POLITICO: “The House Energy and Commerce Committee is launching an investigation into whether top EPA officials violated ethics rules by launching a rollback of air pollution regulations that benefited their former lobbying clients in the electric utility sector. The committee’s Democrats are seeking to probe communications between the utilities and an industry group that was… Continue Reading
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Author Archives: Sabrina I. Pacifici
The bursting, beautiful shelves of famous bibliophile
Washington Post – “Amid the decluttering craze, we asked José Andrés, Andrew Sean Greer and other famous book lovers for the stories behind their collections.” Continue Reading
Ten-Fold Difference in Odds of ICE Enforcement Depending Upon Where You Live
“The odds of being arrested and deported by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) vary greatly depending upon where an individual lives. Sanctuary jurisdictions that limit local cooperation with ICE enforcement officers often reduce these odds. Despite ICE statements that the agency uses stepped-up arrests out in the community when local jurisdictions fail to cooperate, ICE… Continue Reading
The Power of Judicial Review
In Custodia Legis: The following is a guest post by Janeen Williams, a Legal Reference Specialist with the Public Services Division of the Law Library of Congress. “The federal judiciary has the authority to review actions of the legislative and executive branches to verify that they comport with the Constitution see Marbury v. Madison). However,… Continue Reading
Systematic Reviews of Our Metadata
Hanging Together – The OCLC Research Blog: “That was the topic discussed recently by OCLC Research Library Partners metadata managers, initiated by Melanie Wacker of Columbia University, Roxanne Missingham of Australian National University, and Sharon Farnel of University of Alberta. Librarians and administrators are well aware of the tension that exists between delivering access to… Continue Reading
How the Law Can Boost Recession Recovery
Knowledge@Wharton – “In the Great Recession, the two key tools for rescuing the economy — fiscal and monetary policy — had big limitations, according to Yair Listokin, author of a new book: Law and Macroeconomics: Legal Remedies to Recessions. The big increases in government spending needed to get the economy cooking again were mostly a… Continue Reading
Obama’s Presidential Library Is Already Digital
The Atlantic – The question now is how to leverage its nature to make it maximally useful and used…”The debate about the Obama library exhibits a fundamental confusion. Given its origins and composition, the Obama library is already largely digital. The vast majority of the record his presidency left behind consists not of evocative handwritten… Continue Reading
Transparency tool on FB inadvertently provides window into confusing maze of companies who have your data
BuzzFeedNews – “On Facebook under Settings, there’s a page in the Ads section where you can view your Ad Preferences. Most of this is fairly straightforward — choices about how you’ll allow ads and how advertisers target you based on things like what pages you’ve liked. But there’s one section there that will probably surprise… Continue Reading
This tech tells cities when floods are coming and what they will destroy
“…One Concern debuted Flood Concern in late 2018. It creates map-based visualizations of where water surges may hit hardest, up to five days ahead of an impending storm. For cities, that includes not just time-lapse breakdowns of how the water will rise, how fast it could move, and what direction it will be flowing, but… Continue Reading
To Purge Some of Social Media’s Ugliness, an Unlikely Lesson From Wall St.
The New York Times Deal Book – A simple rule that bolsters the banking system – “know your customer” — could help combat fake news and hate speech online if companies like Facebook and Twitter embraced it. “…The concept is “know your customer” — or KYC, as it’s called on Wall Street — and it’s… Continue Reading
Lifting Journalism by Knowing What Readers Are Looking For
The New York Times: “Claudio E. Cabrera, who specializes in search engine optimization, describes how he keeps track of what’s hot in search and how that informs coverage — and what the limits are…How do you keep track of search trends? A lot of it really starts with taking a dive into the journalism your… Continue Reading
Trump moving to dismantle OPM
Washington Post: “If the Trump administration succeeds at dismantling the Office of Personnel Management, the closure could be a blueprint for shuttering other departments as it tries to shrink government….The agency would be pulled apart and its functions divided among three other departments. An executive order directing parts of the transition by the fall is… Continue Reading
