Search Results from beSpacific
Social Transmission and Viral Culture, by Jonah Berger, assistant professor of Marketing and Katherine L. Milkman, assistant professor of Operations and Information Management at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. "People often share news, opinions, and information, and social transmission...
February 05, 2010 - Al Qaeda and Affiliates: Historical Perspective, Global Presence, and Implications for U.S. Policy "Al Qaeda (AQ) has evolved into a significantly different terrorist organization than the one that perpetrated the September 11, 2001, attacks. At the...
News release: "Public health and environmental advocates faced off against household cleaning giants Procter & Gamble, Colgate-Palmolive, Church and Dwight and Reckitt-Benckiser in a Manhattan court today in a fight for transparency about the toxic chemicals in cleaning products. The...
"Science Fair season is rapidly approaching, and Cool Science can help! A good science fair project begins with an understanding of the scientific method and ends with sure-fire ways to communicate science research. At Cool Science, you can find a...
Ballistic Missile Defense Review Report, February 2010 "The Department of Defense conducted the first-ever Ballistic Missile Defense (BMD) Review from March 2009 through January 2010. Mandated by Congress, and guided by a Presidential directive, the review comprehensively considered U.S. BMD...
NASA: Key Management and Program Challenges, GAO-10-387T, February 03, 2010: "The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is in the midst of many changes and one of the most challenging periods in its history. The space shuttle is slated to...
News release, U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood: “I want to encourage owners of any recalled Toyota models to contact their local dealer and get their vehicles fixed as soon as possible. NHTSA will continue to hold Toyota’s feet to the...
News release: "As part of President Obama’s commitment to more effective and open government, the public can more quickly access federal regulations at Regulations.gov, thanks to comments received during the Regulations.gov Exchange online forum held last year. Regulations.gov provides one-stop...
Annual Threat Assessment of the US Intelligence Community for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Dennis C. Blair, Director of National Intelligence, February 2, 2010 "The national security of the United States, our economic prosperity, and the daily functioning of...
Anatomy of a Large-Scale Social Search Engine, by Damon Horowitz and Sepandar D. Kamvar [via Abi Morgan] "We present Aardvark, a social search engine. With Aardvark, users ask a question, either by instant message, email, web input, text message, or...
News release: "After more than a decade of nationwide effort, the Digital Promise Project has achieved an essential goal – the creation of the National Center for Research in Advanced Information and Digital Technologies. This year the Department of Education,...
NASA: Assessments of Selected Large-Scale Projects, GAO-10-227SP, February 01, 2010 Defense Acquisitions: Observations on the Department of Defense Service Contract Inventories for Fiscal Year 2008, GAO-10-350R, January 29, 2010 Employment and Training Administration: Increased Authority and Accountability Could Improve Research...
News release: "President Barack Obama sent to Congress a proposed defense budget of $708 billion for fiscal 2011. The budget request for the Department of Defense (DoD) includes $549 billion in discretionary budget authority to fund base defense programs and...
News release: "A one-stop source for biogeographic information collected from U.S. waters and oceanic regions is now available from the National Biological Information Infrastructure (NBII) Program. The OBIS-USA website offers a unique combination of tools, resources, and biodiversity information to...
"In a report released on January 28, 2010, Green Investing 2010: Policy Mechanisms to Bridge the Financing Gap, the World Economic Forum revealed that investment in clean energy has held up better than expected during the financial crisis and resulting...
Psychology and Global Climate Change Addressing a Multi-faceted Phenomenon and Set of Challenges - Report of the American Psychological Association Task Force on the Interface Between Psychology and Global Climate Change: "The task force’s report reviews a wide range of...
News release: "More than three million girls’ genitals are forcibly cut every year and approximately 140 million women are living with mutilated genitals. Maternal mortality and infection are just two of the many health effects they suffer. This issue of...
OPNAV NOTICE 5400, January 11, 2010: "Action will establish U. S. Fleet Cyber Command as an echelon II command to serve as the Navy Component Commander to United States Cyber Command upon its establishment. Interim reporting will be to United...
Follow up to previous postings on high speed rail, today's announcement via the DOT blog: "The investments we announce today make rail a viable transportation alternative in many regions. With this historic $8 billion investment by President Obama, we are...
News release: "A new report released today by the Joint Economic Committee (JEC) provides a snapshot of the current economic climate in each state, offering policy makers easy access to the major economic indicators in all 50 states and the...
Corn Ethanol and Wildlife - How increases in corn plantings are affecting habitat and wildlife in the Prairie Pothole Region, 01-13-2010. Rebecca Brooke, Gregory Fogel, Aviva Glaser, Elizabeth Griffin and Kristen Johnson. "Government incentives have led to skyrocketing growth in...
Christian Science Monitor: "At least three US oil companies were the target of a series of previously undisclosed cyberattacks that may have originated in China and that experts say highlight a new level of sophistication in the growing global war...
Commissioner Copps' Remarks at the State of the Net Preconference of the Congressional Internet Caucus, January 26, 2010: "Our democracy relies on a well-informed citizenry. Right now that means primarily traditional journalism, from newspapers and broadcasting because that’s where 75%...
"The indicators included in Science and Engineering Indicators 2010 derive from a variety of national, international, public, and private sources and may not be strictly comparable in a statistical sense. As noted in the text, some data are weak, and...
Kaiser Family Foundation resource links: "With technology allowing nearly 24-hour media access as children and teens go about their daily lives, the amount of time young people spend with entertainment media has risen dramatically, especially among minority youth, according to...
News release: "The Commerce Department’s Economics and Statistics Administration today issued a new report for Vice President Biden’s Middle Class Task Force: Middle Class in America. The report, which identifies what it means to be middle class in America today,...
News release: "The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency today announced a new national air quality standard for nitrogen dioxide (NO2). This new one-hour standard will protect millions of Americans from peak short-term exposures, which primarily occur near major roads. Short-term exposures...
BBC News: "Web founder Sir Tim Berners-Lee has unveiled his latest venture for the UK government, which offers the public better access to official data. A new website, data.gov.uk, will offer reams of public sector data, ranging from traffic statistics...
World Resources Institute: "On January 20th, sixty corporations begin measuring the greenhouse gas emissions of their products and supply chains by road testing a new global framework that is part of the Greenhouse Gas Protocol Initiative. Developed by the World...
News release: "Astronauts aboard the International Space Station received a special software upgrade this week - personal access to the Internet and the World Wide Web via the ultimate wireless connection. Expedition 22 Flight Engineer T.J. Creamer made first use...
News release: "In 2009, the union membership rate--the percent of wage and salary workers who were members of a union--was 12.3 percent, essentially unchanged from 12.4 percent a year earlier, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. The number...
News release: "Regional and state unemployment rates were generally higher in December. Forty-three states and the District of Columbia recorded over-the-month unemployment rate increases, four states registered rate decreases, and three states had no rate change, the U.S. Bureau of...
Race and Hispanic Origin of the Foreign-Born Population in the United States: 2007: "This report from American Community Survey data describes the race and Hispanic-origin composition of the foreign-born population in 2007 and compares it with that of the total...
News release: "Median weekly earnings of the nation's 98.7 million full-time wage and salary workers were $748 in the fourth quarter of 2009, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. This was 2.7 percent higher than a year earlier,...
Afghanistan and Pakistan Regional Stabilization Strategy, Office of the Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan January 2010. "The Afghan government is under assault from the Taliban and struggling to provide security, jobs, and basic justice to a society devastated by...
U.S. Immigration Policy on Haitian Migrants, January 15, 2010:" The environmental, social, and political conditions in Haiti have long prompted congressional interest in U.S. policy on Haitian migrants, particularly those attempting to reach the United States by boat. While some...
A Review of the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Use of Exigent Letters and Other Informal Requests for Telephone Records, January 2010, Unclassified, Redacted. See also from EFF: Over Redaction in Audit of FBI’s Use of Illegal Exigent Letters...
News release: "U.S. productivity weathered the recession well, growing 2.5 percent (in per hour terms) in 2009, The Conference Board reported today. This blip in the prevailing downward trend in U.S. productivity was largely explained by dramatically reduced working hours...
News release: "The Conference Board Leading Economic Index™ (LEI) for the U.K. increased by 0.9 percent in November to 98.6 (2004 = 100), following gains of 1.1 percent in October and 1.0 percent in September. All seven components made positive...
The Internet's Impact on Public Health Planning: "Susannah Fox provides data on the current internet population, with a particular focus on health communication, wireless adoption, social media, and implications for public health planning."...
"Technological innovations are key causal agents of surprise and disruption. In the recent past, the United States military has encountered unexpected challenges in the battlefield due in part to the adversary's incorporation of technologies not traditionally associated with weaponry. Recognizing...
Via Freakonomics - Do Bike-Helmet Laws Discourage Bicycling? - this report, Intended and Unintended Effects of Youth Bicycle Helmet Laws, Christopher S. Carpenter, Mark F. Stehr, NBER Working Paper No. 15658, Issued in January 2010 "Over 20 states have adopted...
TechCrunch - Research firm Outsell has published its third annual News Users’ report [fee only], which is based on a survey about the online and offline news preferences of 2,787 US news consumers. The Outsell report unsurprisingly predicts ongoing, steep...
The discovery of Large-billed Reed Warblers Acrocephalus orinus in north-eastern Afghanistan, BirdingASIA 12 (2009): 42–45 "Protection of this threatened ecosystem [the Wakhan region of Badakshan province, north-eastern Afghanistan], possibly one of the principal breeding habitats for Large-billed Reed Warbler, is...
World Health Organization: "Strong coordination of health services and supplies is needed to effectively treat thousands of people injured in the 12 January earthquake. WHO is sending medicines and supplies to treat 165 000 people for one month, plus drugs...
UK TimesOnline: "Nestled amid the bustle of north Mumbai, the headquarters of Pangea3, one of India’s biggest legal outsourcing companies, is enough to give a British corporate lawyer used to the slick environs of the City or Canary Wharf the...
Follow up to previous postings on Follow up to previous postings on missing White House emails during Bush administrations, from the National Security Archive: "Pursuant to a settlement reached between the National Security Archive and the White House Executive Office...
News release: "IRS e-file, the popular electronic tax return delivery service used by two-thirds of the nation’s taxpayers, opened for business January 15 and marks 20 years of safely and securely transmitting nearly 800 million individual federal tax returns. The...
News release: "The shooting spree allegedly perpetrated by a self-radicalized soldier of Muslim faith has revealed shortcomings in the Defense Department’s ability to counter dangerous outside influences on the military, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said today. Gates disclosed this...
First Public Hearing of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission Day 2, January 14, 2010. Panel 1: Current Investigations into the Financial Crisis — Federal Officials. Panel 2: Current Investigations into the Financial Crisis — State and Local Officials. Related postings...
News release: "The Federal Reserve Board on Tuesday approved a final rule amending Regulation Z (Truth in Lending) to protect consumers who use credit cards from a number of costly practices. Credit card issuers must comply with most aspects of...
Four in ten seniors go online, by Susannah Fox, Jan 13, 2010: "As of December 2009, 38% of U.S. adults age 65 and older go online, a significantly lower rate of internet adoption than the general population (74%) and even...
Official Google Blog: "In mid-December, we detected a highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China that resulted in the theft of intellectual property from Google. However, it soon became clear that what at first appeared...
Federal Railroad Administration (FRA), Department of Transportation (DOT), Final Rule, January 12, 2010: "FRA is issuing regulations implementing a requirement of the Rail Safety Improvement Act of 2008 that defines criteria for certain passenger and freight rail lines requiring the...
News release: "The Center for Biological Diversity petitioned the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency today to establish water-quality criteria for numerous endocrine-disrupting chemicals under the Clean Water Act, the first step in regulating and eliminating persistent and widespread chemicals that damage...
Project for Excellence in Journalism - How News Happens: A Study of the News Ecosystem of One American City, January 11, 2010. "The study, which examined all the outlets that produced local news in Baltimore, Md., for one week, surveyed...
New Deal Denialism, Eric Rauchway, Dissent Winter 2010 "From the start of the current economic crisis, commentators have compared the ongoing unpleasantness to the crash of 1929, with the implication that we might soon begin to suffer a version of...
"CareerCast.com's 2010 Jobs Rated report offers a comprehensive analysis of 200 different jobs – from Accountant to Zoologist – giving each a unique ranking based on factual analysis and hard data, not guesswork. If you're entering (or re-entering) the job...
The New York Review of Books - Who's in Big Brother's Database? By James Bamford - The Secret Sentry: The Untold History of the, National Security Agency, by Matthew M. Aid, Bloomsbury. "...this library expects few visitors. It's being built...
Chronicle of Higher Education: "The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation is closing a grant program that financed a series of high-profile university software projects, leaving some worried about a vacuum of support for open-source ventures. Mellon’s decade-old Research in Information Technology...
CRS: International Terrorism and Transnational Crime: Security Threats, U.S. Policy, and Considerations for Congress, January 5, 2010. "This report provides a primer on the confluence of transnational terrorist and criminal groups and related activities abroad. It evaluates possible motivations and...
News release: "Citing a need to improve certainty and order in oil and gas leasing on U.S. public lands, Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar today announced several reforms that the Bureau of Land Management will undertake to improve protections...
An Economic Evaluation of the War on Cancer, by Eric C. Sun et al.: "For decades, the US public and private sectors have committed substantial resources towards cancer research, but the societal payoff has not been well-understood. We quantify the...
"The UK Border Agency is responsible for delivering the e-Borders programme, and we are doing so with the support of the police and HM Revenue & Customs. We are working closely with the travel industries, whose support is crucial to...
News release: "The Federal Trade Commission, as required by The Do-Not-Call Registry Fee Extension Act of 2007, has approved two reports to Congress: a biennial report focusing on the use of the Do Not Call Registry by both consumers and...
WSJ.com: "An Arctic blast swept across a large swath of the U.S. on Monday, sending temperatures plunging from Minnesota to Florida and bringing a bone-chilling start to the first workweek of the year...Temperatures fell below zero from the Great Plains...
American Indians and the Great Recession—Economic Disparities Growing Larger, By Algernon Austin, Economic Policy Institute, December 2009 "American Indians, like Hispanic Americans and African Americans, have had the misfortune of experiencing double-digit unemployment rates for most or all of 2009....
News release: "Albert Gonzalez, 28, of Miami, pleaded guilty today to conspiring to hack into computer networks supporting major American retail and financial organizations, and to steal data relating to tens of millions of credit and debit cards, announced Assistant...
National Institute of Justice InShort report, Cell Phones Behind Bars, December 2009 "A widespread technology that allows people to connect with anyone, anywhere, has created concerns for corrections officials. The use of inexpensive, disposable cell phones has changed the age-old...
Harnessing Free-Flowing Competitive Intelligence Through Social Media Sites: "For competitive intelligence research purposes, traditional Web sites (read Web 1.0) have offered a range of valuable information for those seeking to get a leg up on the competition. But that information...
Executive Order - Original Classification Authority, December 29, 2009: designating specific officials to classify information originally as "Top Secret" or "Secret" New York Times: "President Obama declared on Tuesday that “no information may remain classified indefinitely” as part of a...
News release: "While the Recovery Act has made unprecedented investments in clean energy, energy efficiency, and other environmental improvements, a new report by The Council of State Governments finds that in most states the wave of green jobs tied to...
Follow up to previous postings on Google Book Search - Google & the Future of Books: An Exchange By Paul N. Courant, Laine Farley, Paula Kaufman, John Leslie King, Theodore Koditschek, Anthony Lewis et al. "To the Editors: In his...
"The mission of the American Institute of Philanthropy (AIP), a nonprofit charity watchdog and information service, is to maximize the effectiveness of every dollar contributed to charity by providing donors with the information they need to make more informed giving...
News release: Amazon.com, Inc. today announced [December 26, 2009] that Kindle has become the most gifted item in Amazon's history. On Christmas Day, for the first time ever, customers purchased more Kindle books than physical books. The Kindle Store now...
Aquacalypse Now - The End of Fish, by Daniel Pauly "Our oceans have been the victims of a giant Ponzi scheme, waged with Bernie Madoff–like callousness by the world’s fisheries. Beginning in the 1950s, as their operations became increasingly industrialized--with...
Green Protectionism in the European Union: How Europe’s Biofuels Policy and the Renewable Energy Directive Violate WTO Commitments, European Centre for International Political Economy (ECIPE) "This paper examines the trade-policy consequences of current approaches to biofuels. The paper is not...
News release: "A combination of man-made global warming and a moderate warming of the tropical Pacific Ocean, a phenomenon known as El Niño, means it is very likely that 2010 will be a warmer year globally than 2009. Recently released...
The Customer Is Always Right - Since founding Amazon in 1994, he has revolutionized retailing. Now he's out to transform how we read. By Daniel Lyons | NEWSWEEK. "There are two ways that companies can extend what they're doing. One...
Forbes: "If people can read this story a millennium from now, they may have Tadahiro Kuroda to thank. Kuroda, an electrical engineering professor at Keio University in Japan, has invented what he calls a "Digital Rosetta Stone," a wireless memory...
Forbes: Eyeglasses are as old as the Renaissance, but even now we still need trained professionals to fit them. That's no problem for the Western world, which has around one optometrist for roughly every 10,000 people. But it's a nightmare...
Wired Science: "When the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change meets in 2014, tipping points — or tipping elements, in academic vernacular — will get much more attention. Scientists still disagree about which planetary systems are extra-sensitive to climate shifts, but...
LLRX.com: Understanding the Limitations - and Maximizing the Value- of eBooks: The holiday season is here, and many signs suggest that thousands of people are finding themselves new owners of electronic book ("eBook") readers. Whether it's an Amazon Kindle, a...
Pew Research Center - Current Decade Rates as Worst in 50 Years: "As the current decade draws to a close, relatively few Americans have positive things to say about it. By roughly two-to-one, more say they have a generally negative...
"...e-reader technology also presents significant new threats to reader privacy. E-readers possess the ability to report back substantial information about their users' reading habits and locations to the corporations that sell them. And yet none of the major e-reader manufacturers...
The Macroeconomic Impacts of the 9/11 Attack: Evidence from Real-Time Forecasting, Bryan W. Roberts, PhD: "Estimates of the consequences of human-made and natural disasters are crucial for informing decision making by both public and private actors. The 9/11 attack stands...
Regional and State Employment and Unemployment (Monthly), December 18, 2009: "In November, 36 states and the District of Columbia recorded over-the-month unemployment rate decreases, 8 states registered increases, and 6 states had no change. Nonfarm payroll employment increased in 19...
The Liberal Tradition of the Supreme Court Clerkship: Its Rise, Fall, and Reincarnation? William E. Nelson, Harvey Rishikof, I. Scott Messinger, Michael Jo | 62 Vand. L. Rev. 1749 (2009) "This srticle presents the first comprehensive empirical study of the...
Surge Driven by Steep Jump in Immigration Filings: "As a result of an unusual flood of immigration prosecutions, the total number of federal criminal filings reached an all time high in the just ended fiscal year, according to timely Justice...
News release: "In the EU27, 65% of households had access to the internet during the first quarter of 2009, compared with 60% during the first quarter of 2008, and 56% had a broadband internet connection in 2009, compared with 49%...
DRAFT Security Requirements for Cryptographic Modules (Revised Draft): "The Revised Draft FIPS 140-3 is the second public draft of NIST’s proposed revision of FIPS 140-2. The Revised Draft was developed using the comments received on the first public draft, which...
Follow up to United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change: Draft of Global Climate Pact, today's White House announcement: A Meaningful and Unprecedented Breakthrough Here in Copenhagen - "In a much-anticipated United Nations climate change conference in Copenhagen, Denmark, the...
"The MetroMonitor is a quarterly, interactive barometer of the health of America’s 100 largest metropolitan economies. It examines trends in metropolitan-level employment, output, and housing conditions to look “beneath the hood” of national economic statistics to portray the diverse metropolitan...
News release: "Newspaper publishers experienced a single-year decline in total revenue of 8.3 percent — from $47.9 billion in 2007 to $43.9 billion in 2008. This followed a more modest decline of 2.7 percent in 2007, the U.S. Census Bureau...
Nearly half of Detroit's workers are unemployed: "Despite an official unemployment rate of 27 percent, the real jobs problem in Detroit may be affecting half of the working-age population, thousands of whom either can't find a job or are working...
Impoundment Control Act: Use and Impact of Rescission Procedures, GAO-10-320T, December 16, 2009 Service-Disabled Veteran-Owned Small Business Program: Case Studies Show Fraud and Abuse Allowed Ineligible Firms to Obtain Millions of Dollars in Contracts, GAO-10-306T, December 16, 2009 Status of...
"The National Financial Capability Study established a baseline measure of the ability of Americans to manage their money, benchmarking four key indicators of financial capability and evaluating how these indicators vary with underlying demographic, behavioral, attitudinal and financial literacy characteristics...The...
"Joblessness has wreaked both financial and emotional havoc on the lives of many of those out of work, according to a New York Times/CBS News poll of unemployed adults, causing major life changes, mental health issues and struggles to maintain...
Jose Antonio Vargas, Technology and Innovations editor, Huffington Post: "This is the transcript of a wide-ranging, two-part, three-hour interview with Al Gore, touching on the impact of technology and the Internet in politics, both in the U.S. and abroad; the...
News release: "Today, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) and the National Security Archive (NSA) reached a final settlement of their long-running lawsuits challenging the failure of the Bush White House and the National Archives and Records Administration...
Melting snow and ice: a call for action, A report commissioned by Nobel Peace Prize laureate Al Gore and Norway’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Jonas Gahr Støre, Centre for Ice, Climate and Ecosystems, Norwegian Polar Institute, Polar Environmental Centre, NO–9296...
Pew Hispanic Center Report - Between Two Worlds: How Young Latinos Come of Age in America, December 2009 (156 pages, PDF) "Hispanics are the largest and youngest minority group in the United States. One- in-five schoolchildren is Hispanic. One-in-four newborns...
Transcript: "Over the past two years, more than seven million Americans have lost their jobs, and factories and businesses across our country have been shuttered. In one way or another, we’ve all been touched by the worst economic downturn since...
Chair’s Proposed Draft Text on the Outcome of the Work of the Ad Hoc Working Group on Long Term Cooperative Action under the Convention, Version 11/12/09 Ad Hoc Working Group on Further Commitments for Annex I Parties under the Kyoto...
Huffington Post Investigative Fund: "here's a guide to how the current bills in the House and Senate approach three major problem areas in the financial system."...
News release: "The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) released its final WaterSense single-family new homes specification today, creating the first national, voluntary, water-efficiency specification for an entire new home...EPA worked with hundreds of stakeholders over the past three years to...
News release: "Companies are still lagging in appointing women to board seats and very few women hold Executive Officer positions, according to the 2009 Catalyst Census: Fortune 500 Women Board Directors and the 2009 Catalyst Census: Fortune 500 Women Executive...
Word from the White House: Health CEOs Confirm Reform Lowers Costs Supporting letter: CEO Work Group on Health Reform, 12/8/09 Supporting letter: David M. Cote, CEO, Honeywell, 12/7/09 Related postings on health care reform...
News release: "The year 2009 is likely to rank in the top 10 warmest on record since the beginning of instrumental climate records in 1850, according to data sources compiled by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). The global combined sea...
News release: "The House Financial Services Committee today [began] marking up a bill that would create a new consumer protection agency and increase regulation of a number of financial products, including credit cards, insurance, mortgages and "derivatives." Even as members...
Jobs Crisis Fact Sheet By Anna Turner, Economic Policy Institute, December 4, 2009 "Number unemployed: 15.4 million (up from 7.5 million in December 2007) Portion of unemployed who have been jobless more than six months: 38.3% Total jobs lost during...
The Collections Search Center provides easy "one-stop searching" of more than 2 million of the Smithsonian's museum, archives, library and research holdings and collections. The access to more Smithsonian collections via this Search Center is increasing over time. Collections currently...
Official Google Blog: "Our real-time search enables you to discover breaking news the moment it's happening, even if it's not the popular news of the day, and even if you didn't know about it beforehand...Click on "Latest results" or select...
Official Google Blog: "Today, as part of our ongoing effort to make the web faster, we're launching our own public DNS resolver called Google Public DNS, and we invite you to try it out. Most of us aren't familiar with...
Follow up to previous postings on health care reform, today's news release: "U.S. Senator Tom Coburn, M.D. (R-OK) released the following statement today regarding a new report by the non-partisan Congressional Research Service (CRS) that shows that 60 percent of...
Pew Center for People and the Press: America’s Place in the World 2009 - U.S. Seen as Less Important, China as More Powerful, December 3, 2009 "The general public and members of the Council on Foreign Relations are apprehensive and...
The Use of Agricultural Offsets to Reduce Greenhouse Gases, December 3, 2009. Testimony before the Subcommittee on Conservation, Credit, Energy, and Research, Committee on Agriculture, U.S. House of Representatives. "Offsets used as a part of a cap-and-trade program for greenhouse-gas...
Official Google Blog: "The main feature of the new homepage is that it "fades in" — when the page first loads, it shows only our logo, the search box and the buttons. For the vast majority of people who come...
Google News Blog: "There are more than 25,000 publishers from around the world in Google News today. [With] the new Google News web crawler publishers [can]...keep their content out of Google News and still remain in Google Search...if a publisher...
Bank for International Settlements Working Papers No 293 - Ten propositions about liquidity crises by Claudio Borio, Monetary and Economic Department, November 2009. "What are liquidity crises? And what can be done to address them? This short paper brings together...
Estimated Impact of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act on Employment and Economic Output as of September 2009 - November 2009 "Recipients report that about 640,000 jobs were created or retained with ARRA funding through September 2009. Such reports, however,...
Guardian UK - From young Mozart to black holes, 350 years of the Royal Society go online: "Britain's academy of the sciences marks anniversary with online archive including letters from Newton and Captain Cook." "Welcome to Trailblazing, an interactive timeline...
Financial Times: "The US economy continued to shrink in the second quarter, but the pace of contraction slowed as aggressive government spending started to loosen the grip of the longest recession on record." News release: "Real gross domestic product --...
An Analysis of Health Insurance Premiums Under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, November 30, 2009 - Letter to the Honorable Evan Bayh "There is great interest in how proposals being considered by the Congress to change the health...
World Bank news release: "According to the new report - Rethinking School Feeding: Social Safety Nets, Child Development, and the Education Sector - school feeding programs in poor countries boost school attendance, help children to learn more effectively, and spur...
"This e-learning site focuses on a critical, but often neglected skill for business, communication, and engineering students, namely visual literacy, or the ability to evaluate, apply, or create conceptual visual representations. After this tutorial, students should be able to evaluate...
News release: "Building upon last month’s historic release of nearly 500 White House visitor records, today the White House releases more than 1,600 records of visits to the White House in response to another month’s worth of requests. You can...
News release: "U.S. house prices rose modestly in the third quarter of 2009 according to the Federal Housing Finance Agency’s (FHFA) seasonally adjusted purchase-only house price index (HPI). The HPI, calculated using home sales price information from Fannie Maeand Freddie...
News release: "At an event in Columbus, Ohio this afternoon, Secretary Chu announced that the Department of Energy is awarding $620 million for projects around the country to demonstrate advanced Smart Grid technologies and integrated systems that will help build...
News release: "Citizen satisfaction with federal government websites surged to a new all-time high in the third quarter of 2009, according to the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) E-Government Satisfaction Index released from ForeSee Results and ACSI. The Index reached...
CBO Economic and Policy Brief: The Costs of Reducing Greenhouse-Gas Emissions, November 23, 2009 "Human activities around the world are producing increasingly large quantities of greenhouse gases, particularly carbon dioxide (CO2) resulting from the consumption of fossil fuels and deforestation....
Official Google Blog, Ken Harrenstien, Software Engineer: "Since the original launch of captions in our products, we’ve been happy to see growth in the number of captioned videos on our services, which now number in the hundreds of thousands. This...
Budget Issues: Electronic Processing of Non-IRS Collections Has Increased but Better Understanding of Cost Structure Is Needed, GAO-10-11, November 20, 2009 Defense Acquisitions: Further Actions Needed to Address Weaknesses in DOD's Management of Professional and Management Support Contracts, GAO-10-39, November...
News release: "Capgemini released the 8th Benchmark Measurement of European eGovernment services. This Benchmark, prepared since 2001 for the European Commission’s (EC) Directorate General for Information Society and Media on the progress of eGovernment across the EU overall, shows Europe’s...
Wired: "The Navy’s Arctic Roadmap, written by the recently launched Navy Task Force Climate Change (TFCC), opens with an acknowledgment that worldwide temperatures are on the rise — especially up north. The Arctic is warming twice as fast as the...
News release: "The U.S. Census Bureau today released 2008 income and poverty estimates for every school district and county in the nation. These data, part of the Small Area Income and Poverty Estimates (SAIPE) program, currently represent the only source...
Jon Lipe's blog: "The Obama Administration announced state and local allocations totaling $18.6 billion under its HFA Initiative’s New Issue Bond Program (NIBP). In addition, the Administration revealed that it will be providing $10.5 billion in liquidity support to 23...
"The Cornell e-Rulemaking Initiative is proud to announce a preview of Regulation Room, a collaborative effort with the United States Department of Transportation seeking to increase and enhance public engagement during administrative rulemaking proceedings. Administrative agencies have traditionally used the...
Center for Economic and Policy Research - The Changing Face of Labor, 1983-2008 - November 2009, John Schmitt and Kris Warner: "Over the last quarter century, the unionized workforce has changed dramatically, according to this new CEPR report. In 2008,...
News release: "World Wide Web Foundation (Web Foundation), a nonprofit organization dedicated to advancing the Web to empower people, announced the launch of global operations including the existence of its first projects. Speaking at the 2009 Internet Governance Forum in...
Unemployment, 2004 to Present, via Flowing Data - the work of Nathan Yau. Click to pan and zoom. Right click for more options. View raw image. Related postings on financial system...
"Two years ago, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Center for American Progress, and Frederick M. Hess of the American Enterprise Institute came together to grade the states on school performance. In that first Leaders and Laggards report, we found...
CRS Report R40901 - Terrorism Information Sharing and the Nationwide Suspicious Activity Report Initiative: Background and Issues for Congress, November 05, 2009 "The 2004 National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (the 9/11 Commission) cited breakdowns in information...
Follow up to previous postings on Google Book Search, news from the Authors Guild that 14 minutes before before midnight on November 13, 2009, "the parties filed with the Court an Amended Settlement Agreement and a motion for preliminary approval...
Lisa Smith: "Over the past two decades law firms have advanced significantly in measuring performance both internally and externally. But are some of the very metrics firms have come to rely on now impeding progress in a world that requires...
News release: "The Federal Reserve Board on Thursday announced final rules that prohibit financial institutions from charging consumers fees for paying overdrafts on automated teller machine (ATM) and one-time debit card transactions, unless a consumer consents, or opts in, to...
Pew Research Center: A Year Out, Widespread Anti-Incumbent Sentiment Obama's Afghanistan Rating Declines "The mood of America is glum. Two-thirds of the public is dissatisfied with the way things are going in the country. Fully nine-in-ten say that national economic...
News release: "The Federal Reserve Board on announced the availability of a collection of brief articles that examine ways to improve the availability of housing options for low-income renters. The publication, commissioned in conjunction with the Community Affairs staff at...
"This year, it's especially important to have clear information on what you can do to prepare for the flu season. With this in mind, we are happy to share a new feature for the U.S. which allows you to more...
"The Rule of Law Index is a new tool, created by the WJP [World Justice Project Rule], which measures countries’ adherence to the rule of law...The Rule of Law Index is the first index that examines the rule of law...
"The Food and Drug Administration announced the publication of the 2009 FDA Food Code, a model code and reference document that provides a scientifically sound technical and legal basis for regulating the retail and food service segment of the food...
"Through a national network of cooperating libraries, NLS administers a free library program of braille and audio materials circulated to eligible borrowers in the United States by postage-free mail."...
"Despite considerable progress in the past decades, societies continue to fail to meet the health care needs of women at key moments of their lives, particularly in their adolescent years and in older age. These are the key findings of...
News release: "Oracle's acquisition of Sun is essential for competition in the high end server market, for revitalizing Sparc and Solaris and for strengthening the Java development platform. The transaction does not threaten to reduce competition in the slightest, including...
Jeffrey Peng, Software Engineer, Google Books, a software engineer on Google Books: "One of my main projects is adding magazine content and features to the site. In September we were excited to announce the availability of over 1,860 issues of...
Protectionism Online: Internet Censorship and International Trade Law, ECIPE [European Centre for International Political Economy] Working Paper No. 12/2009, By Brian Hindley, Hosuk Lee-Makiyama "This paper suggests that many W TO member states are legally obliged to permit an unrestricted...
Poverty in the United States: 2008, Thomas Gabe, Specialist in Social Policy, October 6, 2009 "In 2008, 39.8 million people were counted as poor in the United States—an increase of 2.6 million persons from 2007, and nearly the largest number...
Afghanistan's Security Environment, GAO-10-178R, November 5, 2009 Applying Agreed-Upon Procedures: Fiscal Year 2009 Airport and Airway Trust Fund Excise Taxes, GAO-10-92R, November 5, 2009 Applying Agreed-Upon Procedures: Fiscal Year 2009 Highway Trust Fund Excise Taxes, GAO-10-93R, November 5, 2009 Defense...
Official Google Blog: "In an effort to provide you with greater transparency and control over their own data, we've built the Google Dashboard. Designed to be simple and useful, the Dashboard summarizes data for each product that you use (when...
"Consumer Reports’ latest tests of canned foods, including soups, juice, tuna, and green beans, have found that almost all of the 19 name-brand foods tested contain measurable levels of Bisphenol A (BPA). The new findings show that BPA can be...
Follow up to previous postings on e-voting, via Wired: "On Tuesday voters in Takoma Park, Maryland, got to try out a new, transparent voting system that lets voters go online to verify that their ballots got counted in the final...
News release: "Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo today filed a federal antitrust lawsuit against Intel Corporation, the world’s largest maker of computer microprocessors. The suit charges that Intel violated state and federal anti-monopoly laws by engaging in a worldwide, systematic...
"Fully one-third of the 110 Am Law 200 firms participating in our fourteenth annual survey of technology directors reported that their capital budgets were down more than 10 percent this year. Staffing levels and salaries have taken hits, and equipment...
World Resources Institute: Power, Responsibility, and Accountability: Re-Thinking the Legitimacy of Institutions for Climate Finance, Working Paper: November, 2009 by Maria Athena Ballesteros, Smita Nakhooda, Jake Werksman, with Kaija Hurlburt and Seema Kumar "This Working Paper seeks to ground the...
The Government Domain: A Handful of Classics - Peggy Garvin has updated her directory of useful government information resources online, the e-Government and Web Directory: U.S. Federal Government Online. Her research has found that federal web sites do not change...
AP: Analysis of Positions Created by the 2009 Recovery Act - use drop-down menus to choose industry and respective state. Thereafter, mouse-over map to see data on jobs in specific counties. Related postings on financial system related postings on American...
"New research quantifies the primary factors driving the cost of a lost or stolen laptop. Learn from Intel IT’s best practices." "To better understand the range of potential outcomes, the Ponemon Institute compiled data on 138 instances of laptop loss...
News release: "We previously announced that the White House in December of this year would -- for the first time in history -- begin posting all White House visitor records under the terms of our new voluntary disclosure policy. As...
Official Google Blog: "...we're rolling out a search feature that...enabl[es] you to search and more easily discover millions of songs, all via a simple Google web search...Now, when you enter a music-related query — like the name of a song,...
"States and local governments should increase citizens' access to raw, machine-readable data through sites similar to the federal government's Data.gov. Data democratization will lead to greater citizen engagement and government accountability, according to the National Association of State CIOs' latest...
New York Times: "In September 2008, the Bush administration changed domestic intelligence-gathering rules. The Federal Bureau of Investigation's interpretation of those rules was recently made public when the bureau released a redacted copy of its "Domestic Investigations and Operation Guide"...
News release: "A recent Pew Research survey showing a sharp decline in the proportion of the public saying there is solid evidence of global warming has triggered considerable speculation about why these views are changing. The poll was released a...
"Congressional Management Foundation (CMF) and its academic research partners have released a report entitled Online Town Hall Meetings: Exploring Democracy in the 21st Century. The report summarizes findings and recommendations from conducting online town hall meetings between Members of Congress...
The Shriver Report - A Woman’s Nation Changes Everything, By Maria Shriver and the Center for American Progress, edited by Heather Boushey and Ann O'Leary | October 16, 2009 "This report describes how a woman’s nation changes everything about how...
"Nuclear power could play a role in reducing global warming emissions because reactors emit almost no carbon while they operate and can have low life-cycle emissions. Partly for that reason, advocates are calling for a nationwide investment in at least...
Nieman Foundation’s Guide to Covering Pandemic Flu: "This Web site is a one-stop resource for reporters, editors and newsroom managers trying to navigate the complex and at times confusing details of the flu story. Most of the information is relevant...
News release: 'Regional and state unemployment rates were generally little changed in September. Twenty-three states and the District of Columbia recorded over-the-month unemployment rate increases, 19 states registered rate decreases, and 8 states had no rate change, the U.S. Bureau...
Twitter and Status Updating, Fall 2009, by Susannah Fox, Kathryn Zickuhr, Aaron Smith - Oct 21, 2009 "Some 19% of internet users now say they use Twitter or another service to share updates about themselves, or to see updates about...
Medicare Part D Plan Sponsor Electronic Prescribing Initiatives (OEI-05-08-00322), Otober 16, 2009 "E-prescribing occurs when a prescriber uses a computer or an electronic hand-held device, such as a personal digital assistant, to write and send a prescription directly to a...
News release: "A report released today by the Death Penalty Information Center concludes that states are wasting hundreds of millions of dollars on the death penalty, draining state budgets during the economic crisis and diverting funds from more effective anti-violence...
Follow up to previous postings on airport whole body imaging technology, this article from the Economist.com: "Much excitement in Manchester where trials have started of Britain’s first whole-body scanner. The machine takes X-ray photographs of passengers, and can reveal concealed...
Internet Archive BookServer: "The widespread success of digital reading devices has proven that the world is ready to read books on screens. As the audience for digital books grows, we can evolve from an environment of single devices connected to...
"NIEM, the National Information Exchange Model, is a partnership of the U.S. Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security. It is designed to develop, disseminate and support enterprise-wide information exchange standards and processes that can enable jurisdictions to...
Iran’s Ballistic Missile Program, Greg Bruno, October 15, 2009 "U.S. President Barack Obama cited the rising threat of Iran's ballistic missile program as a key driver in his decision to alter course on a Bush-era missile shield for Europe. Tehran's...
HUD Inspector General report - Controls over FHA single-family lender approval process need improvement, issued September 30, 2009 "Finding 1: FHA's Lender Approval Process Did Not Ensure That Only Eligible Applicants Were Approved. FHA's lender application process was not adequate...
Electric Power Monthly (10/15/2009): "Net generation in the United States dropped by 7.6 percent from July 2008 to July 2009. This was the 12th consecutive month that net generation was down compared to the same calendar month in the prior...
Fossil Fuel Production Up Despite Recession, by James Russell. October 15, 2009 "World production of fossil fuels-oil, coal, and natural gas-increased 2.9 percent in 2008 to reach 27.4 million tons of oil equivalent (Mtoe) per day. In the first half...
"Archive-It, a subscription service from the Internet Archive, allows institutions to build and preserve collections of born digital content. Through our user-friendly web application, Archive-It partners can harvest, catalog, manage, and browse their archived collections. Collections are hosted at the...
"Whether this season’s swine flu turns out to be deadly or mild, most experts agree that it’s only a matter of time before we’re hit by a truly devastating flu pandemic—one that might kill more people worldwide than have died...
Who's in Big Brother's Database? By James Bamford - A review of The Secret Sentry: The Untold History of the National Security Agency by Matthew M. Aid. "On a remote edge of Utah's dry and arid high desert, where temperatures...
Follow up to October 10, 2009 posting, Mandatory Flu Shots for New York Health Care Workers, the New York Times today reported Thomas J. McNamara, an acting justice of the State Supreme Court in Albany, issued a temporary order halting...
News release: "New data, released by the Catlin Arctic Survey and WWF, provides further evidence of thinning Arctic Ocean sea ice, supporting the emerging thinking that the Ocean will be largely ice-free in summer within a decade. The Catlin Arctic...
News release: "Companies are seeing a litigation wave that corporate counsel expect to swell in the coming year, according to respondents of Fulbright’s 6th Annual Litigation Trends Survey Report. Corporate counsel say they are steeling themselves for a big year...
News release: "The U.S. Department of the Treasury today released the Semi-Annual Report to Congress on International Economic and Exchange Rate Policies, as required under Sections 3004 and 3005 of the Omnibus Trade and Competitiveness Act of 1988. The report...
Senior Research Specialist Amanda Lenhart's slideshow presentation, The Democratization of Online Social Networks: A look at the change in demographics of social network users over time, given at AoIR 10.0 in Milwaukee, WI on October 8, 2009....
News release: "Abuses and abusers from the subprime mortgage market have begun showing up in the reverse mortgage market, putting at risk the equity and savings of millions of seniors. That’s the main finding of Subprime Revisited: How the Rise...
Sunlight Foundation: "One year after the biggest economic collapse since the Great Depression, Congress is still debating new financial regulations to protect consumers and prevent risk-taking in the financial sector. The House Committee on Financial Services is currently undertaking the...
Follow up to previous postings on Google Book Search, this insightful commentary from The American Lawyer - Scanning the Future, by Ben Hallman: "Lawyers familiar with the talks say the book publishing industry had watched in horror as the music...
News release: "Focused on identifying opportunities to improve, The Commonwealth Fund's State Scorecard on Health System Performance assesses states’ performance on health care relative to achievable benchmarks for 38 indicators of access, quality, costs, and health outcomes. The 2009 State...
National Identity Theft Prevention Week - UK's Fraud Prevention Service resources: Practical Guide To Identity Fraud Prevention For Business A Quick Reference Guide Leaflet Protecting your Information Checklist Personal Advice: A Quick Reference Guide Leaflet The Anonymous Attacker, A special...
Remarks of President Barack Obama - As Prepared For Delivery Consumer Financial Protection Event, October 9, 2009: "The new Consumer Financial Protection Agency that I've asked Congress to create will have just one mission: to look out for the financial...
News release: "The Congressional Oversight Panel today released its October oversight report, An Assessment of Foreclosure Mitigation Efforts after Six Months. The Panel expresses concern about the limited scope and scale of the Making Home Affordable program and questions whether...
Latinos and Education: Explaining the Attainment Gap, Mark Hugo Lopez, Associate Director, Pew Hispanic Center, October 2009. "Nearly nine-in-ten (89%) Latino young adults ages 16 to 25 say that a college education is important for success in life, yet only...
Official Google Blog: "If you're like us, you're probably thinking a lot about how this year's flu season might affect you and your community. To help you out, we at Google.org are excited to announce the expansion of Google Flu...
News release: "The Department of Justice is releasing a new study today that measures the effects of youth violence in America, and the results are staggering. More than 60 percent of the children surveyed were exposed to violence in the...
News release: "The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is issuing a final rule to ensure that safe and reliable drinking water is provided to aircraft passengers and crew. The rule provides multiple-barrier protection through requirements for coliform sampling, best management practices,...
National Law Journal: "The economy has employers extra jittery about company secrets getting out, so nervous that they're hiring staff just to monitor outbound e-mails. That's the conclusion of a recent study by Proofpoint, an Internet security and data loss...
Emergency Capital Injections Provided to Support the Viability of Bank of America, Other Major Banks, and the U.S. Financial System, October 5, 2009 Committee on Oversight and Reforms - Republican: "A report released today by the Office of the Special...
News release: "The Federal Reserve Board on Monday announced two changes to the procedures for evaluating asset-backed securities (ABS) pledged to the Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility (TALF). The TALF, which was authorized by the Board on November 24, 2008,...
Briefing on Air Force's Response on Fee-For-Service Aerial Refueling, GAO-10-124R, October 05, 2009 Retirement Savings: Better Information and Sponsor Guidance Could Improve Oversight and Reduce Fees for Participants, GAO-09-641, September 04, 2009 Biofuels: Potential Effects and Challenges of Required Increases...
Crime Against People with Disabilities, 2007, 10/1/09: "First national study on crime against persons with disabilities — Young and middle-age persons with disabilities experienced higher rates of violence than persons of similar ages without disabilities." The report, Crime Against People...
News release: "The Federal Housing Finance Agency today reported that the average interest rate on conventional 30-year, fixed-rate, mortgage loans of $417,000 or less decreased 1 basis point to 5.30 percent in August. The average interest rate on 15-year, fixed-rate...
Center for Economic and Policy Research: Decreased Jobs and Hours Push Economy Back to 1997 Hours Level, By Dean Baker "The benchmark revisions will show job loss was 824,000 larger than originally reported. The loss of 263,000 payroll jobs, coupled...
New Yorker (no fee): Rational Irrationality - The real reason that capitalism is so crash-prone. by John Cassidy "Most of the time, financial markets are pretty calm, trading is orderly, and participants can buy and sell in large quantities. Whenever...
Contingency Contracting: DOD, State, and USAID Continue to Face Challenges in Tracking Contractor Personnel and Contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan, GAO-10-1, October 01, 2009 Emergency Management: Preliminary Observations on FEMA's Community Preparedness Programs Related to the National Preparedness System, GAO-10-105T,...
Follow up to postings on banning texting while driving, this announcement today by the Secretary of Transportation: "Last night, President Obama signed an Executive Order directing federal employees not to engage in text messaging while driving government-owned vehicles; when using...
Brazil Country Analysis Brief (09/30/2009): "Brazil is the 10th largest energy consumer in the world and the 3rd largest in the Western Hemisphere, behind the United States and Canada. Total primary energy consumption in Brazil has increased significantly in recent...
Metropolitan Area Employment and Unemployment Summary, August 2009: "Unemployment rates were higher in August than a year earlier in all 372 metropolitan areas, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Sixteen areas recorded jobless rates of at least 15.0...
Federal Computer Week: "The upgraded version of the Recovery.gov Web site for tracking spending under the economic stimulus law gets mostly positive reviews, but has disappointed some visitors. The retooled site, sponsored by the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, went...
News release: "Twenty five million more children will be malnourished in 2050 due to effects of climate change, according to a report by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI). This study, the most comprehensive assessment of the impact of...
News release: "The Central Intelligence Agency is launching The Center on Climate Change and National Security as the focal point for its work on the subject. The Center is a small unit led by senior specialists from the Directorate of...
News release: "The Conference Board Consumer Confidence Index®, which had improved in August, dipped in September. The Index now stands at 53.1 (1985=100), down from 54.5 in August. The Present Situation Index decreased to 22.7 from 25.4. The Expectations Index...
News release: "A federal judge on Friday approved a settlement between the Center for Biological Diversity and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration requiring the agency to decide whether ice-dependent ringed, bearded, and spotted seals deserve legal protection under the...
"Since launching Bing, Microsoft sites have seen a significant increase in search queries, but Google still controls nearly two-thirds of the U.S. search query market, according to a new report released last week. In August, Google sites, including Google, YouTube,...
Deloitte: Cloud computing - A collection of working papers, released September 17, 2009 and published on July 31, 2009. "Cloud Computing frequently is taken to be a term that simply renames common technologies and techniques that we have come to...
EPIC: "...the Department of Justice announced a new policy that limits the government’s use of the state secrets privilege. The state secrets privilege is a rule of evidence intended to prevent genuine matters of national security from being disclosed in...
Follow up to August 31, 2009 posting, New Nationwide Insurance survey shows overwhelming support for laws banning texting while driving, this related news - Survey: U.S. Drivers Say Texting While Driving Should be Banned; Voice Technology Seen as Safer: "A...
Improving Transparency, Integrity, and Accountability in Water Supply and Sanitation. World Bank and Transparency International. Read and navigate the Report by E-Book. "This volume will serve as a useful tool for those who wish to diagnose, analyze, and take action...
News release: "The massive scale of global corruption resulting from bribery, price-fixing cartels and undue influence on public policy is costing billions and obstructing the path towards sustainable economic growth, according to a new report released today by Transparency International...
"Over the next 15 years, battery electric vehicles will barely reach a market share of three percent in the worldwide automotive sector. Substantial extra costs, which presently reach as much as Euro 20,000 for a car in the same category...
Peek: Mobile E-Mail On A Budget - Conrad J. Jacoby discusses his experiences using the Peek mobile e-mail device (Time Magazine's 2008 Gadget of the Year), which he believes is genuinely useful and an excellent value for its cost....
High School Dropouts and The Economic Losses from Juvenile Crime in California. California Dropout Research Project Report #16, September 2009, By Clive R. Belfield Queens College, City University of New York and Henry M. Levin Teachers College, Columbia University [thanks...
"A fast-growing FBI data-mining system billed as a tool for hunting terrorists is being used in hacker and domestic criminal investigations, and now contains tens of thousands of records from private corporate databases, including car-rental companies, large hotel chains and...
"In a case brought by Center for Food Safety and Earthjustice representing a coalition of farmers and consumers, a Federal Court ruled yesterday that the Bush USDA’s approval of genetically engineered (GE) “RoundUp Ready” sugar beets [note: sugar beets produce...
The 50 Richest Members of Congress: "Even membership in Congress’ most exclusive club couldn’t insulate lawmakers from the economic downturn. According to Roll Call’s annual examination of House and Senate financial disclosure forms, while the 50 richest Members of Congress...
News release: "The U.S. Census Bureau today released the latest American Community Survey (ACS) data, providing a statistical portrait of the characteristics of the nation’s population in 2008. / Detailed tables / ACS Media Toolkit / 2008 ACS Questionnaire. According...
Follow up to previous postings on what is becoming the saga of the Google Book Settlement, the following articles, legal documents and commentary today: New York Times: Google Working to Revise Digital Books Settlement Author's Guild: "Beating their midnight deadline...
The Conference Board Task Force on Executive Compensation, September 2009 "The current economic crisis, precipitated by the meltdown in the financial services industry, has led to a loss of public trust in corporations and other institutions. Executive compensation has become...
News release: "Counting down the hours until payday? You’re not alone. As the economic downturn trudges on, many workers are struggling with household budgets. Six-in-ten (61 percent) workers report they always or usually live paycheck to paycheck just to make...
News release: "With national unemployment topping 9 percent and many Americans seeking online information and new technology skills that can help keep them and their families afloat in hard times, U.S. public libraries are first responders in a time of...
Megaregions and America’s economic recovery - A look at opportunities for megaregional planning across the U.S. [This article appears in the September 2009 issue of the Urbanist] "The Obama administration's commitment to high-speed rail, including $8 billion in the American...
HeinOnline blog: "HeinOnline has had Federal Register coverage back to 1936 for several years now, but restrictions in our production process limited how quickly we could get new Federal Register days online. Recently, those production restrictions were eliminated, and starting...
The Internet as a Diversion, September 2009: "Three-quarters of online economic users go online to relax and take their minds off of the recession. Fully 88% of 18-29 year old online economic users look to the internet to relax." See...
Press Accuracy Rating Hits Two Decade Low: "The public’s assessment of the accuracy of news stories is now at its lowest level in more than two decades of Pew Research surveys, and Americans’ views of media bias and independence now...
News release: "Regional and state unemployment rates were generally little changed in August. Twenty-seven states and the District of Columbia reported over-the-month unemployment rate increases, 16 states registered rate decreases, and 7 states had no rate change, the U.S. Bureau...
Fact Sheet on U.S. Missile Defense Policy - A "Phased, Adaptive Approach" for Missile Defense in Europe: "President Obama has approved the recommendation of Secretary of Defense Gates and the Joint Chiefs of Staff for a phased, adaptive approach for...
The Economic Effects of Legislation to Reduce Greenhouse-Gas Emissions, September 2009 "U.S. emissions currently account for roughly 20 percent of global emissions. As a result, substantially reducing global emissions would probably entail large reductions in U.S. emissions as well as...
eWeek.com: "Google agrees to provide 2 million non-copyrighted book titles for On Demand Books printing and cutting using its high-speed Espresso Book Machine. Google Books titles offered via the Espresso Machine will have a recommended sales price of $8 per...
How Regulatory Standards Can Affect a Cap-and-Trade Program for Greenhouse Gases, September 16, 2009 "Some legislation considered by the current and previous Congresses has proposed combining cap-and-trade programs with various regulatory standards to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. Greenhouse gases increase the...
Google proposal: "The Newspaper Association of America's Request for Information "seeks to gather information about the products and services available from qualified providers with expertise in helping local online publishers additionally monetize digital content, either through transactions (pay for content)...
Official Google Blog: "Google for the Public Sector, a one-stop shop of tools and tips that local, state and federal government officials can use to help promote transparency and increase citizen participation. The site helps government agencies: Make your website,...
News release: "Apps.gov is an online storefront for federal agencies to quickly browse and purchase cloud-based IT services, for productivity, collaboration, and efficiency. Cloud computing is the next generation of IT in which data and applications will be housed centrally...
DOD Business Systems Modernization: Navy Implementing a Number of Key Management Controls on Enterprise Resource Planning System, but Improvements Still Needed, GAO-09-841, September 15, 2009 Homeland Security: Despite Progress, DHS Continues to Be Challenged in Managing Its Multi-Billion Dollar Annual...
Brookings September 2009 — MetroMonitor: "The American economy continued to weaken during the months of April, May, and June 2009, but it was no longer in free fall. Employment remained on a downward path—the nation lost nearly 1.3 million jobs...
Remarks by the President on Financial Rescue and Reform, Federal Hall New York, New York - September 14, 2009: "Eight months later, the work of recovery continues. And though I will never be satisfied while people are out of work...
"Executives at Britain's top companies saw their basic salaries leap 10% last year, despite the onset of the worst global recession in decades, in which their companies lost almost a third of their value amid a record decline in the...
Boston.com: "Mayor Thomas M. Menino’s administration, prompted by public records requests from the Globe, has acknowledged that city employees were routinely deleting e-mails, a potential violation of the state public records law. The acknowledgement came after the Globe filed several...
New York Times: Wall Street’s Math Wizards Forgot a Few Variables: "But the real failure, according to finance experts and economists, was in the quants’ mathematical models of risk that suggested the arcane stuff was safe. The risk models proved...
New York Times: Clean Water Laws Are Neglected, at a Cost to Health "Across the nation, the system that Congress created to protect the nation’s waters under the Clean Water Act of 1972 today often fails to prevent pollution. The...
WSJ: Sept. 11 Attacks Remembered New York Times: Showcase: The World, as of 9/10/01 New York Times: Obama Extols the ‘True Spirit’ of Sept. 11 New York Times: Remembering the Horror of a Bright Blue Morning LLRX Newstand - 9-11-2001...
Via Out of the Jungle, insightful commentary and content from a fee based Chronicle of Higher Education article, Choosing Up Sides to Hate or Love the Google Books Deal: "...And—this is what intrigues me the most—how will Judge Chin decide...
Gallup: "As the U.S. Supreme Court convenes Wednesday with recently sworn-in Justice Sonia Sotomayor on the bench, Gallup finds Americans broadly upbeat about the performance of the high court. Sixty-one percent of Americans approve and 28% disapprove of the job...
The Apps for America Winners [via Abi Morgan]: DataMasher: "DataMasher helps citizens have a little fun with those data by creating mashups to visualize them in different ways and see how states compare on important issues. Users can combine different...
White House: "Tonight the President will make clear to Congress exactly what he would like to see in the health insurance reform legislation that gets sent to his desk. With four out of five committees in Congress having finished their...
Prepared Remarks of President Barack Obama Back to School Event, Arlington, Virginia, September 8, 2009: "Every single one of you has something you’re good at. Every single one of you has something to offer. And you have a responsibility to...
Economic Policy Institute Fact Sheet, Labor Day by the Numbers, September 7, 2009 . Note that all numbers are current as of September 4, 2009. TOTAL JOBS LOST DURING THE RECESSION: 6.9 MILLION. "New jobs needed per month to keep...
Meeting of Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors, London, 4-5 September 2009, "We must build on what we have already achieved and tackle the significant challenges that lie ahead. It is vital for growth that we act to support lending,...
News release: "As the federal government develops a national strategy to address the H1N1 virus for the fall and winter flu seasons, the National Conference of State Legislatures has developed a comprehensive webpage with resources for states. Since states are...
visualeconomics: The Value of United States Currency in Circulation - "We look into how much paper currency and coin production is in circulation, and some interesting facts surrounding the U.S. Mint’s production."...
visualeconomics: U.S. Trade Partners Around The Globe - The trade partnerships of the United States are a vital part of it’s economic prosperity and growth."...
White House: "We have previously reported six limited waivers that have been granted by the White House pursuant to the President’s Executive Order on Ethics for Executive Branch personnel – the strongest ethics standards in U.S. government history. Three of...
Remarks by the Vice President on the 200 Days of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act: "First, we had to stabilize the financial system. We took the unpopular but necessary step of rescuing the banks. And now, although there's a...
"The American work force is graying -- and not just because the American population itself is graying. Older adults are staying in the labor force longer, and younger adults are staying out of it longer. Both trends took shape about...
Official Gmail Blog: "Gmail's web interface had a widespread outage [September 1, 2009], lasting about 100 minutes. We know how many people rely on Gmail for personal and professional communications, and we take it very seriously when there's a problem...
Arbor Networks: The Internet After Dark (Part 1), by Craig Labovitz: "After dark when the dinner dishes are put away and the kids are safely tucked into bed, the Internet subtly changes. Starting in the twilight of early evening, business...
Online Behavioral Tracking and Targeting Concerns and Solutions, Legislative Primer September 2009 - from the Perspective of: Center for Digital Democracy, Consumer Federation of America, Consumers Union, Consumer Watchdog, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Privacy Lives, Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, Privacy Times, U.S....
News release: "Scientists led by a former co-chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will warn today that the UN negotiations aimed at tackling climate change are based on substantial underestimates of what it will cost to adapt to...
The Government Domain: Tracking Congress 2.0 - With the 111th Congress of the United States reconvening on September 8th, e-gov expert Peggy Garvin highlights new tools and sources that enhance and expand your ability to track and monitor the action....
News release: "Nationwide Insurance today released the results of its new On Your Side® survey, which found that 8 in 10 Americans surveyed this month say they would support legislation restricting cell phone use while driving. The survey, conducted Aug....
Official Google Blog: "Today, we're excited to announce that we've added nine new languages to Google Translate: Afrikaans, Belarusian, Icelandic, Irish, Macedonian, Malay, Swahili, Welsh and Yiddish. That means that Google Translate now supports 51 languages and 2550 language pairs...
Re-Hashing the Hash Tag - Crowd Competition and Community Standards at the #AALL2009 Conference: Roger V. Skalbeck and Meg Kribble describe how the majority of social media activity during the 2009 AALL conference took place on Twitter, and how this...
Medical Bankruptcy in the United States, 2007: Results of a National Study, David U. Himmelstein, MD, Deborah Thorne, PhD, Elizabeth Warren, JD, Steffie Woolhandler, MD, MPH. The American Journal of Medicine (2009). "Our 2001 study in 5 states found that...
EPA website on Lead in Paint, Dust, and Soil: "Lead is a toxic metal that was used for many years in products found in and around our homes. Lead also can be emitted into the air from motor vehicles and...
News release: "The American Bar Association, in partnership with the Alliance for Community Trees (ACT) and the Parks & People Foundation, will kick off the ABA’s One Million Trees Project in a public ceremony Sept. 23 at Franklin Square Elementary/Middle...
2008 State Snapshots - "The State Snapshots provide State-specific health care quality information, including strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities for improvement. The goal is to help State officials and their public- and private-sector partners better understand health care quality and disparities...
News release: "Commercial banks and savings institutions insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) reported an aggregate net loss of $3.7 billion in the second quarter of 2009, a decline of $8.5 billion from the $4.8 billion in profits...
News release: "The Federal Housing Finance Agency today reported that the average interest rate on conventional 30-year, fixed-rate, mortgage loans of $417,000 or less increased 19 basis points to 5.31 percent in July. The average interest rate on 15-year, fixed-rate...
News release: "The Conference Board Consumer Confidence Index ®, which had retreated in July, rebounded in August. The Index now stands at 54.1 (1985=100), up from 47.4 in July. The Present Situation Index increased slightly to 24.9 from 23.3 last...
News release: "Today, the National Security Archive posted a side-by-side comparison of two very different versions of a 2004 report on the CIA's "Counterterrorism Detention and Interrogation Activities" by Agency Inspector General John Helgerson. Yesterday, the Obama administration released new...
News release: "The [redacted] documents [below] were released through FOIA litigation by the Center for Constitutional Rights, Amnesty International USA, and the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice at New York University School of Law seeking disclosure of information...
Calculated Risk: Failed Banks and the Deposit Insurance Fund: "The FDIC is seizing about 4 to 5 banks per week recently, and with over four months to go in 2009, this suggests close to 150 bank failures this year..At the...
Private Pensions: Alternative Approaches Could Address Retirement Risks Faced by Workers but Pose Trade-offs, GAO-09-642, July 24, 2009....
News release: "In response to increasing concerns in the health care debate regarding the long-term costs of reform, the Bipartisan Policy Center (BPC) released a report examining various steps for reforming the health care system to one that delivers better...
Debating How Much Weed Killer Is Safe in Your Water Glass: "For decades, farmers, lawn care workers and professional green thumbs have relied on the popular weed killer atrazine to protect their crops, golf courses and manicured lawns. But atrazine...
News release: "The delinquency rate for mortgage loans on one-to-four-unit residential properties rose to a seasonally adjusted rate of 9.24 percent of all loans outstanding as of the end of the second quarter of 2009, up 12 basis points from...
Health Insurance: Enrollment, Benefits, Funding, and Other Characteristics of State High-Risk Health Insurance Pools, GAO-09-730R, July 22, 2009 "A growing number of states--35 as of June 2009--have created high-risk health insurance pools (HRPs) primarily to provide coverage to individuals whose...
TechDailyDose: "The Obama administration's open government crusade appears to be contagious. San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom on Wednesday announced the launch of DataSF.org, a Web site that will offer convenient access to city data that is relevant to the community....
"PandaLabs issued a release on the proliferation of identity theft malware during times of economic crisis. Our research found that the number of users affected by malware designed for identity theft has increased 600 percent this year compared to the...
U.S. Solar Energy Demand Dynamics - Financing Structures, Government Incentives, and Market Drivers for Solar Photovoltaics Projects: 2009-2015 "The United States has become one of the more aggressive nations in promoting alternative energy technologies, but at the federal level tax...
News release: "High potential employees aren’t afraid to strike out for greater opportunities despite the continuing recession, according to a study of how the best and brightest of high potential talent have weathered the global recession over the past 18...
American Customer Satisfaction Index - Annual E-Business Report, August 18, 2009, by Larry Freed President and CEO, ForeSee Results "In 2009, the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) score for the e-business sector rises to an all-time high of 81.5 on...
News release: "The re-launched www.nationalgallery.org.uk is the first major gallery website to offer a full-screen zoom facility for its entire collection. Users can now examine every National Gallery masterpiece in outstanding detail, effortlessly sweep across digital canvases and zoom into...
News release: "Congresswoman Carolyn B. Maloney, Chair of the Joint Economic Committee (JEC), along with Rep. Elijah Cummings and Rep. Jim Moran released a JEC new report entitled, Comprehensive Health Insurance Reform: An Essential Prescription for Women. The report reveals...
News release: "Are law firms putting their bottom lines at risk? According to Catalyst’s Women of Color in U.S. Law Firms, women of color face complex barriers compared to other groups that may significantly decrease job satisfaction and increase the...
Audit Report, Protection of the Department of Energy's Unclassified Sensitive Electronic Information - DOE/IG-0818 August 2009: "The Department of Energy and its contractors store and process massive quantities of sensitive information to accomplish national security, energy, science, and environmental missions....
News releases: "The Federal Reserve Board and the Treasury Department on Monday announced that they approved an extension to the Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility (TALF) and that, at this time, they do not anticipate any further additions to the...
News release: "On the eve of the 74th anniversary of Social Security, nearly nine in ten (88%) Americans say Social Security is more important than ever as a result of today's economic crisis, and three-quarters of Americans say it is...
GreenerComputing Staff: "A new article in the journal Environmental Science & Technology looks at the market for reuse of exported computers and other electronics and finds that there is plenty of life in those old machines -- although e-waste exports...
Via Slate: Seeking How the brain hard-wires us to love Google, Twitter, and texting. And why that's dangerous, by Emily Yoffe. "...Actually all our electronic communication devices—e-mail, Facebook feeds, texts, Twitter—are feeding the same drive as our searches. Since we're...
WEEKLY ADDRESS: President Obama Says Health Reform Will Put Patients’ Interests Ahead of Insurance Company Profits: "President Barack Obama described just how dysfunctional the current health insurance system is and how reform will fix it. Right now, the American people...
Congressional Budget Office (CBO) - Quality Initiatives Undertaken by the Veterans Health Administration, August 2009. "With the return of veterans who have served in the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan and with a much larger number of veterans from earlier...
Federal Websites: Cookie Policy - Posted by Michael Fitzpatrick is Associate Administrator, OMB Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, Vivek Kundra is Federal CIO: "During the Open Government Initiative outreach, Federal employees and the public have asked us questions about...
"In the 2005 NASA Authorization Act, Congress mandated that by 2020 NASA should be capable of detecting at least 90 percent of objects over 140 meters wide in the vicinity of Earth’s orbit. Near-Earth Object Surveys and Hazard Mitigation Strategies,...
The Value of Provider Networks And the Role of Out-of-Network Charges In Rising Health Care Costs: A Survey of Charges Billed By Out-of-Network Physicians "Protecting consumers from runaway charges billed by some out-of-network physicians is an important policy issue at...
News release: "U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa P. Jackson announced that the agency is taking an important step to ensure children’s health is taken into account when evaluating the chemical perchlorate. To enhance transparency, the agency is seeking public...
"For the last several months, a large team of Googlers has been working on a secret project: a next-generation architecture for Google's web search. It's the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size,...
Congressional Oversight Panel, August 11, 2009 - Submitted under Section 125(b)(1) of Title 1 of the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008, Pub. L. No. 110-343. August Oversight Report - The Continued Rise of Troubled Assets. "Given the ongoing uncertainty,...
News release: "In a new report, Coverage Denied: How the Current Health Insurance System Leaves Millions Behind, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services examines the insurance company practice of denying coverage to or discriminating against Americans who have...
Policy Brief, August 2009: "New data from the U.S. Department of Education’s National Postsecondary Student Aid Study reveal that while many students are accumulating high levels of debt, these students remain the exception. Between 2003-04 and 2007-08, debt levels increased...
News release: "House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers, Jr. (D-Mich.) today released over 700 pages of on-the-record interview transcripts of Karl Rove and Harriet Miers on the U.S. attorney firings and the Bush administration’s politicization of the Department of Justice....
WSJ: Justice O'Connor's continuing judicial work [as a substitute judge, Justice O'Connor has heard nearly 80 cases and written more than a dozen opinions] comes in addition to many other activities, from ceremonial functions -- such as serving as grand...
North American Leaders’ Declaration on Climate Change and Clean Energy, August 10, 2009 "We, the leaders of North America reaffirm the urgency and necessity of taking aggressive action on climate change. We stress that the experience developed during the last...
News release: "The Federal Reserve Board on Monday published its annual adjustment of the dollar amount of fees that triggers additional disclosure requirements under the Truth in Lending Act for home mortgage loans that bear rates or fees above a...
News release: "Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo today announced that his office has issued cease-and-desist letters to nearly 40 auto dealers across New York state whose advertisements for the new federal Car Allowance Rebate System (“CARS” or “Cash for Clunkers”)...
News release: "Filling a major gap in the availability of residential property data, the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy and the Graaskamp Center for Real Estate at the Wisconsin School of Business announced a new online database detailing land and...
CRS: Private Health Insurance Provisions of H.R. 3200, July 27, 2009 "This report summarizes key provisions affecting private health insurance in H.R. 3200, America’s Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009, as ordered reported by House Committees on Education and Labor...
Joel Zand, FindLaw: "A panel of three federal judges ordered the State of California to reduce its inmate population because of prison overcrowding, resulting in the release of approximately 43,000 prisoners during the next two years so that the state's...
Warning: Oil supplies are running out fast - Catastrophic shortfalls threaten economic recovery, says world's top energy economist "The world is heading for a catastrophic energy crunch that could cripple a global economic recovery because most of the major oil...
The Audience for Online Video-Sharing Sites Shoots Up, Pew Internet & American Life Project, Mary Madden, Senior Research Specialist, July 2009. "The audience for online video sharing sites like YouTube and Google Video continues to grow swiftly across all demographic...
News release: "The eRulemaking Program has launched a significant upgrade to the Web site that provides one-stop, public access to information related to current and forthcoming regulations issued by the federal government. Enhancements to regulations.gov include improved search capabilities, new...
CBO's Economic Forecasting Record: 2009 Update, July 2009 "Since publishing its first macroeconomic forecast in 1976, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has compiled a forecasting track record that is comparable in quality with that of the Administration and that of...
News release: "comScore, Inc., a leader in measuring the digital world, released a June 2009 overview of the career services & development category based on data from comScore Media Metrix and comScore Marketer. The study revealed that more than 65...
News release: "MBTA General Manager Daniel A. Grabauskas announced the T's partnership with Google Transit and the convenience and ease travelers will have when planning a trip on the authority's bus, subway, commuter rail, and boat service. Similar to the...
NO RHYME OR REASON: The 'Heads I Win, Tails You Lose' Bank Bonus Culture, Andrew M. Cuomo, Attorney General, State of New York [Report Was Previously Transmitted to House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, Chairman Edolplhus Towns (D-NY)] "Through various...
The Internet and the Recession, by Lee Rainie, Aaron Smith - July 15, 2009 "Some 69% of all Americans have used the internet to cope with the recession as they hunt for bargains, jobs, ways to upgrade their skills, better...
Wireless Internet Use, by John Horrigan, July 22, 2009 "An April 2009 survey by the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project shows that 56% of adult Americans have accessed the internet by wireless means, such as using a...
Career and Technical Education: States Have Broad Flexibility in Implementing Perkins IV, GAO-09-683, July 29, 2009 Career and Technical Education: Surveys to State Directors of Career and Technical Education (GAO-09-737SP, July 2009), an E-supplement to GAO-09-683, GAO-09-737SP, July 29, 2009...
The Government Domain - Congressional Documents on FDsys: the Basics - E-Gov guru and research expert Peggy Garvin provides an overview of the organization, content and search features of GPO's new Federal Digital System (FDsys)....
S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Factsheet S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Indices Methodology S&P/Case-Shiller® Home Price FAQ May 26, 2009: S&P/Case-Shiller U.S. National Home Price Values July 28, 2009: Historical Values Supplemental Data Related postings on financial system...
"The Financial Crisis Advisory Group (FCAG), a high level group of recognised leaders with broad experience in international financial markets, today published its recommendations related to accounting standard-setting activities, and other changes to the international regulatory environment following the global...
Characteristics and Performance of Nonprime Mortgages, GAO-09-848R, July 28, 2009 Electronic Health Records: DOD and VA Efforts to Achieve Full Interoperability Are Ongoing; Program Office Management Needs Improvement, GAO-09-775, July 28, 2009 Home Mortgages: Recent Performance of Nonprime Loans Highlights...
News release: "Several large-scale, naturalistic driving studies (using sophisticated cameras and instrumentation in participants’ personal vehicles) conducted by the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute (VTTI), provide a clear picture of driver distraction and cell phone use under real‐world driving conditions. Combined,...
Council of Economic Advisors: The Economic Effects of Health Care Reform on Small Businesses and Their Employees, July 25, 2009...
News release: "Sales of new one-family houses in June 2009 were at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 384,000, according to estimates released jointly today by the U.S. Census Bureau and the Department of Housing and Urban Development. This is...
News release: "In conjunction with the 19th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act, the U.S. Department of Labor has re-named and re-launched DisabilityInfo.gov as Disability.gov. The site now offers comprehensive information about programs and services to better serve the...
"In times of economic crisis, governments face pressure to adopt measures which may restrict trade and there are real dangers that such pressures, if not addressed adequately, can lead to a dangerous escalation. Contingency measures can act as a safety...
GNC.com: "The days of a Web presence being an optional component for agencies are long gone. For most citizens, the primary way of interacting with their government is through Web sites. By and large, agencies have responded to that demand...
"This updated, third edition of WTO Dispute Settlement: One-Page Case Summaries has been prepared by the Legal Affairs Division of the WTO with special assistance from the Rules Division and the Appellate Body Secretariat. This new edition covers all panel...
News release - High-Speed Services for Internet Access. Provides summary statistics of subscribership data that facilities-based providers of high-speed services file twice a year on FCC Form 477: "High-speed lines, defined as connections delivering services at speeds exceeding 200 kbps...
FEMA Responses to Formaldehyde in Trailers (OIG-09-83), (Redacted), June 2009 "Nearly one-third of the trailers provided to victims of hurricanes Katrina and Rita were eventually projected to have significant potential formaldehyde problems. Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) officials, in our...
News release: "The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) today released new data on local telephone service competition in the United States. Twice a year, all incumbent local exchange carriers (incumbent LECs) and competitive local exchange carriers (CLECs) are required to report...
"Most Americans rate the nation's health care as no better than average when compared with health care in other industrialized countries. Just 15% say health care in this country is the "best in the world," while 23% rate it as...
"The report Sustaining California Agriculture in an Uncertain Future shows that California agriculture can flourish despite diminishing water supply and future uncertainty from climate change, but it will require great strides in increasing the water efficiency of the agricultural sector....
Preliminary Analysis Of the Effects of HR 2454 On U.S. Agriculture - Office of the Chief Economist Economic Research Service, U.S., Department of Agriculture, July 22, 2009 Executive Summary: "USDA performed a preliminary economic analysis of the impacts of House-passed...
The Internet and the Recession by Lee Rainie, Aaron Smith, July 15, 2009: "More than two-thirds of Americans – 69% – have used the internet to help them with personal economic issues that have arisen in the recession and to...
"Greater meat consumption and demand for fossil fuels worldwide are expected to cause increasingly more harmful algal blooms and dead zones in coastal and freshwater areas. “Nutrient pollution in aquatic ecosystems, or eutrophication, is a rapidly growing environmental crisis,” said...
Federal Reserve's semiannual Monetary Policy Report to the Congress, July 21, 2009 "Amid a severe global economic downturn, the U.S. economy contracted further and labor market conditions worsened over the first half of 2009. In the early part of the...
News release: "The Congressional Oversight Panel today released its Special Report on Farm Loan Restructuring, fulfilling a mandate under the Helping Families Save Their Homes Act of 2009 to analyze "the state of the commercial farm credit markets and the...
News release: "From December 2007 to December 2008, employment declined in 285 of the 334 largest U.S. counties, according to preliminary data released today by the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Department of Labor. Elkhart County, Ind., located...
"The following body of research, conducted by the Department of Transportation and completed in 2003, has not been made public until now. The documents pertain to the safety of using wireless communication devices while driving. The New York Times obtained...
News release: "Regional and state unemployment rates were generally higher in June. Thirty-eight states and the District of Columbia recorded over-the-month unemployment rate increases, 5 states registered rate decreases, and 7 states had no rate change, the Bureau of Labor...
PASS ID Act Addresses Major Privacy Concerns in REAL ID: "CDT testified [July 15, 2009] before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs hearing on reevaluating the REAL ID Act. CDT testified in support of the PASS ID...
United States Air Force Unmanned Aircraft Systems Flight Plan 2009-2047 (Unclassified), May 18, 2009...
News release: Javelin Strategy & Research released its Fifth Annual Card Issuers’ Identity Safety Scorecard, which analyzes the top 25 U.S. card issuers’ capabilities for protecting customers from identity fraud. To compile the report, Javelin incorporated data from annual household,...
"The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and the staff of the Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) have completed a preliminary analysis of H.R. 3200, the America’s Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009, as introduced on July 14, 2009. This analysis does...
Guardian UK: "The Financial Times editor, Lionel Barber, has predicted that "almost all" news organisations will be charging for online content within a year. Barber said building online platforms that could charge readers on an article-by-article or subscription basis was...
The Long-Term Budget Outlook, July 16, 2009. Testimony before the Committee on the Budget, United States Senate. "Measured relative to GDP, almost all of the projected growth in federal spending other than interest payments on the debt comes from growth...
U.S. States E-Governance Report (2008) An Assessment of State Websites, Marc Holzer, Aroon Manoharan, Robert Shick, Genie Stowers "The U.S. States E-Governance Survey assessed the practice of digital governance in states across the United States by evaluating their websites and...
Fact Sheet: Administration's Regulatory Reform Agenda Moves Forward: Legislation for the Registration of Hedge Funds Delivered to Capitol Hill "Continuing its push to establish new rules of the road and make the financial system more fair across the board, the...
Clean Water Infrastructure: Design Issues and Funding Options for a Clean Water Trust Fund, GAO-09-893T, July 15, 2009 Coast Guard Retiree Health Care: Coast Guard Contributions to and Payments from the DOD Medicare-Eligible Retiree Health Care Fund (MERHCF), GAO-09-857R, July...
S. 1390, National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2010 - July 14, 2009, Cost estimate for the bill as reported by the Senate Committee on Armed Services on July 2, 2009 "S. 1390 would authorize appropriations totaling $681 billion...
CBO Preliminary Analysis of the Insurance Coverage Specifications Provided by the House Tri-Committee Group, July 14, 2009, Letter to the Honorable Charles B. Rangel "The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and the staff of the Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) have...
CBO: Intergovernmental Mandates in Federal Legislation, July 14, 2009, Economic and Budget Issue Brief "Federal law sometimes requires state, local, or tribal governments to spend money to achieve certain goals. In some cases, a requirement is imposed as a condition...
Testimony Before the House of Representatives Committee on Financial Services Subcommittee on Capital Markets, Insurance and Government-Sponsored Enterprises, SEC Oversight: Current State and Agenda, Tuesday, July 14, 2009, by Chairman Mary L. Schapiro, U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. "The last...
Coast Guard: As Deepwater Systems Integrator, Coast Guard Is Reassessing Costs and Capabilities but Lags in Applying Its Disciplined Acquisition Approach, GAO-09-682, July 14, 2009 Electronic Health Records: Program Office Improvements Needed to Strengthen Management of VA and DOD Efforts...
"UK Music fans are turning their backs on regular file-sharing in favour of streaming and other ways of sharing music, especially amongst teens, according to the latest survey by The Leading Question, the specialist media and technology research agency. Following...
"Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT) today released a Policy Post discussing privacy implications for the federal data clearinghouse known as data.gov and de-identification considerations for the Open Government Directive. While this initiative signifies a step in the right direction...
"In a major step toward developing a state-of-the-art Recovery.gov website, a contract was awarded this week to Smartronix, Inc., a Maryland information technology firm. The company will build the new website for the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, an independent...
PBS.org FRONTLINE - Ghana, Digital Dumping Ground: "When containers of old computers first began arriving in West Africa a few years ago, Ghanaians welcomed what they thought were donations to help bridge the digital divide. But soon exporters learned to...
Memorandum: Risk Management - Asset and Liability Concentrations - Office of Thrift Supervision, July 9, 2009 "The Office of Supervision (OTS) has conducted internal reviews of recent savings association failures and has identified concerns regarding asset and liability concentrations and...
Working Paper - Structural Inflation Models with Real Wage Rigidities: The Case of Canada, Jean-Marie Dufour, Lynda Khalaf, and Maral Kichian, July 2009 "Real wage rigidities have recently been proposed as a way of building intrinsic persistence in inflation within...
Pew Research Center: Public Praises Science; Scientists Fault Public, Media - Scientific Achievements Less Prominent Than a Decade Ago "Americans like science. Overwhelming majorities say that science has had a positive effect on society and that science has made life...
News release: "The Pacific Research Institute (PRI) announced the release of a new report on Internet privacy and security. Click Confidential: A Privacy Primer for the Social Web, authored by Daniel Ballon, Ph.D., PRI senior fellow in technology studies, outlines...
Two Recent Studies of Regional Differences in the Effects of Policies That Would Price Carbon Dioxide Emissions, July 9, 2009, Letter to the Honorable James M. Inhofe "As you know, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) recently analyzed the effects that...
News release: "Important new information was added today to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ (CMS) Hospital Compare Web site that reports how frequently patients return to a hospital after being discharged, a possible indicator of how well the...
From Visual Economics, this graphical image: Where Does the Money Go? - U.S. Consumer Unit Expenditures - average annual expenditures and percentage of total, using data from Bureau of Labor Statistics....
Official Google Blog: "It's been an exciting nine months since we launched the Google Chrome browser. Already, over 30 million people use it regularly. We designed Google Chrome for people who live on the web — searching for information, checking...
Mastering Counterinsurgency: A Workshop Report, Stephen P. Cohen, Senior Fellow, Foreign Policy, Shuja Nawaz, Director, South Asia Center, The Atlantic Council, July 7, 2009 "The Brookings Institution and the Pakistan National Defence University, with support from the U.S. National Defense...
News release: "A group of the nation's largest media and marketing trade associations...released self-regulatory principles to protect consumer privacy in ad-supported interactive media that will require advertisers and Web sites to clearly inform consumers about data collection practices and enable...
News release: "A wide-ranging review of how Americans engage with and value the nation’s land and water resources and its outdoor recreation assets calls for a comprehensive overhaul of programs and policies to safeguard these resources for future generations and...
White House Fact Sheet: United States-Russia Military to Military Relations. See also: Press Conference by President Obama and President Medvedev of Russia Fact Sheet - The Joint Understanding for the START Follow-on Treaty Fact Sheet: U.S.-Russia Bilateral Presidential Commission...
"Codex Sinaiticus is one of the world's outstanding manuscripts. Together with Codex Vaticanus, it is one of the earliest extant Bibles, containing the oldest complete New Testament. This treasured codex is indispensable for understanding the earliest text of the Greek...
Google LatLong Blog: "The web is becoming increasingly indispensable to people looking for a new home to buy...from today, if you enter a query like homes for sale in san francisco>> on Google Maps, you'll see that we make it...
New York Times DealBook: "A federal judge late on Sunday approved a plan by General Motors to sell its best assets to a new, government-backed company, a crucial step for the automaker to restructure and complete its trip through bankruptcy...
News release: "The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed suit against the Department of Justice [on June 24, 2009], demanding the public release of the surveillance guidelines that govern investigations of Americans by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). The FBI's...
USAspending.gov: Where Americans Can See Where Their Money Goes - Have you ever wanted to find more information on government spending? Have you ever wondered where Federal contracting dollars and grant awards go? Or perhaps you would just like to...
News release: "The Conference Board Consumer Confidence Index™, which had improved considerably in May, retreated in June. The Index now stands at 49.3 (1985=100), down from 54.8 in May. The Present Situation Index decreased to 24.8 from 29.7. The Expectations...
UberCEO: Fortune 100 CEOs and Social Media - "...top CEOs in the country appear to be mostly absent from the social media community. That's the result from research we conducted over the past several weeks. We looked at Fortune's 2009...
News release: "The Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency today issued the host state loan-to-deposit ratios that the banking agencies will use to determine...
Arctic Climate Change and Security Policy Conference: Final Report and Findings, Kenneth Yalowitz, James Collins, Ross Virginia Report, June 2009 "This final report summarizes the panel discussions from a conference on arctic climate change and security policy sponsored by the...
WSJ: "U.S. consumers are saving more of their incomes than any time since 1993 -- a major shift toward frugality that's expected to be one of the lasting effects of this deep and lengthy recession." U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis...
UNODC Releases 2009 World Drug Report: The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime has just released the 2009 version of its annual drug report. The Report was launched in Washington, D.C., by UNODC Executive Director Antonio Maria Costa and...
News release: "CDT's Health Privacy Project released a paper advocating the need for stronger standards for "de-identified" personal health information when used for medial research, to promote public health, or other specialized purposes. The paper notes that stronger standards are...
Banque de France Press Release: 2008 annual report of the Commission bancaire - "In 2008 the financial turmoil resulting from the subprime crisis intensified, leading many credit institutions, in particular in the United States, to make substantial write-downs and impairments....
"The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Environmental Justice Resource Guide, a handbook for community organizers and decision-makers, is now available from the EPA’s Pacific Southwest Environmental Justice Office....it provides information on funding sources and other resources that can help communities understand,...
Aviation Safety: Better Data and Targeted FAA Efforts Needed to Identify and Address Safety Issues of Small Air Cargo Carriers, GAO-09-614, June 24, 2009 Coast Guard: Observations on the Genesis and Progress of the Service's Modernization Program, GAO-09-530R, June 24,...
News release: "EPA has released the latest version of a state-of-the-science tool that estimates health risks from breathing air toxics in the United States. The National Air Toxics Assessment (NATA), based on 2002 air emissions data, helps federal, state, local...
Patricia White, Associate Director, Division of Research and Statistics - Testimony: Over-the-counter derivatives Before the Subcommittee on Securities, Insurance, and Investment, Committee of Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, U.S. Senate, Washington, D.C. June 22, 2009 [link to all related testimony]:...
News release: "EPA released a first-of-its-kind guide to help states save money and reduce greenhouse gas emissions by adopting clean energy practices in their facilities, operations and vehicle fleets. States spend about 10 percent of their operating budgets on energy...
"Traffic Volume Trends is a monthly report based on hourly traffic count data reported by the States. These data are collected at approximately 4,000 continuous traffic counting locations nationwide and are used to estimate the percent change in traffic for...
"Google's book search engine has a new interface [details and screen shots provided] that adds many missing features. The sidebar has been moved to the left, you can now embed a book by click on "Link" and selecting the embedding...
Firearms Trafficking: U.S. Efforts to Combat Arms Trafficking to Mexico Face Planning and Coordination Challenges, GAO-09-709, June 18, 2009 International Trade: Observations on U.S. Government Efforts to Address Textile Transshipment, GAO-09-813T, June 18, 2009 Medical Devices: Shortcomings in FDA's Premarket...
Pew Internet & American Life Project: Home Broadband Adoption 2009, by John Horrigan, June 17, 2009 "An April 2009 survey by the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project shows 63% of adult Americans now have broadband internet connections...
"The Federal Trade Commission today described its comprehensive efforts to combat identity theft before the U.S. House Subcommittee on Information Policy, Census, and National Archives of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. The FTC also recommended legislative remedies to...
Follow up to June 16, 2009 posting - Draft of the White House Financial Regulatory Overhaul Plan - the White House today released: Financial Regulatory Reform: A New Foundation - Rebuilding Financial Supervision and Regulation - "We must act now...
"Crossing Our Lines: Working Together to Reform the U.S. Health System, is a bipartisan agreement for comprehensive health reform reached by Senators Howard Baker, Tom Daschle, and Bob Dole. It is the culmination of an inclusive year-and-a-half effort that included...
WSJ: "The 85-page proposal is part of an effort by the Obama administration to redraw the rules that govern finance in an attempt to restore confidence in U.S. and global markets. Obama administration officials want the rules to be tough...
Defense Acquisitions: Issues to be Considered for Army's Modernization of Combat Systems, GAO-09-793T, June 16, 2009 Federal Bankruptcy Judges: Measuring Judges' Case-Related Workload, GAO-09-808T, June 16, 2009 Influenza Pandemic: Greater Agency Accountability Needed to Protect Federal Workers in the Event...
"Social networks are exploding in popularity. Forty-three percent of the online community now uses social networking sites, including Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn. This is up from 27 percent a year ago, reports The Conference Board and TNS. The Consumer Internet...
Official Google Blog: "...Citizentube, a special YouTube blog devoted to chronicling the way that people are using video to change the world. If you've followed news and politics on YouTube, you might have noticed that we started Citizentube as a...
News release: "On the basis of available evidence and expert assessments of the evidence, the scientific criteria for an influenza pandemic have been met. The Director-General of WHO has therefore decided to raise the level of influenza pandemic alert from...
Committee on Oversight and Government Reform and Subcommittee on Domestic Policy held a hearing on: Bank of America and Merrill Lynch: How Did a Private Deal Turn Into a Federal Bailout? Opening Statement of Chairman Edolphus Towns Prepared Testimony of...
News release: "A report released today by the U.S. Department of the Interior reveals flaws in the process through which a controversial set of oil and gas leases were offered in Utah in the waning days of the previous Administration,...
Putting Women's Health Care Disparities On The Map: Examining Racial and Ethnic Disparities at the State Level, June 10, 2009: "This Kaiser Family Foundation report documents the persistence of disparities between white women and women of color across the country....
List of Distressed or Underserved Nonmetropolitan Middle-Income Geographies. Available Formats: 2009 Distressed or Underserved Tract List Excel File | PDF File | Accessible PDF File Related postings on financial system...
"On Monday, June 8, the World Factbook team unveiled its thoroughly redesigned Web site. Presenting a cleaner look, improved navigation, and a host of added features, the new site provides visitors with a more user-friendly experience. The CIA first made...
"H.R. 2454, American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009, as ordered reported by the House Committee on Energy and Commerce on May 21, 2009 would make a number of changes in energy and environmental policies largely aimed at reducing...
Jobs Picture, by Heidi Shierholz, 06-05-09: "The unemployment rate increased from 8.9% to 9.4% in May, as the Household Survey showed that over three-quarters of a million workers were added to the jobless rolls, according to the Bureau of Labor...
News release: "Terms of Service" policies on websites define how Internet businesses interact with you and use your personal information. But most web users don't read these policies -- or understand that the terms are constantly changing. To track these...
News release: "Nonfarm payroll employment fell by 345,000 in May, about half the average monthly decline for the prior 6 months, the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Department of Labor reported today. The unemployment rate continued to rise,...
Beth Noveck, Deputy Chief Technology Officer for Open Government: "...this initial public engagement process on open government policy will take place in three phases (brainstorming, discussion, drafting). Following this initial process, we will distill the input received here, from submissions...
FoxBusiness: "Lawmakers and Obama Administration officials are moving closer to finalizing proposals to overhaul the financial regulatory system -- a discussion which now includes federal insurance regulation and institutions such as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, but significant conflicts remain...
"The Commerce Department’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) delivered to the Election Assistance Commission (EAC) a draft revision to the 2005 federal Voluntary Voting System Guidelines (VVSG) Version 1.0, specifying how electronic voting machines are built and tested....
ADP National Employment Report: "Nonfarm private employment decreased 532,000 from April to May 2009 on a seasonally adjusted basis, according to the ADP National Employment Report®. The estimated change of employment from March to April was revised by 54,000, from...
News release: "The Federal Reserve Bank of New York welcomes the letter published today by major financial market participants, committing to additional changes in the market design and risk management for over-the-counter (OTC) derivatives. The letter, which addresses issues discussed...
Computerworld: "After weeks of speculation and online chatter, Microsoft last week took the wraps off Bing, which is the update to its far-from-beloved Microsoft Live Search. The update, which was code-named Kumo, comes with a phalanx of related services, like...
News release: "The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) learned in late March 2009 that an external hard drive containing copies of Clinton Administration Executive Office of the President (EOP) data was missing from a NARA processing room. The external...
News release: "The fifth meeting of the OECD’s Forum on Tax Administration was held in Paris on 28-29 May 2009, bringing together more than 100 participants from 34 OECD and non-OECD countries. The discussions focused on the challenges and opportunities...
"FlightAware offers live flight data, airport information, weather maps and charts, as well as aviation news to nearly two million users a month. FlightAware also powers operational management and dispatch software, airport FIDS (flight information displays), and provides reporting data...
News release: "The eRulemaking Program, a federal-wide E-Government project led by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, has launched Regulations.gov Exchange. Regulations.gov is the one-stop, online source for citizens to search, view and comment on regulations issued by the U.S. government....
From Law Shucks, the Layoff Tracker: "Major law firms are turning out to be just as susceptible to general economic conditions as every other industry. Historically, layoffs by top-tier firms were kept quiet and were done on a one-off basis....
Amnesty International: The State of the World's Human Rights Find a Report - scroll to the bottom of each link below to select a specific country's data Africa Americas Asia and the Pacific Europe and Central Asia Middle East and...
"After several months of declines since reaching all-time highs in September, new immigration prosecutions in February were up 22% from the previous month. According to timely case-by-case data obtained and analyzed by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), these 8,179...
American Lawyer: "Mortgage-related lawsuits are on the rise, with homeowners and investors alike suing over allegedly being duped by the mortgage industry. According to a litigation report from MortgageDaily.com, an online mortgage news analyst, the number of mortgage-related lawsuits filed...
News release: "Devolution has changed the system of Government of the United Kingdom irreversibly, according to the Commons Justice Committee, but has left England’s government highly centralised and, in the view of many, in need of fundamental change. Report -...
New York Times: "President Obama announced on Tuesday that he will nominate the federal appeals judge Sonia Sotomayor for the Supreme Court, choosing a daughter of Puerto Rican parents raised in Bronx public housing projects to become the nation’s first...
News release: "Our current economic situation has altered some of the usual interactions between monetary and fiscal policy. One change regards the relative effects of monetary and fiscal policy. The depth and persistence of economic weakness has meant that traditional...
"The proposed national autos program adopts uniform federal standards to regulate both fuel economy and greenhouse gas emissions while preserving the legal authorities of DOT, EPA and California. The program covers model year 2012 to model year 2016 and ultimately...
News release: "Today, President Obama...sign[ed] the Helping Families Save Their Homes Act and the Fraud Enforcement and Recovery Act into law...The Helping Families Save Their Homes Act is an important step towards stabilizing and reforming our nation’s financial and housing...
"A new study from the Pew Philadelphia Research Initiative looks at how 13 major cities are coping with the recession and finds that most are facing significant budget gaps and are cutting services and personnel in response. Philadelphia is one...
Remarks: "...While the United States makes up less than 5 percent of the world's population, we create roughly a quarter of the world's demand for oil. And this appetite comes at a tremendous price -- a price measured by our...
"Banks have seized homes in Orange County at a pace that dwarfs the darkest days of the housing downturn in the 1990s. Yet eager buyers have grabbed those properties, keeping the county's foreclosure inventory in check, according to a special...
CNN Transcripts - "ORSZAG: Well, I think what happened is the free-fall in the economy seems to have stopped and we're, I guess the analogy there are some glimmers of sun shining through the trees, but we're not out of...
The Global Food Crisis, The End of Plenty - by Joel K. Bourne Jr. "It is the simplest, most natural of acts, akin to breathing and walking upright. We sit down at the dinner table, pick up a fork, and...
Follow up to May 14, 2009 posting, FTC Files Suit to Stop Illegal Robocalls Pushing Vehicle “Warranty Extensions" - "Today Judge John F. Grady of the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois issued a temporary restraining...
Follow up to previous postings on Chrysler, this WSJ article, downloadable list, and graphic chart: "Chrysler will close one-quarter of its dealerships in the United States...see names, location details of the 789 dealers the embattled auto maker is seeking to...
News release: "Pool chemical injuries account for as many as 5,200 emergency room visits each year. A new study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows that these injuries are preventable, and during 2007 almost half of those...
News release: "The crisis of the past 20 months has exposed critical gaps and weaknesses in our financial regulatory system. As risks built up, internal risk management systems, rating agencies and regulators simply did not understand or address critical behaviors...
Review of the European Data Protection Directive, by Neil Robinson, Hans Graux, Maarten Botterman, Lorenzo Valeri "The Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) asked a multidisciplinary international research team led by RAND Europe with time-lex and GNKS-Consult to review the strengths and...
Through Boom and Bust: Minorities, Immigrants and Homeownership, May 12, 2009: "The boom-and-bust cycle in the U.S. housing market over the past decade and a half has generated greater gains and larger losses for minority groups than it has for...
News release: "As part of the Administration's effort to develop a budget that invests in our nation's future, the U.S. Treasury Department today released the General Explanations of the Administration's Fiscal Year 2010 Revenue Proposals (Greenbook) to provide details of...
Google News Blog: "Last Thursday we launched a new format for story pages on Google News. These are the pages you see when you click the "all [#] news articles" link of each cluster of articles which cover the same...
New York Times DealBook: "Three United States banks, apparently emboldened by the clean bills of health they received under the federal stress tests, announced plans Monday to pay down the government’s investments under the TARP program by selling billions of...
"Scoopler is a real-time search engine. We aggregate and organize content being shared on the internet as it happens, like eye-witness reports of breaking news, photos and videos from big events, and links to the hottest memes of the day....
Follow up to April 26, 2009 posting - WSJ Interactive Map - Adverse events at top 100 newspapers, 2006-2009, this New York Times op-ed by Frank Rich - The American Press on Suicide Watch: "Newspaper circulations and revenues are in...
News release: "Despite declining home prices, many of the jobs created through the federal stimulus package do not pay enough to afford a home, according to Paycheck to Paycheck: Wages and the Cost of Housing in America. This new study...
Employment Situation Summary, April 2009: "Nonfarm payroll employment continued to decline in April (-539,000), and the unemployment rate rose from 8.5 to 8.9 percent, the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Department of Labor reported today. Since the recession...
News release: "The results of a comprehensive, forward-looking assessment of the financial conditions of the nation's 19 largest bank holding companies (BHCs) by the federal bank supervisory agencies were released on Thursday. The exercise--conducted by the Federal Reserve, the Office...
News release: "U.S. home values continued to slide for the ninth consecutive quarter, declining 14.2 percent from a year ago, and falling 21.8 percent since the market peak in 2006. Additionally, one-fifth (21.9%) of all homeowners in the United States...
News release: "During this period of extraordinary economic uncertainty, the U.S. federal banking supervisors believe it to be important for the largest U.S. bank holding companies (BHCs) to have a capital buffer sufficient to withstand losses and sustain lending even...
News release: "Recommind...search-powered information risk management (IRM) software....released the results of its recent research into the information access and search habits of UK organisations. With businesses capable of searching just 50 percent of the information that their employees need for...
Potential Impacts of Climate Change in the United States, May 2009 "This paper summarizes the current state of scientific understanding of the potential effects of projected changes in climate and related developments. The paper describes the wide range of potential...
News release: "The Federal Trade Commission today testified on the Commission’s efforts to promote better security for sensitive consumer information and to prevent the inadvertent sharing of consumers’ personal or sensitive data over Peer-to-Peer Internet file-sharing networks. As part of...
"GPO is pleased to announce the re-launch of its agency Web site. This enhanced site includes separate Web pages for FDLP and LSCM information for the public. The new Web pages will help inform the public about and lead the...
The April 2009 Senior Loan Officer Opinion Survey on Bank Lending Practices: Current survey | Full report | Table 1 | Table 2 | Chart data | Table 1 | Table 2 | Charts "The April 2009 Senior Loan Officer...
A Tradecraft Primer: Structured Analytic Techniques for Improving Intelligence Analysis, Prepared by the US Government, March 2009 "Using the analytic techniques contained in this primer will assist analysts in dealing with the perennial problems of intelligence: the complexity of international...
Update to May 1, 2009 posting - White House Website Adds Links to FaceBook, Twitter, MySpace - the Official White House Photostream on Flickr EFF: White House Photos — Does the Public Need a License to Use?...
American Customer Satisfaction Index E-Government (ACSI) Satisfaction Index Q1 2009 - April 28, 2009 - by Larry Freed, ForeSee Results: "Citizen satisfaction with e-government websites dropped more than half a point since last quarter, down to 73.6 on the study’s...
May 3, 2009 - Swine Flu: First, Sow No Panic, By Elisabeth Rosenthal: "Wash your hands. I know this sounds silly, but it is far more effective at preventing flu than having a dose-pack of Tamiflu in the medicine chest....
"On Tuesday, April 28, the Senate overwhelmingly passed anti-fraud legislation that was reported earlier this year by the Senate Judiciary Committee. The Fraud Enforcement and Recovery Act was introduced on February 5 by Committee Members Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), Chuck Grassley...
Follow up to previous postings on swine flu, from the World Health Organization (WHO) today: "Based on assessment of all available information and following several expert consultations, Dr Margaret Chan, WHO's Director-General raised the current level of influenza pandemic alert...
Follow up to Authors, Publishers, and Google Reach Landmark Settlement, from the Authors Guild: "The court overseeing Authors Guild v. Google extended the time for authors and publishers to opt out of the settlement by four months, to September 4th...
Acquisition Workforce: DOD Can Improve Its Management and Oversight by Tracking Data on Contractor Personnel and Taking Additional Actions, GAO-09-616T, April 28, 2009 Bureau of Public Debt: Areas for Improvement in Information Security Controls, GAO-09-633R, April 28, 2009 Fiscal Year...
"U.S. News analyzed more than 12,000 graduate programs to bring you this year's rankings." The following are included: Business School Rankings Education School Rankings Engineering School Rankings Law School Rankings Medical School Rankings Library and Information Studies...
E-Discovery Update: E-Discovery in the $50,000 Case - Conrad J. Jacoby's focus for this column is smaller legal disputes that may involve electronic evidence, including divorce proceedings and child custody matters, as well as criminal cases, all of which may...
"In a recent poll by NationalJournal.com, new media experts from across the political spectrum gave WhiteHouse.gov an average grade of C+. (See report card by scrolling down on this page.) Although they mostly saw the site as an improvement from...
Follow up to previous postings on Chrysler, this news release: "The UAW announced tonight that a settlement agreement has been reached with Chrysler, Fiat and the U.S. Treasury Department. When Chrysler’s Feb. 17 viability plan was rejected, President Obama gave...
Follow up to previous postings on swine flu, see the CDC Swine Influenza (Flu) Portal "...CDC activated its Emergency Operations Center to coordinate the agency's response to this emerging health threat and yesterday the Secretary of the Department Homeland Security,...
News release: "Throughout the developing world, infrastructure is improving living conditions and reducing poverty. But these life-changing investments are increasingly threatened as budgets shrink in the global financial crisis. The World Bank estimates all developing countries could face an infrastructure...
Background Paper: How CBO Estimates the Costs of Reducing Greenhouse-Gas Emissions, April 2009 "Households and businesses in a modern industrial economy like that of the United States emit a number of different greenhouse gases through a wide variety of activities—any...
News release: "The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) will make its entire Bird Strike database available on a public website this Friday, April 24. Portions of the database have been publicly available since the information was first collected in 1990, but...
News release: "The likelihood of customers switching banks increases by up to three times after their bank merges with or is acquired by another financial institution, according to the J.D. Power and Associates 2009 Bank Mergers and Acquisitions Report...The report...
"In the most severe recession since World War II, the global economy is projected to shrink by 1.3 percent in 2009, with a slow recovery expected to take hold next year, according to the IMF’s April 2009 World Economic Outlook...
Public Printer of the United States: "I am pleased to announce the launch of FDsys, GPO's new Federal Digital System, an innovative tool to enable Americans and people worldwide to search and access the documents of the U.S. government. FDsys...
News release: "Today, in an Earth Day speech at a wind turbine tower manufacturing plant, President Barack Obama announced that the Department of the Interior has finalized a long-awaited framework for renewable energy production on the U.S. Outer Continental Shelf...
Press notice: "The Government’s economic objective is to build a strong economy and a fair society, where there is opportunity and security for all. Budget 2009, Building’s Britain’s Future, presents updated assessments and forecasts of the economy and public finances...
Secretary Geithner Opening Statement Before the Congressional Oversight Panel, April 21, 2009: "Today I will outline the steps taken by the Obama Administration to restore the flow of credit to get our economy back on track and Americans back to...
News release: "State Labor Commissioner M. Patricia Smith announced today that additional transportation assistance for unemployed workers will be made available in 20 non-rural counties in New York State. Each Workforce Investment Board in these counties will receive $6,250 that...
Google News Blog: "Today, we're announcing Google News Timeline--a new feature on Google Labs that organizes many different types of search results on a zoomable, graphical timeline. Google News Timeline presents search results from a wide range of sources. You...
Press release: "The Conference Board Leading Economic Index™ (LEI) for the U.S. decreased 0.3 percent, The Conference Board Coincident Economic Index™ (CEI) decreased 0.4 percent and The Conference Board Lagging Economic Index™ (LAG) decreased 0.4 percent in March." Download a...
News release: "...Congressmen Mike Thompson (D-CA) and Eric Cantor (R-VA) introduced the Conservation Easement Incentive Act, H.R. 1831. This bill will aid in the protection of millions of acres of the nation’s agricultural lands and open spaces. H.R. 1831 makes...
What 1 TRILLION Dollars Looks Like In Dollar Bills - scroll to the bottom of the page to see the complete range of illustrations. Note that the size of the person changes dramatically as the scale is defined. Related postings...
Follow up to April 16, 2009, Vision of High-Speed Rail in America, from the WSJ: Spain's Bullet Train Changes Nation -- and Fast - "The growth of the Alta Velocidad Española, or AVE, is having a profound effect on life...
Via NPR - Marketplace: "U.S. manufacturers, including major drugmakers, have legally released at least 271 million pounds of pharmaceuticals into waterways that often provide drinking water _ contamination the federal government has consistently overlooked, according to an Associated Press investigation."...
An Updated Annual Energy Outlook 2009 Reference Case (04/17/2009): "This report updates the Reference Case presented in the Annual Energy Outlook 2009 based on recently enacted legislation and the changing macroeconomic environment. U.S. Coal Supply and Demand: 2008 Review (04/15/2009):...
Follow up to previous postings on Google Book search, "The [Internet] Archive is one of many Internet content providers that have an interest in opposing the proposed [Google Book]Settlement Agreement because it effectively limits the liability for the identified uses...
George Stephanopoulos: "White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel said on "This Week" Sunday that he believes the government has enough resources on hand that the Obama administration will not have to go back to Congress to ask for more...
Staff Report - Financing the Dream: Securing College Affordability for the Middle Class "A central goal of the White House Task Force on the Middle Class is to ensure that public policy is helping middle-class families to realize their aspirations....
Implementation of Executive Order on Removing Barriers to Responsible Scientific Research Involving Human Stem Cells, Notice Number: NOT-OD-09-085, Release Date: April 17, 2009. Issued by National Institutes of Health (NIH). "On March 9, 2009, President Barack Obama issued Executive Order...
"Statehealthfacts.org has updated state rankings in foreclosures, unemployment, and food stamp participation, based on foreclosures data from RealtyTrac as of February 2009, unemployment data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics for February 2009, and January 2009 food stamp enrollment data...
News release: "Despite the emphasis on homeownership and the marginalization of renters, renter households still make up fully one-third of the households in the United States — more than 36 million households. Out of Reach 2009, Persistent Problems, News Challenges...
Statement of President Barack Obama on Release of OLC Memos: "The Department of Justice will today release certain memos issued by the Office of Legal Counsel between 2002 and 2005 as part of an ongoing court case. These memos speak...
"The Symantec Internet Security Threat Report offers analysis and discussion of threat activity over a one-year period. It covers Internet threat activities, vulnerabilities, malicious code, phishing, spam and security risks as well as future trends. The fourteenth version of the...
NPR: "The radar system used to guide U.S. flights is more than 40 years old, which may help explain why nearly one-quarter of all those flights are late. The Federal Aviation Administration wants to phase out radar and roll out...
White House Fact Sheet - Reaching Out to the Cuban People: "Today, the Obama administration announced a series of changes in U.S. policy to reach out to the Cuban people in support of their desire to freely determine their country’s...
News release: "Presents the number of persons on probation and parole at yearend 2007, by state, with percent changes in each state during the year. The statistical tables provide state-level probation and parole supervision rates and entries and exits. National...
News release: "Fewer than one-third of the adult population have a health care power of attorney or other advance directive. While many of us may be afraid to talk about death, it is critically important to name someone to make...
News release: "The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) today announced plans to make $1 billion available for the Community Services Block Grant (CSBG) program. Funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, the new resources will be...
"When President Obama signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act into law on February 17, 2009, it marked the beginning of a 45-day window for each state to claim the funds allocated to it by the act. In order to...
"The Rechargeable Battery Recycling Corporation (RBRC) is a non-profit, public service organization dedicated to rechargeable battery recycling. Founded by the rechargeable battery industry in 1994, RBRC’s mission is to promote the recycling of used rechargeable batteries found in many cordless...
News release: "Organizations representing booksellers, librarians, publishers, and writers today launched the latest phase in their five-year campaign to restore the reader privacy safeguards that were stripped away by the USA Patriot Act. Since 2003, the Department of Justice has...
Council of Economic Advisors (CEA) Notes on Refinancing Activity and Mortgage Rates: "The Administration’s homeownership plan, along with actions taken by the Federal Reserve, has had a notable impact on mortgage rates and refinancing activity. This fact sheet summarizes mortgage...
D-2009-073 DoD Components' Use of Global War on Terror Supplemental Funding Provided for Procurement and Research, Development, Test, and Evaluation, April 8, 2009 (Project No. D2006-D000AE-0241.001) "What We Did: We reviewed 130 sample dollar points associated with Global War on...
"The Federation of American Scientists (FAS) and the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) released a report calling for fundamental changes to U.S. nuclear war planning, a vital prerequisite if smaller nuclear arsenals are to be achieved. From Counterforce to Minimal...
"In winning the 2008 presidential election, Democrat Barack Obama built his 7 percentage-point popular vote margin over Republican John McCain on widespread appeal across the nation's regional lines. This is evident in the map, based on CQ Politics' analysis of...
CBO Paper: The Impact of Ethanol Use on Food Prices and Greenhouse-Gas Emissions, April 2009 this analyisis "examines the relationship between increasing production of ethanol and rising prices for food. In particular, CBO estimated how much of the rise in...
News release: "As part of its efforts to celebrate Earth Day during the entire month of April, the U.S Environmental Protection Agency has launched National Cell Phone Recycling Week, April 6 through April 12. This joint effort between EPA’s Plug-In...
"The following tables update the Congressional Budget Office’s (CBO’s) estimates of historical effective tax rates—that is, households’ tax liability divided by their income—for various income categories.1 These new tables incorporate estimates for an additional calendar year, 2006, for the four...
"In the just-ended fiscal year, more than three quarters of the tax returns filed by the nation's largest corporations came from financial service organizations — banks, insurance companies, investment advisors, brokerage houses, securities services and the like. And the same...
"The latest Pew Research Center News IQ survey finds the American public reasonably well-informed about a number of basic facts pertaining to the current economic situation. Fully 83% know that the government assistance to banks and other financial institutions is...
The Register: "My story is the story of a [San Francisco] Bay Area nerd who goes to Washington and encounters some rather surprising obstacles - surprising in the sense that they are more tenacious and more obscure than you might...
"The House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure today released a report on the progress of programs under the Committee’s jurisdiction funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 Transportation and Infrastructure Provisions...
On the 2 April 2009 world leaders gathered in London to address the global financial crisis. The communique - The Global Plan for Recovery and Reform, 2 April 2009: "We start from the belief that prosperity is indivisible; that growth,...
ACLU Blog of Rights: "Coinciding with the start of Sexual Assault Awareness Month, the fully revised and updated fourth edition of The Rights of Women was released this week. The latest release in the ACLU Handbook Series, The Rights of...
Bureau of Labor Statistics - Metropolitan Area Employment and Unemployment Summary, February 2009: "Unemployment rates were higher in February than a year earlier in all 372 metropolitan areas, the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Department of Labor reported...
Contingency Contracting: DOD, State, and USAID Are Taking Actions to Track Contracts and Contractor Personnel in Iraq and Afghanistan, GAO-09-538T, April 01, 2009 Defense Acquisitions: Measuring the Value of DOD's Weapon Programs Requires Starting with Realistic Baselines, GAO-09-543T, April 01,...
News release: "What began six months ago with a massive de-leveraging in financial markets has turned into one of the sharpest global economic contractions in modern history. As investors repatriated overseas assets and credit conditions were tightened, firms around the...
News release: "World Bank Group President Robert B. Zoellick said there would be a sharp slowdown in economic growth in the developing world this year, putting more poor people at risk, and the Group of 20 must not shrink from...
The Conference Board: Worldwide Global Economy Will Show Large Discrepancies in 2009 "The global economy is experiencing a strong slowdown, driven largely by the emergence of a serious recession in almost all advanced economies. The output estimates for European countries...
A Review of CBO's Activities in 2008 Under the Unfunded Mandates Reform Act, March 2009 "In 2008, the Congress and the President enacted 285 public laws. Nineteen contained at least one intergovernmental mandate as defined in UMRA, and 29 contained...
News release: "..the President announced that his Auto Task Force has completed its evaluation of the viability of General Motors and Chrysler in light of their requests for federal assistance. In addition to releasing the viability assessments, he also released...
Bank Secrecy Act: Suspicious Activity Report Use Is Increasing, but FinCEN Needs to Further Develop and Document Its Form Revision Process, GAO-09-226, February 27, 2009 Defense Acquisitions: Assessments of Selected Weapon Programs, GAO-09-326SP, March 30, 2009 Defense Infrastructure: DOD Needs...
An Assessment of the Potential Effects of the Reductions in Medicare's Payment Rates for Physicians Called for Under Current Law, March 27, 2009 Letter to the Honorable John M. Spratt Jr.: "This letter responds to your request for an assessment...
News release: "Vice President Joe Biden and Michael J. Astrue, Commissioner of Social Security, announced today that the federal government will send out $250 economic recovery payments to people who receive Social Security and Supplemental Security Income (SSI) benefits beginning...
The Mobile Difference, by John Horrigan, March 25, 2009 "Some 39% of Americans have positive and improving attitudes about their mobile communication devices, which in turn draws them further into engagement with digital resources – on both wireless and wireline...
Two new improvements to Google results pages : "...we're rolling out two new improvements to Google search. The first offers an expanded list of useful related searches and the second is the addition of longer search result descriptions -- both...
Database State, Executive Summary and Full Report - By Ross Anderson, Ian Brown, Terri Dowty, Philip Inglesant, William Heath, Angela Sasse, Foundation for Information Policy Research (March 2009) "In recent years, the Government has built or extended many central databases...
2010 Census: Communications Campaign Has Potential to Boost Participation, GAO-09-525T, March 23, 2009 Nonprescription Drugs: Considerations Regarding a Behind-the-Counter Drug Class, GAO-09-245, February 20, 2009 State Children's Health Insurance Program: CMS Should Improve Efforts to Assess whether SCHIP Is Substituting...
News release: "Trust for America's Health (TFAH) and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's (RWJF) report examines how the economic downturn could lead to serious cuts to disease prevention and emergency preparedness programs at the state level. Researchers found that Midwestern...
Multi-Generational Housing Patterns Research Report, Teresa A. Keenan, Ph.D., AARP Knowledge Management, February 2009 "While most respondents to this January 2009 survey of adults ages 18 and older said that moving in with a friend or family member was unlikely,...
"In testimony before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar detailed President Obama's New Energy for America Plan that will create a clean energy-based economy that promotes investment and innovation here at home, generating...
National Institute on Money in State Politics: "As the climate change debate heats up in the states, those with a keen interest in the issue have turned up the pressure to make sure their voices are heard in the lawmaking...
American Recovery and Reinvestment Act: GAO's Role in Helping to Ensure Accountability and Transparency for Science Funding, GAO-09-515T, March 19, 2009 Department of Veterans Affairs Contracting with Veteran Owned-Small Businesses, GAO-09-391R, March 19, 2009 Federal Real Property: Authorities and Actions...
News release: "The Financial Services Authority (FSA) has today published the Turner Review of global banking regulation. Lord Turner, chairman of the FSA, was asked by the Chancellor of the Exchequer to review the events that led to the financial...
News release: "The U.S. Department of Labor today issued policy guidance to states and outlying areas for the implementation of American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA) investments in core employment and training programs. This critical investment of $3,514,500,000...
MARI®Mortgage Asset Research Institute Eleventh Periodic Mortgage Fraud Case Report To: Mortgage Bankers Association, by Denise James, Jennifer Butts Michelle Donahue, March 2009 "The year proved to be a swift introduction to how the industry must and will soon change...
Prepared Testimony of Doug Shulman, Commissioner Internal Revenue Service, Before the Senate Finance Committee on Tax Issues Related to Ponzi Schemes and an Update on Offshore Tax Evasion Legislation, March 17, 2009 "The IRS is issuing two guidance items to...
News release: "The Securities and Exchange Commission took further action to help increase the transparency of credit default swaps by approving conditional exemptions that will allow the Chicago Mercantile Exchange Inc. (CME) to operate as a central counterparty for clearing...
March 16, 2009 letter from Attorney General Cuomo to Edward M. Liddy, Chairman & CEO of AIG, concerning bonuses: "The Office of the New York Attorney General has been investigating compensation arrangements at AIG since last Fall. We were disturbed...
WSJ: Cough It Up, Bernie: Feds Look to Seize Homes, Boats, Pianos... USA v Madoff 09 Cr. 213 U.S. District Court for the Southern District Court of New York (Manhattan) and 08-01789 in U.S. Bankruptcy Court, Southern District of New...
On March 13, 2009 the Brookings Institution hosted Lawrence Summers, Director of the White House National Economic Council, for a discussion of the Obama administration’s economic program and the prospects for the American economy. "Transcript Larry Summers: Our single most...
An HSUS Report: Human Health Implications of Non-Therapeutic Antibiotic Use in Animal Agriculture "In 1951, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the addition of penicillin and tetracycline to chicken feed as growth promoters, encouraging pharmaceutical companies to mass-produce...
Nicolas Rapp, Art Director for the multimedia and graphic department at AP, posted a link to one of his many outstanding infographics of special value to financial researchers. As noted on his site, since November 2008 he has been tracking...
Two articles focused on significant changes impacting newspapers and professional journalists: Clay Shirky - Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable: "Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism. For a century, the imperatives to strengthen journalism and to strengthen newspapers...
News release: "n a filing today with the federal District Court for the District of Columbia, the Department of Justice submitted a new standard for the government’s authority to hold detainees at the Guantanamo Bay Detention Facility. The definition does...
CBO Testimony: Statement of Terry M. Dinan Senior Advisor - The Distributional Consequences of a Cap-and-Trade Program for CO2 Emissions before the Subcommittee on Income Security and Family Support, U.S. House of Representatives, March 12, 2009. "One option for reducing...
Regional and State Employment and Unemployment Summary: "Regional and state unemployment rates were nearly all higher in January. Forty-nine states and the District of Columbia recorded over-the-month unemployment rate increases, while all states and the District of Columbia had higher...
"Media Cloud is a system that lets you see the flow of the media. The Internet is fundamentally altering the way that news is produced and distributed, but there are few comprehensive approaches to understanding the nature of these changes....
Mother Jones: "By slipping a simple, three-sentence provision into the gargantuan spending bill passed by the House of Representatives last week, a congressman from Silicon Valley is trying to nudge Congress into the 21st Century. Rep. Mike Honda (D-Calif.) placed...
Executive Order Removing Barriers to Responsible Scientific Research Involving Human Stem Cells, March 9, 2009. "By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, it is hereby ordered as...
News release: "Developing countries face a financing shortfall of $270-700 billion this year, as private sector creditors shun emerging markets, and only one quarter of the most vulnerable countries have the resources to prevent a rise in poverty, the World...
Transcript - Obama Radio Address, Saturday, March 7, 2009: "My administration inherited a $1.3 trillion budget deficit, the largest in history. And we've inherited a budgeting process as irresponsible as it is unsustainable. For years, as Wall Street used accounting...
Eric Nalder, Seattle Post-Intelligencer: "Numerous convicts -- including embezzlers, robbers, meth dealers and rapists -- sold mortgage loans to unsuspecting homeowners in Washington in recent years while state lawmakers and members of Congress debated and tabled requirements for licensing and...
US Courts: "Bankruptcy filings in the federal courts rose 31 percent in calendar year 2008, according to data released today by the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts. The number of bankruptcies filed in the twelve-month period ending December 31,...
Recovery.gov: "President Obama and Transportation Secretary LaHood have announced that $27 billion in American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) funds are headed to states to provide critical repairs to our nation's crumbling roads and bridges. Parts of the allocation are...
NASA: Assessments of Selected Large-Scale Projects, GAO-09-306SP, March 02, 2009 GAO Cost Estimating and Assessment Guide: Best Practices for Developing and Managing Capital Program Costs, GAO-09-3SP, March 02, 2009 Nuclear Detection: Domestic Nuclear Detection Office Should Improve Planning to Better...
DOE Information Related to the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 EPA Information Related to the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Recovery Act) National Conference of State Legislatures Summary on Human Services Provisions Recovery.gov: State Recovery Sites...
Hard Times for Horses: "According to Dr. Tom Lenz, a veterinarian who is the chairman of the Unwanted Horse Coalition, although the elimination of domestic slaughterhouses has reduced the total number of horses killed, 100,000 to 150,000 are still exported...
EPIC: "Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano testified before the House Committees on Homeland Security, and said that DHS plans to connect governmental databases containing personal information, expand the government's employment tracking system, promote passenger screening, use e-passports, employ watchlists and...
WSJ: Berkshire Hathaway Reports Worst Year Ever Warren Buffett's Letter to Berkshire Shareholders, February 28, 2009: "As the year progressed, a series of life-threatening problems within many of the world’s great financial institutions was unveiled. This led to a dysfunctional...
"The latest available data from the Justice Department show that during November 2008 the government reported 16 new national internal security/terrorism prosecutions. According to the case-by-case information analyzed by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), this number is up from...
Remarks of President Barack Obama – As Prepared for Delivery Responsibly Ending the War in Iraq, Camp Lejeune, North Carolina. Friday, February 27, 2009: "Let me say this as plainly as I can: by August 31, 2010, our combat mission...
News release: "As economic conditions continue to worsen, the public is increasingly worried about the affordability and availability of care, with many postponing or skipping treatments due to cost in the past year and a notable minority forced into serious...
Newspapers Face a Challenging Calculus - Online Growth, but Print Losses are Bigger, February 26, 2009: "The trend is unmistakable: Fewer Americans are reading print newspapers as more turn to the internet for their news. And while the percentage of...
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Technical Paper VI- Climate Change and Water "The importance of freshwater to our life support system is widely recognised, as can be seen clearly in the international context. Freshwater is indispensable for all forms...
"U.S. home prices posted record declines in the fourth quarter of 2008 according to the Federal Housing Finance Agency’s House Price Index (HPI). The FHFA seasonally-adjusted purchase-only house price index, based on data from home sales, was 3.4 percent lower...
HHS - Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services: National Health Expenditure Projections 2008-2018 "Forecast Summary: Growth in national health expenditures (NHE) in the United States is projected to be 6.1 percent in 2008. National health spending is expected to increase...
Timothy B. Lee: "Speaking at Princeton on Thursday, Richard Sarnoff, chairman of the Association of American Publishers, discussed the landmark settlement in the Google Book Search case. Sarnoff speculated that the agreement could effectively give Google and Amazon a "duopoly"...
News release: "While states will benefit greatly from the federal stimulus program – receiving over $150 billion over three years – state budget gaps still loom at the end of that period, according to a new report issued today by...
White House: "Two important takeaways from the President's Weekly Address [Saturday February 21, 2009]. the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act will start having an impact as soon as a few weeks from now, in the form of the quickest and...
"The Kaiser Family Foundation this week updated a number of its key resources on the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the United States, timed with the release of new surveillance data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Updated resources...
Pew Research Center for the People & the Press: "Americans continue to follow news about the economic crisis closely because they feel it is directly relevant to their lives. More than eight-in-ten (85%) say even when the economic news is...
R40224, Troubled Asset Relief Program and Foreclosures, February 17, 2009 "Increasing foreclosure rates and problems in financial markets are some of the issues addressed in the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 (P.L. 110-343), which created the Troubled Asset Relief...
News release: "The Homeowner Affordability and Stability Plan is part of the President's broad, comprehensive strategy to get the economy back on track. The plan will help up to 7 to 9 million families restructure or refinance their mortgages to...
Embassy Construction: Additional Actions Are Needed to Address Contractor Participation, GAO-09-48, January 16, 2009: "To provide safe and secure workplaces for overseas posts, the Department of State (State) has built 64 new embassy compounds (NEC) and other facilities since 1999,...
Carlyle group presentation on the world financial crisis, 15 Oct 2008 [via Wikileaks - 80 pages, PDF] Related postings on financial system...
E-Discovery Update: Revisiting ESI Agreements and Court Orders - Conrad J. Jacoby focuses on the new requirement that litigants must meet early in a dispute to discuss the scope of discovery work to reach agreement on how best to proceed...
Follow up to February 4, 2009 posting, Treasury Announces New Restrictions On Executive Compensation , from ProPublica, Stimulus Bill Limits TARP Exec Pay: "...tucked into the 1,071-page bill [H.R. 1, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009] is a...
The Stimulus Plan: A Detailed List of Spending by Michael Grabell and Christopher Weaver, ProPublica: "The appropriations section of the bill details spending in excess of $311 billion for programs ranging from Pell grants for college students to clean water...
Via THOMAS: HR1: The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (stimulus bill) New York Times - Stimulus Plan Places New Limits on Wall St. Bonuses: "The restriction with the most bite would bar top executives from receiving bonuses exceeding...
"The Law Library of Congress is pleased to present a newly digitized collection to celebrate the bicentennial of Abraham Lincoln's birth. The collection covers three eras including nine items in the Lincoln the Lawyer collection, five on Habeas Corpus and...
The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act: State-By-State Jobs Impact, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, February 12, 2009 Related postings on financial system...
House Financial Services Committee hearing entitled TARP Accountability: Use of Federal Assistance by the First TARP Recipients, February 11, 2009. The committee called on eight CEOs representing companies who received TARP money to testify. Witness List & Prepared Testimony: Lloyd...
Follow up to related postings on the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, from the Senate Finance committee, this Side-By-Side Chart of Notable Differences Between the Senate-Passed and the House-Passed American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 Joint Committee...
U.S. Crude Oil, Natural Gas, and Natural Gas Liquids Reserves 2007 Annual Report (02/10/2009): "National and State estimates of proved reserves of crude oil, natural gas, and natural gas liquids in the United States as of December 31, 2007." OPEC...
News release: "The Federal Reserve Board on Tuesday announced that it is prepared to undertake a substantial expansion of the Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility (TALF). The expansion could increase the size of the TALF to as much as $1...
"This year will bring change in Iraq that will fundamentally affect every aspect of the reconstruction program. This change began on January 1 when the Security Agreement and the Strategic Framework Agreement became effective, redefining the bilateral relationship between Iraq...
Social Security Administration: Service Delivery Plan Needed to Address Baby Boom Retirement Challenges, GAO-09-24, January 09, 2008 Aviation Security: TSA's Cost and Performance Study of Private-Sector Airport Screening, GAO-09-27R, January 09, 2009...
News release: "The Conference Board Employment Trends Index (ETI)™ fell further in January. The index now stands at 96.6, down 1.0 percent from the December revised figure of 97.5, and down 18.6 percent from a year ago. “The Employment Trends...
WSJ: "Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner is expected to announce that the government will become a partner with the private sector to purchase banks' troubled assets, according to people familiar with the matter. The plan for a so-called aggregator bank, a...
"...the Journal of Legal Analysis (JLA) is a new open-access law journal co-published by Harvard University Press (HUP) and the John M. Olin Center for Law, Economics, and Business at Harvard Law School. For the record, this is the first...
Unemployed and Uninsured in America analyzes the health coverage status of unemployed workers with low and moderate incomes, including national and state-level data. (February 2009) Related postings on financial system...
News release [includes data and charts]: "Nonfarm payroll employment fell sharply in January (-598,000) and the unemployment rate rose from 7.2 to 7.6 percent, the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Department of Labor reported today. Payroll employment has...
EEOC: "On January 29, 2009, President Obama signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009 (“Act”), which supersedes the Supreme Court’s decision in Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co., Inc., 550 U.S. 618 (2007). Ledbetter had required a...
"GPO’s Federal Digital System (FDsys) is an advanced digital system that will enable GPO to manage Government information in a digital form. FDsys will enable GPO to manage information from all three branches of the U.S. Government. As a state-of-the-art...
"Nonfarm private employment decreased 522,000 from December 2008 to January 2009 on a seasonally adjusted basis, according to the ADP National Employment Report®. The estimated change of employment from November to December 2008 was revised up by 34,000, from a...
"A new Kaiser Family Foundation report, Health Care on a Budget: An Analysis of Spending by Medicare Households, finds that in 2006, out-of-pocket health care spending accounted for 14.1 percent of all expenditures for Medicare households – less than housing...
Estimated Macroeconomic Effects of the Inouye-Baucus Amendment in the Nature of a Substitute to H.R. 1, February 4, 2009, Letter to the Honorable Judd Gregg. "At your request, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has conducted an analysis of the macroeconomic...
"The White House today released additional state-specific details on the American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan. The recovery plan will create and save jobs in the near future while addressing long-neglected needs that are critical to laying the foundation for a...
Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs, Modernizing the U.S. Financial Regulatory System, February 4, 2009. Witnesses - Paul A. Volcker, Chair of the President's Economic Recovery Advisory Board and former Chairman, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve...
"Almost 150 years after Charles Darwin published his groundbreaking work On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, Americans are still fighting over evolution. If anything, the controversy has recently grown in both size and intensity. In the...
American Customer Satisfaction Index E-Government Satisfaction Index, February 3, 2009 and related Excel Score Chart "The truth is that even before Obama became President, the government was doing a remarkable job satisfying citizens with e-gov initiatives—in fact, as the following...
Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR) - Hard Lessons: The Iraq Reconstruction Experience, February 2, 2009 "Since the March 2003 invasion, the Congress appropriated about $50 billion in taxpayer dollars for Iraq's relief and reconstruction. This...
The Financial Services Fact Book 2009, Insurance Information Institute, The Financial Services Roundtable: "The 2009 edition includes a host of new material to shed light on this challenging environment, including - Trends in bank insolvencies Data on credit default swaps...
CRS Report - Retirement Plan Participation and Contributions: Trends from 1998 to 2006,January 30, 2009 "The U.S. Census Bureau periodically collects information from individuals about their participation in employer-sponsored retirement plans. The most recent such survey was conducted from February...
News release: "A larger percentage of foreign-born than native-born residents had a master’s degree or higher in 2007, according to a new report from the U.S. Census Bureau. Nationally, 11 percent of foreign-born — people from another country now living...
The Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction issued the following new audits: 09-009 Full Impact of Department of Defense Program to Restart State-owned Enterprises Difficult to Estimate, January 30, 2009: "Task Force efforts have served to help restart state-owned factories...
Troubled Asset Relief Program: Status of Efforts to Address Transparency and Accountability Issues, GAO-09-296, January 30, 2009. "As of January 23, 2009, Treasury had disbursed about $293.7 billion of the $700 billion in program funds. Most of the funds (about...
5 Best Data Visualization Projects of the Year: "Data visualization continues to grow online and in the real world. It exists as masterful art pieces and amazingly useful analysis tools. In both cases though it brings data -- which is...
News release: "The U.S. Department of Justice announced the availability of an on-line computer system to help protect states and consumers from automobile fraud and to provide law enforcement with new tools to investigate fraud, theft, and other crimes involving...
The U.S. wind energy industry shattered all previous records in 2008 by installing 8,358 megawatts (MW) of new generating capacity (enough to serve over 2 million homes), the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA) said today, even as it warned of...
"Starting on January 5, 2009, DOL archived all DOL agency Web sites as they existed at that time. Please remember that this is archived material and that any guidance contained within the pages may have been superceded. The content available...
News release: "Acting U.S. Trade Representative Peter Allgeier announced today that a World Trade Organization (WTO) dispute settlement panel has found important aspects of China’s intellectual property rights (IPR) regime to be inconsistent with China’s obligations under the WTO Agreement...
This memo provides a synopsis of the innovation performance of the different Member States, as measured in the European Innovation Scoreboard 2008 (EIS). Commissioned by the Directorate-General for Enterprise and Industry of the European Commission, the European Innovation Scoreboard is...
The Internal Revenue Service Deployed the Modernized e-File System With Known Security Vulnerabilities, December 30, 2008, Reference Number: 2009-20-026 "The MeF system will provide a single method for filing all IRS tax returns, information returns, forms, and schedules via the...
George W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum: "The George W. Bush Library holds millions of pages of official records documenting the two-term administration (2001-2009) of the nation's forty-third president, as well as donated historical materials that document Bush's 2000 presidential...
"This final rule establishes a new official updated daily online-only publication entitled the "Daily Compilation of Presidential Documents." The paper edition of the Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents will no longer be issued. The annual edition of the Public Papers...
"A new National Priorities Project (NPP) analysis highlights a significant gap in the Army's 2008 quantity and quality goals...This analysis is based on data obtained from the Department of Defense (Army Recruiting Command) through a Freedom of Information Act request...
CQ: "As one of his final acts as the nation’s spy chief, Michael McConnell on Friday said he would soon sign off on an intelligence information sharing policy that will result in a “staggering” increase in the amount of data...
From the journal Nature, via a New York Times article, this new fee based report, Warming of the Antarctic ice-sheet surface since the 1957 International Geophysical Year, for which Figures and tables as well as Supplementary info are available to...
Posted by Michael Bloomberg, Mayor of New York City: "In partnership with Google, we are launching a new website and Information Center to help make it easier for both visitors and residents to explore all the energy, excitement and diversity...
CNN: "Barack Obama was sworn in as the 44th president of the United States and the nation's first African-American president Tuesday. This is a transcript of his prepared speech." The video link is here. New York Times: "CNN said it...
"Welcome to the new WhiteHouse.gov. A short time ago, Barack Obama was sworn in as the 44th president of the United States and his new administration officially came to life. One of the first changes is the White House's new...
Follow up to January 19, 2009 posting, Treasury Issues Additional Executive Compensation Rules Under TARP, "The U.S. Treasury, under pressure to revive lending, is demanding monthly reports from the banks that received the most capital from the government’s $700 billion...
News release: "The Treasury Department, through the First Accounts Program, has contributed to the opening of over 37,000 savings and checking accounts in urban, suburban, rural and Native American communities across the country. The Treasury released a report [Executive Summary...
"The IRS does not initiate communication with taxpayers through e-mail. Before identity theft happens, safeguard your information...IRS Identity Protection Specialized Unit, toll-free at 1-800-908-4490."...
News release: "The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) E-Government and IT (E-Gov) released the Expanding E-Government Results Report,Q1 FY2009 Homeland Security Presidential Directive-12 (HSPD-12) status update, Federal CIO Council Transition Guide, Report to Congress on the Benefits of the...
Follow up to previous postings on missing White House emails, today's news release: "At a hearing today concerning the risks posed by the presidential transition to the recovery of millions of missing e-mails from the Executive Office of the President...
Financial Regulation: A Framework for Crafting and Assessing Proposals to Modernize the Outdated U.S. Financial Regulatory System, GAO-09-310T, January 14, 2009. "...significant developments have outpaced a fragmented and outdated regulatory structure, and, as a result, significant reforms to the U.S....
A Visual Guide to the Financial Crisis: The Bailout by WallStats.com: "What do you do if you don’t have the money to pay a debt? If you are like most of us, you borrow. The US Government is no different....
News release: "The Project On Government Oversight (POGO) is publicly releasing for the first time the final version of a white paper created by the National Procurement Fraud Task Force Legislation Committee recommending ways to reduce procurement fraud. The June...
Pew Research Center for the People & the Press: "The internet, which emerged this year as a leading source for campaign news, has now surpassed all other media except television as an outlet for national and international news. Currently, 40%...
Understanding Crime Trends: Workshop Report, 2008 "Changes over time in the levels and patterns of crime have significant consequences that affect not only the criminal justice system but also other critical policy sectors. Yet compared with such areas as health...
News release: "Oxford Analytica collaborated with Ernst & Young to produce the 2009 Business Risk Report, which has been widely picked up in the media, including The Times. The report assesses the top 10 risks to global business in 2009,...
Squeezed! Caught between Unemployment Benefts And Health Care Costs, January 2009, by Families USA Foundation. "This report shows that, to maintain their employer-based health coverage under COBRA [Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1986], most unemployed people would have to...
The Job Impact of the American Recovery and Investment Plan, released January 10, 2009 - by Christina Romer and Jared Bernstein. "A key goal enunciated by the President-Elect concerning the American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan is that it should save...
Nuclear Challenges and Policy Options for the Next U.S. Administration - Jean du Preez, Editor. James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, Occasional Paper No. 14, December 2008. "...the Obama administration should send a clear and unambiguous message to the international...
News release: "Online advertised job vacancies declined 507,000 to 3,861,000 in December, according to The Conference Board’s Help-Wanted Online Data Series (HWOL)™ released today. The December loss brought the monthly total of online advertised vacancies below 4 million for the...
Pro Publica Map: "Each marker represents the headquarters of a financial institution that expects or has already received money from the Treasury Department under the TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program). The size of each marker represents the amount of bailout...
States of the Union Before and After Bush, by Jodie T. Allen, Senior Editor, Pew Research Center, January 5, 2009 "No question the overall mood of the public has changed a great deal since Bush was elected president in the...
"The new U.S. Capitol Visitor Center welcomed its first public guests last month. This 580,000-square-foot facility offers new amenities and services as visitors learn about America’s legislative process and about the art and architecture of the U.S. Capitol Building. In...
Job Loss and Infrastructure Job Creation During the Recession, December 23, 2008: "After the long economic expansion that characterized much of the current decade, the nation entered its eleventh postwar recession in December 2007. The unemployment rate rose from 5.0%...
News release: "The Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC) today released the Pension Insurance Data Book 2007, which offers information on statistical trends related to defined benefit retirement plans in the private sector. The 2007 Data Book features an article examining...
CQ: "New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson has withdrawn as President-elect Barack Obama’s choice to be Commerce Secretary amid reports that a federal grand jury has been looking into whether a California company won a state contract after contributing to Richardson’s...
Editorial - Exit Stonewalling: "...E-mail messages that have gone suspiciously missing are estimated to number in the millions. These could illuminate some of the administration’s darker moments, including the lead-up to the Iraq war, when intelligence was distorted, the destruction...
Via David Meerman Scott's blog WebInkNow, news about forward thinking and actionable PR and IT business process improvement from the U.S. Air Force: "David Faggard, Chief of Emerging Technology at the Air Force Public Affairs Agency in the Pentagon [in...
Universal Declaration of Human Rights Website - "This site provides access to United Nations documentation related to the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. From 1946-1948 delegates to the United Nations discussed and drafted an international declaration on...
[Federal Register: January 2, 2009 (Volume 74, Number 1)] [Notices][Page 133-139] Order Pursuant to Section 36 of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 Granting Temporary Exemptions From Sections 5 and 6 of the Exchange Act for Broker-Dealers and Exchanges Effecting...
"The benchmark 30-year fixed-rate mortgage fell 20 basis points, to 5.64 percent, according to the Bankrate.com national survey of large lenders. A basis point is one-hundredth of 1 percentage point. The mortgages in this week's survey had an average total...
Several sources are reporting the current price tag for the bailout of the financial system. According to the Washington Post's Binyamin Appelbaum, "...the Treasury Department has now spent or committed more money than Congress has allocated to its financial rescue...
Reduced Hospitalizations for Acute Myocardial Infarction After Implementation of a Smoke-Free Ordinance — City of Pueblo, Colorado, 2002–2006. CDC Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, January 2, 2009 / Vol. 57 / No. 51 & 52. "Exposure to secondhand smoke (SHS)...
"The Secure World Foundation (SWF) spotlights progress in 2008 on several fronts: The work underway by the Association of Space Explorers, which has flagged the danger to the planet from incoming asteroids, organizing a series of workshops to identify possible...
News release: "The U.S. Department of Labor's Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) [published] a final rule....in the Federal Register that requires operators of underground coal mines to provide refuge alternatives to protect miners when a life-threatening event occurs that...
News release: "The Federal Reserve on Tuesday announced that it expects to begin operations in early January under the previously announced program to purchase mortgage-backed securities (MBS) and that it has selected private investment managers to act as its agents...
News release: "The Conference Board Consumer Confidence Index™, which had increased moderately in November, declined to a new all-time low in December. The Index now stands at 38.0 (1985=100), down from 44.7 in November. The Present Situation Index plummeted to...
News release: "The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence today filed suit in federal court asking that the court strike down a last-minute Bush Administration rule change allowing concealed, loaded firearms in national parks and wildlife refuges. The suit was...
News release: "Data through October 2008, released today by Standard & Poor’s for its S&P/Case-Shiller1 Home Price Indices, the leading measure of U.S. home prices, shows continued broad based declines in the prices of existing single family homes across the...
News release: "Demand response and advanced metering programs have made significant progress in serving more consumers across the country, says a new Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) report that charts the expansion of these energy-saving programs since 2006. The report,...
NASA Year in Review 2008: "NASA landed on Mars, photographed distant worlds, added to the International Space Station, took part in a lunar science mission with India and made major progress toward returning astronauts to the moon as the agency...
News release: "The incomes of American families with children have become increasingly stratified since 1975, with income inequality increasing two-thirds during a 30-year period, according to findings published in the December issue of the peer-reviewed science journal American Sociological Review....
New York Times: "The National Archives has put into effect an emergency plan to handle electronic records from the Bush White House amid growing doubts about whether its new $144 million computer system can cope with the vast quantities of...
State of the USA Health Indicators: Letter Report, December 2008. Committee on the State of the USA Health Indicators, Institute of Medicine. News release: "Policymakers, the media, and the public should focus on 20 specific health indicators as "yardsticks" to...
Pew Research Center for the People & the Press: "The internet, which emerged this year as a leading source for campaign news, has now surpassed all other media except television as a main source for national and international news. Currently,...
News release: "Existing-home sales weakened against a backdrop of an eroding economy, according to the National Association of Realtors®. Existing-home sales – including single-family, townhomes, condominiums and co-ops – fell 8.6 percent to a seasonally adjusted annual rate¹ of 4.49...
News release and Tables: "In November, employers took 2,328 mass layoff actions, seasonally adjusted, as measured by new filings for unemployment insurance benefits during the month, the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Department of Labor reported today. Each...
News release: "The federal bank, credit union, and thrift regulatory agencies today announced publication of a revised identity theft brochure – You Have the Power to Stop Identity Theft – to assist consumers in preventing and resolving identity theft. The...
News release and Tables: "Regional and state unemployment rates were generally higher in November. Overall, 37 states and the District of Columbia recorded over-the-month unemployment rate increases, 5 states registered decreases, and 8 states had no change, the Bureau of...
The Government Domain: Wrapping Up 2008 - E-gov expert Peggy Garvin provides an overview of the significant developments in the world of online government information this past year. According to Peggy, overall the year saw a push by individuals and...
TechCrunch: "Video search on YouTube accounts for a quarter of all Google search queries in the U.S., according to the latest search engine numbers from comScore. Its monthly qSearch report, which was released on Thursday night, breaks out the number...
CNET: "One day after Virginia Tech released thousands of documents solely to families of victims in last year's massacre, the university's student newspaper made them public. On Thursday, the Collegiate Times posted the documents, which include e-mails sent from the...
News release: "The Conference Board Employment Trends Index (ETI)™ declined further in November. The index fell to 102.9, down 1.6 percent from the October revised figure of 104.5, and down over 13 percent from a year ago. “Thus far, the...
News release: "The Federal Trade Commission issued a report today recommending five measures to help prevent Social Security numbers from being used for identity theft. Principal among the report’s recommendations is that Congress consider taking action to strengthen the procedures...
Press Release: William J. Clinton Foundation Publishes Names of All Contributors on Foundation Website New York Times, Clinton Foundation Donors: Search - "Former President Bill Clinton released a list of thousands of donors to his charity, the William J. Clinton...
News release: "The U.S. Census Bureau released today the new Statistical Abstract of the United States: 2009. First published in 1878, “Uncle Sam’s Almanac” is a summary of statistics on a wide range of important topics, from A (aquaculture) to...
"The Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U) for the South declined 2.2 percent in November to 205.559 (1982-84=100), the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Department of Labor reported today. Sheila Watkins, the Bureau’s regional commissioner, noted...
Review of NASA's Exploration Technology Development Program An Interim Report, Committee to Review NASA's Exploration Technology Development Program, National Research Council, December 2008 "To meet the objectives of the Vision for Space Exploration (VSE), NASA must develop a wide array...
Medicare Advantage: Characteristics, Financial Risks, and Disenrollment Rates of Beneficiaries in Private Fee-for-Service Plans, GAO-09-25, December 15, 2008 Disaster Assistance: Federal Efforts to Assist Group Site Residents with Employment, Services for Families with Children, and Transportation, GAO-09-81, December 11, 2008...
Best Careers, 2009: "U.S. News profiles 30 careers that offer strong outlooks and high job satisfaction. Here's what's new in 2009...as well as a look at 13 cutting-edge careers, viable now and poised for future growth. They stem from megatrends...
News release: "A report released [December 11, 2008] documents how many states across the country are slashing their health care safety net programs in response to fiscal crises caused by the recession. With at least 43 states facing budget deficits...
News release: "Some 578 leading Internet activists, builders, and commentators responded in this survey to scenarios about the effect of the Internet on social, political, and economic life in the year 2020. An additional 618 stakeholders also participated in the...
E-Discovery Update: My E-Discovery Holiday Wish List - Conrad J. Jacoby's holiday wish is for the legal community to finally develop one or more judicially accepted standards that can be used to craft consistent ways of requesting and producing information....
Kaiser Women's Health Policy Program: Health Insurance Coverage of Women Ages 18 to 64, by State, 2006-2007 "This fact sheet provides state-by-state data on the uninsured rate, as well as rates of private insurance coverage and Medicaid coverage, among women...
Troubled Asset Relief Program: Additional Actions Needed to Better Ensure Integrity, Accountability, and Transparency, GAO-09-266T, December 10, 2008. "Treasury has taken a number of steps to try to stabilize the U.S. financial markets and banking system, including injecting billions of...
"With two wars and an economy in shambles, it’s not hard to get the feeling that something’s gone terribly wrong here in Washington...Public opinion pollsters give this president the lowest marks for job performance of any administration since they started...
News release: "The Securities and Exchange Commission today announced that it has unanimously approved measures that will shine more light than ever before on the municipal securities market by tapping the power of the Internet. For the first time, investors...
"The Commission will consider whether to adopt final rule amendments and whether to propose new rule amendments that will impose additional requirements on nationally recognized statistical rating organizations in order to address concerns raised about the policies and procedures for,...
Remarks of President-elect Barack Obama Radio Address on the Economy, Saturday, December 6, 2008 [Watch the video on YouTube]: "Today, I am announcing a few key parts of my plan. First, we will launch a massive effort to make public...
Today's FBI: Celebrating a Century of Service: 2008-2009 Facts and Figures: "Throughout its 100-year history, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has protected the American people from threats to our way of life. Whether the greatest dangers came from gangsters, public...
News release: "The U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Science and Technology Directorate released the final Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) for the National Bio and Agro-Defense Facility (NBAF) today, recommending Manhattan, Kan., as the preferred site for the state-of the-art,...
Bureau of Justice Statistics: Capital Punishment, 2007 - Statistical Tables, Tracy L. Snell, BJS Statistician "Presents characteristics of persons under sentence of death on December 31, 2007, and persons executed in 2007. Tables present state-by-state information on the movement of...
News release: "The Ecology Center today released the 2nd annual consumer guide to toxic chemicals in toys. Researchers tested over 1,500 new, popular children's toys for lead, arsenic, mercury and other harmful chemicals. The Ecology Center determined that one-third of...
"The NMI (Non-Manufacturing Index) registered 37.3 percent in November, 7.1 percentage points lower than the 44.4 percent registered in October, indicating contraction in the non-manufacturing sector for the second consecutive month. The Non-Manufacturing Business Activity Index decreased 11.2 percentage points...
News release: "For years, the prevailing attitude of Americans toward our federal government has been best reflected by the famous line from President Reagan’s first inaugural address, “…Government is not the solution to our problems; government is the problem” –...
Flood Insurance: FEMA's Rate-Setting Process Warrants Attention, GAO-09-12, October 31, 2008 "Questions about the financial status of the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) have increased since the 2005 hurricanes, which left the program with an unprecedented $17.4 billion deficit--a debt...
"In a report sponsored by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, ITIF [Information Technology and Innovation Foundation] employs 29 indicators to assess the extent to which the 50 state economies are structured according to the tenets of the New Economy. The...
100 Notable Books of 2008 - New York Times: "The Book Review has selected this list from books reviewed since Dec. 2, 2007, when we published our previous Notables list." Includes Fiction and Poetry, and Nonfiction....
News release: "The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) released a list of orders of administrative enforcement actions taken against banks and individuals in October. No administrative hearings are scheduled. The FDIC processed a total of 37 orders in October. These...
News release: The 2008 Atlantic Hurricane Season officially comes to a close on Sunday, marking the end of a season that produced a record number of consecutive storms to strike the United States and ranks as one of the more...
News release: "The Federal Trade Commission has rescinded guidance issued in 1966 that generally permitted statements concerning tar and nicotine yields if they were based on the Cambridge Filter Method, sometimes called the FTC method. As a result, advertisers should...
United States District Court for the District of Columbia, Anthrax Case Documents. Amerithrax Investigation...
"The Economic and Fiscal Strategy Report and the Financial Statement and Budget Report contain the Government’s assessment of the medium-term economic and budgetary position. They set out the Government’s tax and spending plans, including those for public investment, in the...
"In this report, e-Government and e-Participation, produced for the publication series ICT Research: The Policy Perspective, we examine how information and communications technology, or ICT, is revolutionising the way citizens, businesses and public administrations interact. The EU is investing heavily...
Defense Acquisitions: Timely and Accurate Estimates of Costs and Requirements Are Needed to Define Optimal Future Strategic Airlift Mix, GAO-09-50, November 21, 2008 Department of Labor: Better Cost Assessments and Departmentwide Performance Tracking Are Needed to Effectively Manage Competitive Sourcing...
The Fast-Food Information Age: We Are What We Read, Michael Ross - November 10, 2008 "...teachers and students—whose jobs and degrees depend on trust and accuracy—in addition to ordinary Internet users, turn to search engines (e.g., Google, Yahoo) as their...
Library of Congress, Federal Research Division: Rule of Law Handbook 2008, The Judge Advocate General's Legal Center and School, U.S. Army Center for Law and Military Operations...
Official Google Blog: "Today we're launching SearchWiki, a way for you to customize search by re-ranking, deleting, adding, and commenting on search results. With just a single click you can move the results you like to the top or add...
Forged in the Fire - Lessons Learned During Military Operations (1994-2008), September 2008 "Judge Advocates have used these resources for over a decade and they continue to be in demand today. A recurring comment from the field, however, concerns the...
News release: "China relies on heavy-handed government control over its economy to maintain an export advantage over other countries. The result: China has amassed nearly $2 trillion in foreign exchange and has increasingly used its hoard to manipulate currency trading...
News release: "EPA is seeking comments on its proposed guidelines to control the discharge of pollutants from construction sites. The proposal would require all construction sites to implement erosion and sediment control best management practices to reduce pollutants in stormwater...
News release: "The Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U) for the South1 declined 1.2 percent in October to 210.108 (1982-84=100), the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Department of Labor reported today. Sheila Watkins, the Bureau’s regional...
News release: "Working as part of a NASA-wide team, engineers from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., used software called Disruption-Tolerant Networking, or DTN, to transmit dozens of space images to and from a NASA science spacecraft located about...
The Future of Privacy Forum Agenda for Consumers and Businesses [See also: About the Forum] "FPF will seek to bring transparency to online data practices. Our plan is to document practices, produce multi-media educational materials, and commission reports and studies...
Household Food Security in the United States, 2007, By Mark Nord, Margaret Andrews, and Steven Carlson, Economic Research Report No. (ERR-66) 65 pp, November 2008 "Eighty-nine percent of American households were food secure throughout the entire year in 2007, meaning...
Senate Banking Committee Hearing: Oversight of the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act: Examining Financial Institution Use of Funding Under the Capital Purchase Program, November 13, 2008 Opening Statement of Chairman Christopher J. Dodd, “Oversight of the EESA: Examining Financial Institution Use...
News release: "The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation has issued an Interagency Statement on Meeting the Needs of Creditworthy Borrowers to all FDIC supervised institutions. The statement encourages financial institutions to support the lending needs of creditworthy borrowers, strengthen capital, engage...
Washington Post: "Armed with millions of e-mail addresses and a political operation that harnessed the Internet like no campaign before it, Barack Obama will enter the White House with the opportunity to create the first truly "wired" presidency. Obama aides...
News release: "The Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) announced the conforming loan limit will remain $417,000 for 2009 for most areas in the U.S. but specified higher limits in certain cities and counties. The conforming loan limit is the maximum...
News release: "Vehicle owners across the nation can be instantly informed of a safety recall under a new automated alert system announced today by U.S. Transportation Secretary Mary E. Peters. The recall alerts can be received via e-mail or RSS-feeds...
"During the 77 days from the election to the Inauguration, Brookings experts will offer twelve “Memos to the President” on these policy priorities, starting with climate change and expanding across the spectrum of domestic and global challenges. Weekly events will...
News release: "A court ruled today that the National Security Archive may proceed with its effort to force the White House to recover millions of Bush Administration Executive Office of the President (EOP) e-mail records before the presidential transition. Rejecting...
Worldwide Infrastructure Security Report, Volume III: "Arbor Networks®, Inc., in cooperation with the Internet security operations community, has completed the third edition of an ongoing series of annual operational security surveys. This survey, covering a 12-month period from July 2006...
Spamalytics: An Empirical Analysis of Spam Marketing Conversion, October 2008 - Chris Kanich, Christian Kreibich, Kirill Levchenko, Brandon Enright, Geoffrey M. Voelker, Vern Paxson† Stefan Savage "The “conversion rate” of spam — the probability that an unsolicited e-mail will ultimately...
"This First Tranche Report to Congress (First Tranche Report) is the first report under section 105(b) of the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 (EESA). This First Tranche Report is in satisfaction of the requirements for reporting at the $50...
"Nearly 180 organizations representing the business, education and scientific communities have urged the next president to appoint a White House science adviser by January 20—Inauguration Day—and give the adviser cabinet rank." "Dear Senator Obama: The next President of the United...
News release: "The U.S. Department of the Treasury today announced that it is revoking the "U-turn" license for Iran, further restricting Iran's access to the U.S. financial system. Treasury's move today follows a series of U.S. government actions to expose...
New York Times: "Barack Hussein Obama was elected the 44th president of the United States on Tuesday, sweeping away the last racial barrier in American politics with ease as the country chose him as its first black chief executive." Politico...
Data as of November 3, 2008 - Commercial Paper Rates and Outstanding Derived from data supplied by The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation "Commercial paper consists of short-term, promissary notes issued primarily by corporations. Maturities range up to 270 days...
"The Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC) today announced that the maximum insurance benefit for participants in underfunded pension plans terminating in 2009 is $54,000 per year for those who retire at age 65, up from $51,750 for 2008. The amount...
Follow up to November 2, 2008 posting - TSA, EU Agree on Cargo Screening Standards - the copy of a Joint Statement of Purpose on Coordination of Efforts to Enhance Air Cargo Security, by Department of Homeland Security's Transportation Security...
The DOJ's Single-Firm Conduct Report: Promoting Consumer Welfare Through Clearer Standards for Section 2 of the Sherman Act, October 2008 "On September 8, 2008, the Department of Justice (the "Department") issued a 213-page report entitled Competition and Monopoly: Single-Firm Conduct...
National Association for Business Economics Industry Survey: A Significant Downshift - October 2008 - Summary "Demand for goods and services increased at 30% of respondents’ firms and fell at 35%, the first time since 2001 that more respondents reported declines...
Telework Legislation Pending in the 110th Congress: A Side-by-Side Comparison of Provisions, October 20, 2008 S. 1000, the Telework Enhancement Act of 2007, and H.R. 4106, the Telework Improvements Act of 2008, are currently pending in the 110th Congress. Two...
"Electronics recyclers have a new guide on how to run safe and environmentally protective recycling operations. EPA, as part of a group of recycling stakeholders, developed the Responsible Recycling (R2) Practices for Use in Accredited Certification Programs for Electronics Recyclers...
U.S. Census Bureau - Census 2010: Dress Rehearsal of Address Canvassing Revealed Persistent Deficiencies in Approach to Updating the Master Address File - Final Report No. OSE-18599 October 2008 "Our review revealed that (1) millions of ungeocoded Postal Service addresses...
E-Discovery Update: Pushing Back Against Hardcopy ESI Productions - Conrad J. Jacoby addresses how critical technology issues related to document authenticity and document-associated metadata have left fewer lawyers willing to accept e-mail messages and other electronic documents in print format....
Individual Retirement Accounts and 401(k) Plans: Early Withdrawals and Required Distributions, Updated October 27, 2008 "In the interest of encouraging workers to save for retirement, Congress has authorized several kinds of retirement savings plans that qualify for reduced or deferred...
The Changing Prospects for Building Home Equity: An Updated Analysis of Rents and the Price of Housing in 100 Metropolitan Areas, October 2008, Hye Jin Rho, Danilo Pelletiere, and Dean Baker "This report updates CEPR's May 2008 report titled Ownership,...
Check 21 Act: Most Consumers Have Accepted and Banks Are Progressing Toward Full Adoption of Check Truncation, GAO-09-8, October 28, 2008: "The purpose of Check 21, which took effect in 2004, was to facilitate electronic check processing by authorizing the...
Depressed economy wallops states, By Pamela M. Prah, Stateline.org Staff Writer "Staggered by turbulent financial markets and anxious about a rapidly slumping economy, many state governments are slashing their budgets, frantically trying to stay afloat. After two years free of...
M-09-03, Guidance on implementing P.L. No. 110-329 in accordance with Executive Order 13457 on “Protecting American Taxpayers From Government Spending on Wasteful Earmarks” (October 23, 2008) M-09-02, Information Technology Management Structure and Governance Framework: "Organizational Structure and Reporting Relationships of...
"The final Kaiser Health Tracking Poll: Election 2008 finds more people are reporting problems with health care bills, and paying for health care retains a solid hold on the public’s list of their top economic concerns. About one in three...
ABA Journal, November 2008: The Pre-emption Prescription - The FDA is claiming total responsibility for drug and medical device safety. "The FDA had been signaling its new attitude of tort reform regarding prescription drugs and medical devices since 2001, when...
Gartner Says Citizen Social Networks Will Complement, and May Replace, Some Government Functions, Egham, UK, October 23, 2008 — "By 2011, 70 per cent of social computing deployments in government that achieve business benefits will do so in unplanned or...
Official Google Blog: "Today we are pleased to announce the launch of a 5-year quotes index. This expanded coverage lets you explore what Governor Palin said before she was a VP nominee, or Senator Obama before he was a presidential...
News release: "Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo, joined by Vice President Al Gore, today announced an agreement that requires a national energy company, Dynegy Inc. (“Dynegy”), to disclose timely and relevant information to investors about climate change risks...Under the agreement,...
Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) in the Executive Office of the President - Federal R&D Agenda for Net Zero Energy, High-Performance Green Buildings, October 22, 2008. "...the National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) released a report describing R&D...
News release: "The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) today announced the issuance of the Secure Flight Final Rule, which shifts pre-departure watch list matching responsibilities from individual aircraft operators to the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) and carries out a...
White House Summit on International Development Conference Program, October 21, 2008 Fact Sheet: Transforming International Development, October 20, 2008 Fact Sheet: White House Summit on International Development, October 20, 2008...
Environmental Enforcement: EPA Needs to Improve the Accuracy and Transparency of Measures Used to Report on Program Effectiveness, GAO-08-1111R, September 18, 2008 Responses to Questions for the Record; September 2008 Hearing on the Next Generation Air Transportation System: Status and...
News release: "The Federal Reserve Board on Tuesday announced the creation of the Money Market Investor Funding Facility (MMIFF), which will support a private-sector initiative designed to provide liquidity to U.S. money market investors. Under the MMIFF, authorized by the...
News release: "Alternative sources of fossil fuels such as oil sands and coal-to-liquids have significant economic promise, but the environmental consequences must also be considered, according to a RAND Corporation study issued today. The study by RAND, a non-profit research...
News release: "The Federal Reserve Board on Monday approved final amendments to Regulation C that revise the rules for reporting price information on higher-priced mortgage loans. The changes are intended to improve the accuracy and usefulness of data reported under...
"EPIC's voting project releases the first report on the technology of deceptive campaign practices. Deceptive campaigns are attempts to misdirect voters regarding the voting process for public elections. Deceptive campaign activity can be false statements about polling times, date of...
Indoor Mold: Better Coordination of Research on Health Effects and More Consistent Guidance Would Improve Federal Efforts, GAO-08-980, September 30, 2008 Defense Management: DOD Can Establish More Guidance for Biometrics Collection and Explore Broader Data Sharing, GAO-09-49, October 15, 2008...
Fulbright & Jaworski LLP 2008 Litigation Trends Survey, 253 pages, PDF, prepared by Greenwood Surveys, July 2008. [Note: there were 358 participants in this study: 251 in the U.S. and 100 in the UK] "Following two straight years of reporting...
Securities and Exchange Commission, Office of Inspector General - SEC’s Oversight of Bear Stearns and Related Entities: Broker-Dealer Risk Assessment Program, September 25, 2008, Report No. 446-B SEC's Division of Trading and Markets (TM)..."is not fulfilling its obligations in accordance...
Intelligence Community Directive Number 704, Personnel Security Standards and Procedures Governing Eligibility for Access to Sensitive Compartmented Information and Other Controlled Access Program Information (Effective 01 October 2008): "This Intelligence Community Directive (lCD) establishes Director of National Intelligence (DNI) personnel...
News release: "The Census Bureau's Small Area Health Insurance Estimates (SAHIE) program produces estimates of health insurance coverage for states and all counties. In July 2005, SAHIE released the first nation-wide set of county-level estimates on the number of people...
FOX News: "The World Bank Group's computer network — one of the largest repositories of sensitive data about the economies of every nation — has been raided repeatedly by outsiders for more than a year, FOX News has learned. It...
EPA Children's Environmental Health: 2008 Highlights "In the field of environmental protection, even experts did not always recognize that children are different from adults. were first written with the average American adult—not children—in mind. Calculating the environmental contribution to disease...
News release: "The G-7 agrees today that the current situation calls for urgent and exceptional action. We commit to continue working together to stabilize financial markets and restore the flow of credit, to support global economic growth. We agree to:...
News release: "Online scammers are taking advantage of tough economic times. While e-mails phishing for sensitive data are nothing new, scammers are taking advantage of upheavals in the financial marketplace to confuse consumers into parting with valuable personal information. The...
UK Daily Mail: "Iceland's banking system is £35billion in debt - the equivalent of an incredible £116,000 for every man, woman and child on the island, it was revealed today. With a population of just over 300,000 - less than...
The Open House Project: "Fulfilling one of the recommendations of the Open House Project report, The Library of Congress has published on their THOMAS web page directions for creating permanent links." THOMAS: "Legislative Handles are a new persistent URL service...
News release: "All U.S. agencies with counterterrorism programs that collect or "mine" personal data -- such as phone, medical, and travel records or Web sites visited -- should be required to systematically evaluate the programs' effectiveness, lawfulness, and impacts on...
News release: "The Federal Reserve Board on Tuesday announced the creation of the Commercial Paper Funding Facility (CPFF), a facility that will complement the Federal Reserve's existing credit facilities to help provide liquidity to term funding markets. The CPFF will...
"Federal Employee Appraisals to Include Information Sharing: PM-ISE and the Office of Personnel Management Release Guidance on Information Sharing Elements for Performance Appraisals. The Information Sharing Council includes the Central Intelligence Agency; Federal Bureau of Investigation; departments of Defense, Energy,...
Department of Justice, Office of Legal Counsel: Enforceability of Certain Agreements Between the Department of the Treasury and the Government Sponsored Enterprises, (September 26, 2008) (added 10/02/08) "Under the Agreements, following a payment default by a GSE with respect to...
News release: "...the Sunlight Foundation is releasing a beta version of FARAdb, which digitizes disclosures filed by lobbyists representing 15 foreign countries required by the Foreign Agent Registration Act. These reports are filed twice a year by firms hired to...
News release: "To assist in responding to potential effects of climate change, a new strategy focuses on 40 specific actions for the national water program to take to respond to climate change. EPA's National Water Program Strategy: Response to Climate...
Follow-up to previous posting, Perchlorate and TCE in the Nation’s Waters, this news release: "The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency conducted extensive review of scientific data related to the health effects of exposure to perchlorate from drinking water and other sources...
From NextGov: "Members of the House will be permitted to use third-party Web sites like YouTube to communicate with constituents as long as the content is for official purposes, and not personal, commercial or campaign communication, according to rules adopted...
Follow up to previous posting, Senate Passes Bailout Bill - Moves Back to House on Friday, the House vote today was 263 to 171 The Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008, H.R. 1424, passed in the House, Friday, October 3,...
Health-Care-Associated Infections in Hospitals: An Overview of State Reporting Programs and Individual Hospital Initiatives to Reduce Certain Infections, GAO-08-808, September 5, 2008 "Health-care-associated infections (HAI) are infections that patients acquire while receiving treatment for other conditions. Normally treated with antimicrobial...
News release: "The Commission has taken steps during recent weeks to address concerns regarding short sales in light of the ongoing credit crisis. These efforts relating to short sales have focused particularly on the securities of financial institutions whose health...
Official Google Blog: "Today, we're pleased to launch a new homepage for Google Blog Search so that you too can browse and discover the most interesting stories in the blogosphere. Adapting some of the technology pioneered by Google News, we're...
Find your voting location, registration information and more. Just enter your home address... Google Public Policy Blog: "Our guide already includes voting locations for a number of states and the District of Columbia, and we are aiming to have voting...
Follow up to September 28, 2008 posting on The Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008, "Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Chairman Barney Frank of the House Financial Services Committee, and House Democratic leaders held a news conference this afternoon following the defeat...
CNNMoney.com: "The federal government would provide as much as $700 billion in a far-reaching plan to rescue the nation's troubled financial system, according to a draft of the proposed bill obtained by CNN. The legislation is still being negotiated and...
Chris Harrelson, Tech Lead & Creator of Google Transit: "We've just added comprehensive transit info for the entire New York metro region, encompassing subway, commuter rail, bus and ferry services from the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), the Port Authority of...
W. David Stephenson - Automated Data Feeds Make Smart Regulation Possible Now: "The District of Columbia, long plagued by corruption, began a transparency initiative under former Mayor Anthony Williams. It shifted into high gear under Mayor Adrian Fenty, and CTO...
"Health care has been an important issue in this year's presidential campaign and the candidates have staked out positions on key health care issues. Both major party candidates have developed comprehensive health care reform proposals addressing health coverage and access,...
Information Security: Actions Needed to Better Protect Los Alamos National Laboratory's Unclassified Computer Network, GAO-08-1001, September 09, 2008 U.S. Asylum System: Agencies Have Taken Actions to Help Ensure Quality in the Asylum Adjudication Process, but Challenges Remain, GAO-08-935, September 25,...
President's Address to the Nation, East Room of the White House, September 24, 2008: "This is an extraordinary period for America's economy. Over the past few weeks, many Americans have felt anxiety about their finances and their future. I understand...
September 22, 2008 - Proposal to Allow Treasury to Buy Mortgage Related Assets to Address Financial Instability "Financial markets underwent severe stress during the week of September 15-22, 2008. After Lehman Brothers declared bankruptcy and AIG received a bridge loan...
"Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere 2008 report...will be released in five consecutive daily segments. Since 2004, our annual study has unearthed and analyzed the trends and themes of blogging, but for the 2008 study, we resolved to go beyond the...
"Freshwater Ecoregions of the World, (FEOW) provides a new global biogeographic regionalization of the Earth's freshwater biodiversity. Covering virtually all freshwater habitats on Earth, this first-ever ecoregion map, together with associated species data, is a useful tool for underpinning global...
OFHEO Strategic Plan 2006-2011: "OFHEO has an important and compelling mission “to promote housing and a strong national housing finance system by ensuring the safety and soundness of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.” These Enterprises own or guarantee 41 percent...
Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee hearing entitled Turmoil in U.S. Credit Markets: Recent Actions Regarding Government Sponsored Entities, Investment Banks and Other Financial Institutions, September 23, 2008 A Summary of Chairman Dodd's proposal in response to the Treasury...
News release: The Federal Reserve Board on Sunday approved, pending a statutory five-day antitrust waiting period, the applications of Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley to become bank holding companies. To provide increased liquidity support to these firms as they transition...
September 18, 2008 - Royalty Relief for U.S. Deepwater Oil and Gas Leases September 18, 2008 - Reauthorization of the Federal Maritime Commission (FMC): Opportunity to Reexamine the Congressionally Mandated Antitrust Exemption for Ocean Liner Carriers? September 16, 2008 -...
New York Times: "The Bush administration on Saturday formally proposed a vast bailout of the United States financial system, requesting unfettered authority for the Treasury Department to buy up to $700 billion in mortgage-related assets from financial institutions based in...
News release: "A new study from The Nielsen Company says that more than 20 million U.S. telephone households (17 percent) are wireless substitutors — homes without landlines that rely solely on a mobile phone for their home telecommunications." Call My...
State statutes of limitation for credit card debt - Collectors have a limited time to file lawsuits over unpaid card debts, by Emily Starbuck Gerson and Connie Prater: "CreditCards.com compiled a state-by-state listing of credit card debt statutes of limitations....
Via Government Executive: "... summary of where each [candidate] stands on issues of importance to government workers..." [thanks TM] See also: "this side-by-side comparison of the candidates' positions on health care was prepared by the Kaiser Family Foundation with the...
"Food at home and shelter prices in the Washington-Baltimore area advanced, while energy prices declined in August, as measured by the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U), the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Department of Labor...
Gas Price Watch Reporting Form: "The Department of Energy is very concerned about the impact of gasoline prices on American families. While we are working to address longer term supply issues, we're also working to make sure American families are...
The Municipal Guidebook to Bringing Broadband Fiber Optics to Your Community (126 pages, PDF) "is the first comprehensive guide written for city, county, and utility officials. The guide highlights the economic and quality-of-life benefits to communities that have a robust...
New York Times: "The Justice Department made public on Friday a plan to expand the tools the Federal Bureau of Investigation can use to investigate suspicions of terrorism inside the United States, even without any direct evidence of wrongdoing. Justice...
Commodity Futures Trading Commission Staff Report on Commodity Swap Dealers & Index Traders with Commission Recommendations, September 2008 "Major changes in the composition of futures market participants have developed over the last 20 years. Specifically, there has been an influx...
"This memorandum conveys the final results of three separate Office of Inspector General (OIG) investigations into allegations against more than a dozen current and former Minerals Management Service (MMS) employees. In the case of one former employee, Jimmy Mayberry, he...
World Bank Doing Business Project: "For the fifth year in a row Eastern Europe and Central Asia led the world in Doing Business reforms. Twenty-six of the region’s 28 economies implemented a total of 69 reforms. Since 2004 Doing Business...
News release: "A blue-ribbon panel has praised the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) for its “comprehensive strategy” in suicide prevention that includes a “number of initiatives and innovations that hold great promise for preventing suicide attempts and completions.” Among the...
News release: "The Department today issued a report informing consumers, businesses and policy makers about issues relating to monopolization offenses under the antitrust laws. The report, Competition and Monopoly: Single-Firm Conduct Under Section 2 of the Sherman Act, September 2008,...
News release: "For consumers who choose to buy a new TV, EPA recommends purchasing Energy Star-qualified sets. EPA also encourages consumers to recycle their unwanted TVs, which recovers valuable materials from the circuit boards, metal wiring, leaded glass, and plastics....
Official Google Blog: "Today, we're launching an initiative to make more old newspapers accessible and searchable online by partnering with newspaper publishers to digitize millions of pages of news archives...Not only will you be able to search these newspapers, you'll...
"The Treasury Department and the Federal Housing Finance Agency, with support from the Federal Reserve, announced actions today regarding the housing government sponsored enterprises to protect the financial system, to support the housing market, and to protect the taxpayers." Paulson...
News release: "The (ITN) International Telecommunication Union launched its key Telecommunication/ICT Indicators Report for the Asia-Pacific region at ITU TELECOM ASIA 2008...The Report (for purchase) focuses on broadband connectivity as a vehicle for content to drive development and build a...
World Wildlife Fund - Increasing Vulnerability to Hurricanes: Global Warming’s Wake-Up Call for the U.S. Gulf and Atlantic Coasts "The destructive potential of tropical storms in the North Atlantic has increased by about 50 percent since the 1970s. This increase,...
University of Florida News: "Permafrost blanketing the northern hemisphere contains more than twice the amount of carbon in the atmosphere, making it a potentially mammoth contributor to global climate change depending on how quickly it thaws. So concludes a group...
News release: "The delinquency rate for mortgage loans on one-to-four-unit residential properties stood at 6.41 percent of all loans outstanding at the end of the second quarter of 2008, up six basis points from the first quarter of 2008, and...
National Law Journal (subscription req'd): "The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit affirmed a $1 billion damages award by the U.S. Court of Federal Claims for the government's breach of oil and gas leases held by 11 companies...
News release: "The FDIC issued a report on ways mortgage lenders can responsibly and profitably expand the availability of home loans to low- and moderate-income (LMI) borrowers and still make a profit. The report -- a summary of best practices...
9/11 Commemorations and Information 9/11 Commemorations and Local Resources White House Archives What You Can Do Other 9/11 Resources...
E-Discovery Update: Producing Spreadsheets in Discovery – 2008 In spite of great financial investment to produce these documents in a way that satisfies competing litigation needs of authenticity and full native functionality, litigants continue to disagree on a production format...
CDC, Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, September 5, 2008: National National, State, and Local Area Vaccination Coverage Among Children Aged 19--35 Months - United States, 2007. "Maintaining high vaccination coverage and continued attention to reducing current poverty disparities is needed...
"Financial market turmoil, the bursting of the housing bubble and high commodity prices continue to weigh on global economic growth, according to OECD’s latest interim economic assessment of the G7 countries. Banks have recognized most of the losses and write-downs...
News release: "The Securities and Exchange Commission today charged two Wall Street brokers with defrauding their customers when making more than $1 billion in unauthorized purchases of subprime-related auction rate securities...The SEC alleges that Julian Tzolov and Eric Butler misled...
The Social Security Administration's Enterprise-Wide Infrastructure Contract, A-14-08-18014, September 2, 2008. "On September 28, 2005, SSA entered into a contract with Northrop Grumman to address hardware, software, maintenance and technical support of the Agency's Enterprise-Wide Network. The contract has an...
Early responses to Mercer's annual survey indicate cost will rise 5.7 percent next year, September 4, 2008: "After three years of double-digit growth in the first half of the decade, annual health benefit cost increases slowed to about 6 percent...
Catalyst Group - Beyond Red and Blue: Insights into the Design of Presidential Candidate Websites, August 6, 2008 - "The results of our research indicated that aesthetics play an important role in users’ evaluation of a candidate’s site, but that...
News release: "A new study clearly finds that America’s public libraries are breaking through traditional brick-and-mortar walls to serve more people online and in person. America’s 16,543 public library buildings are leveraging technology to help children succeed in school and...
The Official Google Blog: "As you may have read in the blogosphere, we hit "send" a bit early on a comic book introducing our new open source browser, Google Chrome. As we believe in access to information for everyone, we've...
State and Federal Electronic Government in the United States, 2008, Darrell M. West, Vice President and Director, Governance Studies, The Brookings Institution, August 26, 2008. Executive Summary: "This report assesses the nature of American state and federal electronic government in...
USDOJ: "Enhanced 911 systems would accommodate calls from Internet Protocol (IP)-enabled phones under rules proposed by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). Electronic 911 (e-911) calls are routed to about 6,000 call centers nationwide (known as public safety answering points) using...
News release: "Tens of thousands of New Jersey residents are drinking polluted water, according to a new state report. Despite widespread exposure to drinking unsafe well water, state health officials ignore the risks to an unknowing public, according to Public...
Threats to Internet Routing and Global Connectivity, 20th Annual FIRST Conference, Vancouver, British Columbia Canada, June 2008 (69 page presentation) includes discussion of the following topics: Physical problems (Physical Infrastructure: Natural, accidental or intentional destruction) Earthquakes, Anchors/Backhoes, Hurricanes Routing Vulnerabilities...
U.S. Treasury: First Annual Report on the Latin America Small Business Lending Initiative (PDF), August 29, 2008. "The three-part initiative is jointly supported by the U.S. Treasury Department, the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), and the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC)....
News release: "Senator Charles E. Schumer and Representative Carolyn B. Maloney, Chairman and Vice-Chair of the Joint Economic Committee (JEC) released statements in reaction to troubling new data from the U.S. Census Bureau on household incomes, health care coverage, and...
Realizing the Global Promise of the Internet: The Future of Internet Governance, Constance Ledoux Book, Janna Quitney Anderson, Michele Hammerbacher, Anne Nicholson, Dannika Lewis, Eryn Gradwell, August 13, 2008....
Great .gov Web sites, by Joab Jackson: "These 10 sites show agencies putting the power of the Web to work. Government agencies are finally catching on to the World Wide Web. Ten years ago, most government executives saw the Web...
Woodstock Institute - Foreclosure Fallout: An Analysis of Foreclosure Auctions in the Chicago Region: Huge inventory of foreclosed properties and fewer bidders means lenders on the hook for billions in Chicago region, says new report. "The following report examines the...
Brookings Governance Studies: Improving Technology Utilization in Electronic Government around the World, 2008 - Darrell M. West "This report reviews the current condition of electronic government and makes practical suggestions for improving the delivery of information and services over the...
USA.gov: "The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) issued e-mail archiving applications guidance July 31 for certain e-mails that are considered records under the Federal Records Act. The bulletin informs agencies that e-mail archiving technologies may not necessarily meet all...
Recent Trends in Home Prices: Differences across Mortgage and Borrower Characteristics, August 2008 - "This Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight (OFHEO) research paper analyzes differences in recent price trends for homes with different types of financing and borrower characteristics....
Is the U.S. on the Path to the Lowest Motor Vehicle Fatalities in Decades? by Michael Sivak, The University of Michigan, Transportation Research Institute "Trends in U.S. motor vehicle fatalities, gasoline sales, and distance driven were examined for 12 months...
Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight (OFHEO) news release: "U.S. home prices fell in the second quarter of 2008 according to OFHEO’s seasonally-adjusted purchase-only house price index. The index, which is based on data from home sales, was 1.4 percent...
News release: "Most companies do not have a plan to manage and transfer knowledge and even fewer factor cross-generational challenges into business strategy, says a new report from The Conference Board... "As the Baby Boom generation of corporate leaders and...
CDT: "In comments filed with the Department of Homeland Security today, CDT highlighted privacy concerns implicated by DHS' new system of databases to record personal information and border crossing history. CDT called on DHS to reduce the 15-year period for...
Pew Research Center - Men or Women: Who's the Better Leader? A Paradox in Public Attitudes, August 25, 2008 "Americans believe women have the right stuff to be political leaders. When it comes to honesty, intelligence and a handful of...
The Government Domain: Back to School for Constitution Day 2008 - E-gov expert Peggy Garvin guides researchers, educators and librarians to key online resources available for teaching, training and educational activities associated with the September 17, 2008 celebration of Constitution...
Urban Institute: "U.S. public policy has increasingly been conceived, debated, and evaluated through the lenses of politics and ideology. The fundamental question—Will the policy work?—too often gets short shrift or even ignored. A remedy is evidence-based policy—a rigourous approach that...
"Gannett News Service compiled 2002 data from the National Center for Education Statistics on more than 9,000 public library systems nationwide. To make a five-year comparison, GNS also obtained 2006 data from each state and the District of Columbia that...
News release: "The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) has published Social Software in Libraries, SPEC Kit 304, which provides an overview of ARL libraries’ implementation of software that people use to connect with one another online...In the last few years,...
News release: "AARP announced today that it has added four new health tools to its Web site, to help consumers get trusted, reliable online health information. These tools will enable people to do everything from choose an excellent doctor or...
CIA FOIA Electronic Reading Room: "This collection of material [A Life in Intelligence - The Richard Helms Collection] by and about Richard Helms as Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) and Ambassador to Iran comprises the largest single release of Helms-related...
National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 254: "The U.S. intelligence community buckled sooner in 2002 than previously reported to Bush administration pressure for data justifying an invasion of Iraq, according to a documents posting on the Web today by...
News release: "The fall of the 47-story World Trade Center building 7 (WTC 7) in New York City late in the afternoon of Sept. 11, 2001, was primarily due to fires, the Commerce Department’s National Institute of Standards and Technology...
News release: "Investors engaging with U.S. companies on the financial risks and opportunities from climate change achieved breakthrough results during the 2008 proxy season. A record 57 climate-related shareholder resolutions were filed with U.S. companies, of which nearly half were...
Hardrock Mining: Information on State Royalties and Trends in Mineral Imports and Exports, GAO-08-849R, July 21, 2008. "Since the passage of the General Mining Act of 1872, miners have extracted billions of dollars worth of gold, silver, copper, and other...
News release: "Customer satisfaction continues on a bumpy path without momentum or trend in the second quarter, according to the American Customer Satisfaction Index. After a small uptick last quarter, ACSI slips 0.1% to 75.1 on a 100-point scale. The...
Justia: Find Attorneys, Legal Aid and Legal Services - Arranged by practice areas, states and metro areas....
News release: "The Reason Foundation's 17th Annual Report on the Performance of State Highway Systems measures the performance of all state-owned roads and highways from 1984 to 2006. The study calculates the effectiveness and performance of each state in 12...
News release: "The percentage of internet users who use search engines on a typical day has been steadily rising from about one-third of all users in 2002, to a new high of just under one-half (49%). With this increase, the...
News release: "U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) announced August 15, 2008 a series of proposed rule changes that will streamline procedures for hiring workers under the H-2B program. These changes are being proposed in further fulfillment of the commitment...
Washington-Baltimore Consumer Price Index: July 2008 - "Retail prices in the Washington-Baltimore area, as measured by the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U), rose 1.7 percent from May to July, following a 1.1-percent increase in the previous two-month...
News release: "The nation will be more racially and ethnically diverse, as well as much older, by midcentury, according to projections released today by the U.S. Census Bureau. Minorities, now roughly one-third of the U.S. population, are expected to become...
2008 Best Law Firms for Women Announced by Working Mother and Flex-Time Lawyers - FindLaw: "The legal profession is in a work/life crisis, with 78% of associates leaving law firms by their fifth year and nearly 50% of women lawyers...
"The Proliferation of the media in children's lives has created a new "marketing ecosystem" that encompasses cell phones, mobile music devices, instant messaging, videogames, and virtual three-dimensional worlds. This report by Jeff Chester from the Center for Digital Democracy and...
Official Google Enterprise Blog: "In July, our Postini datacenters saw the biggest volume of email virus attacks so far in 2008, with a peak of nearly 10 million messages on July 24. One of the more prominent attacks in the...
News release: "The Bush Administration plans to rollback protections for America’s imperiled wildlife by re-writing the regulations of the Endangered Species Act. According to leaked documents obtained by the National Wildlife Federation, the proposed changes would weaken the safety net...
Follow up to previous postings on the EPA library closures, today this news release from the Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER): "The Memorandum of Agreement between the EPA and the American Federation of Government Employees becomes final today....EPA will...
"W3C...announced new standards that will make it easier for people to browse the Web on mobile devices. Mobile Web Best Practices 1.0, published as a W3C Recommendation by the Mobile Web Best Practices Working Group, condenses the experience of many...
ABC News/Planet Green/Stanford University Poll Finds Concern for Environment, Support for Drilling "High energy prices are double-teaming with environmental concerns to prompt broad conservation efforts, with seven in 10 Americans saying they're trying to reduce their "carbon footprint," chiefly by...
News release: "Citizen satisfaction with federal government websites ended a losing streak by improving for the first time in a year, according to the second quarter report of the University of Michigan’s American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) E-Government Satisfaction Index....
"Fannie Mae reported a wider-than-expected second-quarter loss of $2.3 billion and said it expects more heavy losses from the surge in home-mortgage defaults. Mounting losses at both Fannie and Freddie Mac, the two main providers of money for home mortgages,...
"The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC)...issued its list of state nonmember banks recently evaluated for compliance with the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA). The list covers evaluation ratings that the FDIC assigned to institutions in May 2008. The CRA is a...
News release: "Ob-gyns should routinely screen all women between the ages of 19 and 64 for HIV, regardless of their risk factors, according to a Committee Opinion, Routine Human Immunodeficiency Virus Screening, issued today by The American College of Obstetricians...
Brookings - The New Orleans Index Anniversary Edition: Three Years after Katrina - "Greater New Orleans approaches the end of its third year of recovery from a position of strength, with the vast majority of its pre-storm population and jobs....
Department of Energy IG Audit Report - Management Controls over Changes to the Idaho Cleanup Project Contract Baseline, July 2008 "In Fiscal Year 2005, the Department of Energy (Department) awarded a Cost-Plus-Incentive-Fee coiltract to CH2M + WG Idaho, LLC (CWI)...
News release: "Before Congress spends billions to build public schools that meet "green" environmental standards, it should review Washington state's experience, which shows that green buildings have higher than expected costs, and the energy savings and other projected benefits are...
News release: "The unemployment rate rose to 5.7 percent, and nonfarm payroll employment continued to trend down in July (-51,000), the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Department of Labor reported today. Employment continued to fall in construction, manufacturing,...
WSJ Business Technology Blog: "Aspiring corporate-technology execs need to read. A lot. That’s the opinion of Bob Rouse, who runs the Society for Information Management’s Regional Leadership Forum, which will train 265 potential chief information officers this year. Rouse has...
Department of Housing and Urban Development Office of Community Planning and Development - The Third Annual Homeless Assessment Report to Congress, July 29, 2008 (144 pages, PDF) "...on a single night in January 2007, there were 671,888 sheltered and unsheltered...
News release: "The national security system created by the U.S. government in 1947 that served the nation throughout the Cold War is outdated and needs a massive restructuring to better protect the American people from terrorism, rogue states and other...
News release: "New Federal data showing further steep declines in the number of miles Americans are driving is additional proof that the country needs new means - other than the gas tax - to finance the nation's transportation infrastructure, U.S....
Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR): Comprehensive Plan Needed to Guide the Future of the Iraq Reconstruction Management System, July 25, 2008 "This report addresses the Iraq Reconstruction Management System. Public Law 108-106 created the $18.4...
News release: "A year after the subprime market crisis erupted in the United States, triggering financial market turmoil around the world, global financial markets continue to be fragile and systemic risks remain elevated, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) said in...
Follow up to July 8, 2008 posting, SEC Examinations Find Shortcomings in Credit Rating Agencies' Practices and Disclosure to Investors, today's article from the WSJ (requires subscription - letter to SEC linked below is available free): S&P Resists SEC Ratings...
News release: "...a new report by U.S.-based consumer advocacy group Food & Water Watch, What’s Behind the Global Food Crisis? How Trade Policy Undermined Africa's Food Self-Sufficiency, found that the steady increase in food cultivation in Africa between 1980s and...
Analyses of the Effects of Global Change on Human Health and Welfare and Human Systems, Final Report, Synthesis and Assessment Product 4.6, U.S. Climate Change Science Program And the Subcommittee on Global Change Research, July 2008 [284 pages, PDF]. "This...
News release: "Even as the last of the stimulus checks that have blunted the worst effects of the economic downturn are cashed, the economy remains poised on the brink of what could be a prolonged period of economic stagnation. According...
Government Performance: 2007 Federal Managers Survey on Performance and Management Issues: (GAO-08-1036SP, July 2008), an E-supplement to GAO-08-1026T, GAO-08-1036SP, July 24, 2008 Government Performance: Lessons Learned for the Next Administration on Using Performance Information to Improve Results, GAO-08-1026T, July 24,...
InformationWeek: " "More than three-quarters of bank Web sites have design flaws that could expose bank customers to financial loss or identity theft, according to a University of Michigan study that will be presented this week at the Symposium on...
Agencies Believe Strengthening International Agreements to Improve Collection of Antidumping and Countervailing Duties Would Be Difficult and Ineffective, GAO-08-876R, July 24, 2008 Aviation Security: Transportation Security Administration Has Strengthened Planning to Guide Investments in Key Aviation Security Programs, but More...
"Baby boomers looking for jobs in growth fields that welcome older workers will want to dust off their diplomas rather than their treadmills, according to a new report from the Urban Institute. Most of the fastest-growing occupations that already employ...
Official Google Blog: "A few months ago we announced that we were testing a new product called Knol. Knols are authoritative articles about specific topics, written by people who know about those subjects. Today, we're making Knol available to everyone....
Defined Benefit Pensions: Plan Freezes Affect Millions of Participants and May Pose Retirement Income Challenges, GAO-08-817, July 21, 2008 Human Capital: Selected Agencies Have Implemented Key Features of Their Senior Executive Performance-Based Pay Systems, but Refinements Are Needed, GAO-08-1019T, July...
"The 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals today upheld a lower court ruling striking down the controversial Child Online Protection Act (COPA) that required Web operators to restrict access to large amounts of constitutionally protected speech. COPA placed severe restrictions...
RS22916 Fannie Mae's and Freddie Mac's Financial Problems: Frequently Asked Questions, July 15, 2008 "What risks do Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac face in today’s economic environment? Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have traditionally kept some of their mortgages in...
Department of Commerce Office of Inspector General - United States Patent and Trademark Office, The Overseas Intellectual Property Rights Attaché Program Is Generally Working Well, but a Comprehensive Operating Plan Is Needed, Final Report IPE-19044/July 2008. "According to the U.S....
"Chairman Waxman requests additional information about Defense Department and KBR failures to address defective electrical systems throughout Iraq that have caused hundreds of fires and resulted in multiple fatalities." Documents and Links Letter to Robert M. Gates Memorandum for Defense...
News release: "U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s Office of International Trade announced today that the domestic value of counterfeit and pirated products seized by CBP and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement increased by 2.7 percent in mid-fiscal year 2008 to...
Criminal Justice Resources: Sex Offender Residency Restrictions - Ken Strutin's guide collects recent court decisions, research papers and reports that have addressed the efficacy of exclusionary zoning laws and the impact of these restrictions on sex offenders reentering their communities....
News release: "A new collaborative study by World Resources Institute and other researchers finds that much of the world’s deforestation is isolated in a handful of “hotspots,” not spread out over many nations and many locations. In fact, this study...
News release: "Coral reefs are a vital part of the Caribbean’s marine environment, and are integral to the economies of many of the region’s small island states. World Resources Institute’s economic valuation methodology can help decision-makers in the region better...
Department of Homeland Security: Essential Technology Task Force, June 25 2008 (PDF, 24 pages) "The Department is suffering from systemic weaknesses in its ability to accept and manage change in technologies essential to its missions. Many of these ongoing weaknesses...
Follow up to July 16, 2008 posting, SEC Enhances Investor Protections Against Naked Short Selling, this WSJ article: SEC Short-Sale Rule Gets Negative Reviews - Banks Not on List Fear They're Now Even Bigger Targets - "The Securities and Exchange...
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Technical Paper on Climate Change and Water, June 2008 (214 pages, PDF) "The Technical Paper addresses the issue of freshwater. Sealevel rise is dealt with only insofar as it can lead to impacts on freshwater...
News release: "An investigation by the Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming has found that members of government at the highest levels, including the office of President George W. Bush’s Chief of Staff and numerous heads of Cabinet...
News release: "The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) today announced a set of security recommendations for the transportation of certain quantities of hazardous materials across the nation's highways. The recommendations - while voluntary - will help to ensure the secure transportation...
News release: "Almost three out of five new middle-class retirees will outlive their financial assets if they attempt to maintain their pre-retirement standard of living, according to a new study conducted by Ernst & Young LLP on behalf of Americans...
"The National Association of State Chief Information Officers (NASCIO) is pleased to announce the release of its research brief, Ready for the Challenge? State CIOs and Electronic Records. The brief is a product of NASCIO's Electronic Records and Digital Preservation...
Iran's Political, Demographic, and Economic Vulnerabilities, by Keith Crane, Rollie Lal, Jeffrey Martini, July 2008. "Iran is one of the United States' most important foreign policy concerns. It has also been an extraordinarily difficult country with which to engage. Ironically,...
Bill Summary - H.R. 5811: The Electronic Message Preservation Act. Rep. Henry A. Waxman, Chairman, Committee on Oversight and Government Reform "Investigations by the Oversight Committee have revealed significant deficiencies in the preservation of e-mail by the White House and...
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace: "China’s economy will surpass that of the United States by 2035 and be twice its size by midcentury, a new report by Albert Keidel concludes. China’s rapid growth is driven by domestic demand—not exports—and will...
News release: "The Securities and Exchange Commission today released findings from extensive 10-month examinations of three major credit rating agencies that uncovered significant weaknesses in ratings practices and the need for remedial action by the firms to provide meaningful ratings...
Committee on Oversight: "Rep. Henry A. Waxman, Rep. Wm. Lacy Clay, and Rep. Paul W. Hodes released a new GAO report that finds that senior federal officials are failing to comply with requirements to preserve e-mail records. On Wednesday, the...
Army Working Capital Fund: Actions Needed to Reduce Carryover at Army Depots, GAO-08-714, July 08, 2008 Bureau of Justice Statistics Funding to States to Improve Criminal Records, GAO-08-898R, July 08, 2008 Federal Records: National Archives and Selected Agencies Need to...
The Role of Biofuels and Other Factors in Increasing Farm and Food Prices - A Review of Recent Developments with a Focus on Feed Grain Markets and Market Prospects. Keith Collins, Ph.D. June 23, 2008. Executive Summary "Farm-level prices have...
Social Security Administration Inspector General - Congressional Response Report: Financial Institutions Deducting Fees and Garnishments from Social Security Benefits, July 2, 2008. "The objective of our review was to determine whether financial institutions (FI) were deducting service fees and garnishments...
Defense Acquisitions: A Knowledge-Based Funding Approach Could Improve Major Weapon System Program Outcomes, GAO-08-619, July 02, 2008...
News release: "The impact of surging oil and food prices is being felt globally but is most acute for import-dependent poor and middle-income countries confronted by balance of payments problems, higher inflation, and worsening poverty, a new IMF study warns....
E-Discovery Update: Precision, Accuracy, and Relevance - Conrad J. Jacoby discusses the challenges and ramifications inherent in an evironment where litigants have increasingly come to rely on computerized search queries rather than free-form document review to identify potentially relevant documents....
Criminal Justice Degree Guides: "The Top 100 Law and Lawyer Blogs Law blogs, also known as blawgs, are plentiful these days. In fact, there are probably thousands to choose from and more appear each week. For that reason, it may...
The Assets Agenda Policy Options To Promote Savings And Asset Ownership By Low- And Moderate-Income Americans, By Alejandra Lopez-Fernandini, Reid Cramer, Rourke O'Brien, New America Foundation June 30, 2008. "The agenda we present here includes calls for new structures and...
Report on Progress toward Security and Stability in Afghanistan, June 2008. Report to Congress in accordance with the 2008 National Defense Authorization Act (Section 1230, Public Law 110-181), Unclassified. "After the attacks of September 11, 2001, the United States and...
"The World Trade Indicators (WTI), an interactive tool designed to benchmark a country’s trade policy and institutions and help policy makers, advisors, and analysts’ identify the main border and behind-the border constraints to trade integration. The WTI 2008 database is...
Inside Google Blog Search: "U.S. Copyright Office records. Records from 1978 onward are online but not downloadable in bulk. The Copyright Office hasn't digitized their earlier records, but Carnegie Mellon scanned them as part of their Universal Library Project, and...
Aalok Mehta aboard the C.C.G.S. Amundsen, National Geographic News June 20, 2008: "Arctic warming has become so dramatic that the North Pole may melt this summer, report scientists studying the effects of climate change in the field. "We're actually projecting...
OIG, Social Security Administration, Benefit Payments in Instances Where the Social Security Administration Removed a Death Entry from the Beneficiary's Record, A-06-07-27156, 06/19/08: "The DMF [Death Master File] is a publicly available database maintained by SSA that contains detailed information...
News release: "A majority of Americans (64%) say that it is important to know their physician’s financial ties to pharmaceutical companies and 68% would support legislation requiring pharmaceutical companies to disclose gifts to doctors, according to the results of a...
News release: "This year’s updated version of the Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI) compiled by World Bank researchers shows many developing country governments making important gains in control of corruption, and some of them matching rich country performance in overall governance...
News release: "Handling about 550,000 copyright claims annually, the U.S. Copyright Office in the Library of Congress is making it much easier for the public to register and protect its collective creativity. On July 1, the Copyright Office will enter...
Pew Internet news release: "The Library of Congress invited Michael Wesch to deliver the third of four Digital Natives lectures. Wesch, creator of the world-famous YouTube video, The Machine is Us/ing Us, presented the "Anthropology of YouTube" to a packed,...
The Third Branch: "In a pilot project that began last August, five federal courts are docketing some digital audio recordings to Case Management/Electronic Case Files (CM/ECF) systems to make the audio files available in the same way written files have...
News release: "To protect our nation’s water supply for future use, the Environmental Protection Agency is promoting and enhancing the market for water efficient products through the WaterSense program. The latest is a draft specification for water-efficient new single-family homes....
Measuring Stability & Security in Iraq — (06/16/2008): "The following reports to Congress are submitted pursuant to the section entitled “Measuring Stability and Security in Iraq” of House Conference Report 109-72 accompanying H.R. 1268, Emergency Supplemental Appropriations Act for Defense,...
Hazard Mitigation Assistance Program Guidance - Pre-Disaster Mitigation, Flood Mitigation Assistance, Repetitive Flood Claims, Severe Repetitive Loss, June 19, 2008 (227 pages, PDF) "The Pre-Disaster Mitigation (PDM) program is authorized by the Robert T. Stafford Disaster Assistance and Emergency Relief...
Statewatch Analysis, June 2008 - Proposal on access to documents: Article-by-Article commentary, Steve Peers, Professor of Law, University of Essex "The following Statewatch analysis looks at every provision of the access to documents Regulation which the Commission has proposed to...
Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration, Improvements to the Modernized e-File System Will Help Provide Intended Benefits to the Internal Revenue Service and Taxpayers June 18, 2008. "The IRS does not have a formal process for identifying, reporting, and resolving...
News release: "The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has released a report that can help reduce the potential impact of climate change on estuaries, forests, wetlands, coral reefs, and other sensitive ecosystems. The report, entitled Preliminary Review of Adaptation Options for...
June 16, 2008 - Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA): What Is It, and How Might One Be Utilized In Iraq? June 16, 2008 - Boumediene v. Bush: Guantanamo Detainees' Right to Habeas Corpus June 11, 2008 - Telework Legislation Pending...
News release: "The U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Science and Technology Directorate issued today the National Bio and Agro-Defense Facility Draft Environmental Impact Statement (NBAF Draft EIS) for public review and comment...The proposed NBAF is a joint effort with...
White Space Devices & The Battle Over Innovation: Public Access vs. Industry Control of the Airwaves, By Sascha Meinrath, New America Foundation, June 2008 "I wouldn't be surprised if you've never heard of a “White Space Device.” And yet, white...
Options for Offsetting the Economic Impact on Low-and Moderate-Income Households of a Cap-and-Trade Program for Carbon Dioxide Emissions, June 17, 2008. Letter to Jeff Bingaman, Chairman, Committee on Energy and Natural Resources The Long-Term Budget Outlook and Options for Slowing...
News release: "Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman John “Jay” Rockefeller (WV), Senate Intelligence Committee Vice-Chair Kit Bond (MO), House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (MD), and House Minority Whip Roy Blunt (MO) announced today that a bipartisan compromise has been agreed to...
News release: "U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s Office of International Trade has developed a new online trade violation reporting system called eAllegations to provide concerned members of the public a means to confidentially report suspected trade violations to CBP. [effective]...
News release: "EPA is releasing a new resource, A Business Guide to U.S. EPA Climate Partnership Programs, for businesses committed to addressing the risks and opportunities associated with climate change. The guide features profiles on 35 EPA climate-change related partnership...
News release: "The Government Accountability Office (GAO) today sustained the Boeing Company’s protest of the Department of the Air Force’s award of a contract to Northrop Grumman Systems Corporation for KC-X aerial refueling tankers. Boeing challenged the Air Force’s technical...
Oversight of U.S. Efforts to Train and Equip Police and Enhance the Justice System in Afghanistan - David T. Johnson, Assistant Secretary for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs - Statement before the Subcommittee on National Security and Foreign Affairs...
Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse [TRAC] Report: "Federal immigration prosecutions in March 2008 continued their recent and highly unusual surge, apparently reaching an all-time high, according to timely data from the Justice Department. The total of 9,350 such prosecutions was up...
Follow up - related postings on missing White House emails, today's news: News release: "Today, D.C. District Court Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly issued an opinion in CREW v. Office of Administration, finding that the Office of Administration (OA) is not an...
National Intelligence Estimate - Iran: Nuclear Intentions and Capabilities, November 2007 - released June 11, 2008: "This National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) assesses the status of Iran’s nuclear program, and the program’s outlook over the next 10 years. This time frame...
UK House of Commons, Home Affairs Committee, A Surveillance Society? Fifth Report of Session 2007–08 Volume I Report, together with formal minutes Ordered by The House of Commons to be printed 20 May 2008. House of Commons Home Affairs Committee...
Attorney General's Report to the President on Executive Order 13,392, "Improving Agency Disclosure of Information" (posted 06/10/2008) "In the Executive Order, the President directed the head of each Executive Branch agency to designate a senior official (at the Assistant Secretary...
EPIC: "President Bush has signed Executive Order 12989 which gives the Department of Homeland Security authority to review employment eligibility for all federal employees and federal contractors. The decision to expand E-Verify comes after Congress rejected the President's verification proposal...
News release: "Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo [June 5, 2008] announced that he has reached landmark agreements with the nation’s three principal credit rating agencies that will fundamentally reform the Residential Mortgage-Backed Securities (“RMBS”) market. The agreements with Standard &...
Akamai, 1st Quarter 2008 - The State of the Internet Report. "During the first quarter, Akamai observed attack traffic originating from 125 unique countries around the world. China and the United States were the two largest attack traffic sources, accounting...
Understanding Individual Human Mobility Patterns [Published Version], MC Gonzalez, CA Hidalgo, A-L Barabasi. Nature (2008) 453: 779-782. "Despite their importance for urban planning, traffic forecasting and the spread of biological and mobile viruses, our understanding of the basic laws governing...
International Atomic Energy Agency news release: "Amid heightened international interest in nuclear energy, countries are paying closer attention to a finite resource that helps to make nuclear power possible: uranium. A report released today finds that new discoveries and re-evaluations...
Google Book Search Bibliography, Charles W. Bailey, Jr. Version 2: 5/27/2008 "This bibliography presents selected English-language articles and other works that are useful in understanding Google Book Search. It primarily focuses on the evolution of Google Book Search and the...
News release: "A WRI [World Resources Institute] analysis of the complex challenges that investors would face when deploying carbon capture and storage (CCS) technologies shows that until government policies support large-scale demonstrations it is unlikely that CCS will be able...
Proofpoint’s Outbound Email and Data Loss Prevention in Today’s Enterprise, 2008 report - ["the survey was fielded in the US, UK, France, Germany and Australia to explore global concerns.] "Email remains the most important medium for communications both inside and...
Executive Office of the President: Expanding E-Government - Achieving Results for the American People, May 2008. "The Federal Government continues to improve services and deliver results through the adoption and implementation of the E-Government (E-Gov) initiatives and common government wide...
News release: "For the third consecutive year the U.S. was home to the fastest-growing wind power market in the world, according to a report released today by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab)....
News release: "The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced today the Interim Final Rule for the Electronic System for Travel Authorization (ESTA), a new online system that is part of the Visa Waiver Program (VWP) and is required by...
Official Google Blog: "We're very excited to tell you that real-time quotes on NASDAQ securities are now available on Google Finance. This is an important (and way overdue) development for everyone who consumes financial information. Historically, real-time stock data was...
Aboveground Oil Storage Tanks: More Complete Facility Data Could Improve Implementation of EPA's Spill Prevention Program, GAO-08-482, April 30, 2008 DOD Health Care: Mental Health and Traumatic Brain Injury Screening Efforts Implemented, but Consistent Pre-Deployment Medical Record Review Policies Needed,...
"The Congressional Pig Book is CAGW's annual compilation of the pork-barrel projects in the federal budget. The 2008 Pig Book identified 11,610 projects at a cost of $17.2 billion in the 12 Appropriations Acts for fiscal 2008. A "pork" project...
Doctrine of Eternal Recurrence -- The U.S. Military and Counterinsurgency Doctrine, 1960-1970 and 2003-2006, RAND Counterinsurgency Study -- Paper 6, by Austin Long. [Note: related reports/papers are available online here] "The publication of a new counterinsurgency (COIN) doctrine manual in...
News release: "Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) introduced a revolutionary new global warming bill today that would reduce global warming pollution according to scientific targets, reinvest any revenue back to American workers and technology, and would re-establish America as a...
News release: "The Treasury Department released today two papers illustrating the benefits to American families and businesses from the tax relief enacted over the last seven years. The papers were released on the five-year anniversary of President Bush's signing the...
Government Technology: "The New York State Office for Technology and the New York State Archives, a program of the State Education Department, issued a report last week that examines how the state can provide choice, interoperability and vendor neutrality in...
Follow up to previous postings on tainted pet food recalls see Lisa Wade McCormick, ConsumerAffairs.com: "Parties involved in the litigation surrounding the largest pet food recall in U.S. history -- blamed for the deaths and illnesses of thousands of dogs...
Population Reference Bureau, State-by-State Costs of Child Poverty in the U.S. - by Kelvin Pollard (May 2008) "Research has shown that growing up in poverty leads to negative health, social, and economic consequences for children that often continue in adulthood....
Transportation for Tomorrow: Report of the National Surface Transportation Policy and Revenue Study Commission, "prepared by a specially convened Commission, meets the charge given under Section 1909 of the Safe Accountable, Flexible and Efficient Transportation Equity Act – A Legacy...
Department of Justice Issues New Annual FOIA Report Guidance: "In the wake of the OPEN Government Act of 2007, which amended the reporting requirements for agency Annual FOIA Reports, the Department of Justice, in consultation with the Office of Management...
Data on the Distribution of Federal Taxes and Household Income - December 2007 "This page contains CBO's most recent estimates of federal effective tax rates (taxes as a percentage of income) across household income groups for the four largest sources...
Evidence on the Costs and Benefits of Health Information Technology, May 2008: "In this paper, prepared at the request of the Chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) examines the evidence on the costs and benefits...
The Government Domain: Plain Language in Government Communications: Peggy Garvin demonstrates the impact of the Plain Language in Government Communications Act of 2008 on the accessibility of content posted on e-government websites. — Published May 20, 2008...
Digital Television Transition: GAO DTV Broadcaster Survey, (GAO-08-528SP, April 2008), an E-supplement to GAO-08-510 - GAO-08-528SP, April 30, 2008 Digital Television Transition: Majority of Broadcasters Are Prepared for the DTV Transition, but Some Technical and Coordination Issues Remain, GAO-08-510, April...
Food, Conservation and Energy Act of 2008 Removes Enron Loophole and Reforms Electronic Energy Markets, James Hamilton, J.D., LL.M., CCH Principal Analyst. "A measure reauthorizing the CFTC and closing the Enron loophole is included in the massive Farm Bill that...
Times Online: "Customers in shopping centres are having their every move tracked by a new type of surveillance that listens in on the whisperings of their mobile phones. The technology can tell when people enter a shopping centre, what stores...
"The WorldWide Telescope (WWT) is a Web 2.0 visualization software environment that enables your computer to function as a virtual telescope—bringing together imagery from the best ground and space-based telescopes in the world for a seamless exploration of the universe....
Secure web browsing with the OP web browser, Chris Grier, Shuo Tang, and Samuel T. King, Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign "Current web browsers are plagued with vulnerabilities, providing hackers with easy access to computer systems...
2010 Census: Bureau Needs to Specify How It Will Assess Coverage Follow-up Techniques and When It Will Produce Coverage Measurement Results, GAO-08-414, April 15, 2008 Congressional Review Act: Applicability to CMS Letter on State Children's Health Insurance Program, GAO-08-785T, May...
Semiannual Report to Congress on International Economic and Exchange Rate Policies, May 15, 2008: "Global growth remained strong in 2007, as strong growth in emerging market and developing countries more than offset moderating growth in advanced economies. A slowdown in...
Press release: "The European Ombudsman, P. Nikiforos Diamandouros, has launched a consultation process within the European Network of Ombudsmen on access to information contained in databases. This follows a complaint from a Danish journalist about the refusal of the European...
Committee on Homeland Security Majority Staff Report Examining: Public Health, Safety, and Security for Mass Gatherings, May 2008 (64 pages, PDF). "Mass gatherings pose special challenges in terms of management and control, especially considering their value as targets for terrorism...
News release: "The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) today launched a redesigned Web site featuring expanded content, improved navigation tools, and a new digital subscription service. The site's fresh content includes a Frequently Asked Questions section and...
A Little Grafting of Second Life into a Legal Research Class: Rob Hudson discusses how Second Life can be used to enhance legal research instruction. Experiments in full class lectures and other uses of Second Life in higher education offer...
"The U.S. Government Printing Office (GPO) has released two new Public Access Assessment resources, an Initial Review Checklist and Guidelines for Completing the Initial Review. These documents will be used by GPO personnel as they start an assessment of an...
Definitive Care for the Critically Ill During a Disaster: Current Capabilities and Limitations, From a Task Force for Mass Critical Care Summit Meeting, January 26–27, 2007, Chicago, IL. Michael D. Christian, MD, FRCPC; Asha V. Devereaux, MD, MPH, FCCP; Jeffrey...
Psychology of Intelligence Analysis, Richards J. Heuer, Jr. (21 pages, PDF, dated 1999 and updated 3-16-2007)...
State Handbook of Economic, Demographic, and Fiscal Indicators 2008 "As state and local economic conditions and demographic patterns change, policymakers may consider adjusting their policies on taxes and spending programs. These adjustments become more difficult when economic and demographic changes...
"On May 7, Mary Alice Baish of the American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) gave testimony [Statement on behalf of GPO funding] before the U.S. House Appropriations Committee, Legislative Branch Subcommittee, in support of the fiscal year (FY) 2009 budget...
Quick Health Facts 2008: A Compilation of Selected State Data Research Report, Leigh Purvis, AARP Public Policy Institute, Lynda Flowers, AARP Public Policy Institute, April 2008 "This publication provides a snapshot of each state’s health care landscape by providing comparable...
"As Congress considers President Bush's request for another $178 billion in total war funding for the remainder of Fiscal Year 2008 and the first part of Fiscal Year 2009, the National Priorities Project (NPP) released today a state-level table and...
News release: "The FBI has withdrawn an unconstitutional national security letter (NSL) issued to the Internet Archive after a legal challenge from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). As the result of a settlement...
Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works - hearing entitled Perchlorate and TCE in Water, May 6, 2008. From Opening Statement by Chairman Barbara Boxer: "...today we will hear about EPA's particularly disturbing failures to address significant risks to our...
Employment Verification: Challenges Exist in Implementing a Mandatory Electronic Employment Verification System, GAO-08-729T, May 6, 2008 Medicare: Competitive Bidding for Medical Equipment and Supplies Could Reduce Program Payments, but Adequate Oversight Is Critical GAO-08-767T, May 6, 2008 Natural Catastrophe Insurance:...
Yahoo Search Blog: "Today, we're announcing the beta release of SearchScan, a new feature from Yahoo! Search that helps protect users from viruses, spyware and spam. We've heard from users that security and privacy continue to be major concerns when...
News release: "Today, Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Senator Joseph R. Biden, Jr. (D-DE) released a Congressional Research Service (CRS) study on the implications for U.S. economic and security interests of China’s rising global influence. The study, which...
Analysis of the National Counterterrorism Center Annual Report on Terrorism, David Heyman, May 1, 2008. Center for Strategic & International Studies "Despite local and international efforts, the number of attacks worldwide have remained constant and still up sharply since 2005....
Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT): "The long-range or "vicinity" Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology chosen by the Departments of Homeland Security and State for government-issued ID documents poses serious risks to personal privacy and security, CDT testified today before...
Report on Competitive Sourcing Results Fiscal Year 2007, May 2008 Executive Office of the President, Office of Management and Budget: "This report discusses the use of competitive sourcing (i.e., public-private competition) in FY 2007. The report also analyzes trends over...
News release: "The Securities and Exchange Commission today announced that investors awaiting their refund checks from the Internal Revenue Service will simultaneously be receiving information about a new SEC phone-based resource that can help them learn more about various investing...
Global Climate Change National Security Implications. Edited by Dr. Carolyn Pumphrey. 454 pages, PDF. Added May 1, 2008. "On March 29-31, 2007, the Strategic Studies Institute and the Triangle Institute for Security Studies conducted a colloquium on “Global Climate Change:...
News release: "Challenging the perception of American technology entrepreneurs as 20-something wunderkinds launching businesses from college dorm rooms, a new study by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation and researchers at Duke and Harvard universities reveals most U.S.-born technology and engineering...
May 2008 Petroleum Marketing Monthly With Data for February 2008 (04/30/2008): "Monthly price and volume statistics on crude oil and petroleum products at a national, regional and state level." April 2008 Natural Gas Monthly With Data for February 2008 (04/30/2008):...
D-2008-083 Obligation of Funds for Ship Maintenance and Repair at the U.S. Fleet Forces Command Regional Maintenance Centers, April 25, 2008 (Project No. D2007-D000FC-0151.000) D-2008-082 Summary Report on Potential Antideficiency Act Violations Resulting From DoD Purchases Made Through Non-DoD Agencies...
News release: "The Federal Trade Commission testified before the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation’s Subcommittee on Interstate Commerce, Trade, and Tourism [Improving Consumer Protections in Subprime Lending], about the Commission’s continuing efforts to protect subprime mortgage borrowers....
Global HIV/AIDS: A More Country-Based Approach Could Improve Allocation of PEPFAR Funding, GAO-08-480, April 02, 2008 Toxic Chemicals: EPA's New Assessment Process Will Increase Challenges EPA Faces in Evaluating and Regulating Chemicals, GAO-08-743T, April 29, 2008 Chemical Assessments: Low Productivity...
News release: "The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced today improvements aimed at strengthening aviation security while decreasing the hassle factor for travelers. Among the key improvements, DHS is providing airlines more flexibility to allow passengers to check in...
www.fueleconomy.gov helps consumers make informed fuel economy choices when purchasing a vehicle and helps them achieve the best fuel economy possible from the cars they own...it is maintained jointly by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Energy Efficiency and...
UK Guardian: "Airline passengers are to be screened with facial recognition technology rather than checks by passport officers, in an attempt to improve security and ease congestion..From summer, unmanned clearance gates will be phased in to scan passengers' faces and...
2007 Securities Litigation Study, April 2008 (77 pages, PDF): "By far, the most significant happening in 2007 was the unfolding of what has become known as the subprime crisis. Early in the year, amid a falling housing market, increasing interest...
Science 2.0 - Is Open Access Science the Future? Is posting raw results online, for all to see, a great tool or a great risk? By M. Mitchell Waldrop: "Science 2.0 generally refers to new practices of scientists who post...
"The fiscal year 2008 update to the Long Range Plan for Information Technology in the Federal Judiciary articulates five-year directions and objectives for the judiciary’s information technology program. The plan presents the program in terms of five fundamental areas: external...
Abstinence Education: Assessing the Accuracy and Effectiveness of Federally Funded Programs, GAO-08-664T, April 23, 2008 Antidumping and Countervailing Duties: Congress and Agencies Should Take Additional Steps to Reduce Substantial Shortfalls in Duty Collection, GAO-08-391, March 26, 2008 Federal Records: Agencies...
News release: "An investigation of the Environmental Protection Agency released today found that 889 of nearly 1,600 staff scientists reported that they experienced political interference in their work over the last five years. The study, by the Union of Concerned...
H.R. 5613, Protecting the Medicaid Safety Net Act of 2008, April 22, 2008: "Cost estimate for the bill as ordered reported by the House Committee on Energy and Commerce on April 16, 2008." "H.R. 5613 would extend existing moratoria on...
News release: "Fuel efficiency standards for both passenger vehicles and light trucks would increase by 4.5 percent per year over the five-year period ending in 2015 – a 25 percent total improvement that exceeds the 3.3 percent baseline proposed by...
News release: "Short-term exposure to current levels of ozone in many areas is likely to contribute to premature deaths, says a new National Research Council report, which adds that the evidence is strong enough that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency...
News release: Updating the Council on the humanitarian situation in Darfur, John Holmes, Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, said "I am saddened and angry that, after five years of suffering, and four years since this Council became...
News release: The Bank of England is today launching a scheme to allow banks to swap temporarily their high quality mortgage-backed and other securities for UK Treasury Bills. With markets for many securities currently closed, banks have on their balance...
Employment and Training: Most One-Stop Career Centers Are Taking Multiple Actions to Link Employers and Older Workers, GAO-08-548, April 21, 2008. "The share of older persons in the U.S. population age 55 and older is projected to increase to 30...
Rand Report - Comparing Alternative U.S. Counterterrorism Strategies Can Assumption-Based Planning Help Elevate the Debate? By: Robert J. Lempert, Horacio R. Trujillo, David Aaron, James A. Dewar, Sandra H. Berry, Steven W. Popper. "The United States faces the challenge of...
Follow up to April 15, 2008 posting, National Toxicology Program Draft Brief on Bisphenol A..."Bisphenol A can migrate into food from food and beverage containers with internal epoxy resin coatings and from consumer products made of polycarbonate plastic such as...
ReCellular: "You can make a difference with cell phone recycling. Help our environment and the planet. Help a charity and a person in need. Hundreds of millions of used cell phones are taken out of service each year around the...
"The National Homeland Security Consortium has outlined a vision for how the nation should address homeland security in the modern era in a new white paper, Protecting Americans in the 21st Century: Imperatives for the Homeland. In particular, the paper...
News release: "Today, the White House sought clarification from the court concerning its ability to restore missing records from backup tapes that are currently being preserved. The White House inquiry comes as the National Security Archive continues to await a...
Treasury today released the fourth in a series of papers on Social Security. Issue Brief No. 4 is entitled Social Security Reform: Mechanisms for Achieving True Pre-Funding. "As was discussed in the second brief, there is nothing currently in place...
"Prepared at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and based on information collected on or before April 7, 2008. This document summarizes comments received from businesses and other contacts outside the Federal Reserve and is not a commentary on...
2010 Census: Census at Critical Juncture for Implementing Risk Reduction Strategies, GAO-08-685T, April 15, 2008 Transportation Security: Efforts to Strengthen Aviation and Surface Transportation Security Continue to Progress, but More Work Remains, GAO-08-651T, April 15, 2008 Health-Care-Associated Infections in Hospitals:...
Google Earth 4.3 - "With this version, we have completely rethought how you might interact with the 3D world. We've redesigned the navigation to make it much easier to fly from the heavens down to the streets of your town....
News release: "Bankruptcy filings in the federal courts rose 38 percent in calendar year 2007, according to data released today by the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts. The number of bankruptcies filed in the twelve-month period ending December 31,...
CBO - Policy Options for the Housing and Financial Markets, April 2008: "The housing and financial markets are in the midst of severe adjustments. House prices are falling rapidly, and they are expected to continue to fall. Mortgage foreclosures, particularly...
Avatars, Virtual Reality Technology, and the U.S. Military: Emerging Policy Issues, April 9, 2008: "This report describes virtual reality technology, which uses three-dimensional user-generated content, and its use by the U.S. military and intelligence community for training and other purposes....
News release: "The Federal Communications Commission (FCC)... adopted a First Report and Order (Order) that will support the ability of the nation’s wireless carriers to transmit timely and accurate alerts, warnings and critical information to the cell phones and other...
"This WRI/WBCSD publication, is an information and decision-making tool to help customers develop their own sustainable procurement policies for wood and paper-based products. It also has information on existing approaches to procurement from legal and sustainable sources. Authors: Ruth Nogueron,...
News release: "The U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) [April 10, 2008] issued China: Description of Selected Government Practices and Policies Affecting Decision Making in the Economy [270 pages, PDF]. The ITC, an independent, nonpartisan, factfinding federal agency, prepared the report...
The Rise of the Mega-Region, by Richard Florida, director of the Martin Prosperity Institute and professor of business and creativity at the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management. "While there are 191 nations in the world, just 40 significant...
"Senior financial supervisors from five countries (collectively the “Senior Supervisors Group”) today issued a report that reviews the disclosure practices of financial services firms concerning their exposures to certain financial instruments that the marketplace now considers to be high-risk. This...
Jerry Crimmins, Chicago Daily Law Bulletin, April 10, 2008: " The University of Chicago Law School has removed Internet access in most of its classrooms because of a growing problem of students surfing the Web on laptops during lectures...Law students'...
News release: "Times change and so should the tax code, but with tax day less than a week away millions of entrepreneurs are facing outdated IRS provisions that stifle their ability to boost the economy. Today, the House Committee on...
National Priorities Project: "Taxpayers can take stock of how the federal government spent their 2007 income tax dollars: over 40 percent went towards military spending, while education received just over 4 percent. This publication shows how the median income family's...
General David H. Petraeus, USA Commanding General Multi-National Force-Iraq Prepared Statement Charts to accompany the testimony of GEN David H. Petraeus...
The Personal Information Trainer, by Stuart Basefsky Criminal Law Resources: Fingerprint Evidence Challenges, by Ken Strutin The Social Networking Titans: Facebook and MySpace, by Deborah Ginsberg and Meg Kribble Update to Choosing Law Librarianship: Thoughts for People Contemplating a Career...
"The World Privacy Forum filed extensive comments [April 4, 2008] regarding privacy protections for patients whose health care information will be shared with patient safety safety organizations under newly proposed Department of Health and Human Services regulations. After a landmark...
News release: AeA, Advancing the Business of Technology - Cyberstates 2008: A Complete State-by-State Overview of the High-Technology Industry (fee) "This 148 page report provides you with new 2007 national data on high-tech employment and venture capital investments. Cyberstates 2008...
"A new publication from the Federal Judicial Center discusses methods federal judges have employed to meet the challenges posed by cases related to terrorism." Terrorism-Related Cases: Special Case-Management Challenges Case Studies. Robert Timothy Reagan, Federal Judicial Center, March 26, 2008...
"The Center for Public Integrity’s Buying of the President series made its debut in 1996, with subsequent editions published in 2000 and again in 2004, when the book made The New York Times best-seller list. Like its three predecessors, the...
News release: "The Federal Trade Commission today reiterated that despite the claims made in e-mails circulating on the Internet, consumers should not be concerned that their cell phone numbers will be released to telemarketers in the near future, and that...
A Review of CBO's Activities in 2007 Under the Unfunded Mandates Reform Act, March 2008. "The Unfunded Mandates Reform Act of 19951 (UMRA) established procedures for providing information to the Congress about the effects of legislative provisions on state, local,...
Federal Compensation Programs: Perspectives on Four Programs for Individuals Injured by Exposure to Harmful Substances, by Anne-Marie F. Lasowski, acting director, education, workforce, and income security issues, before a joint hearing of the Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and...
News release: "To further protect children from exposure to lead-based paint, EPA is issuing new rules for contractors who renovate or repair housing, child-care facilities or schools built before 1978. Under the new rules, workers must follow lead-safe work practice...
Averting Financial Crisis, Updated March 21, 2008, Mark Jickling, Specialist in Financial Economics, Government and Finance Division. "There is no precise definition of “financial crisis,” but a common view is that disruptions in financial markets rise to the level of...
News release: "...we're releasing YouTube Insight, a free tool that enables anyone with a YouTube account to view detailed statistics about the videos that they upload to the site. (You can see this...announcement on the Google blog and on the...
EPA National Library Network News - Update on EPA's Library Network - March 2008 "EPA submitted a National Library Network Report to Congress (PDF, 8 pages) on March 26 as requested in the Explanatory Statement accompanying the FY 2008 consolidated...
Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration: Increasing Federal and State Cooperation and Promoting Electronic Filing Would Improve Administration of Taxes Used to Maintain the Nation’s Highways, March 24, 2008. Reference Number: 2008-40-089. "The Heavy Vehicle Use Tax is a prepaid...
Getting Rid of Junk, Staying Green: "Boulder's Center for Hard-to-Recycle Materials (CHaRM) opens its doors to one new material each year. The center takes in a variety of items, including porcelain sinks and toilets, home audio equipment and cooking oil."...
News release: "The Commission has issued a staff report highlighting the challenges of consumer protection in the face of emerging and evolving technologies in the next ten years. The report summarizes the proceedings of the FTC’s three-day public hearings, “Protecting...
San Francisco Plastic Bag Ban Interests Other Cities, by David Gorn: "In San Francisco, the age-old question "Paper or plastic?" was answered one year ago this week. The city banned hard-to-recycle plastic bags in grocery stores, and so far, that...
HIV/AIDS in the United States, March 2008: "At the end of 2003, an estimated 1,039,000 to 1,185,000 persons in the United States were living with HIV/AIDS. In 2006, 35,314 new cases of HIV/AIDS in adults, adolescents, and children were diagnosed...
Food & Water Watch - a nonprofit consumer organization that works to ensure clean water and safe food: More Foul Fowl - An Updated Analysis of Salmonella Contamination in Broiler Chickens, March 2008: "The bacteria Salmonella is the leading cause...
National Committee on Vital and Health Statistics, 2005-2006. February 2008 37 pp. (PHS) 2008-1205 "This report is the latest in a series of periodic reviews of the work of the National Committee on Vital and Health Statistics (NCVHS), the statutory...
Related to this posting today, Social Security Trustees Release 2008 Annual Report, a new report, Social Security's Financial Outlook: The 2008 Update in Perspective, by Alicia H. Munnell, Center for Retirement Research at Boston College. "The Trustees of the Social...
UK Times Online: "A one-year investigation and analysis of 235 countries by Jane's Information Services has put the UK joint seventh in the premier league of nations with the US at 22nd and Switzerland, normally associated with wealth and untouchable...
March 24, 2008: Resolution From the Federal Housing Finance Board - Allows Federal Home Loan Banks to Make Additional Investments in Mortgage-Backed Securities....
"The new AIDS.gov home page provides easier access to site information and offers new features." Prominently displayed at the top right side of the page are links to: a well designed and organized Blog, Podcasts to which users may listen...
"Change Congress is a movement to build support for basic reform in how our government functions. Using our tools, both candidates and citizens can pledge their support for basic changes to reduce the distorting influence of money in Washington. Our...
Follow up to previous postings on litigation and hearings on missing White House email and violations of the Presidential Records Act, news today from AP: "Older White House computer hard drives have been destroyed, the White House disclosed to a...
News release: "On the fifth anniversary of the Iraq war, a new report from Oil Change International, entitled A Climate of War - The war in Iraq and global warming, quantifies both the greenhouse gas emissions of the Iraq War...
"The Commission has authorized the staff to release publicly the 30th Annual Report to Congress on the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act (FDCPA). This report...summarizes the Commission’s administration and enforcement of the FDCPA during 2007. It presents an overview of...
In Series of Videos, Supreme Court Justices Make Their Case - Justices' candid observations and pet peeves spill forth in legal writing guru Bryan Garner's video interviews. Legal Times, Tony Mauro March 11, 2008. "...the collection of videos on LawProse.org...
News release: "The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) today released new data on high-speed connections to the Internet in the United States. Twice a year, all facilities-based broadband providers are required to report to the Commission basic information about their service...
Pew Research Center, Public Attitudes Toward the War in Iraq: 2003-2008 - March 19, 2008: "Five years after the start of the conflict in Iraq, many public evaluations of the situation in Iraq have turned more positive. But there has...
News release: "Free and green. Those are the goals of a pilot program launched today by the U.S. Postal Service that allows customers to recycle small electronics and inkjet cartridges by mailing them free of charge. The “Mail Back” program...
News release: "Citizen satisfaction with federal government websites declines for a third consecutive quarter, according to the first quarter report [Excel] of the University of Michigan’s American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) E-Government Satisfaction Index. The Index aggregate score for the...
Official Google Blog: "Today, we're excited to launch Google For Non-Profits, a one-stop shop for tools to help advance your organization's mission in a smart, cost-efficient way. This site features ideas and tutorials for how you can use Google tools...
Convergence in Global Food Demand and Delivery, By Anita Regmi, Hiroyuki Takeshima, and Laurian Unnevehr, U.S. Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Report No. (ERR-56) 39 pages, March 2008: "Using food expenditures and food sales data over 1990-2004, this report examines...
"On March 17, CDC hosted the first of five Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) regional meetings to discuss the Healthy People 2020 framework. Healthy People provides science-based, 10-year national objectives for promoting health and preventing disease. Since 1979,...
"Three-quarters of American adults view the federal government as secretive, and nearly nine in 10 say it's important to know presidential and congressional candidates' positions on open government when deciding who to v