson Controls, Inc."

News release: "Full-time workers in the U.S. who are overweight or obese and have other chronic health conditions miss an estimated 450 million additional days of work each year compared with healthy workers -- resulting in an estimated cost of more than $153 billion in lost productivity annually. These findings are based on Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index data collected between Jan. 2 and Oct. 2, 2011. Gallup surveyed 109,875 full-time employees -- those who work at least 30 hours per week -- during this time period."

These documents via governmentattic.org:

• National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) internal agency records which discuss the merits of iPads and/or similar pad/tablet computer devices for agency employee use, 2011
  
• Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) internal agency records which discuss the merits of iPads and/or similar pad/tablet computer devices for agency employee use, 2011
  
• Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) internal agency records which discuss the merits of iPads and/or similar pad/tablet computer devices for agency employee use, 2011
  
• National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) internal agency records which discuss the merits of iPads and/or similar pad/tablet computer devices for agency employee use, 2011
  
• Federal Trade Commission (FTC) internal agency records which discuss the merits of iPads and/or similar pad/tablet computer devices for agency employee use, 2011

Digital Omnivores: How Tablets, Smartphones and Connected Devices are Changing U.S. Digital Media Consumption Habits, comScore, October 2011.

Banking on the Social Network: "Despite compliance issues and the difficulty of measuring returns, a panel of bankers says social media has emerged as a must-have marketing tool." by Karen Epper Hoffman

CPA Insider: "The special retirement planning needs of women involve more than extended life expectancy over men. They include issues such as divorce, family, work history, care giving responsibility and healthcare costs." October 11, 2011 by James Sullivan, CPA, PFS

Investment Perspective - Preparing for Turbulence, EdwardJones, October 2011

News release: "Do you like your job? How’s your health? Are you spending enough time each day with your children? When you need them, are your friends there for you? Can you trust your neighbours? And how satisfied are you, overall, with your life? A new OECD publication, How’s Life?, looks at these questions and others, offering a comprehensive picture of what makes up people’s lives in 40 countries worldwide. The report assesses 11 specific aspects of life – ranging from income, jobs and housing to health, education and the environment – as part of the OECD’s ongoing effort to devise new measures for assessing well-being that go beyond Gross Domestic Product. OECD Secretary-General Angel Gurría launched How’s Life? during an international conference at the OECD commemorating the two-year anniversary of the landmark Stiglitz-Sen-Fitoussi report on the measurement of economic performance and social progress. The landmark report sought to address concerns that standard macroeconomic statistics like GDP failed to give a true account of people’s current and future well-being. The OECD has been addressing the issue of measuring progress since 2000, with its latest work forming the basis of this publication."

Kuttner, Ran, Conflict-Specialists-As-Leaders: Revisiting the Role of the Conflict Specialist from a Leadership Perspective (September 9, 2011). Conflict Resolution Quarterly, 2011.

News release: "With the U.S. economy still unsteady, most U.S. companies are finding it relatively easy to attract or retain workers, with one major exception-critical-skill employees. A new survey from global professional services company Towers Watson and WorldatWork, an international association of human resource professionals, shows that for the second consecutive year, the number of U.S. companies having difficulty finding and keeping critical-skill workers has increased. The Towers Watson Talent Management and Rewards Survey, a study of 316 North American companies, including 218 from the United States, also found that nearly two-thirds of respondents expect their employees to work more hours now than they did prior to the recession and see this trend continuing for some time. Additionally, respondents are concerned about the impact that organizational changes they made in response to the recession are having in areas such as employees’ work/life balance, productivity and willingness to take risks. Most companies have already made or are planning to make additional changes to their reward and talent management, and other organizational, programs."

Use of Dashboards in Government, by Sukumar Ganapati, Florida International University, IBM Center for the Business of Government

Publisher Names in Bibliographic Data: An Experimental Authority File and a Prototype Application - This is a pre-print version of a paper published in Library Resources and Technical Services, 55,4.

Afghanistan 10 years on: Slow progress and failed promises, Amnesty International

Conflict in Organizations, by Olivier Serrat, Asian Development Bank (ADB) Knowledge Solutions

Six Provocations for Big Data, Danah Boyd and Kate Crawford

Urban Informatics Research and Insights for Libraries, Cultural Industries and Innovation Systems, by Marcus Foth, September 2011

Account Deactivation and Content Removal: Guiding Principles and Practices for Companies and Users, Erica Newland, Caroline Nolan, Cynthia Wong, and Jillian York. The Berkman Center for Internet & Society and. The Center for Democracy & Technology, September 2011

Daniel Soar: "This spring, the billionaire Eric Schmidt announced that there were only four really significant technology companies: Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Google, the company he had until recently been running. People believed him. What distinguished his new ‘gang of four’ from the generation it had superseded – companies like Intel, Microsoft, Dell and Cisco, which mostly exist to sell gizmos and gadgets and innumerable hours of expensive support services to corporate clients – was that the newcomers sold their products and services to ordinary people. Since there are more ordinary people in the world than there are businesses, and since there’s nothing that ordinary people don’t want or need, or can’t be persuaded they want or need when it flashes up alluringly on their screens, the money to be made from them is virtually limitless. Together, Schmidt’s four companies are worth more than half a trillion dollars. The technology sector isn’t as big as, say, oil, but it’s growing, as more and more traditional industries – advertising, travel, real estate, used cars, new cars, porn, television, film, music, publishing, news – are subsumed into the digital economy. Schmidt, who as the ex-CEO of a multibillion-dollar corporation had learned to take the long view, warned that not all four of his disruptive gang could survive. So – as they all converge from their various beginnings to compete in the same area, the place usually referred to as ‘the cloud’, a place where everything that matters is online – the question is: who will be the first to blink?"

Fighting Poverty in a Bad Economy, Americans Move in with Relatives, By Rakesh Kochhar and D’Vera Cohn. October 3, 2011

Rhett Butler, A Revolutionary Technology is Unlocking Secrets of the Forest

Federal Reserve Bank of New York - Sentiment Analysis And Social Media Monitoring Solution. Request for Proposal (Event-6994)

House Is Gone but Debt Lives On: "Forty-one states and the District of Columbia permit lenders to sue borrowers for mortgage debt still left after a foreclosure sale. The economics of today's battered housing market mean that lenders are doing so more and more. Foreclosed homes seldom fetch enough to cover the outstanding loan amount, both because buyers financed so much of the purchase price—up to 100% of it during the housing boom—and because today's foreclosures take place following a four-year decline in values...100,000 was roughly the average amount by which foreclosure sales fell short of loan balances in hundreds of foreclosures in seven states reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. And 64% of the 4.5 million foreclosures since the start of 2007 have taken place in states that allow deficiency judgments. Lenders still sue for loan shortfalls in only a small minority of cases where they legally could. Public relations is a limiting factor, some debt-buyers believe. Banks are reluctant to discuss their strategies, but some lenders say they are more likely to seek a deficiency judgment if they perceive the borrower to be a "strategic defaulter" who chose to stop paying because the property lost so much value."

"Standard & Poor's Ratings Services is pleased to bring you the 2011-2012 edition of our Guide To The Loan Market - September 2011, which provides a detailed primer on the syndicated loan market along with articles that describe the bank loan and recovery rating process as well as our analytical approach to evaluating loss and recovery in the event of default."

2011 Investment Company Fact Book, 51st Edition. A Review of Trends and Activity in the Investment Company Industry.

Bankrate’s 2011 Checking Account Survey: "Free checking is on the way out in 2011, while the banking industry ushered in increases in checking account fees, ATM charges and penalties for account overdrafts. This is the banking landscape revealed by Bankrate's 2011 Checking Account Survey. Just 45 percent of noninterest checking accounts are now free, down from the peak of 76 percent just two years ago. However, banks still will offer free checking for meeting conditions such as signing up for direct deposit. New records were set in two categories in this year's study. Fees for nonsufficient funds, or overdrafts, hit a new high for the 13th consecutive year, while ATM fees rose to their highest level for the seventh consecutive year. To find out what to do about them, check out Bankrate's Checking Account Survey. Bankrate's data come from surveying the five largest banks and five largest thrifts in 25 of the nation's biggest markets from Aug. 1-12, 2011. The survey asked those institutions about the terms on one generic noninterest account and one interest-bearing account for the general consumer."

Coast Guard Has Taken Steps To Strengthen Information Technology Management, but Challenges Remain, OIG-11-108, September 2011.

"The Israel Museum welcomes you to the Dead Sea Scrolls Digital Project, allowing users to examine and explore these most ancient manuscripts from Second Temple times at a level of detail never before possible. Developed in partnership with Google, the new website gives users access to searchable, fast-loading, high-resolution images of the scrolls, as well as short explanatory videos and background information on the texts and their history. The Dead Sea Scrolls, which include the oldest known biblical manuscripts in existence, offer critical insight into Jewish society in the Land of Israel during the Second Temple Period, the time of the birth of Christianity and Rabbinic Judaism. Five complete scrolls from the Israel Museum have been digitized for the project at this stage and are now accessible online."

How people learn about their local community: "Contrary to much of the conventional understanding of how people learn about their communities, Americans turn to a wide range of platforms to get local news and information, and where they turn varies considerably depending on the subject matter and their age, according to a survey by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism and Internet & American Life Project, produced in association with the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation that asks about local information in a new way. Most Americans, including more tech-savvy adults under age 40, also use a blend of both new and traditional sources to get their information. Overall, the picture revealed by the data is that of a richer and more nuanced ecosystem of community news and information than researchers have previously identified...local TV draws a mass audience largely around a few popular subjects; local newspapers attract a smaller cohort of citizens but for a wider range of civically oriented subjects."

Taking Stock and Making Hay: Archival Collections Assessment, by Martha O'Hara Conway, University of Michigan, and Merrilee Proffitt, OCLC Research

"Harvard Health Publications, in conjunction with nutrition experts at the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH), has unveiled the Healthy Eating Plate, a visual guide that provides a blueprint for eating a healthy meal. Like the U.S. government’s MyPlate, the Healthy Eating Plate is simple and easy to understand — and it addresses important deficiencies in the MyPlate icon. The Healthy Eating Plate is based on the latest and best scientific evidence, which shows that a plant-based diet rich in vegetables, whole grains, healthy fats, and healthy proteins lowers the risk of weight gain and chronic disease. Helping Americans get the best possible nutrition advice is of critical importance, as the U.S. and the world face a burgeoning obesity epidemic. Currently, two in three adults and one in three children are overweight or obese in the U.S."

Food Hardship in America 2010 Households with and without Children, August 2011

"The Economic Mobility Project's report, Downward Mobility from the Middle Class: Waking Up from the American Dream, examines potential factors that cause some Americans who grow up in the middle class to fall down the economic ladder as adults. Authored by Gregory Acs during his tenure at the Urban Institute, the report finds that a middle-class upbringing does not guarantee the same status over the course of a lifetime. Marital status, education, test scores and drug use have a strong influence on whether a middle-class child loses economic ground as an adult. Race and gender also are factors in who falls out of the middle class. The racial gap in downward mobility is driven by a disparity between white and black men, and the gender gap in downward mobility is driven by a disparity between white men and white women."

Gallup Poll: "The percentage of Greeks who rate their lives so poorly that they are considered "suffering" has more than tripled to 24% in 2011, from 7% in 2007. Greeks are more likely to be suffering than "thriving," a reality uncommon in the developed world...Greeks' current life evaluation -- with 14% thriving, 62% struggling, and 24% suffering -- is also low compared with ratings in other European countries surveyed so far in 2011. More Greeks are now classified as suffering than those living in several other European nations, including those in other countries hard hit by the financial and economic crisis such as Ireland and Italy. Suffering is higher only in Hungary (29%), Romania (30%), and Bulgaria (42%), and thriving is significantly lower only in Bulgaria."

Culturomics 2.0: Forecasting large-scale human behavior using global news media tone in time and space, by Kalev H. Leetaru. First Monday, Volume 16, Number 9 - 5 September 2011.

Via WSJ: Steven Pinker is the Harvard College Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. This essay is adapted from his new book, "The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined," published by Viking.

Microsoft Becomes First Corporate User of Standard XML-Based Bank Statements

The Skills, Tools, and Perspectives Behind Great Data Science Groups, DJ Patil, 2011 O’Reilly Media

The Digital Revolution and Higher Education College Presidents, Public Differ on Value of Online Learning, By Kim Parker, Amanda Lenhart and Kathleen Moore. August 28, 2011

News release: "Symantec Corp. announced the findings of its 2011 Information Retention and eDiscovery Survey which examined how enterprises manage their ever-growing volumes of electronically stored information and prepare for the eventuality of an eDiscovery request. The survey of legal and IT personnel at 2,000 enterprises worldwide found email is not the primary source of records companies must produce, and more importantly, respondents who employ best practices for records and information management are significantly less at risk of court sanctions or fines."

The Global Biomedical Industry: Preserving U.S. Leadership
Executive Summary & Research Findings - Ross C. DeVol, Armen Bedroussian, and Benjamin Yeo, September 2011

Economic Policy Institute: A lost decade - Poverty and income trends continue to paint a bleak picture for working families, By Elise Gould and Heidi Shierholz | September 14, 2011

Bayesian Dynamic Factor Analysis of a Simple Monetary DSGE Model, Maxym Kryshko, September 01, 2011

Future of the First Amendment 2011 Survey of High School Students and Teachers, Commissioned by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation - September 2011

Growth Spillover Dynamics from Crisis to Recovery, Hélène Poirson and Sebastian Weber, September 2011

CRS: Social Media and Disasters: Current Uses, Future Options, and Policy Considerations, Bruce R. Lindsay, Analyst in American National Goverment, September 6, 2011

Alex Campbell: "Incoming students at the University of North Carolina’s School of Information and Library Science this year are getting a new kind of welcome-to-campus perk: Free data storage, for keeps. The service, called LifeTime Library, works on students’ personal computers, allowing them to automatically archive files and folders. The data are preserved on the Web, where students can search for files by name or by date saved. Students can continue to use the online storage locker after they graduate, and the plan is for the program to remain free, said Gary Marchionini, the school’s dean. About 60 incoming students out of a total of 160 have signed up for the first year of the program, he said. The idea is to “help students learn to manage their digital lives,” Mr. Marchionini said. Dealing with large amounts of online data is a big part of what students learn at the School of Information and Library Science, and the LifeTime Library can serve as a teaching tool for students to figure out the best ways to organize reams of their own digital information."

Kampelmann, Stephan and Rycx, Francois, Are Occupations Paid What They are Worth? An Econometric Study of Occupational Wage Inequality and Productivity. IZA Discussion Paper No. 5951. Forschungsinstitut zur Zukunft der Arbeit, Institute for the Study of Labor [download via SSRN]

Radical change is certainly producing some alarming symptoms: "According to Nielsen BookScan, the publishing industry standard for book sales data, book sales are pretty healthy, with one significant proviso which I'll come to. Ten years ago in 2001, 162m books were sold in Britain. Ten years later – a decade in which the internet bloomed, online gaming exploded, television channels proliferated, digital piracy rampaged and, latterly, recession gloomed – 229m books sold. So, a 42% increase in the number of books sold over the last 10 years...For one thing, people are buying more and more books in Amazonia, and more and more of them are on Amazon's ebook platform the Kindle. In May this year, Amazon announced that, for the first time, it was selling more Kindle versions of books than paperback and hardbacks combined, and (here's the thing that doesn't get quoted so often) sales of print books were still increasing."

Press release: "On September 12, 2011 the Authors' Guild and a number of other entities filed suit against HathiTrust and a number of its university partners. The issues in the suit are the orphan works project as well as the digitization effort that we have been engaged in for almost two decades. Digitization is a reflection of library prudence, rather than the reckless activity as characterized by the Authors' Guild complaint and accompanying statement. From its inception, the primary motive driving our digitization effort has been, and remains, preservation. Preserving the scholarly and cultural record is at the core of the Library's mission. Digitization offers a means of preserving the intellectual content of books whose lives as objects are subject to the vagaries of storage conditions and their own composition; for example, the vast majority of the volumes in our collection are printed on acid paper. Many of these volumes are protected by copyright, but if we wait until they enter the public domain they will be too brittle to circulate or digitize, and of no use to anyone. The Orphan Works Project is an example of library prudence in other ways. Digitized collections offer other obvious benefits. They can be more readily shared with our community, who increasingly expect their research materials to be available in digital form, and they can also provide a trove of data, both humanistic and scientific, that will help scholars and researchers discover and create new knowledge. And in many cases, they can also be made available to anyone in the world with a connection to the Internet. The way in which the HathiTrust partners share this particular collection is guided by a deep and abiding respect for intellectual property and US copyright law, particularly Sections 107 and 108, which help define how libraries may lawfully share their collections. While the law does not specifically address orphan works, we are certain that our scholarly purpose, along with our careful methodology in determining whether these works have a market or an extant copyright holder who can be contacted, make this sharing legal. Sharing, by the way, which is limited to online reading by our faculty and students in the United States, and one-page-at-a-time downloads; not, as the Guild complaint states, worldwide availability and full PDF downloads."

"The World Wide Web Foundation is very pleased to announce an exciting new initiative: the World Wide Web Index. We thank Google for a generous grant of US $1 million to the Foundation, which we are using to seed the creation of the Index...What is the Web Index? The Web Index will be the world’s first multi-dimensional measure of the Web and its impact on people in a large number of countries. It will be a composite index, incorporating political, economic, social, and developmental indicators, as well as indicators of Web connectivity and infrastructure."

"The Tracking Protection Working Group is chartered to improve user privacy and user control by defining mechanisms for expressing user preferences around Web tracking and for blocking or allowing Web tracking elements. The group seeks to standardize the technology and meaning of Do Not Track, and of Tracking Selection Lists." See in Input Documents as follows

• The FTC staff report that calls on industry to create a Do Not Track mechanism
  
• FTC guidelines for behavioral targeting
  
• IAB Self-Regulatory Principles for Online Behavioral Advertising
  
• Neelie Kroes, EU Commission, Online privacy - reinforcing trust and confidence
  
• Do Not Track Cookbook: approaches to data collection in DNT-friendly ways
  
• IETF proposal for Do Not Track
  
• Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) discussion of Do Not Track
  
• The Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT) DNT proposal
  
• Mozilla Do Not Track Field Guide
  
• Microsoft Web Tracking Protection, member submission to W3C

Via Rich McCue: UVic Law Student Technology Survey 2011 - "In addition to the technology questions we’ve been asking UVic Law students over the past nine years, we decided for the second year in a row to ask some extra questions about the mobile technology that students are arriving at Law School equipped with. This survey was completed by 139 incoming and transferring law students, which is a strong 90% plus response rate. Executive Summary:

• 84% of incoming law students own “Smart Phones” that can browse the internet (up dramatically from 50% last year), with 42% of the total being iPhones, 13% Android and 27% Blackberry’s.
  
• 19% of students own tablet devices or ebook readers.
  
• 98% of students own laptops, and 16% own both a laptop and a desktop computer.
  
• 50% of student laptops are Mac’s, up from 44% last year.
  
• The average laptop price stayed basically the same as last year at $1,186, which is down from $1400 in 2007, and from $2,100 in 2004.
  
• The students’ average typing speed was was 60 wpm.
  
• 72% of all students bring their laptops to school almost every day.
  
• 55% of students use Gmail as their primary email account (up from 49% last year), 9% use UVic email and 22% Hotmail.
  
• 60% of students identified MS Word as their favorite tool for collaborative document editing (down from 67%). 30% favor Google Docs (up from 27%) and 2% OpenOffice.
  
• 58% of students report backing up their primary computer on a regular basis. 60% of those backing up do so to an external hard drive and 25% to a cloud storage solution.
  
• 97% of students use Facebook (up from 91%) and 92% (up from 80%) would like to see law school events and activities published on Facebook as well as through the online faculty calendar

Ergonomics - Human Centered Design: "CUErgo presents information from research studies and class work by students and faculty in the Cornell Human Factors and Ergonomics Research Group (CHFERG), directed by Professor Alan Hedge, in the Department of Design and Environmental Analysis at Cornell University. CHFERG focuses on ways to enhance usability by improving the ergonomic design of hardware, software, and workplaces, to enhance people's comfort, performance and health in an approach we call Ergotecture. We recognize that this is also as an important component of the Department's Ecotecture sustainable design approach."

Brussels, 13 September 2011 - "The European Commission today welcomed the launch of Education at a Glance 2011, a new report which gathers statistical data on investment in education, student-teacher ratios, teaching hours, graduate numbers and results. 21 EU countries are covered by the report, which is compiled annually by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), drawing on data jointly collected with Eurostat and the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). Androulla Vassiliou, European Commissioner for Education, Culture, Multilingualism and Youth, said: "The report provides invaluable evidence and data for policy-makers. Its findings underline the importance of our Europe 2020 targets to reduce early school leaving and boost university education, both in terms of increasing graduate numbers and quality. 35% of jobs in the EU will require high-level qualifications by 2020, so it's vital that we continue to invest properly in schools and universities. Education must remain a top priority for the EU, even in a tough economic climate."

Richest haul of planets so far includes 16 new super-Earths: "Astronomers using ESO’s world-leading exoplanet hunter HARPS have today announced a rich haul of more than 50 new exoplanets, including 16 super-Earths, one of which orbits at the edge of the habitable zone of its star. By studying the properties of all the HARPS planets found so far, the team has found that about 40% of stars similar to the Sun have at least one planet lighter than Saturn. The HARPS spectrograph on the 3.6-metre telescope at ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile is the world’s most successful planet finder [1]. The HARPS team, led by Michel Mayor (University of Geneva, Switzerland), today announced the discovery of more than 50 new exoplanets orbiting nearby stars, including sixteen super-Earths [2]. This is the largest number of such planets ever announced at one time [3]. The new findings are being presented at a conference on Extreme Solar Systems where 350 exoplanet experts are meeting in Wyoming, USA."

News release: "Nearly 90,000 high resolution scans of the more than 200,000 historical USGS topographic maps, some dating as far back as 1884, are now available online. The Historical Topographic Map Collection includes published U.S. maps of all scales and editions, and are offered as a georeferenced digital download or as a scanned print from the USGS Store...Historical maps are an important national resource as they provide the long-term record and documentation of the natural, physical and cultural landscape. The history documented by this collection and the analysis of distribution and spatial patterns is invaluable throughout the sciences and non-science disciplines. Genealogists, historians, anthropologists, archeologists and others use this collection for research as well as for a framework on which a myriad of information can be presented in relation to the landscape. For more than 130 years, the USGS topographic mapping program has accurately portrayed the complex geography of our nation through maps using the lithographic printing process. The historical collection contains high resolution scanned images from the USGS legacy series and other sources."

"Business without Borders [sponsored by HSBC] is a unique resource in the United States — an online platform for businesses expanding beyond the U.S. borders. Targeted content from Business without Borders, and content partners The Wall Street Journal, Economist Intelligence Unit, and video content from Bloomberg Master Class, address the issues and needs of growing U.S. companies, from business tools, global trends and market analysis, to case studies and sector profiles. More than just content, Business without Borders is also a meeting place where members can develop relationships and share their experiences in being part of the global economy. Business without Borders also hosts regular, timely, events that key in on the issues affecting global trade. These events are held throughout the United States and are open to members. Best of all, Business without Borders offers all this and more … for free."

News release: "LexisNexis® Risk Solutions today unveiled the HPCC Systems Alliance Program, which is a collaboration of partners to stimulate innovation and accelerate market adoption of the newly open sourced HPCC Systems, an enterprise-proven, open source solution to help large organizations process “Big Data”. Built on a high performing computer cluster technology, HPCC Systems is an alternative to Hadoop. Interest in processing and managing Big Data is growing rapidly among enterprise and service provider customers. LexisNexis collaboration with innovative leaders will help customers navigate options for addressing large data sets, reduce overall infrastructure costs, and improve business agility and data insight. Products and solutions from these partners will help deliver fully integrated, turnkey solutions."

Citation by Citation, New Maps Chart Hot Research and Scholarship's Hidden Terrain, by Jennifer Howard

The Association of American Publishers - BookStats Publishing Formats Highlights: "e-books and other non-physical formats - "The consistent, growing popularity of e-books and apps are a major success story in content formats, even in advance of data for 2011, which is currently tracking high e-format sales. Highlights:

• e-books have grown from 0.6% of the total Trade market share in 2008 to 6.4% in 2010. While that represents a small amount in the total market for formats, it translates to 1274.1% in publisher net sales revenue year-over-year with total net revenue for 2010 at $878 Million.
  
• Net unit sales growth for e-books was equally impressive, increasing 1039.6% for the same three-year period. In 2010, e-book net units were 114M.
  
• Beyond the top-level format figures, the explosive growth of e-books is even more visible when considering certain categories. In Adult Fiction, e-books are now 13.6% of the net revenue market share.

The New York Times - 9/11: The Reckoning, America and the World A Decade After 9/11

Bloomberg BusinessWeek: "...Hadoop...helps businesses quickly and cheaply sift through terabytes or even petabytes of Twitter posts, Facebook updates, and other so-called unstructured data. Hadoop, which is customizable and available free online, was created to analyze raw information better than traditional databases like those from Oracle."

NBER Digest OnLine, September 2011: • Job Loss in the Great Recession • Bank Performance in 1998 Explains Performance during the Recent Crisis • The Impact of Ozone Pollution on Worker Productivity • Limited Attention in the Car Market • How Finance, Trade, and Growth
are Connected • The Consequences of Risk Adjustment in the Medicare Advantage Program

End of history and the last woman: "As The Economist reports this past week, many women in the richer parts of Asia have gone on “marriage strike”, preferring the single life to the marital yoke. That is one reason why their fertility rates have fallen. And they are not alone. In 83 countries and territories around the world, according to the United Nations, women will not have enough daughters to replace themselves, unless fertility rates rise. In Hong Kong, for example, a cohort of 1,000 women would be expected to give birth to just 547 daughters, at today’s fertility rates. (That gives Hong Kong a “net reproduction rate” of just 0.547, in the language of demographers.) If nothing changed, those 547 daughters would be succeeded by just 299 daughters of their own, and so on. At that rate, according to some back-of-the-envelope calculations by The Economist, it would take about 25 generations for Hong Kong’s female population to shrink from 3.75m to just one. Given that Hong Kong’s average age of childbearing is 31.4 years, it could expect to give birth to its last woman in the year 2798. (That is some time after its neighbour, Macau, which has a higher reproduction rate, but a much smaller population.) By the same unflinching logic, Japan, Germany, Russia, Italy and Spain will not see out the next millennium. Even China, which has a recorded history stretching back at least 3,700 years, has only about 1,500 years left—if present trends continued unbroken."

The Encyclopedia of 9/11: "Here in New York City, we heard it first, the drone of the plane down the West Side, surprisingly loud. Then, if we were outside, our heads pointed in the right direction, we could see it: the dull-red gash in the North Tower, smoking ominously. Just as we’d begun to absorb this strange sight, wondering what pilot could have been so dim as to steer his plane into one of those towers on what seemed the clearest, bluest September day anyone could remember, came a second plane, then a terrible blossom of flame, then the billowing smoke enshrouding downtown. There would be more, of course, two planes aimed at Washington, one that would dive into the Pentagon, the other downed in a field in Pennsylvania. But for New Yorkers, it was the most intimate of tragedies. Within weeks, the day had become a number, a kind of shorthand for a whole universe, one that hadn’t existed on 9/10."

James Hall, Consumer Affairs Editor - "Heavy discounting by supermarkets, the rise of internet retailers and the growing popularity of e-readers such as the Kindle have forced nearly 2,000 bookshops to close since 2005. There were 2,178 high street bookshops left in Britain in July, according to research carried out by Experian, the data company, compared with 4,000 in 2005. A total of 580 towns do not have a single bookshop. Campaigners warned yesterday that the loss of bookshops, coupled with threats to close thousands of libraries as part of council cuts, will lead to "book deserts" across large areas of the country."

Top Companies for Career Opportunities (2011) - "Employees have reported how their companies rate when it comes to opportunities for professional growth and career advancement – find out which 25 companies rate the highest."

"Uniforms worn by medical and nursing staff are not usually considered important in the transmission of microorganisms. We investigated the rate of potentially pathogenic bacteria present on uniforms worn by hospital staff, as well as the bacterial load of these microorganisms...Up to 60% of hospital staff’s uniforms are colonized with potentially pathogenic bacteria, including drug-resistant organisms. It remains to be determined whether these bacteria can be transferred to patients and cause clinically relevant infection." AJIC: American Journal of Infection Control
Volume 39, Issue 7, Pages 555-559, September 2011.

Gallup, September 5, 2011 - Workers least satisfied with on-the-job stress, tangible rewards for their work, by Lymari Morales:
"U.S. workers are more dissatisfied today with their health insurance benefits and their chances for promotion than they were before the global economic collapse. These are the biggest movers since August 2008 on a list of 13 specific job aspects Gallup tracks."

In Classroom of Future, Stagnant Scores: "...In a nutshell: schools are spending billions on technology, even as they cut budgets and lay off teachers, with little proof that this approach is improving basic learning. This conundrum calls into question one of the most significant contemporary educational movements. Advocates for giving schools a major technological upgrade — which include powerful educators, Silicon Valley titans and White House appointees — say digital devices let students learn at their own pace, teach skills needed in a modern economy and hold the attention of a generation weaned on gadgets...Critics counter that, absent clear proof, schools are being motivated by a blind faith in technology and an overemphasis on digital skills — like using PowerPoint and multimedia tools — at the expense of math, reading and writing fundamentals. They say the technology advocates have it backward when they press to upgrade first and ask questions later."

"This issue of The Lancet [subscription with abstracts] allows reflections on the events of 9/11, and particularly explores some of the research, review, and opinion pieces on the short-term and long-term physical, mental, and public health consequences of the terrorist attacks. The research papers report not only US domestic health effects but also some of the international consequences. Respiratory illnesses and post-traumatic stress disorder are known to be increased in those who survived the World Trade Center disaster, but data reported in this issue show that 9 years after the attacks, rescue and recovery workers continue to have substantial physical and mental health problems. No excess overall mortality is shown, although high levels of exposure to injury or to the dust cloud are linked to increased risk of all-cause and heart-disease-related mortality. An excess of cancer cases is reported in firefighters who survived the disaster which may have implications for policy on eligibility for compensation."

Food Insecurity Among Older Adults - A report submitted to AARP Foundation, August 2011 - James P. Ziliak, Ph.D., University of Kentucky; Craig Gundersen, Ph.D., University of Illinois

News release: Data through June 2011, released [August 30, 2011] by S&P Indices for its S&P/Case-Shiller1 Home Price Indices, the leading measure of U.S. home prices, show that the U.S. National Home Price Index increased by 3.6% in the second quarter of 2011, after having fallen 4.1% in the first quarter of 2011. With the second quarter’s data, the National Index recovered from its first quarter low, but still posted an annual decline of 5.9% versus the second quarter of 2010. Nationally, home prices are back to their early 2003 levels. As of June 2011, 19 of the 20 MSAs covered by S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Indices and both monthly composites were up versus May – Portland was flat. However, they were all down compared to June 2010. Twelve of the 20 MSAs and both Composites have now increased for three consecutive months, a sign of the seasonal strength in the housing market. None of the markets posted new lows with June’s report. Minneapolis posted a double-digit 10.8% annual decline; Portland is not far behind at -9.6%. Thirteen of the cities and both composites saw improvements in their annual rates; however; they all are in negative territory and have been so for three consecutive months."

"The database here [scroll down the page] contains the latest population estimates for 942 metropolitan and micropolitan areas, along with their official figures from April 2010. Use the tab to winnow the list to a single state, or simply hit the Search button to view the rankings in their entirety. On Numbers has developed a computer program that projects the current populations of metros, micros and states, based on an analysis of demographic trends since 2000. New estimates are released periodically."

Made in America, Again: Why Manufacturing Will Return to the U.S., August 25, 2011 - "The new report analyzes those cost shifts in greater detail and explains why the U.S. will gain manufacturing even if Chinese productivity accelerates. Although Chinese productivity will continue to grow at an impressive 8.5 percent annually for the next five years, factory wages will rise twice as fast. Even if Chinese factories install the same highly automated assembly lines used in U.S. factories, that would not be enough to preserve China’s fast-eroding manufacturing cost advantage for many products."

Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media: "Zotero is an easy-to-use yet powerful research tool that helps you gather, organize, and analyze sources (citations, full texts, web pages, images, and other objects), and lets you share the results of your research in a variety of ways. An extension to the popular open-source web browser Firefox, Zotero includes the best parts of older reference manager software (like EndNote)—the ability to store author, title, and publication fields and to export that information as formatted references—and the best parts of modern software and web applications (like iTunes and del.icio.us), such as the ability to interact, tag, and search in advanced ways. Zotero integrates tightly with online resources; it can sense when users are viewing a book, article, or other object on the web, and—on many major research and library sites—find and automatically save the full reference information for the item in the correct fields. Since it lives in the web browser, it can effortlessly transmit information to, and receive information from, other web services and applications; since it runs on one’s personal computer, it can also communicate with software running there (such as Microsoft Word). And it can be used offline as well (e.g., on a plane, in an archive without WiFi)."

The Impact of Economics Blogs, David McKenzie and Berk Özler, August 2011

International Trade and Firm Performance: A Survey of Empirical Studies Since 2006. IZA Discussion Paper No. 5916. Joachim Wagner, University of Lueneburg - Institute of Economics. Posted August 28, 2011

Inside Higher Ed: "The ERIAL (Ethnographic Research in Illinois Academic Libraries) project -- a series of studies conducted at Illinois Wesleyan, DePaul University, and Northeastern Illinois University, and the University of Illinois’s Chicago and Springfield campuses -- was a meta-exercise for the librarians in practicing the sort of deep research they champion. Instead of relying on surveys, the libraries enlisted two anthropologists, along with their own staff members, to collect data using open-ended interviews and direct observation, among other methods. The goal was to generate data that, rather than being statistically significant yet shallow, would provide deep, subjective accounts of what students, librarians and professors think of the library and each other at those five institutions. The resulting papers are scheduled to be published by the American Library Association this fall, under the title: “Libraries and Student Culture: What We Now Know.” One thing the librarians now know is that their students' research habits are worse than they thought."

Clifford Marks, National Journal: "Major U.S. newspapers have increasingly shifted their attention away from coverage of unemployment in recent months while greatly intensifying their focus on the deficit, a National Journal analysis shows. The analysis -- based on a measure of how often the words "unemployment" and "deficit" appear in major publications -- portrays a dramatically shifting landscape of coverage over the past two years, as the debate over how to fix the federal deficit has risen to prominence and the question of how to handle still-high unemployment has faded from the media's consciousness. National Journal compiled counts of articles that mention one of the words in their headline or first sentences in the five largest newspapers in the country by print circulation -- a group that consists of The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, and The Washington Post. The data was taken over a period of roughly two years from April 15, 2009, to May 15, 2011, using LexisNexis, a news information service. The numbers exclude mentions that also used the words Europe(an) and Greece or Greek in an effort to focus solely on the domestic debate, though even with those included, the trend was not materially different."

Extracting, Transforming and Archiving Scientific Data - Daniel Lemire1 and Andre Vellino, National Research Council of Canada, August 23, 2011. Fourth Workshop on Very Large Digital Libraries, 2011

24% Growth from 2009 to 2010 - Hispanic College Enrollment Spikes, Narrowing Gaps with Other Groups, by Richard Fry, Senior Research Associate, Pew Hispanic Center

"August 25, 2011 - Facebook is rolling out a series of changes to its privacy controls. We reviewed the changes in detail on Tuesday; now here’s how you can take advantage of these changes.

"The events of September 11th, 2001 affected the entire world. The 9/11 Television News Archive is a library of news coverage of the events of 9/11/2001 and their aftermath as presented by U.S. and international broadcasters. A resource for scholars, journalists, and the public, it presents one week of news broadcasts for study, research and analysis. Television is our pre-eminent medium of information, entertainment and persuasion, but until now it has not been a medium of record. This Archive attempts to address this gap by making TV news coverage of this critical week in September 2001 available to those studying these events and their treatment in the media. Explore 3,000 hours of international TV News from 20 channels over 7 days, and select analysis by scholars."

Accessibility vs. access: How the rhetoric of “rare” is changing in the age of information abundance by Maria Popova.

International Bloggers and Internet Control, Hal Roberts, Ethan Zuckerman, Jillian York, Robert Faris, and John Palfrey. Berkman Center for Internet & Society, August 2011

News release: "The Institute for the Advancement of the American Legal System (IAALS) at the University of Denver today launches a unique, national initiative to change the way law schools educate students. Educating Tomorrow’s Lawyers provides a platform to encourage law schools in the U.S. to showcase innovative teaching to produce more practice-ready lawyers who can better meet the needs of an evolving profession."

News release: "As students across the country prepare to start their freshman year of college, more than 40 percent of them will not graduate within six years – costing billions of dollars in lost earnings for the students and millions of dollars in lost tax revenue, according to a new analysis by the American Institutes for Research (AIR). AIR conducted a study that examined the more than 1.1 million full-time students who entered college in 2002 seeking bachelor degrees. Of that total, almost 500,000 did not graduate within six years – costing a combined $4.5 billion in lost income and lost federal and state income taxes. The AIR analysis found that the 493,000 students who started college in 2002 but did not earn a degree within six years lost a total of approximately $3.8 billion in income in 2010 alone. The lost income would have generated $566 million in federal income tax revenue, while states would have collected more than $164 million in state income taxes. “These findings represent just one year and one graduating class. Therefore, the overall costs of low graduation rates are much higher since these losses accumulate year after year,” explained Mark Schneider, a vice president at AIR who co-authored the report, The High Cost of Low Graduation Rates: How Much Does Dropping Out of College Really Cost?, with Lu (Michelle) Yin. “This is just the tip of the iceberg. While this report focuses on only one cohort of students, losses of this magnitude are incurred annually by each and every graduating class.”

"Scientists at the University of California, Irvine, have for the first time fully mapped the movement of Antarctica’s vast ice sheets and glaciers, which comprise 90 percent of the ice on Earth. Using data gathered by satellites from the U.S., Europe, Canada, and Japan, the researchers have assembled a color animation depicting how the glaciers flow from the vast polar plateau to the Southern Ocean, with some ice sheets moving up to 800 feet a year. Lead researcher Eric Rignot said that the study showed conclusively that the rivers of ice move by slipping along their beds. “This is like seeing a map of all the ocean’s currents for the first time,” said Rignot. He and other scientists said that the glacial mapping project will be vital to understanding how Antarctica’s ice sheets and glaciers will react to warming temperatures, which will help scientists forecast future sea level rise. If glaciers and ice sheets melt more rapidly along Antarctica’s coasts because of rising ocean and air temperatures, that loss is likely to accelerate the flow of ice from Antarctica’s interior to the sea along the routes mapped by Rignot and his colleagues."

Update, November 30, 2011: Seeking Synchronicity Webinar Recording Now Available
OCLC - "A new membership report from OCLC Research, in partnership with Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, Seeking Synchronicity distills more than five years of virtual reference (VR) research into a readable summary that features memorable quotes that vividly illustrate very specific and actionable suggestions. Taken from a multi-phase research project that included focus group interviews, surveys, transcript analysis, and phone interviews, with VR librarians, users, and non-users, these findings are meant to help practitioners develop and sustain VR services and systems. The report asserts that the "R" in "VR" needs to emphasize virtual "Relationships" as well as "Reference". Among the topics addressed are:

• The exaggerated death of ready reference
  
• The importance of query clarification in VR
  
• Ways to boost accuracy and build better interpersonal relationships in VR
  
• What can be learned from VR transcripts
  
• How convenience is the "hook" that draws users into VR services
  
• Generational differences in how people perceive reference interactions and determine success
  
• The need for more and better marketing"

Pronunciation Book - spoken pronunciation of words, via YouTube (worth visiting)

The ways in which old-fashioned newspapers still trump online newspapers, by Jack Shafer

A Guide to Facebook Security For Young Adults, Parents, and Educators, Linda McCarthy, Keith Watson, and Denise Weldon-Siviy, August 2011. "This online guide explains how you can:

• Protect your Facebook account
  
• Avoid the scammers
  
• Use advanced security settings
  
• Recover a hacked Facebook account
  
• Stop imposters

Federal Computer Week: "Although Google+ has attracted more than 10 million users since its recent debut, many people in government are wondering what it is and how it ought to be used. Thanks to the Navy, now there is an overview of the new site. The Navy recently published a 13-page online guide titled What’s the deal with Google+? on the SlideShare website, providing a basic introduction to the new social networking site and how it could be used by individuals. The Navy’s presentation had been viewed by 606 people as of Aug. 16."

"Since 2004, the Council of Graduate Schools (CGS) has conducted a multi-year empirical examination of international graduate application, admission, and enrollment trends. This analysis responds to member institutions’ concerns about continuing changes in the enrollment of students from abroad seeking master’s and doctoral degrees from U.S. colleges and universities. International students currently comprise about 15.5% of all graduate students in the United States. The core of this examination is a three-phase survey of CGS member institutions. The CGS International Graduate Admissions Survey collects an initial snapshot of applications to U.S. graduate schools from prospective international students, final applications and an initial picture of admissions offers to prospective international students, and final offers of admission and first-time and total international graduate student enrollment. Data from this year’s Phase II survey reveal that applications from prospective international students to U.S. graduate schools increased 11% in 2011, marking the sixth consecutive year of growth and the largest increase since 2006. The Phase II survey also found that initial offers of admission to prospective international graduate students increased 11% in 2011 following a 3% gain in 2010 and a 1% decline in 2009. This year’s increase in international offers of admission is also the largest since 2006."

Women See Value and Benefits of College; Men Lag on Both Fronts, Survey Finds, By Wendy Wang, and Kim Parker, August 17, 2011

"The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) endorses the secure use of Web-based collaboration and social media tools to enhance communication, stakeholder outreach collaboration, and information exchange; streamline processes; and foster productivity improvements. Use of these tools supports VA and VA’s goal of achieving an interoperable, net-centric environment by improving employee effectiveness through seamless access to information. Web-based collaboration tools enable widely dispersed facilities and VA personnel to more effectively collaborate and share information—which can result in better productivity, higher efficiency, and foster innovation. This Directive establishes policy on the proper use of these tools, consistent with applicable laws, regulations, and policies."

News release: "America’s children have fallen further behind in the last year in a range of leading indicators according to The State of America’s Children 2011, a new report from the Children’s Defense Fund. With unemployment, housing foreclosures, and hunger at historically high levels, children’s well-being is in jeopardy. In the United States one in five children is poor and children are our poorest age group. In 2009, millions of children fell into poverty due to the economic downturn, an increase of almost 10 percent, the largest single year rise since 1960. Today, 15.5 million children are adrift in a sea of poverty and every 32 seconds another child is born poor. Two-thirds of poor children live in families in which at least one family member works. The gap between rich and poor families has continued to grow. Income gains for the bottom 90 percent were completely wiped out by the recession, leaving the average income for the bottom 90 percent at its lowest level in more than a decade."

News release: "Many young children are getting a head start on acquiring the skills needed to read, as family members take time out of their day on a regular basis to read aloud with them, the U.S. Census Bureau reported today. In 2009, half of children age 1 to 5 were read to seven or more times a week by a family member. A series of tables, Selected Indicators of Child Well-Being (A Child's Day): 2009, uses statistics from the Survey of Income and Program Participation to provide a glimpse into how children younger than 18 spend their day, touching on subjects such as the degree of interaction with parents and extracurricular activities. These statistics are compared with those from earlier years. While reading interactions are more frequent among families above poverty, reading interactions among low-income families have increased over the last 10 years. In 2009, 56 percent of 1- and 2-year-olds above poverty were read to seven or more times a week, compared with 45 percent below the poverty level. However, while parental reading involvement for children above poverty was not different from rates in 1998, it rose from 37 percent for those below poverty."

The health risks and benefits of cycling in urban environments compared with car use: health impact assessment study. BMJ 2011; 343:d4521 doi: 10.1136/bmj.d4521 (Published 4 August 2011)

News release: "The Getty recently unveiled a newly expanded search function on its website that will allow scholars, researchers, and the interested public to better access the Getty's vast resources of information about the visual arts. The Getty Search Gateway, which is now available online, provides streamlined searches through the Museum's collections and the Getty Research Institute's library catalog, digital collections, and collection inventories and finding aids...In addition to streamlining the search process, the Getty Search Gateway is able to make available information about many more objects from the Museum's collection. Now information about most of the Museum's collection is available online, along with an expanded set of images."

Search the database from National Real Estate Trends - 1,612,778 Foreclosure Homes | $183,377 Average Foreclosure Sales Price. Find foreclosures, MLS listings and home values; Search ANY address in the U.S.

Poll - Even among people in their 80s and 90s, emotional health remains high: "Americans aged 60 and older demonstrate significantly better emotional health than those younger than 60 years. In fact, a septuagenarian is far more likely than someone in their 30s to have high emotional health. These results hold true even after statistically controlling for gender, race, education, marital status, employment, income, and regional location...This analysis, based on more than 500,000 interviews conducted between January 2010 and June 2011 as part of the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index, measures Americans' Emotional Health Index (EHI) scores, based on self-reports of positive and negative daily emotions as well as clinical diagnosis of depression. Specifically, Americans are asked whether they felt "a lot of" each of the following emotions the day before the survey: smiling/laughing, learning/doing something interesting, being treated with respect, enjoyment, happiness, worry, sadness, anger, and stress. Emotionally well-off Americans are defined as those whose EHI scores are over 90, out of a maximum of 100. Rather than focusing on just happiness or enjoyment, this large set of questions, including respondents' medical diagnoses of depression, provides a more comprehensive view of emotional health."

Search and email still top the list of most popular online activities - Two activities nearly universal among adult internet users, by Kristen Purcell

"One year ago, Weber Shandwick and Powell Tate, in partnership with KRC Research, released its first annual Civility in America: A Nationwide Survey. Due to the increased attention paid to civility over the past year, we wanted to re-assess Americans’ attitudes towards the subject. Coverage in the media, community attention to the issue and creation of new non-profit organizations such as The National Institute for Civil Discourse have continued to attract attention to the topic. In an online search, over 12 million mentions of “civility” surfaced. This is a 460% increase from the same time one year ago. How, if at all, has this increased attention impacted civility or perceptions about it? Without a doubt, the past 12 months have been tumultuous when it comes to how civility has played. The 2011 results from Civility in America fall into several key areas in this report — civility in politics, education, the workplace, the Internet and the marketplace. Attitudes about the state of civility in America remain as high as they were one year ago — two-thirds (65%) still believe that we have a major civility problem. The more disturbing news, however, is that Americans expect civility to erode even further over the next few years. Whereas more than one-third (39%) expected things to turn less civil when surveyed in 2010, now more than one out of two Americans — 55% — expect a lack of civility to become the norm. Only nine percent in this year’s survey expect civility to get better compared to 26% who expected some relief last year. Incivility seems to be here to stay."

Snapshot|What Drives Innovation in the Federal Government: "How innovative is the federal government? What drives innovation in federal agencies? And, what can leaders do, if anything, to promote innovation within their agencies and teams? Given the importance of improving government effectiveness and delivering better results for the American people within today’s budgetary constraints, these are the questions the Partnership for Public Service and the Hay Group set out to explore. Our analysis underscored that innovation depends on the total environment leaders create for employees...According to 2010 Employee Viewpoint Survey results, the top large agency on innovation was the National Aeronautics and Space Administration with a score of 75.9, followed closely by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. NASA and NRC are also among the five highest ranking agencies on the Best Places to Work list. Rounding out the top five was: General Services Administration; Department of State; and the Department of the Army."

Work-based predictors of mortality: A 20-year follow-up of healthy employees. Shirom, A., Toker, S., Alkaly, Y., Jacobson, O. & Balicer, R. (in press). Health Psychology.

Giant Fish Blenders: How Power Plants Kill Fish & Damage Our Waterways, Sierra Club, August 2011

"IndustryWeek U.S. 500 is IndustryWeek's report on the 500 largest publicly held U.S. manufacturing companies companies based on revenue

Dr. Kari Kraus, University of Maryland, via NYT: "..if we’re going to save even a fraction of the trillions of bits of data churned out every year, we can’t think of digital preservation in the same way we do paper preservation. We have to stop thinking about how to save data only after it’s no longer needed, as when an author donates her papers to an archive. Instead, we must look for ways to continuously maintain and improve it. In other words, we must stop preserving digital material and start curating it."

"The Institute for the Future of the Book seeks to chronicle this shift, and impact its development in a positive direction. The Institute is a project of the Annenberg Center for Communication at the University of Southern California, and is based in Brooklyn, New York. We're a small think-and-do tank investigating the evolution of intellectual discourse as it shifts from printed pages to networked screens. There are independent branches of Institute in New York, London and Brisbane. The New York branch is affiliated with the Libraries of New York University."

"U.S. hospitals waste thousands of tons of medical supplies every day. This includes unused, sterile medical supplies discarded for regulatory reasons and fully functional equipment. DOC2DOCK collects and redistributes these supplies to match the specific needs of hospitals in the developing world. To achieve this goal, we have built a strong network of medical professionals and volunteers in the U.S. and developing countries to collect, sort, ship and redistribute usable medical supplies and equipment. DOC2DOCK started in 2005 as a commitment to global human health during the inaugural Clinton Global Initiative, which is chaired by President Clinton. So far, our shipments have helped bring hope and care to more than 2 million people in the developing world. And, in the process, reduced waste in the U.S."

News release: "Despite graduating from top universities at rates that far exceed their peers and forming an important part of the talent pipeline for many professions, Asian-Americans remain largely underrepresented in leadership ranks, according to Asians in America: Unleashing the Potential of the ‘Model Minority,’ a new study from the Center for Work-Life Policy. Although Asians are a mere 5 percent of the US population, they are one of the fastest growing minority groups and a vital part of the nation’s talent pipeline. Consider, for instance, the representation of Asians at top schools: they account for 15 to 25 percent of Ivy League enrollment, 24 percent at Stanford and a stunning 46 percent at UC Berkeley. At the same time, Asians are fewer than two percent of Fortune 500 CEOs and corporate officers. How can we understand this disparity? According to the study, what keeps Asians from making it to the top are subtle workplace biases that are masked by the general perception of Asians as a highly qualified, successful “model minority”."

Immigration and Poverty in America's Suburbs - Opportunity and Well-being, Immigration, U.S. Poverty, Race, Ethnicity, Roberto Suro, Jill H. Wilson, Audrey Singer - The Brookings Institution, August 2011: "An analysis of poverty levels among U.S.-born and foreign-born residents in the nation’s 95 largest metropolitan areas in 2000 and 2009 shows that:

"The National Insurance Crime Bureau today Hot Wheels — its list of the 10 most stolen vehicles in the United States. The report examines vehicle theft data submitted by law enforcement to the National Crime Information Center (NCIC) and determines the vehicle make, model, and model year most reported stolen in 2010."

News release: "Dow Jones Indexes, a leading global index provider, today announced the launch of the Dow Jones Islamic Market RBP U.S. 50 Index, a unique gauge designed to measure the largest 50 U.S. stocks ranked by RBP® probabilities supplied by Transparent Value, LLC that have first passed the screens for Shari’ah compliance. RBP®, which stands for Required Business Performance, is calculated by Transparent Value by taking a reverse discounted cash flow approach to determine the future business performance required by a company to support its current stock price. RBP® probabilities measure the likelihood that a company can deliver the required business performance identified by applying the methodology over specified time periods. The Dow Jones Islamic Market RBP U.S. 50 Index is the latest addition to the Dow Jones RBP series of quantitative strategy indexes offered by Dow Jones Indexes and Transparent Value LLC, a New York-based asset management and financial information services company. The Dow Jones RBP Indexes are built upon patent-pending proprietary rules-based analytics supplied by Transparent Value."

Forum Guide to Ensuring Equal Access to Education Websites - Introduction to Electronic Information Accessibility Standards, July 2011

National Center for Education Statistics: "Fewer than one-third of the nation’s students achieve at or above the Proficient level in geography, according to the latest results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP.) Although fourth graders made gains in achievement since 2001, The Nation’s Report Card: Geography 2010 shows that performance by eighth graders remained flat, and achievement by twelfth graders declined from 1994."

• Browse the report online and link to the full data for each figure.
  
• Download a copy of the report to print or share.
  
• Read the statement from Jack Buckley, Commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics.

"The First Command Financial Behaviors Index assesses trends among the American public’s financial behaviors, intentions and attitudes through a monthly survey of approximately 1,000 U.S. consumers, ages 25–70, with annual household incomes of at least $50,000. Survey results, which are reported quarterly, were first compiled in February 2008 and assigned a baseline of 100 points. In subsequent months, consumers’ responses to questions about their financial behaviors, attitudes and intentions may drive the index above or below the baseline. “Positive” or “productive” behaviors, intentions and attitudes — such as increasing savings/investments and reducing personal debt — influence the index upward. “Negative” or “unproductive” behaviors, attitudes and intentions — such as decreasing savings/investments and assuming greater personal debt — influence the index downward."

How Google Dominates Us, James Gleick, Auguat 18, 2011

"The report, Power Sector Development in Europe - Lenders' Perspectives 2011, notes that the European electricity industry will need an estimated EUR 1,900bn investment over the next twenty-five years if it is to meet both increasing electricity demand and ever-tightening environmental standards. Based on interviews with a selection of top European banks, the report concludes that the financial sector is confident that the capital will be available for the numerous, complex projects that need to be undertaken in the coming decades, but only if the project developers address and minimize risks appropriately."

Bennett,Rick, Edward T. O'Neill, Kerre Kammerer, and JD Shipengrover. 2011. mapFAST: A FAST Geographic Authorities Mashup with Google Maps. Code4Lib Journal, 14, 2011-07-25

News release: "Mortgage applications decreased 5.0 percent from one week earlier, according to data from the Mortgage Bankers Association’s Weekly Mortgage Applications Survey for the week ending July 22, 2011. The Market Composite Index, a measure of mortgage loan application volume, decreased 5.0 percent on a seasonally adjusted basis from one week earlier. On an unadjusted basis, the Index decreased 4.9 percent compared with the previous week. The Refinance Index decreased 5.5 percent from the previous week. The seasonally adjusted Purchase Index decreased 3.8 percent from one week earlier. The unadjusted Purchase Index decreased 3.4 percent compared with the previous week and was 2.2 percent higher than the same week one year ago."

NARA Bulletin 2011-04, July 18, 2011. TO: Heads of Federal Agencies; SUBJECT: Guidance on Managing Mixed-Media Files; EXPIRATION DATE: July 31, 2014

News release: "A ground-breaking membership report from OCLC Research suggests that by transforming virtual reference (VR) service encounters into relationship-building opportunities, librarians can better leverage the positive feelings people have for libraries. This is critically important in a crowded online space where the biggest players often don’t have the unique experience and specific strengths offered by librarians. The report — Seeking Synchronicity: Revelations and Recommendations for Virtual Reference — demonstrates that today’s students, scholars and citizens are not just looking to libraries for answers to specific questions—they want partners and guides in a lifelong information-seeking journey. Seeking Synchronicity: Revelations and Recommendations for Virtual Reference, from OCLC Research, in partnership with Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, and additionally funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), distills more than five years of VR research into a readable summary featuring memorable quotes that vividly illustrate very specific and actionable suggestions. Taken from a multiphase research project that included focus group interviews, online surveys, transcript analysis and phone interviews, with VR librarians, users and non-users, these findings are meant to help practitioners develop and sustain VR services and systems. The report asserts that the “R” in “VR” needs to emphasize virtual “Relationships” as well as “Reference.”

"As outlined in the federal agencies’ Final Rule implementing the SAFE Act’s federal registration requirement, certain pieces of federal registrant information will be made publicly available through Consumer Access. Federal registrant information is currently scheduled to be made publicly available through Consumer Access on August 1, 2011, shortly following the end of the federal registration initial transition period. Federal registration information will be displayed in Consumer Access using a format similar to that currently used for state licensing information. Below are examples of how information will be displayed in Consumer Access for both institutions and individual mortgage loan originators, as well as explanations regarding how Consumer Access will derive specific pieces of information.

Pew Research Center: GOP Makes Big Gains among White Voters
Especially among the Young and Poor, July 22, 2011

Flying Blind: How Working Americans View Healthcare Costs in Retirement A Sun Life Financial Unretirement Survey - May 4, 2011

"Science, engineering, and technology permeate nearly every facet of modern life and hold the key to meeting many of humanity's most pressing challenges, both present and future. To address the critical issues of U.S. competitiveness and to better prepare the workforce, Framework for K-12 Science Education proposes a new approach to K-12 science education that will capture students' interest and provide them with the necessary foundational knowledge in the field. Framework for K-12 Science Education outlines a broad set of expectations for students in science and engineering in grades K-12. These expectations will inform the development of new standards for K-12 science education and, subsequently, revisions to curriculum, instruction, assessment, and professional development for educators. This book identifies three dimensions that convey the disciplinary core ideas and practices around which science and engineering education in these grades should be built. These three dimensions are: cross-cutting concepts that unify the study of science and engineering through their common application across these fields; scientific and engineering practices; and core ideas in four disciplinary areas: physical sciences, life sciences, earth and space sciences, and engineering, technology, and the applications of science. The overarching goal is for all high school graduates to have sufficient knowledge of science and engineering to engage in public discussions on science-related issues; be careful consumers of scientific and technological information; and have the skills to enter the careers of their choice."

News release: "The social media market is primed for a new player that allows users to connect with friends, according to the 2011 American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) E-Business Report, produced in partnership with customer experience analytics firm ForeSee Results. Despite a small improvement this year, Facebook (+3% to 66) is the lowest-scoring site, not only in the social media category, but of all measured companies in this report. The survey was conducted last month, before the widespread introduction of Facebook’s biggest competitor, Google+, but Facebook’s low score indicates that Google+ could easily pounce and gain market share if they can provide a superior customer experience."

Google Effects on Memory: Cognitive Consequences of Having Information at Our Fingertips - Betsy Sparrow, Jenny Liu, Daniel M. Wegner. Science DOI: 10.1126/science.1207745, Published Online 14 July 2011. See also Google's Effects on Memory, PBS NewsHour via YouTube.

College students and technology by Aaron Smith, Lee Rainie, Kathryn Zickuhr - July 19, 2011

Poor Economics: rethinking poverty and the ways to end it: "In many countries, a significant percentage of the population survives on just a few dollars a day. Here's a look at the distribution of consumption in several developing nations."

Commentary: "Britain is now enmeshed in a gigantic scandal around privacy invasions by the press and police. It began with revelations about reporters for Rupert Murdoch's British tabloid newspaper News of the World hacking into the voicemail of a murdered young girl, and has expanded as other privacy invasions have come to light."

Via FCW - Federal CIO Vivek Kundra:

• "Build end-to-end digital systems to reduce errors and protect the integrity of the data across the federal enterprise.
  
• Build once, use often.
  
• Tap into the "golden sources" of data. Don’t rely on derivative databases or data derived from other data sources. Go directly to the transactional systems that do the business on a day-to-day basis.
  
• Release data in a machine-readable format and encourage third-party applications.
  
• Employ common data standards. Think about what would have happened if railroads across the country had used different standards in terms of railroad track gauges.
  
• Use simple, upfront data validations.
  
• Release data as close to real time as possible.
  
• Engineer systems to reduce burdens.
  
• Protect privacy and security. This is critical, especially in the age of Facebook and Twitter. You can create a mosaic effect without really thinking about it. It’s one thing to release data when it comes to health care on a state level, and other thing to release it on a zip-code level.
  
• Provide equal access to data and incorporate user feedback on an ongoing basis.

"The .gov reform effort is part of President Obama's Campaign to Cut Waste, identifying unnecessary websites that can be consolidated into other websites to reduce costs and improve the quality of service to the American public. The President signed Executive Order 13571, "Streamlining Service Delivery and Improving Customer Service," April 27, 2011, which requires federal agencies to take specific steps to strengthen customer service, including how they deliver services and information on federal ".gov" websites."

Women in political dynasties: "Ms Yingluck’s victory in Thailand’s general election on July 3rd is the latest example of an intriguing and, it seems, growing trend: for the sisters, daughters and widows of former leaders to take over the family political business on the death, retirement or—in Mr Thaksin’s case—exile of the founder. There are now more than 20 female relatives of former leaders active in national politics around the world. They include three presidents or prime ministers and at least half a dozen leaders of the opposition or presidential candidates (see table included with article). There are no historical numbers for proper comparison, but it is hard to think of another period—certainly no recent one—when so much dynastic authority has been flowing down the female line."

Google Effects on Memory: Cognitive Consequences of Having Information at Our Fingertips. Betsy Sparrow1, Jenny Liu, Daniel M. Wegner. Science DOI: 10.1126/science.1207745

• Children's Television Act: FCC Could Improve Efforts to Oversee Enforcement and Provide Public Information, GAO-11-659, July 14, 2011
• Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands - Status of Transition to Federal Immigration Law, GAO-11-805T, July 14, 2011
• Defense Logistics: Oversight and a Coordinated Strategy Needed to Implement the Army Workload and Performance System, GAO-11-566R, July 14, 2011
• DOD Civilian Personnel: Competency Gap Analyses and Other Actions Needed to Enhance DOD's Strategic Workforce Plans, GAO-11-827T, July 14, 2011
• Dodd-Frank Act: Eleven Agencies' Estimates of Resources for Implementing Regulatory Reform, GAO-11-808T, July 14, 2011
• EPA Health Risk Assessments: Sustained Management and Oversight Key to Overcoming Challenges, GAO-11-824T, July 14, 2011
• Information Technology: Continued Attention Needed to Accurately Report Federal Spending and Improve Management, GAO-11-831T, July 14, 2011
• Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act: Contracts Awarded and Consultants Retained by Federal Departments and Agencies to Assist in Implementing the Act, GAO-11-797R, July 14, 2011.
• DHS Science and Technology: Additional Steps Needed to Ensure Test and Evaluation Requirements Are Met, GAO-11-596, July 14, 2011

Achieving Effective Supervision: An Industry Perspective, "prepared by the Effective Supervision Advisory Group under Mrs Kerstin af Jochnick, Managing Director of the Swedish Bankers’ Association - addresses the issue of how to make supervision more effective both nationally and globally in the light of the financial crisis. It argues that such supervision has a central role in reinforcing and sustaining sound industry practices and in buttressing strengthened regulation and resolution arrangements. It makes it clear that the industry would welcome more intensive, challenging and action-focused supervision and that the industry is prepared to meet the costs of this. It also stresses the major responsibility of the industry to support effective supervision and includes twelve core recommendations to firms aimed at improving the level and nature of engagement with supervisors."

The report Macroprudential Oversight: An Industry Perspective stresses that the Institute of International Finance strongly supports the development of macroprudential oversight and tools but encourages regulators to balance the need for rapid progress with a degree of caution and a willingness to learn and adapt in the light of experience. The report mainly takes the form of a number of guiding principles that the industry believes should be followed in going forward. In particular, it calls for macroprudential authorities in each jurisdiction and effective international coordination; monitoring of the shadow banking system; and the avoidance of over-reliance on a single macroprudential tool such as capital."

"Based on a sample of 415 companies, the latest edition of The Conference Board survey of U.S. salary increase budgets reveals that these budgets will have a median increase of 3.00 percent in 2011, which is modestly higher than the increases of the past two years. The respondents also project that their salary budget increases for 2012 will be 3.00 percent—an indication that the economic recovery has not yet picked up enough strength to substantially raise salary budgets. In addition to examining overall trends, U.S. Salary Increase Budgets for 2012 reports results for 11 different industry categories."

News release: "NRDC's annual survey of water quality and public notification at U.S. beaches finds that the number of beach closings and advisories in 2010 reached 24,091 — the second-highest level since NRDC began tracking these events 21 years ago, confirming that our nation's beaches continue to suffer from bacterial pollution that puts swimmers at risk. Testing the Waters - A Guide to Water Quality at Vacation Beaches, Twenty First Annual Report focuses primarily on bacteria-related beach water quality concerns. This year and last year, the report also highlighted closures, advisories, and notices issued at beaches impacted by last summer's BP oil disaster. From the beginning of the spill until June 15, 2011 there have been a total of 9,474 days of oil-related beach notices, advisories and closures at Gulf Coast beaches due to the spill."

News release: "Adult obesity rates increased in 16 states in the past year and did not decline in any state, according to F as in Fat: How Obesity Threatens America's Future 2011, a report from the Trust for America's Health (TFAH) and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF). Twelve states now have obesity rates above 30 percent. Four years ago, only one state was above 30 percent. The obesity epidemic continues to be most dramatic in the South, which includes nine of the 10 states with the highest adult obesity rates. States in the Northeast and West tend to have lower rates. Mississippi maintained the highest adult obesity rate for the seventh year in a row, and Colorado has the lowest obesity rate and is the only state with a rate under 20 percent. This year, for the first time, the report examined how the obesity epidemic has grown over the past two decades. Twenty years ago, no state had an obesity rate above 15 percent. Today, more than two out of three states, 38 total, have obesity rates over 25 percent, and just one has a rate lower than 20 percent. Since 1995, when data was available for every state, obesity rates have doubled in seven states and increased by at least 90 percent in 10 others. Obesity rates have grown fastest in Oklahoma, Alabama, and Tennessee, and slowest in Washington, D.C., Colorado, and Connecticut."

401(k) Balances and Changes Due to Market Volatility – Data to July 01, 2011

New York Times: "The Federal Aviation Administration has authorized a handful of commercial and charter carriers to use the tablet computer as a so-called electronic flight bag. Private pilots, too, are now carrying iPads, which support hundreds of general aviation apps that simplify preflight planning and assist with in-flight operations...Alaska Airlines received F.A.A. approval in May to permit its pilots to consult digital flight, systems and performance manuals on the iPad — cutting about 25 pounds of paper from each flight bag. The e-manuals include hyperlinks and color graphics to help pilots find information quickly and easily. And pilots do not have to go through the tedium of updating the manuals by swapping out old pages with new ones because updates are downloaded automatically."

Benjamin Rossi - analyst at Basex: "For students, doing research is the bread and butter of their academic life. Conducting research doesn’t just mean searching for information effectively; it means being able to judge the reliability of sources, place information within various contexts, and synthesize different information sources while developing one’s thesis. Encompassing a wide variety of competencies, research is one of the most important skills that students learn in preparation for participation in the knowledge economy. Increasingly, however, students find that the overwhelming abundance of easily accessible but undifferentiated information on the Web hinders their ability to do the kind of deep, exploratory research that broadens their education and hones critical thinking."

The Economist: "...information overload can make people feel anxious and powerless: scientists have discovered that multitaskers produce more stress hormones. Second, overload can reduce creativity. Teresa Amabile of Harvard Business School has spent more than a decade studying the work habits of 238 people, collecting a total of 12,000 diary entries between them. She finds that focus and creativity are connected. People are more likely to be creative if they are allowed to focus on something for some time without interruptions. If constantly interrupted or forced to attend meetings, they are less likely to be creative. Third, overload can also make workers less productive. David Meyer, of the University of Michigan, has shown that people who complete certain tasks in parallel take much longer and make many more errors than people who complete the same tasks in sequence."

New York Times: "A preliminary examination of executive pay in 2010, based on data available as of April 1, found that the paychecks for top American executives were growing again, after shrinking during the 2008-9 recession. But that study, conducted for The New York Times by Equilar, an executive compensation data firm based in Redwood City, Calif., was just an early snapshot, and there were even more riches to come. Some big companies had not yet disclosed their executive compensation. So Sunday Business asked Equilar to run the numbers again. Brace yourself. The final figures show that the median pay for top executives at 200 big companies last year was $10.8 million. That works out to a 23 percent gain from 2009. The earlier study had put the median pay at a none-too-shabby $9.6 million, up 12 percent."

The Economist: "If the weather holds and there are no unforeseen complications, then early in the morning on July 8th a woman and three men will ascend the launch tower at Florida’s Kennedy Space Centre, strap themselves into Atlantis, the last operational space shuttle, and, as the engines ignite, wait for the countdown to reach zero. Burning thousands of litres of rocket fuel every second and blasting superheated gas into the water-filled trench beneath the pad, the engines will kick up the vast gouts of steam and smoke that characterise a rocket launch."

Rudel RA, Gray JM, Engel CL, Rawsthorne TW, Dodson RE, Ackerman JM, et al. 2011. Food Packaging and Bisphenol A and Bis(2-Ethyhexyl) Phthalate Exposure: Findings from a Dietary Intervention. Environ Health Perspect 119:914-920. doi:10.1289/ehp.1003170

Follow up to previous postings on cell phones and radiation levels, a new study - Mobile Phones, Brain Tumours and the Interphone Study: Where Are We Now?

NYT: "Long regarded as a windowless ivory tower, the World Bank is opening its vast vault of information. True, the bank still lends roughly $170 billion annually. But it is increasingly competing for influence and power with Wall Street, national governments and smaller regional development banks, who have as much or more money to offer. It is no longer the only game in town...For more than a year, the bank has been releasing its prized data sets, currently giving public access to more than 7,000 that were previously available only to some 140,000 subscribers — mostly governments and researchers, who pay to gain access to it. Those data sets contain all sorts of information about the developing world, whether workaday economic statistics — gross domestic product, consumer price inflation and the like — or arcana like how many women are breast-feeding their children in rural Peru. It is a trove unlike anything else in the world, and, it turns out, highly valuable. For whatever its accuracy or biases, this data essentially defines the economic reality of billions of people and is used in making policies and decisions that have an enormous impact on their lives."

News release: "The United Nations has added cultural sites in Ukraine, Mongolia, France and Nicaragua to the World Heritage List, closing out this year’s selection with a total of 25 sites, the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) reported today. UNESCO named the newly protected sites as the residence of Bukovinian and Dalmatian Metropolitans in Ukraine, the petroglyphs of the Mongolian Altai, the Causses and the Cévennes, Mediterranean agro-pastoral landscape in France and León Cathedral in Nicaragua. A total of 35 nominated sites were reviewed by the World Heritage Committee, which has been holding its 35th session at UNESCO’s headquarters in Paris since last week."

News release: "CoreLogic, a leading provider of information, analytics and business services, today released its May Home Price Index (HPI) which shows that home prices in the U.S. increased on a month-over-month basis. According to the CoreLogic HPI, national home prices, including distressed sales, increased by 0.8 percent in May 2011 compared to April 2011, the second consecutive month-over-month increase. On a year-over-year basis, home prices declined by 7.4 percent in May 2011 compared to May 2010 after declining by 6.7 percent* in April 2011 compared to April 2010. Excluding distressed sales, year-over-year prices declined by 0.4 percent in May 2011 compared to May 2010 and by 0.8* percent in April 2011 compared to April 2010. Distressed sales include short sales and real estate owned (REO) transactions."

Global Business Failure Report, June 2011:

• "Business failures have dropped globally, but remain elevated compared with pre-crisis levels.
  
• Failures decreased particularly strongly in Q4 2010 in emerging economies such as South Africa, Brazil, Poland and Singapore.
  
• The Nordic Region was the only region to record an increase in insolvencies in Q4.
  
• There is a rising risk that the global economic slowdown will lead to a reversal of the recent
  downward trend in insolvency levels towards the end of 2011.
  
• Rising insolvency levels: Austria, Australia, Hungary, Switzerland, Taiwan, UK.
  
• Falling insolvency levels: Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Poland, South Africa, US"

Bankruptcies and Business Failures are lower this year: "Business bankruptcies and failures continued to decline this year; however, the pace was slower than in Q4 2011. Overall, business bankruptcies and failures are lower this year in the U.S. and around the world. This is a confidence booster for many businesses and the growth in the small business segment - firms with fewer than 500 employees - is another driver of confidence for the U.S. economy. Both business bankruptcies and business failures continued to decline in Q1 2011, with business failures declining at a slower pace. Business bankruptcies, as reported by the U.S. courts, fell by 8.4%, whereas business failures fell by only 2.2% during the 12 months ending March 2011. Business failures better reflect the state of the economy as formal bankruptcies tend to understate the overall failure rate by not capturing hidden failures."

eFinancialCareers: "With on-the job training and incredible access, the prototypical Wall Street summer associate has one goal in mind - return to campus with an offer. Capturing that prize may be elusive, about half (49%) of Wall Street firms expect to extend offers to 10 percent or less of their summer associates. That's according to the nearly 160 firms who've shared their expectations on the 2011 class with eFinancialCareers – many of whom increased their class size this year as compared to last summer."

Official Google Blog: "Among the most basic of human needs is the need to connect with others. With a smile, a laugh, a whisper or a cheer, we connect with others every single day. Today, the connections between people increasingly happen online. Yet the subtlety and substance of real-world interactions are lost in the rigidness of our online tools. In this basic, human way, online sharing is awkward. Even broken. And we aim to fix it. We’d like to bring the nuance and richness of real-life sharing to software. We want to make Google better by including you, your relationships, and your interests. And so begins the Google+ project..."

BBC Plant finder - "Right plant, right place - Look up detailed information about thousands of plants using our searchable database. You will find descriptions of the plants and tips about growing them."

News release: "Moody's Investors Service says that US commercial real estate prices, as measured by Moody's/REAL National -- All Property Price Index (CPPI), declined in April, by 3.7%, bringing the index down to its lowest level since its inception. However, the price recovery that began a year ago among so-called "trophy properties" in the largest markets continued unabated. The CPPI saw its fifth consecutive decline, with distressed prices helping negate the price recovery seen in larger, higher quality assets, resulting in a continued decline in the overall market."

Scott Hoyt: "U.S. consumers cut spending dramatically during the recession. Even as growth has returned, the level of spending remains low and there is much pent-up demand. One constraint has been the lack of borrowing. Consumer liabilities continue to decline dramatically. A large portion of this decline is due to lenders writing off debt as uncollectible, but even adjusting for write-offs, consumers have been cutting debt, in sharp contrast with the prerecession years when debt increased to finance consumption. One requirement for the reacceleration in spending growth later this year and strong growth in the next few years is the gradual return of borrowing, and this is happening. A 2½-year decline in credit card balances is gradually ending. The Federal Reserve’s seasonally adjusted revolving credit data, primarily credit cards, showed small gains in balances in December and March."

Electric Power Research Institute: "Late in 2010 the first mass-produced electric vehicles hit dealer showrooms, bringing car buyers a new, electric option. Electric cars offer performance, safety and versatility and can be charged from the electric grid, providing convenient, low- cost, at-home charging. At the U.S. national average price of 11.5 cents per kilowatt-hour, buying electricity is approximately equivalent to buying gasoline at $1 per gallon. Displacing gasoline with electricity also lowers emissions and decreases petroleum use. On a typical day half of all drivers log 25 miles or less, so electric vehicles—if widely adopted—could reduce petroleum fuel consumption by 70 to 90%. One challenge for consumers is to understand their driving needs and how each vehicle option can meet their specific requirements. This brochure reviews three options and some essential points for buyers to know about each."

CFO Insights: "At the onset of 2011, KPMG International and CFO Research Services commenced a two-phase survey to examine the outlook and perspectives of senior finance executives in the retail, food, drink, and consumer goods sectors, on the key issues affecting their industry. Highlights from the study include:

• Most companies report resilience to the impact of the MENA and Japan crises.
  
• Consumer demand is expected to rise and company performance will improve in 2011.
  
• Rising merchandise and input costs—coupled with pricing pressure from competitors—place profit margins at risk.
  
• Finance executives see their firms in a healthy financial and operating condition, and see opportunities for growth, expansion and increased efficiency.

EWG's Shopper's Guide to Pesticides in Produce: "Eat your fruits and vegetables! The health benefits of a diet rich in fruits and vegetables outweigh the risks of pesticide exposure. Use EWG's Shopper's Guide to Pesticides to reduce your exposures as much as possible, but eating conventionally-grown produce is far better than not eating fruits and vegetables at all. The Shopper's Guide to Pesticide in Produce will help you determine which fruits and vegetables have the most pesticide residues and are the most important to buy organic. You can lower your pesticide intake substantially by avoiding the 12 most contaminated fruits and vegetables and eating the least contaminated produce."

News release: "Existing-home sales were down in May as temporary factors and financing problems weighed on the market, according to the National Association of Realtors®. Existing-home sales1, which are completed transactions that include single-family, townhomes, condominiums and co-ops, fell 3.8 percent to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 4.81 million in May from a downwardly revised 5.00 million in April, and are 15.3 percent below a 5.68 million pace in May 2010 when sales were surging to beat the deadline for the home buyer tax credit. Lawrence Yun, NAR chief economist, said temporary factors held back the market in May, as implied from prior data on contract signings. “Spiking gasoline prices along with widespread severe weather hurt house shopping in April, leading to soft figures for actual closings in May,” he said. “Current housing market activity indicates a very slow pace of broader economic activity, but recent reversals in oil prices are likely to mitigate the impact going forward. The pace of sales activity in the second half of the year is expected to be stronger than the first half, and will be much stronger than the second half of last year.”

News release: "Major project to digitise up to 40 million pages from 1700-1870, from the French Revolution to the end of slavery - The British Library and Google today announced a partnership to digitise 250,000 out-of-copyright books from the Library’s collections. Opening up access to one of the greatest collections of books in the world, this demonstrates the Library’s commitment, as stated in its 2020 Vision, to increase access to anyone who wants to do research. Selected by the British Library and digitised by Google, both organisations will work in partnership over the coming years to deliver this content free through Google Books and the British Library’s website. Google will cover all digitisation costs."

"How do the region's chief executives stack up when it comes to their pay? For an answer, Capital Business commissioned Equilar, an executive compensation research firm, to analyze the annual pay of CEOs at 100 of the area's largest public companies. Equilar examined the compensation totals for the chief executives serving as of the close of the companies' most recent completed fiscal year ended on or after March 31, 2010, which means in some cases an executive may have since moved on. So consider this listing a snapshot in time."

Social networking sites and our lives How people’s trust, personal relationships, and civic and political involvement are connected to their use of social networking sites and other technologies, June 16, 2011

Short- and long-term benefits of cognitive training. Free via Open Access: OA - Combined PDF of article and Supporting Information - Susanne M. Jaeggi1, Martin Buschkuehl1, John Jonides, and Priti Shah - Department of Psychology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI. Published online before print June 13, 2011, doi: 10.1073/pnas.1103228108.

To Move or Not To Move: The Economics of Cloud Computing - Byung Chul, Tak Bhuvan Urgaonkar, Anand Sivasubramaniam, Computer Systems Laboratory Department of Computer Science and Engineering, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA

Emerging Trends in Real Estate® 2011, Urban Land Institute, PricewaterhouseCoopers

The Information Needs of Communities - The changing media landscape in a broadband age, Steven Waldman and the Working Group on Information Needs of Communities, June 2011

13% of online adults use Twitter Half of Twitter users access the service “on the go” via mobile phone, Aaron Smith, Senior Research Specialist, 6/1/2011

Bloomberg BusinessWeek: "Americans might complain about the high cost of living, but overseas the U.S. dollar is even weaker. Find out where it buys the least."

• World's Most Expensive Cities 2011
  
• 20 Countries With the Highest Proportion of Millionaires
  
• America's Most Expensive Blocks

News release: "NOAA announced an $11.5 million, three-year award to Earth Resources Technologies, Inc. for cloud-based unified messaging services. The agency-wide transition will modernize e-mail and calendar infrastructure, integrate collaborative tools and facilitate synchronization with mobile devices to better support NOAA’s mission and its nationwide workforce. As the largest federal agency to adopt cloud technology to date, NOAA will migrate 25,000 mailboxes to the cloud rather than utilizing in-house servers. NOAA’s decision to pursue the cloud solution supports the Obama administration’s direction to pursue a “cloud first” approach. “The cost to the taxpayer will be 50 percent less than an in-house solution,” said NOAA Chief Information Officer Joseph Klimavicz. “As the new standard, cloud computing has great value allowing us to ramp up quickly, avoid redundancy and provide new services and capabilities to large groups of customers.”

More Food Banks Offering Fresh Fruits, Vegetables - Melinda Burns, Miller-McCune

Announcement by Eva Galperin: "Back in December of 2010, Facebook debuted its tag suggestion feature, which works by using facial recognition technology to examine photos in which you’ve already been tagged, and then creating what Facebook calls your “photo summary” or “photo comparison information,” or what we’ll call your “facial fingerprint.” Using this information, FB suggests your name to your friends when they upload a photo of you, and invites them to tag you in that photo. Over the last few months, Facebook has been slowly rolling this feature out to all of its users, which caught the attention of security firm Sophos, The New York Times, and the European Union, which has launched a probe to investigate the new feature."

PricewaterhouseCoopers’ Health Research Institute, Health Reform Prospering in a post-reform world, June 2001

Connaway, Lynn Silipigni, Timothy J. Dickey, and Marie L. Radford. 2011. "'If It is Too Inconvenient, I'm Not Going After It.:' Convenience as a Critical Factor in Information-seeking Behaviors." Library and Information Science Research, 33: 179-190. doi:10.1016/j.lisr.2010.12.002 Pre-print.

environment 360: "For millennia, the blanket of ice covering the Arctic Ocean protected the shore from damaging storms. But as that ice buffer disappears, increasingly powerful storm surges are eroding the coastline and sending walls of seawater inland, devastating Arctic ecosystems that support abundant wildlife..." by Ed Struzik

Follow up to recent posting, World Health Organization: Radio frequency electromagnetic fields are possibly carcinogenic, news that highlights findings:

• Some cell phones safer than others, tests find
  
• CNET: Cell phone radiation levels - by Nicole Lee, Kent German
  
• NYT: Piercing the Fog Around Cellphones and Cancer, By Tara Parker Pope

What's it Worth? The Economic Value of College Majors - Anthony P. Carnevale, Jeff Strohl, Michelle Melton - Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce, May 2011

News release: "Propelled by growth in nearly every region, global wealth continued a solid recovery in 2010, increasing by 8.0 percent, or $9 trillion, to a record of $121.8 trillion.1 That level was about $20 trillion above where it stood just two years prior during the depths of the financial crisis, according to a new study by The Boston Consulting Group (BCG). Findings from the study appear in BCG’s eleventh annual Global Wealth report titled Shaping a New Tomorrow: How to Capitalize on the Momentum of Change, which was released today at a press briefing in New York. Among the other key findings:

• North America had the largest absolute gain of any regional wealth market in assets under management (AuM), at $3.6 trillion, and the second-highest growth rate, at 10.2 percent. Its $38.2 trillion in AuM made it the world’s richest region, with nearly one-third of global wealth.
  
• In Europe, wealth grew at a below-average rate of 4.8 percent, but the region still had a gain of $1.7 trillion in AuM.
  
• Wealth grew fastest in Asia-Pacific (excluding Japan), at a 17.1 percent rate. In the Middle East and Africa, growth was somewhat above the global average, at 8.6 percent. In Latin America, wealth grew by 8.2 percent. Together, these three regions accounted for 24.4 percent of global wealth in 2010, up from 20.9 percent in 2008."

WSJ [includes data chart[: "Auto sales dropped in May, but the prices consumers paid for new cars were higher than ever. According to estimates by TrueCar.com, an industry research and forecasting company, the average transaction price for passenger vehicles in the U.S. totaled $29,817 in May, an increase of $608 or 2.1% compared with a year ago and up $215 from last month. Higher prices in part reflect a tighter supply of vehicles and a trend toward cars with more extra-cost equipment."

News release: "The National Academies—National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, Institute of Medicine, and National Research Council—are committed to distributing their reports to as wide an audience as possible. Since 1994 we have offered “Read for Free” options for almost all our titles. In addition, we have been offering free downloads of most of our titles to everyone and of all titles to readers in the developing world. We are now going one step further. Effective June 2nd, PDFs of reports that are currently for sale on the National Academies Press (NAP) Website and PDFs associated with future reports* will be offered free of charge to all Web visitors. For more than 140 years, the NAS, NAE, IOM, and NRC have been advising the nation on issues of science, technology, and medicine. Like no other collection of organizations, the Academies enlist the nation’s foremost scientists, engineers, health professionals, and other experts to address the scientific and technical aspects of society’s most pressing problems. The results of their work are authoritative and independent studies published by the National Academies Press. NAP produces more than 200 books a year on a wide range of topics in science, engineering, and health, capturing the best-informed views on important issues."

Official Google Blog - Mining patterns in search data with Google Correlate: "...[Using] Google Correlate, which we’re launching today on Google Labs...you can upload your own data series and see a list of search terms whose popularity best corresponds with that real world trend. In the example below, we uploaded official flu activity data from the U.S. CDC over the last several years and found that people search for terms like [cold or flu] in a similar pattern to actual flu rates. Finding out these correlated terms is how we built Google Flu Trends.

The costly war on cancer: "Cancer is not one disease. It is many. Yet oncologists have long used the same blunt weapons to fight different types of cancer: cut the tumour out, zap it with radiation or blast it with chemotherapy that kills good cells as well as bad ones. New cancer drugs are changing this. Scientists are now attacking specific mutations that drive specific forms of cancer. A breakthrough came more than a decade ago when Genentech, a Californian biotech firm, launched a drug that attacks breast-cancer cells with too much of a certain protein, HER2. In 2001 Novartis, a Swiss drugmaker, won approval for Gleevec, which treats chronic myeloid leukaemia by attacking another abnormal protein. Other drugs take different tacks. Avastin, introduced in America in 2004 by Genentech, starves tumours by striking the blood vessels that feed them. (Roche, another Swiss drug giant, bought Genentech and its busy cancer pipeline in 2009.) These new drugs sell well. Last year Gleevec grossed $4.3 billion. Roche’s Herceptin (the HER2 drug) and Avastin did even better: $6 billion and $7.4 billion respectively. Cancer drugs could rescue big drugmakers from a tricky situation: more than $50 billion-worth of wares will lose patent protection in the next three years."

Federal Computer Week: "NASA is the first federal agency to venture into creating an aggregation network on the SlideShare Web platform, officials announced May 16. The NASA Universe network that started May 16 on SlideShare provides links to the agency’s videos, slide presentations and other documents shared from SlideShare channels sponsored by NASA headquarters and its 10 field centers. NASA Universe takes advantage of the new aggregation network technology, which SlideShare recently established and currently customizes for a handful of clients, including NASA, IBM and Dell. The SlideShare networks automatically and continuously aggregate content from many channels. NASA headquarters and the field centers each has its own channel on the site feeding documents into NASA Universe."

Via WSJ: "This year, the government will spend $80 billion on IT, at agencies as varied as the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Department of Health and Human Services, and on non-classified sections of the US Department of Defense [see Federal Cloud Computing Strategy Published]. As slices of government spending go, this is not huge, amounting to about 2 percent of the federal budget, but not trivial either. As has usually been the case, the government spends more (about $3.8 trillion in 2011) than it brings in via tax revenue (about $2.2 trillion in 2011). With Congress and the President wrestling over extending the debt ceiling, every dollar spent becomes a politically-charged particle of a wider debate over the appropriate role of government in our society...A keystone of Vivek Kundra [Chief Information Officer of the United States], is to push federal agencies to embrace, where possible and appropriate, the cost-savings and efficiency that come from cloud computing. Today he’s released exclusively to AllThingsD a list of 78 different government projects and services that have been identified for a shift to the cloud. Requests for proposals–RFPs, the documents through which government agencies seek bids from the private sector–are either already written or soon to be released." The list is embedded in this article using Scribd.

News release: "After two consecutive years of declining pay, 2010 saw a return to increased pay for many CEOs. Equilar's recent research showed a 28.2 percent increase in median pay for chief executives in the S&P 500. Small- and mid-cap CEOs also saw their pay rebound by over 20 percent from 2009 to 2010. In all three S&P groups, cash bonuses saw the highest percentage increase of all the components, expanding more from 2009 to 2010 than salary, equity, or perks. To discover some of the reasons for the bonus increase, Equilar studied annual cash incentive plans and their payouts among CEOs in the S&P 500 for 2009 and 2010. Researchers took the value of the annual cash incentive payout from the Summary Compensation Table (SCT) and compared it to the target values disclosed in the firm's most recent Grants of Plan-Based Awards Table (GPBAT). Although target values remained flat, payouts increased substantially, as goals (particularly those related to company earnings) proved much easier to hit."

Women's Health Care Chartbook - Key Findings from the Kaiser Women's Health Study, May 2011: "While most women in the U.S. enjoy good health, one third report that they live with a chronic health problem and one in four report depression or anxiety. As women age, they are more likely to experience chronic health problems and report fair or poor health.

• "Eight in 10 women between 18 and 64 report excellent, very good, or good health. However, a sizable minority—nearly
  one in five (18%)—are in fair or poor health, which is a good predictor of need for health care services. This proportion
  increases with age, to over one-quarter (29%) of women ages 50 to 64 reporting fair or poor health.
  
• More than one-third of women (35%), have a chronic condition that requires ongoing medical attention, such as
  diabetes or hypertension. Even among younger women, approximately one in 10 women of reproductive age (18 to 44 years) say they have been diagnosed with arthritis (9%), hypertension (11%), or high cholesterol (9%), and by the time women reach their middle years (45 to 64 years), these rates triple to 39%, 36%, and 34% respectively."

Trends over 5 Decades in U.S. Occupation-Related Physical Activity and Their Associations with Obesity Church TS, Thomas DM, Tudor-Locke C, Katzmarzyk PT, Earnest CP, et al. (2011) PLoS ONE 6(5): e19657. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0019657: "Analysis of energy expenditure for occupations in U.S. private industry since 1960 using data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Mean body weight was derived from the U.S. National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys (NHANES). In the early 1960’s almost half the jobs in private industry in the U.S. required at least moderate intensity physical activity whereas now less than 20% demand this level of energy expenditure. Since 1960 the estimated mean daily energy expenditure due to work related physical activity has dropped by more than 100 calories in both women and men. Energy balance model predicted weights based on change in occupation-related daily energy expenditure since 1960 for each NHANES examination period closely matched the actual change in weight for 40–50 year old men and women. For example from 1960–62 to 2003–06 we estimated that the occupation-related daily energy expenditure decreased by 142 calories in men. Given a baseline weight of 76.9 kg in 1960–02, we estimated that a 142 calories reduction would result in an increase in mean weight to 89.7 kg, which closely matched the mean NHANES weight of 91.8 kg in 2003–06. The results were similar for women."

Journalist's Resource - Research strategy guide: "Knowing how to conduct research efficiently and effectively is a critical skill for journalists — especially in the information age. It is, like other facets of the profession such as interviewing, a matter of practice and establishing good habits. And once you find a successful routine for information-gathering, it will pay dividends time and again."

Official Google Blog: "To help solve these problems, we began testing a mortgage comparison tool in 2009 and have added other financial products such as credit cards, CDs, checking, and savings accounts. Today, we’re rolling these tools into one place: Google Advisor, a site designed to help you quickly find relevant financial products from many providers and compare them side-by-side. Google Advisor is currently only available in the U.S."

SearchEngineLand: "Google’s ambitious effort to digitize the world’s newspaper archives and make them available online has come to an end. The project launched in 2008, and it currently has digitized material from what looks like about 2,000 newspapers — including the Milwaukee Sentinel, whose July 21, 1969 front page is shown at right."

News release: "The latest Broadband Progress Report to Congress from the Federal Communications Commission reveals that approximately 26 million Americans, mostly in rural communities located in every region of the country, are denied access to the jobs and economic opportunity made possible by broadband. While the infrastructure of high-speed Internet is unavailable to those Americans, the FCC report also finds that approximately one-third of Americans do not subscribe to broadband, even when it's available. This suggests that barriers to adoption such as cost, low digital literacy, and concerns about privacy remain too high. The Report also notes limited broadband capacity for schools and libraries as a further indicator that broadband is not being reasonably and timely deployed and is not available to all Americans. Without action by the FCC in partnership with the states and the private sector, prospects for broadband service in many of the areas cited in the Report will remain unacceptably low. The Report finds the problem especially acute among low-income Americans, African-Americans, Hispanics, seniors, and residents of Tribal areas. Congress recognized the importance of broadband in Section 706 of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which directs the FCC to take immediate action to accelerate broadband deployment when it is not "reasonable and timely."

Via LLRX: "Link Rot" and Legal Resources on the Web: A 2011 Analysis by the Chesapeake Digital Preservation Group - Sarah Rhodes describes and documents the work of the Chesapeake Digital Preservation Group's fourth annual investigation of link rot among the original URLs for online law and policy-related materials archived though the group's efforts. Link rot" is used to describe a URL that no longer provides direct access to files matching the content originally harvested from the URL. The Chesapeake Group focuses primarily on the preservation of Web-published legal materials, which often disappear as Web site content is rearranged or deleted over time. In the four years since the program began, the Chesapeake Group has built a digital archive collection comprising more than 7,400 digital items and 3,200 titles, all of which were originally posted to the Web.

Roadmap for the Digital City - Achieving New York City's Digital Future - The City of New York, May 2011

Using Online Tools to Engage – and be Engaged by – The Public: While all federal agencies have developed “open government plans,” many managers find themselves unfamiliar with what tactics and tools work best, under different scenarios. Matt Leighninger, IBM Deliberative Democracy Consortium

"Because we believe that Internet censorship is not only against the basic purpose of the Internet, which is to let people communicate what the want to with the people they want to communicate with, but also fundamentally against the universal right to freedom of opinion and expression [which] includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive, and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers (UDHR, Article 19), we offer you here "How to bypass Internet Censorship". This book, How to bypass Internet Censorship. will not only help you find your way in the diversity of tools and techniques that allow you to defeat Internet censorship, but will also tell you more about how censorship works behind the curtains. You will also learn about the risks that may be linked to the use of such tools, and help you evaluate and mitigate them thanks to encryption or anonymization techniques."

"A recent national survey of 2000 representative Americans found that very large majorities (85 percent) are concerned about gas prices, think it important to reduce oil consumption (87 percent), and believe it important to increase fuel economy standards (75 percent). The survey also revealed that most Republicans, as well as most Democrats, agree that the federal government should require car companies to meet an average 60 miles-per-gallon (mpg) standard by 2025 with a five-year payback period (lower fuel costs pay for higher car costs). The survey, which is analyzed in a report entitled Rising Gasoline Prices and Households Expenditures: Will Policymakers Get Serious About Ending Our “Addiction to Oil” by Supporting a 60 Mile Per gallon Standard, was commissioned by Consumer Federation of America (CFA) and undertaken by Opinion Research Corp. on April 14-18, 2011. The margin of error for the double sample of 2000 is plus or minus two percentage points."

Building a Collaborative Digital Collection, a Necessary Evolution in Libraries, Michelle M. Wu, Georgetown University Law Center, Georgetown Public Law Research Paper No. 11-47, Law Library Journal, Forthcoming

"The Economic Complexity Observatory is a multidisciplinary effort between the Macro Connections group at the MIT Media Lab and the Center for International Development at Harvard University. The goal of the observatory is to develop new tools that can help visualize and make sense of large volumes of data that are relevant for macroeconomic development decision making. The official launch of the observatory is scheduled for October 2011...we are offering limited access to some of the apps we are developing through the following interactive feature.

News release: "RealtyTrac®, the leading online marketplace for foreclosure properties, released its U.S. Foreclosure Market Report™ for April 2011, which shows foreclosure filings — default notices, scheduled auctions and bank repossessions — were reported on 219,258 U.S. properties in April, a 9 percent decrease from March and a 34 percent decrease from April 2010. The report also shows one in every 593 U.S. housing units received a foreclosure filing during April 2011. “Foreclosure activity decreased on an annual basis for the seventh straight month in April, bringing foreclosure activity to a 40-month low,” said James J. Saccacio, chief executive officer of RealtyTrac. “This slowdown continues to be largely the result of massive delays in processing foreclosures rather than the result of a housing recovery that is lifting people out of foreclosure."

News release: "Scholars, artists and other individuals around the world will enjoy free access to online images of millions of objects housed in Yale's museums, archives, and libraries thanks to a new "Open Access" policy that the University announced today. Yale is the first Ivy League university to make its collections accessible in this fashion, and already more than 250,000 images are available through a newly developed collective catalog. The goal of the new policy is to make high quality digital images of Yale's vast cultural heritage collections in the public domain openly and freely available. As works in these collections become digitized, the museums and libraries will make those images that are in the public domain freely accessible. In a departure from established convention, no license will be required for the transmission of the images and no limitations will be imposed on their use. The result is that scholars, artists, students, and citizens the world over will be able to use these collections for study, publication, teaching and inspiration."

Australia Trove: "Find and get over 238,389,330 (and counting) Australian and online resources: books, images, historic newspapers, maps, music, archives and more."

Via Rolling Stone - Listen to The Cars' First Album in 24 Years

"Can digital journalism be profitable? What's making money, what isn't, and why? A new report from Columbia University faculty members Bill Grueskin, academic dean of the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, and Ava Seave, principal at Quantum Media and adjunct professor at the Columbia Business School, addresses these questions about the financial state of digital journalism. The report provides the most comprehensive analysis to date of the business challenges that for-profit news organizations face with their digital ventures. The report, The Story So Far: What We Know About the Business of Digital Journalism, is being issued by the school's Tow Center for Digital Journalism, which is committed to the research and advancement of journalism on digital platforms."

"Whether renting is better than buying depends on many factors, particularly how fast prices and rents rise and how long you stay in your home. Compare the costs of buying and renting a home in the calculator below. Click the advanced settings button to change inputs such as your rate of return on investments, condo/common fees and your tax bracket."

American Bankers Association: "Banks increased farm and ranch lending in 2010, providing the majority of all farm credit, according to the American Bankers Association Center for Agricultural & Rural Banking’s annual Farm Bank Performance Review. In 2010, the U.S. banking industry held $127.4 billion in farm loans, which includes $68.7 billion in small farms loans with $22.7 billion of that in very small farm loans, according to the report. In 2009, the banking industry held $126 billion in farm loans. The number of small farm loans in 2010 reached nearly 1.2 million, with the vast majority – almost 900,000 – under $100,000."

"The Wall Street Journal CEO Compensation Study was conducted by Hay Group, a management-consulting firm. The study analyzes CEO pay from the biggest 350 U.S. public companies by revenue that filed their definitive proxy statements between May 1, 2010, and April 30, 2011.
Survey Methodology & Terms Definitions / Footnotes

"Rising employee turnover intentions mirror employer concerns over retaining critical talent: A stronger economy may actually be fueling a growing concern among employers about retaining top talent, according to the results of a new Deloitte study. With the economy improving, nearly two out of three (65 percent) employees surveyed are actively testing the job market, according to the Deloitte study, Talent Edge 2020: Building the Recovery Together—What Talent Expects and How Leaders Are Responding. Despite the sobering news, dissatisfied employees are transparent about their leading turnover drivers, providing executives and talent managers with a clear picture of the most effective employee retention strategies. When asked to list their top three retention incentives, 53 percent of the respondents ranked promotion/job advancement first, followed by increased compensation at 39 percent, and additional bonuses or other financial incentives at 34 percent. Boosting employee support/recognition from their managers, a non-financial incentive, was also ranked as an effective retention tactic by a strong 30 percent of the surveyed employees."

Release of Faculty-Productivity Data Roils U. of Texas, By Audrey Williams June, Chronicle of Higher Education

A History of the Library as Seen Through Notable Researchers by Thomas G. Lannon, Assistant Curator, Manuscripts & Archives Division, May 2, 2011

Nearly 100 Fantastic Pieces of Journalism by Conor Friedersdorf, an associate editor of The Atlantic and founding editor of The Best Of Journalism

Via Politico: "Profits of the 500 Largest U.S. Corporations Soar by 81% ($318 Billion), the Third Largest Percentage Gain in List History ...Wal-Mart holds the number one spot for the second year in a row ...Exxon Mobil leads profits with $30 billion, for the 8th year in row. ... FORTUNE editors write, 'We've rarely seen such a stark gulf between the fortunes of the 500 and those of ordinary Americans... The profits derived partly from productivity gains, including workforce reductions. And many 500 companies are growing faster overseas than in the U.S."

"Interestingly, absorption seems to be best if the sweetener contains both glucose and fructose. A 2008 study of cyclists found that if they downed a sports drink sweetened with glucose during a two-hour bout of moderate pedaling, they rode faster during a subsequent time trial than riders who had drunk only water. But if the sports drink contained both glucose and fructose (in a two-to-one ratio), the riders were 8 percent faster in the time trial than those drinking glucose-sweetened fluids alone. (Most bottled sports drinks on the American market are sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup, so contain glucose and fructose in a closer to one-to-one ratio.)" [Link]

"Freedom of the Press 2011 identifies the greatest threats to independent media in 196 countries and territories. Released on May 2 as part of the UNESCO World Press Freedom Day celebration in Washington, D.C., the report shows that global media freedom has reached a new low point, contributing to an environment in which only one in every six people live in countries with a Free press. In 2010, there were particularly worrisome trends in the Middle East and the Americas, while improvements were noted in sub-Saharan Africa. Below are several critical tools to highlight data from the annual index of global press freedom, and to help explain the newest findings in their historical context."

"The International Research Portal is a collaboration of national and other archival institutions with records that pertain to Nazi-Era cultural property. These archival institutions, along with expert national and international organizations, are working together to extend public access to the widely-dispersed records through a single internet portal. The portal will enable families to research their losses, provenance researchers to locate important documentation, and historians to study newly accessible materials on the history of this period. This collaborative project was established to fulfill the 1998 Washington Conference Principles on Nazi-Confiscated Art, the 2000 Vilnius Forum Declaration and the 2009 Terezin Declaration, in particular on the importance of making all such records publicly accessible. The portal links researchers to archival materials consisting of descriptions of records and, in many cases, digital images of the records that relate to cultural property that was stolen, looted, seized, forcibly sold, or otherwise lost during the Nazi-era. Cultural property documented in these records covers a broad range from artworks to books and libraries, religious objects, antiquities, archival documents, carvings, silver and more."

Via TPMMuckraker: "Until last night, Twitter use @ReallyVirtual had fewer than 1,000 followers. Yesterday he was Tweeting about a strange event in his neighborhood in Abbottabad, Pakistan. Turns out he was unknowingly chronicling the undercover raid which killed Osama bin Laden, as it happened. "ReallyVirtual", who identifies himself as Sohaib Athar, says he's an "IT consultant taking a break from the rat-race by hiding in the mountains with his laptops."

U.S. Public Libraries and the Use of Web Technologies, 2010 - April 2011, Zeth Lietzau, Jamie Helgren. This study was funded through the Library Services and Technology Act (LSTA) by the Colorado State Library, Colorado Department of Education.

DOJ OIG: The Federal Bureau of Investigation's Ability to Address the National Security Cyber Intrusion Threat (Redacted Version), Audit Report 11-22, April 2011

"iNaturalist.org is a place where you can record what you see in nature, meet other nature lovers, and learn about the natural world. From hikers to hunters, birders to beach-combers, the world is filled with naturalists, and many of us record what we find. What if all those observations could be shared online? You might discover someone who finds beautiful wildflowers at your favorite birding spot, or learn about the birds you see on the way to work. If enough people recorded their observations, it would be like a living record of life on Earth that scientists and land managers could use to monitor changes in biodiversity, and that anyone could use to learn more about nature. That's the vision behind iNaturalist.org. So if you like recording your findings from the outdoors, or if you just like learning about life, join us!"

Brynjolfsson, Erik, Hitt, Lorin M. and Kim, Heekyung Hellen, Strength in Numbers: How Does Data-Driven Decisionmaking Affect Firm Performance? (April 22, 2011).