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Oregon Statutes Freed of Copyright
As noted here before, Oregon has been going through a challenge to its copyrighted statutes. The battle appears to be over now and the the statutes are free! mmmm... we love free government information!
On June 19th the Legislative Counsel held a hearing with activist Carl Malamud from Public.Resource.org and others to discuss the issue.... In the end the Legislative Counsel voted to not assert copyright over the Oregon Revised Statutes. This is a great victory for openness and democracy.Continue reading
Digital Divide Widens in California
A new study says that there are signs that the digital divide is widening for some groups in California, particularly Latino and low-income residents. This conclusion is based on a statewide survey. The study also notes that computer use in California is similar to that in the nation as a whole.
- Californians & information technology, by Mark Baldassare, Dean Bonner, Jennifer Paluch, and Sonja Petek, The Public Policy Institute of California, in collaboration with The California Emerging Technology Fund. June 25, 2008
"...[T]here are tremendous differences in access to critical information that put many at a disadvantage in their everyday lives. At a time when technology's role is growing and in a state that has led the way, this poses a major policy challenge."Continue reading
Criticism of FBI records retention and destruction
It isn't often you see a discussion FOIA, FBI, NARA, and Records Retention Plan and Disposition Schedules in the popular press. This article describes the frustrations of one researcher when he discovered that records had been destroyed by the FBI.
- The Department of Forgetting: How an obscure FBI rule is ensuring the destruction of irreplaceable historical records, By Alex Heard, Slate, June 24, 2008.
The system's fundamentals make sense, I guess--very complicated sense--but to me the disturbing part comes at the end of the line. At some point 25 years after a case closes, a file that isn't marked "permanent" gets pulled and looked at by one or two people inside the FBI. There are no "knowledgeable representatives of the NARA" monitoring this crucial moment. If it's decided internally that the file isn't important, it's gone. Michael Ravnitzky, an FOIA researcher based in the Washington, D.C., area, is no fan of the Records Retention Plan and likens it to an open-ended manual for strip-mining a priceless public record. "The FBI got a list of exceptional files given to them by historians, and they said, 'We'll keep that,' " he says. "We'll keep large files. Smaller files, we'll keep a sampling. Everything else gets tossed. That's what the plan is." Based on documents Ivan Greenberg obtained from the FBI, he estimates that 250 million pages were destroyed between 1986 and 1995.Continue reading
New Army study of its campaign in Iraq
- The United States Army in Operation Iraqi Freedom, May 2003-January 2005 : on point II : transition to the new campaign by Donald P. Wright, Timothy R. Reese ; with the Contemporary Operations Study Team. June 2008 (720 pages, PDF, 104Mb). Also available in paper copy from GPO.
On Point II is the US Army's first historical study of its campaign in Iraq in the decisive eighteen months following the overthrow of the Baathist regime in April 2003. The book examines both the high-level decisions that shaped military operations after May 2003 as well as the effects of those decisions on units and Soldiers who became responsible for conducting those operations. The authors, historians at the US Army's Combat Studies Institute at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, based this account on hundreds of interviews with key participants and thousands of primary documents. Critical chapters in this book address the decision to disband the Iraqi Army, detainee operations (including the incidents at the Abu Ghraib prison), reconstruction efforts, and the Army's response to the growing insurgency. At the core of On Point II is the dramatic story of how after May 2003, the US Army reinvented itself by transforming into an organization capable of conducting a broad array of diverse and complex "Full Spectrum" operations. This was the new campaign that confronted American Soldiers beginning in May 2003 as they strived to create stability in Iraq.See also: Occupation Plan for Iraq Faulted in Army History, by Michael R. Gordon, New York Times, June 29, 2008. Continue reading
Preview of NIST Digital Library of Mathematical Functions
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has put online a preview of its famous Digital Library of Mathematical Functions (DLMF).
From the Preface:Abramowitz and Stegun's Handbook of Mathematical Functions with Formulas, Graphs, and Mathematical Tables is being completely rewritten with regard to the needs of today. The new DLMF (Digital Library of Mathematical Functions) will appear in a hardcover edition and as a free electronic publication on the World Wide Web. The authors will review the relevant published literature and produce approximately twice the number of formulas that were contained in the original Handboook. The DLMF will make full use of advanced communications and computational resources to present downloadable math data, manipulable graphs, tables of numerical values, and math-aware search. The authoritative status of the existing Handbook, and its orientation toward applications in science, statistics, engineering and computation, will be preserved. Thus the utilitarian value of the Handbook will be extended far beyond its original scope and the traditional limitations of printed media. The term digital library has gained acceptance for this kind of information resource, and our choice of project title reflects our hope that the NIST DLMF will be a vehicle for revolutionizing the way applicable mathematics in general is practiced and delivered.See also NIST Releases Preview Of Much-anticipated Online Mathematics Reference, ScienceDaily (June 27, 2008). Continue reading
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