Monthly archives: August, 2013

Defense Support of Civil Authorities

“…The US Armed Forces have a historic precedent and enduring role in supporting civil authorities during times of emergency, and this role is codified in national defense strategy as a primary mission of the Department of Defense….This Joint Publication 3-28 – July 31, 2013 has been prepared under the direction of the Chairman of the Joint …

Subjects: Education, Government Documents

Reforming The Criminal Justice System for the 21st Century

SMART on CRIME – Reforming The Criminal Justice System  for the 21st Century, August 2013 “At the direction of the Attorney General, in early 2013 the Justice Department launched a  comprehensive review of the criminal justice system in order to identify reforms that would ensure  federal laws are enforced more fairly and—in an era of reduced budgets—more …

Subjects: Civil Liberties

Prosecutorial Discretion Closed 1 in 4 Cases in Several Immigration Courts

“During the month of July 2013, ICE exercised prosecutorial discretion (PD) and agreed to close a total of 1,382 deportation cases that were pending before the Immigration Courts. This brings the total to 23,063 court closures over the past 19 months since the PD initiative began. The Seattle, San Diego, and Charlotte Immigration Courts had …

Subjects: Civil Liberties, Courts, Legal Research

Evaluating Obesity Prevention Efforts

Indicators for Measuring Progress in Obesity Prevention: “Obesity poses one of the greatest public health challenges of the 21st century, creating serious health, economic, and social consequences. Despite acceleration in efforts to characterize, comprehend, and act on this problem, further understanding is needed on the progress and effectiveness of implemented preventive interventions. An IOM committee …

Subjects: Economy, Education, Government Documents, Health Care

UN 2013 Human Development Report

“The 2013 Human Development Report – “The Rise of the South: Human Progress in a Diverse World” – examines the profound shift in global dynamics driven by the fast-rising new powers of the developing world and its long-term implications for human development. China has already overtaken Japan as the worlds second biggest economy while lifting …

Subjects: Economy, Education, Government Documents

Income and Earnings Estimates for 1st Quarter 2012

Census – “Using the two most recent waves (11 and 12) from the 2008 Survey of Income and Program Participation panel, this table package presents income and earnings estimates at the individual, family and household level for the first quarter (January, February and March) of 2012. Quarterly estimates by selected demographic characteristics, such as gender, …

Subjects: E-Government, Economy, Financial System, Government Documents

Unemployment, Negative Equity, and Strategic Default

Unemployment, Negative Equity, and Strategic Default – Kristopher Gerardi, Kyle F. Herkenhoff, Lee E. Ohanian, and Paul S. Willen. Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. Working Paper 2013-4. August 2013 “Using new household-level data, we quantitatively assess the roles that job loss, negative equity, and wealth (including unsecured debt, liquid assets, and illiquid assets) play in …

Subjects: Economy, Financial System, Government Documents

Text & Data Mining – A Librarian Overview

Text & Data Mining – A Librarian Overview, Ann Okerson – Senior Advisor, Center for Research Libraries, Chicago IL, USA “Text and data mining offers exciting research opportunities over a broad range of fields. As large corpora of data accumulate, automated and semi-automated analysis of their contents (and often of many different data sets correlated …

Subjects: Copyright, Internet, Knowledge Management, Libraries, Search Engines

Brookings Examines John Roberts Appointments to FISA Court

Russell Wheeler: “Among his non-judicial duties, the Chief Justice of the United States selects sitting federal judges to serve on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in addition to their regular judicial duties. A recent New York Times article reported that ten of the court’s 11 current  judges, all selected by Chief Justice John G. Roberts, …

Subjects: Civil Liberties, Courts, Government Documents, Legal Research

Social Influence Bias: A Randomized Experiment

Social Influence Bias: A Randomized Experiment Lev Muchnik, Sinan Aral, Sean J. Taylor. Science 9 August 2013: Vol. 341 no. 6146 pp. 647-651 DOI: 10.1126/science.1240466 “Our society is increasingly relying on the digitized, aggregated opinions of others to make decisions. We therefore designed and analyzed a large-scale randomized experiment on a social news aggregation Web …

Subjects: Blogs, Internet, Knowledge Management