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Daily Archives: July 14, 2014

SEC Clamps Down On XBRL Filing Holdouts – InformationWeek

“The Securities and Exchange Commission is clamping down on public companies that fail to submit their financial disclosure statements as structured data, agency officials said. The SEC’s Division of Corporation Finance sent letters on July 7 to an unspecified number of companies that are not submitting their financial disclosure statements as machine-readable, structured data. The move comes in the wake of continuing pressure on the SEC by lawmakers, academics, and open data advocacy groups to enforce an agency requirement that has been in place since 2009 for large-sized businesses and gradually phased in over a four-year period for midsized and smaller companies. The target format is XBRL (eXtensible Business Reporting Language), a language for documenting financial reports in XML. A sample letter posted on the SEC’s website indicates that the agency is reminding non-complying companies that its rules require that they file an XBRL version of their quarterly financials and that they include calculation relationships for certain contributing line elements of their financials and related footnotes.”

New York Fed Survey of Consumer Expectations – July 2014

“The New York Fed’s Survey of Consumer Expectations (SCE) provides timely and comprehensive information about consumer expectations through three broad categories: inflation, labor market and household finance. The SCE contains monthly insight about how consumers expect overall inflation and prices for food, gas, housing, education and medical care to change over time. It also provides Americans’ views… Continue Reading

Brookings – A Cascade of Failures: Why Government Fails, and How to Stop It

“In this research paper, Paul C. Light writes that the “first step in preventing future failures is to find a reasonable set of past failures that might yield lessons for repair.” To meet this goal, Light asks four key questions about past federal government failures: (1) where did government fail, (2) why did government fail,… Continue Reading

White House Office of National Drug Control Policy – The 2014 National Drug Control Strategy

The 2014 National Drug Control Strategy, July 2014 “I am pleased to transmit the 2014 National Drug Control Strategy, a 21st century approach to drug policy that is built on decades of research demonstrating that addiction is a disease of the brain—one that can be prevented, treated, and from which people can recover. The pages… Continue Reading

After Action Report of the Washington Navy Yard September 16, 2013 Shooting

After Action Report of the Washington Navy Yard September 16, 2013 Shooting – An Internal Review of the Metropolitan Police Department – July 2014 “The purpose of this report is to describe the events related to the law enforcement response, constructively evaluate and assess the tactical and operational actions, and identify the unique issues and challenges… Continue Reading

Apprenticeships are Good for Business

By Sarah Ayers and Ben Schwartz | July 14, 2014: “Employers are increasingly worried about finding and holding on to quality, skilled workers and economists warn of a widening skills gap. What are employers to do? Apprenticeship—that age-old worker-training model that pairs on-the-job training with classroom instruction—just may be the solution to employers’ woes. According to the Georgetown… Continue Reading

Understanding the group dynamics and success of teams

Michael Klug and James P. Bagrow: “Massive datasets describing the activity patterns of large human populations now provide researchers with rich opportunities to quantitatively study human dynamics including the activities of groups or teams. With the rise in prominence of network science [5, 6], much effort has gone into discovering meaningful groups within social networks and quantifying their… Continue Reading

2014 CoreLogic Storm Surge Analysis

News release: “CoreLogic®, a leading global property information, analytics and data-enabled services provider, today released its 2014 storm surge analysis featuring estimates on both the number and reconstruction value of single-family homes exposed to hurricane-driven storm surge risk within the United States. According to the findings, more than 6.5 million homes along the U.S. Atlantic and Gulf… Continue Reading

No silver bullet: De-identification still doesn’t work

Arvind Narayanan and Edward W. Felten. July 9, 2014 “Paul Ohm’s 2009 article Broken Promises of Privacy spurred a debate in legal and policy circles on the appropriate response to computer science research on re-identification techniques. In this debate, the empirical research has often been misunderstood or misrepresented. A new report by Ann Cavoukian and Daniel Castro is full of such inaccuracies,… Continue Reading