Monthly archives: February, 2013

ACLU – New Document Sheds Light on Government’s Ability to Search iPhones

“Cell phone searches are a common law enforcement tool, but up until now, the public has largely been in the dark regarding how much sensitive information the government can get with this invasive surveillance technique. A document submitted to court in connection with a drug investigation, which we recently discovered, provides a rare inventory of …

Subjects: E-Mail, E-Records, Internet, Privacy

Census Report Shows 30 Percent of Adults Receiving Government Assistance Have a Disability

News release: “Among the 46.0 million adults who received income-based government assistance in 2011, 30.4 percent of them had a disability, according to a report released today from the U.S. Census Bureau. The report, Disability Characteristics of Income-Based Government Assistance Recipients in the United States: 2011, offers information about the occurrence of disabilities among people …

Subjects: Government Documents

Speech – Simplicity, risk sensitivity and comparability: the regulatory balancing act

Simplicity, risk sensitivity and comparability: the regulatory balancing act (speech by Wayne Byres Secretary General Basel Committee on Banking Supervision) BCBS-EMEAP-FSI High-Level Meeting 25–26 February 2013, Seoul, Korea: “But as anyone knows who has built, supervised or just tried to understand internal risk models within a bank, they are not simple. They are, of course, …

Subjects: Government Documents

New GAO Reports – Border Patrol, Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, Southwest Border Security, GAO and Sequestration

Border Patrol – Goals and Measures Not Yet in Place to Inform Border Security Status and Resource Needs, http://GAO-13-330T, Feb 26, 2013 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act – Effect on Long-Term Federal Budget Outlook Largely Depends on Whether Cost Containment Sustained, GAO-13-281, Jan 31, 2013 Southwest Border Security – Data Are Limited and Concerns …

Subjects: Government Documents

An Assessment of the Prospects for Inertial Fusion Energy

“The potential for using fusion energy to produce commercial electric power was first explored in the 1950s. Harnessing fusion energy offers the prospect of a nearly carbon-free energy source with a virtually unlimited supply of fuel. Unlike nuclear fission plants, appropriately designed fusion power plants would not produce the large amounts of high-level nuclear waste …

Subjects: Government Documents

International debt flows before and after the financial crisis

International debt flows before and after the financial crisis by Evis Rucaj, 02-21-23 “New debt statistics show that the composition of long term debt inflows in 2011 follows pre-crisis patterns. Debt statistics are central to understanding the impact of the financial crisis; the World Bank’s International Debt Statistics provides a detailed picture of debt flows …

Subjects: Government Documents

The New Microfinance Handbook: A Financial Market System Perspective

World Bank: “The New Microfinance Handbook provides a primer on financial services for the poor. It is written for a wide audience, including practitioners, facilitators, policy makers, regulators, investors, and donors working to improve the financial system, but who are relatively new to the sector. It will also be useful for telecommunication companies and other …

Subjects: Government Documents

A look behind the scenes at the Google news retrieval algorithm

Frederic Filloux, guardian.co.uk: “Its official blog merely mentions “6 billion visits per month” sent to news sites and Google News claims to connect “1 billion unique users a week to news content” [see The press, Google, its algorithm, their scale]…But how exactly does Google News work? What kind of media does its algorithm favour most? …

Subjects: E-Commerce, Legal Research, Marketing, Patent and Trademark, Search Engines

NY Fed – The Macroeconomic Effects of Forward Guidance

The Macroeconomic Effects of Forward Guidance – Marco Del Negro, Marc Giannoni, and Christina Patterson: “In this post, we quantify the macroeconomic effects of central bank announcements about future federal funds rates, or forward guidance. We estimate that a commitment to lowering future rates below market expectations can have fairly strong effects on real economic …

Subjects: Government Documents