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Free Daily and Weekly Opinion Summaries for all Federal Courts and selected State Supreme Courts
Justia Opinion Summaries, Justia is providing FREE Daily & Weekly Opinion Summaries for all Federal Courts, and selected State Supreme Courts. U.S. Federal Courts, U.S. State Courts, Opinion Summaries by Practice Area. Justia offers free case opinion summary newsletters for many US Appellate Courts. To sign up for the Case Summary Newsletters you first need to login to or create a Justia Account. Then you will be able to select the free newsletters you wish to subscribe to. Subscribe to summaries of US appellate court opinions at Daily.Justia.com. Practice area emails with summaries from all reviewed courts are sent weekly. Hat tip to Sabrina I. Pacifici! Continue reading
Census Blog
Random Samplings: The official blog of the U.S. Census Bureau. Thanks to the Scout Report for pointing out this useful blog!
The U.S. Census Bureau provides a wealth of data about the population and economy of the United States, and certain aspects of their work are covered in this eminently engaging blog, "Random Samplings". The intent of this blog is "to describe the objective of their work and explain census and survey results". The blog began in September 2010, and visitors can search the archive of previous posts by category or date of publication. Some of the categories include "business ownership", "income", and "poverty". -- U.S. Census Bureau: Random Samplings, Scout Report (2011-04-22)Continue reading
Google Map Maker links
The Scout Report has good links to CNET, Wired, and Wall Street Journal articles about Google's Map Maker project, as well as links to the American Memory Project and the David Rumsey Map Collection:
- With the release of Google Map Maker, users can contribute their own spatial knowledge, by Max Grinnell, The Scout Report (2011-04-22). In the previous millennium, those folks who wanted a high-quality map of their area might have had to go purchase or borrow an actual physical map. In recent years, online mapping tools and resources have sprouted like mushrooms after a hard rain. With all of that in mind, it is not so surprising that on Tuesday Google announced that it is allowing users to contribute changes to their very popular maps. This tool is called Google Map Maker...
The Elusive Prerequisite: Text Extraction
As we look to relying increasingly on digital texts for discovery, access, and use of government information, it is worth understanding the issues (and difficulties) in accurately extracting text from a variety of sources. Here is a thirteen page paper that outlines the issues.
- Herceg, Paul M., and Catherine N. Ball, Reliable Electronic Text: The Elusive Prerequisite for a Host of Human Language Technologies, Mitre Technical Report (Mitre, 30 September 2010). Electronic text is a prerequisite for text-processing applications such as indexing and search, named entity recognition (NER), and machine translation (MT). For example, text that is printed on paper must first be converted to electronic form to make it searchable--typically, by scanning the pages and using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to create electronic text. Not all electronic text is created equal, however. Electronic text comes in a wide variety of containers, from Microsoft Office documents to Oracle database records. Electronic text comes in a wide variety of character set encodings, such as Chinese "Big 5" or Unicode UTF-8. Electronic text may be written in any of the world's languages, including the special sublanguages of blogs, chat and forums. And from the end user's perspective, even formatting aspects of the electronic text may be important: for example, if the use case is translating a document for a customer, and the customer requires the translated document to be formatted to look like the original. From the application perspective, all aspects of electronic text potentially make a difference. Almost all products are language-specific, and will produce useful results only on supported languages. In terms of file types, some products accept Microsoft Word documents as input, while others may accept only plain text files. Some products may work best if all text is "normalized" to a single character set encoding such as UTF-8. The purpose of this paper is to explore factors to be considered when trying to match up text-containing files (in a variety of file formats, character set encodings, languages, etc.) with text-processing applications and use cases.
State not fulfilling its obligation to document foreign policy
"...and there is no foreseeable likelihood that it will do so..." Secrecy Overwhelms U.S. Historical Record, by Steven Aftergood, Secrecy News (April 20th, 2011).
The [State] Department's "Foreign Relations of the United States" (FRUS) series is required to fully document the history of U.S. foreign policy no later than 30 years after the fact, but that’s not happening. "No progress has been made toward bringing the [FRUS] series into compliance with the statutory requirement that volumes be published 30 years after the events they document," said the new annual report of the Advisory Committee on Historical Diplomatic Documentation.Continue reading
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