News Briefs
+ Heavy Internet Users Also Watch More TV (Nielsen Wire)
+ More Caregiving Resources Move Online (The New Old Age/New York Times)
+ ‘Ruthless’ Trojan horse steals 500k bank, credit card log-ons (Computerworld)
+ Harvard Refuses To Open In-Copyright Books To Google (InformationWeek)
+ Studs Terkel dies (Chicago Tribune)
2008 SustainLane US City Rankings
Welcome to the 2008 SustainLane US City Rankings! You’ll find extensive coverage on the greening of the 50 most-populous cities in the nation on these pages, and the most complete report card on urban sustainability in America. This report benchmarks each city’s performance in 16 areas of urban sustainability, including an essential new measurement this year: Water Supply. Forged in 2005 and now in its third edition, the peer-reviewed Rankings track the unfolding story of cities working to improve their residents’ quality of life. In this story, some cities are becoming more self-reliant and better prepared for an uncertain future, while others have been slow to act on opportunities to green their municipalities.
Source: SustainLane
FTC Launches New Web Site for Kids
The Federal Trade Commission today launched a new Web site to introduce kids to key
consumer and business concepts. Set in a shopping mall, http://www.ftc.gov/YouAreHere takes kids on an experiential journey that presents the FTC’s mission and its important role in American commerce. Kids under 12 are reported to spend billions of dollars on goods and services every year.
…
The site features animated guides who help visitors navigate a virtual mall and interact with shopkeepers and other consumers. Kids can design and print advertisements for a shoe store, uncover suspicious claims in an ad, and guess the retail price of various candies based on their supply, demand, and production costs. One game that has players match the features of various cell phones with certain audiences illustrates the principles of target marketing; another allows visitors to compare sales pitches from three pizza joints as it explains competition. A short film playing at the cinema illustrates the history of the FTC.For parents and teachers, the site offers fact sheets that cover advertising, marketing, and competition in more detail, along with ideas for related activities.
Source: Federal Trade Commission
HUD Modernizes Online Guide for Avoiding Foreclosure
Do you need help finding a housing counselor or contacting your lender? Or do you want more information about mortgage refinance options offered by HUD’s Federal Housing Administration (FHA)? Americans are able to do all this and more thanks to an updated website developed by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. The Guide to Avoiding Foreclosure is a one-stop-shop designed to educate Americans about the most current housing information and resources HUD has to offer. The updated site has a number of helpful resources particularly important for Americans at risk for losing their homes.
“The Guide to Avoiding Foreclosure is an easy-to-use site allowing users to quickly search information specific to their needs,” said Preston. “The streamlined website educates individuals on the many ways HUD can assist them through these trying times and help them hold on to their homes.”
+ Guide to Avoiding Foreclosure
Source: U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development
Assessing the printability of web sites
A significant percentage of home printing happens off the Internet. However, most websites today are designed without much consideration to the printability of the web pages. Parameters used to assess content quality are not a reliable indication of the printability of web sites. We describe a tool that enables an automated assessment of the printability of web sites. Our tool allows identification of the poorly printable pages on a website (and the Internet) and allows HP to measure its progress in the goal of making the Internet more printable.
+ Full Paper (PDF; 54 KB)
Source: HP Labs
Posted 30 October 2008 on DocuTicker:
+ Global Tourism and Real Estate (2008 Industry Studies Conference Paper)
+ Latinos Account for Half of U.S. Population Growth Since 2000 (Pew Hispanic Center)
+ State-Specific Incidence of Diabetes Among Adults — Participating States, 1995–1997 and 2005–2007 (Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report/CDC)
News Briefs
+ EPA Teams up with the National Geographic Society and World Resources Institute to Map Ecosystem Services, Develop Enhanced Decision-Making Tools (U.S. Environmental Protection Agency)
+ Mutual Fund Regulatory Filings to Be Available to Investors Online (U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission)
+ Some Shed Their Gadgets by Turning to One: iPhone (Wall Street Journal)
+ Are Bots On Twitter Hurting Overall System Performance? (Information Week)
+ TSA tests PDA, cell-based electronic boarding passes (Federal Computer Week)
+ Google Now Indexes Scanned Documents (TechCrunch)
USDA Launches New Searchable Database for Fruit and Vegetable Import Requirements
The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) today launched a new, searchable database, known as FAVIR, for the fruits and vegetables import requirement.
The FAVIR database allows customers to search for authorized fruits and vegetables, by commodity or country, and quickly and easily determine the general requirements for their importation into the United States. The database will include emergency pest notifications to alert users if there is a change in the import status of a commodity or country. It also allows APHIS officials and the Department of Homeland Security’s Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agricultural inspectors to quickly determine whether or not a commodity is authorized entry into the United States, as well as the general requirements for importation.
+ Fruits and Vegetables Import Requirements (FAVIR) Database
Source: U.S. Department of Agriculture Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service
Picking up the Pieces: 12 of the Best Resources for Investors in Tough Times
What should investors worried about market volatility and facing the prospect of reduced assets for retirement do? Where do you turn for help if you face difficulty in the current market downturn and credit crunch?
Today, the nonprofit Alliance for Investor Education (AIE) outlined 12 of the best Web-based resources for investing in uncertain times. The Alliance’s new “Picking Up the Pieces: What Investors Need to Know in Tough Times” is available at http://www.investoreducation.org/pickingupthepieces. AIE is the organization of the United States’ leading financial-related foundations, nonprofit organizations, associations and governmental agencies.
Source: Alliance for Investor Education (AIE)
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Social Networks, the Next Educational Tool?
At last year’s Educause conference, in Seattle, educators pondered what to do about students’ technology habits. Should they try to change them? Accept that they’re here to stay? Try to co-opt them?
A lot can change in a year. Many colleges seem to have moved on from the question of whether to follow students’ lead on technologies they prefer, from Web-based e-mail to Facebook to text messaging. Now, the dilemma they face is whether to adapt students’ existing habits — of messaging each other, checking each other’s profiles and browsing upcoming parties — to the educational realm.
A study conducted this year at Arizona State University sought to take a closer look at first-year students’ use of social networks, mainly Facebook and MySpace. While many of its findings aren’t surprising on the whole, the survey suggests potentially useful conclusions for educators thinking about how to use social networks to reach out to students — both as college applicants and as enrolled pupils.
Source: Inside Higher Ed
Election Education Efforts in the Swing States
Since LJ Publisher Ron Shank’s September 2007 editorial challenging libraries to make 2008 the “year of election education,” we’ve published two follow-up articles (LJ 12/24/07, LJ 2/4/08) surveying libraries’ election-education practices in the months leading up to November 4—everything from special displays to mock elections. With the Election Day a week away, we conclude with an informal look at libraries’ best practices in some swing states: the southern Mountain States, the Rust Belt, and Florida.
Source: Library Journal
Lightbulbs Could Replace Wi-Fi Hotpsots
Boston University’s College of Engineering is launching a program, under a National Science Foundation grant, to develop the next generation of wireless communications technology based on visible light instead of radio waves. Researchers expect to piggyback data communications capabilities on low-power light emitting diodes, or LEDs, to create “Smart Lighting” that would be faster and more secure than current network technology.
This initiative aims to develop an optical communication technology that would make an LED light the equivalent of a Wi-Fi access point.
“Imagine if your computer, iPhone, TV, radio and thermostat could all communicate with you when you walked in a room just by flipping the wall light switch and without the usual cluster of wires,” said BU Engineering Professor Thomas Little. “This could be done with an LED-based communications network that also provides light - all over existing power lines with low power consumption, high reliability and no electromagnetic interference. Ultimately, the system is expected to be applicable from existing illumination devices, like swapping light bulbs for LEDs.”
Source: cellular-news
Visualizing Email Conversations and Related Web Resources
In this note we explore the design of small visual images to represent email conversations about a particular web resource. A working system has been integrated within an Internet browser. While users navigate the web, it searches and displays relevant conversations from their personal email store, providing a visual summary via a thumbnail which depicts conversational participants and message flow along with related web pages and their relevance. Preliminary user studies show our visualizations of participants and related resources were more easily understood than the messaging display. Small image thumbnails have frequently proven to be convenient surrogates for larger pictures and we hope small conversational thumbnails may prove similarly beneficial for email conversations and related web resources.
+ Full Paper (PDF: 724 KB)
Source: HP Labs
Almost any combustible organic matter can potentially be used as an energy source. Biomass is typically defined as any organic matter that is available on a renewable or recurring basis. Materials from biomass can be used as fuel (biofuels), biobased chemicals (bioproducts), or for energy production (bioenergy).
This guide is not intended as a comprehensive bibliography, but rather highlights selected works and resources about biomass energy.
Source: LC