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Daily Archives: July 4, 2017

Sqoop – free data journalism site makes it easier to find and track public records

Data Driven Journalism: “Just because there’s a duty to disclose, doesn’t mean there’s a duty to make it easy. This seems to be a universally true when it comes to public records, regardless of the country or government making them available. The consequences for journalists can be profound: hours of time spent digging through messy data, missing stories that go untold, and the opportunity costs that come with these, just to name a few. This is a problem we set out to improve a couple of years ago in the US with the introduction of Sqoop, a free data journalism site intended to make it easier for reporters to find and track public records, starting with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the Patent Office, and the federal court system, otherwise known as PACER (public access to court automated records). Think of it as a search box across all of these public records sites (and we’re working to add others) as well as a rapid alerting service. If a journalist has saved searches for “Facebook”, “Jeffrey P. Bezos”, or “Internet of Things”, she will receive email alerts every time these search terms show up in new public filings. Journalists can refine search results based on data source, form type, and geographic factors, and then save those searches as alerts…”

Paper – Agency, trust and risks in photo-sharing among friends and romantic partners

“And somehow it ends up on the Internet.” Agency, trust and risks in photo-sharing among friends and romantic partners by Rebecca Venema, Katharina Lobinger, First Monday, Volume 22, Number 7 – 3 July 2017. “Photographic practices and photo-sharing have become pervasive routine communicative acts in everyday life. Photo-sharing can be beneficial for maintaining and strengthening… Continue Reading

OECD – International Migration Outlook 2017

“The International Migration Outlook 2017 [free version online, June 28, 2017], the 41st edition of this annual OECD publication, analyses recent developments in migration movements and policies in OECD countries and selected non-member countries. Where relevant, it examines the impact of the recent increase in humanitarian migration. It looks at the evolution of the labour… Continue Reading

Decline of textbooks in the digital world causes new challenges

The Conversation: “For decades, textbooks were seen as the foundation for instruction in American schools. These discipline-specific tomes were a fundamental part of the educational infrastructure, assigned to students for each subject and carried in heavy backpacks every day – from home to school and back again. The experience of students is much different today.… Continue Reading

Open Sourcing ContraxSuite and Legal Tech and the Modern Information Economy

News release – July 3, 2017: “Over the last decade, we’ve spent many thousands of effort-­‐hours developing the contract analytics and document analytics tools that we use with clients. These tools, based on enterprise-­‐ quality open source frameworks for natural language processing, machine learning, and optical character recognition, have allowed us to quickly and easily… Continue Reading

Yelp’s 6 year battle against Google

The New York Times – “For six years, Jeremy Stoppelman’s (chief executive of Yelp) company has been locked in a campaign on three continents to get antitrust regulators to punish Google, Yelp’s larger, richer and more politically connected competitor. He has testified before Congress, written op-ed columns and used Twitter to bash Google’s behavior. Google… Continue Reading

Dex-Net 2.0: Deep Learning to Plan Robust Grasps with Synthetic Point Clouds and Analytic Grasp Metrics

“In the paper we detail the Dexterity Network (Dex-Net) 2.0, a dataset of 6.7 million robust grasps and point clouds with synthetic noise generated from our probabilistic model of grasping rigid objects on a tabletop with a parallel-jaw gripper. We develop a deep Grasp Quality Convolutional Neural Network (GQ-CNN) model and train it on Dex-Net… Continue Reading

DC launches interactive dashboard to map the performance of area transportation

“The District Mobility Project responds to a request from the DC Council to assess the state of congestion for all surface modes in the District and identify actions to address that congestion. Broadening that vision, the District Department of Transportation (DDOT) sought to better quantify and qualify the state of its transportation system performance from… Continue Reading