Monthly archives: September, 2015

Bing Translator

“Microsoft Translator is built on more than a decade of natural-language research at Microsoft. Rather than writing hand-crafted rules to translate between languages, modern translation systems approach translation as a problem of learning the transformation of text between languages from existing human translations and leveraging recent advances in applied statistics and machine learning. So-called “parallel …

Subjects: Internet, Knowledge Management, Legal Research, Search Engines

IEA releases Oil Market Report for September

News release 11 September 2015 “The latest tumble in the price of oil, which hit a six-year low in August, is expected to cut non-OPEC supply in 2016 by nearly 0.5 million barrels per day (mb/d) – the biggest decline in more than two decades, the IEA Oil Market Report for September informed subscribers. Lower output in the United …

Subjects: Economy, Energy, Environmental Law, Government Documents

Former CBO Director on Dynamic Scoring and Budget Estimates

“Dynamic scoring”: Why and how to include macroeconomic effects in budget estimates for legislative proposals by: Douglas W. Elmendorf “Including macroeconomic effects in budget estimates for certain legislative proposals would improve the accuracy of those estimates and would provide important information about the economic effects of those proposals. Moreover, if certain key conditions were satisfied, …

Subjects: Congress, Economy, Financial System, Government Documents, Knowledge Management

Paper – Crisis in Student Loans

A crisis in student loans? How changes in the characteristics of borrowers and in the institutions they attended contributed to rising loan defaults. Adam Looney, U.S. Treasury Department; Constantine Yannelis, Stanford University, September 2015. “This paper examines the rise in student loan delinquency and default drawing on a unique set of administrative data on federal …

Subjects: Economy, Education, Financial System, Government Documents

Household Food Security in the United States in 2014

Household Food Security in the United States in 2014 by Alisha Coleman-Jensen, Matthew Rabbitt, Christian Gregory, and Anita Singh, USDA, Economic Research Report No. (ERR-194) 43 pp, September 2015 “An estimated 14.0 percent of American households were food insecure at least some time during the year in 2014, meaning they lacked access to enough food …

Subjects: Economy, Food and Nutrition, Government Documents, Health Care

Report – An Economy Doing Half its Job

“In 2013–14, Harvard Business School (HBS) conducted its third alumni survey on U.S. competitiveness. Our report on the findings focuses on a troubling divergence in the American economy: large and midsize firms have rallied strongly from the Great Recession, and highly skilled individuals are prospering. But middle- and working-class citizens are struggling, as are small …

Subjects: Economy, Financial System

OECD Development Co-operation Report 2015

“With the adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals, the question of how to finance, implement and monitor these goals moves to the centre of the debate. Today, international development co-operation takes place in an increasingly complex environment, with an ever growing number of actors, policies and instruments involved. This complexity raises the stakes for achieving …

Subjects: Climate Change, Economy, Energy, Financial System, Government Documents

Migration Policy – Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals

Migration Policy Institute: “About the Data Hub – The Data Hub showcases the most current national and state-level demographic, social, and economic facts about immigrants to the U.S.; as well as stock, flow, citizenship, net migration, and historical data for countries in Europe, North America, and beyond. ” Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) Profiles …

Subjects: Economy, Education, Government Documents, Health Care, Housing

Living Wage Calculator

Via MIT – “In many American communities, families working in low-wage jobs make insufficient income to live locally given the local cost of living. Recently, in a number of high-cost communities, community organizers and citizens have successfully argued that the prevailing wage offered by the public sector and key businesses should reflect a wage rate …

Subjects: Economy, Financial System, Food and Nutrition, Government Documents, Housing

DOJ – New Policy on Individual Liability in Matters of Corporate Wrongdoing

DOJ Memo – Individual Accountability for Corporate Wrongdoing, September 10, 2015: “…we’re taking six specific steps to hold individual corporate wrongdoers accountable.  These steps are the subject of a memo that I issued yesterday to all of the department’s prosecutors and civil litigators…Some of these policies are new and some are already being practiced at …

Subjects: Economy, Financial System, Government Documents, Legal Research

Pew – Americans Concerns about China

Pew Research Center: “As the White House prepares to host Chinese President Xi Jinping for his first state visit to the United States later this month, the American public continues to see a number of issues related to China and its rising power as major concerns. In particular, economic issues loom large. China’s growth rate …

Subjects: Cybercrime, Cybersecurity, Economy, Environmental Law, Government Documents