Monthly archives: May, 2017

CRS – Job Creation in the Manufacturing Revival Marc Levinson Section

Job Creation in the Manufacturing Revival, Marc Levinson, Section Research Manager. May 5, 2017. [via FAS] “The health of the U.S. manufacturing sector is of ongoing interest to Congress. Numerous bills aimed at promoting manufacturing are introduced in each Congress, often with the stated goal of creating jobs. Implicit in many of these bills is …

Subjects: Congress, Economy, Financial System, Government Documents

Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research team published research on neural machine language

Facebook blog – “Language translation is important to Facebook’s mission of making the world more open and connected, enabling everyone to consume posts or videos in their preferred language — all at the highest possible accuracy and speed. Today, the Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research (FAIR) team published research results using a novel convolutional neural network …

Subjects: Knowledge Management

CRS – Shutdown of the Federal Government: Causes, Processes, and Effects

Shutdown of the Federal Government: Causes, Processes, and Effects. May 5, 2017. [via FAS] “Then federal agencies and programs lack funding after the expiration of full-year or interim appropriations, the agencies and programs experience a funding gap. If funding does not resume in time to continue government operations, then, under the Antideficiency Act, an agency …

Subjects: Congress, Economy, Financial System, Government Documents, Legislation

Pew – Key findings about U.S. immigrants

Key findings about U.S. immigrants – May 3, 2017 – “The U.S. has more immigrants than any other country in the world. Today, more than 40 million people living in the U.S. were born in another country, accounting for about one-fifth of the world’s migrants in 2015. The population of immigrants is also very diverse, …

Subjects: Government Documents

Cardozo School of Law Trains Students as Advocates For Shifting Legal Landscape

“In response to unprecedented legal uncertainty in the first weeks of the Trump administration, Cardozo School of Law is offering new classes to prepare future lawyers for a shifting legal and political landscape…Cardozo School of Law is offering students a 10-week course called The First 100 Days: The Trump Administration and the Rule of Law. …

Subjects: Civil Liberties, Courts, Education, Environmental Law, Government Documents, Legal Research

TRAC Sues ICE on Withholding Data on Detainers

“The Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) filed a suit today under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) charging Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) with unlawfully withholding records related to ICE’s immigration enforcement actions and its interaction with other law enforcement agencies. At issue are ICE’s use of detainers. These are requests from ICE to federal, …

Subjects: Civil Liberties, Freedom of Information, Government Documents, Legal Research

Trump Fires FBI Director Comey after Congressional testimony on election investigations – with updates

Follow up to previous postings included in Comey Asks Justice Dept. to Reject Trump’s Wiretapping Claim – tonight via CNN – Trump’s letter firing FBI Director James Comey – (Comey was appointed for a 10 year term.) Update – Politico – The Problems With the FBI’s Email Investigation Went Well Beyond Comey – “…the FBI …

Subjects: Censorship, Civil Liberties, Congress, Government Documents, Legal Research

Center for Open Science Releases Another Branded Preprint Service With LawArXiv

“The Center for Open Science (COS) is pleased to announce that it has added another branded service to its open source preprints service, OSF Preprints. The new service, called LawArXiv,  provides free, open access, open source archives for legal research. LawArXiv is an open access legal repository supported and maintained by members of the scholarly …

Subjects: Education, Knowledge Management, Legal Research

Full transcript: Sally Yates and James Clapper testify on Russian election interference

Washington Post – “Former acting attorney general Sally Yates and James R. Clapper Jr., the former director of national intelligence, are testifying at a Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. This is the transcript of the hearing.” Washington Post – Yates says she warned White House that Flynn could be …

Subjects: Congress, Defense, Government Documents, Legal Research

Transforming Our Libraries from Analog to Digital: A 2020 Vision

Brewster Kahle, March 13, 2017 – Educase Review:”Today, people get their information online — often filtered through for-profit platforms. If a book isn’t online, it’s as if it doesn’t exist. Yet much of modern knowledge still exists only on the printed page, stored in libraries. Libraries haven’t met this digital demand, stymied by costs, e-book …

Subjects: Economy, Knowledge Management, Libraries

Science – Artificial intelligence prevails at predicting Supreme Court decisions

Matt Hudson – Science – May 2, 2017: “…A new study shows that computers can do a better job than legal scholars at predicting Supreme Court decisions, even with less information. Several other studies have guessed at justices’ behavior with algorithms. A 2011 project, for example, used the votes of any eight justices from 1953 to …

Subjects: Courts, Government Documents, Knowledge Management, Legal Research

Creating more accessibility to legislative data focus of think tank Congressional testimony

“The Center for Data Innovation has submitted written testimony to the House Committee on Appropriations Subcommittee on Legislative Branch regarding ways to improve the accessibility of legislative data. The Center recommends that Congress begin publishing legislative data via application programming interface (API) in addition to publishing this data in bulk format. As the Library of Congress …

Subjects: Congress, Freedom of Information, Government Documents, Internet, Knowledge Management, Legal Research, Legislation