RSS feeds from Census
The Census Bureau offers over 40 RSS feeds on general topics (e.g., "Latest Releases," "Tip Sheets") and specific topics ("Aging Population," "Poverty") as well as pocasts (check out "Statistical Abstract 2006")!
- RSS Feeds, U.S. Bureau of the Census.
RSS feeds allow you to easily keep track of content that may be updated frequently. The feeds provide headlines, link back to the source document, and provide brief description information.Continue reading
James’ link dump of the day!
I have a bunch of tabs open of boingboing posts that I want to share, but it's been such a hectic day (I invited Rick Falkvinge of the Swedish Pirate party to give a talk today at my library!) so I think I'll just list them and let you all sort them out.
- Peer to Patent: keeping the Patent Office honest with community review
- Amazon will distribute the US National Archive on DVD
- NY Public Library giving away free public domain books-on-demand
- Pirate Party founder at Stanford (I'll post the video soon. W00t!)
- Bruce Schneier interviews TSA head Kip Hawley
- Data mining prompted fight over NSA domestic spying program (here's a login-free link to the NYT article)
It’s Official: Florida voting machines can be hacked
- Florida voting machines can be hacked, by Marc Caputo, Miami Herald, Jul. 31, 2007.
Reversing an unofficial policy of denial, the Florida Secretary of State's office has conducted an elections study that confirmed Tuesday what a maverick voting chief discovered nearly two years ago: Insider computer hackers can change votes without a trace on Diebold optical-scan machines.See also Lunchtime listen: "Hacking democracy" Most vote machines lose test to hackers (California) Continue reading
Lunchtime listen: “Hacking democracy”
This documentary exposes the vulnerability of electronic voting machines. The film follows investigative journalist Bev Harris as she investigates the security and accuracy of electronic voting systems. It's 1hr 22 minutes so perhaps this will be 2 lunchtime listens. Continue reading
FDSys Receives 1.4TB worth of Statutes at Large
According to the Future Digital System blog, FDSys is ingesting a full run of Statutes at Large from the Library of Congress. The scanned files take up 1.4TB worth of storage space and "The next step is for GPO to assess the content and determine whether the content complies with GPO specifications and create access derivatives (including OCR text) of the content." People who are considering LOCKSS boxes to store federal content shouldn't blanch at the 1.4TB figure for Statutes at Large. Generally speaking, scanned files (which are images) are much larger than born digital content. For example, GPO deposited a year's worth of 10 Federal born-digital e-journals during their LOCKSS pilot. These 10 "journal-years"" worth of content took up 900MB or roughly 0.9 GB. At that rate, we could have harvested these 10 journals for over 250 years before filling up our 250GB hard drive. Of course, we'd need to upgrade our hard drives well before that. Having said that, it will be interesting to see what sort of uses that GPO can put this material to. Continue reading