(OH) American minimum wage workers’ salary compared to CEOs
A faculty member wanted to know how many hours American workers worked a week, American worker productivity, hours of vacation, and average worker makes compared to a CEO. The average hours worked was found in the Statistical Abstract of the U.S., worker productivity, vacation days and extra hours was found in the Dobbs Report: The Perils of Productivity and the CEO salary was found on Congressman Bernie Sander's website (retrieved 7/13/2004). According to the Congressman's website, in 1980 the average CEO pay was 97 times larger than the pay of a minimum wage worker. In 1998 the average CEO pay was 989 times larger. Today, the CEO only has to work two hours to earn as much as a minimum wage worker earns in an entire year. The spread is amazing. The faculty member was pleased with the above information. She said, thank you so very much for this information. It is exactly what I needed. You make my work so much easier! Continue reading
FEMA requires Internet Explorer
FEMA requires Internet Explorer
Following up on the Copyright Office's proposal to have copyright registration limited to Internet Explorer (IE) users (see What the Copyright Office / Internet Explorer rule tells us about government information), we have news today that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is doing something similar:
IE version 6 is only available for Microsoft Windows and has problems of standards compatibility. More information here:
- FEMA requires IE 6 and JavaScript. "I tried the latest Safari, IE and Firefox, none work. Heaven help all the Mac users in the South...."
As government information moves increasingly from documents to transactions and government web-sites become "e-government" sites where every individual user gets different information, the importance of standards-based web sites and usability becomes more and more important.
Continue readingDoes Covert Government Information = Propaganda?
According to USA Today, 'Federal investigators probing the Education Department's public relations contracts have found a pattern of deals in which advocacy organizations received grants totaling nearly $4.7 million to promote Bush administration education priorities in newspaper columns and brochures, but didn't disclose that they received taxpayer funds, as required by law. The department's inspector general says he detected no "covert propaganda," but he told administration officials to consider asking for some of their money back.'
- Report: Education Dept.'s PR funds need oversight Advocacy groups too often failed to disclose grants By Greg Toppo, USA Today, September 5, 2005.
- Following the money for public relations efforts By Greg Toppo, USA Today, September 5, 2005.
The report is evidently this one:
Continue readingNew Report on Government Secrecy
According to a new report government agencies are expanding secrecy in many areas. The report finds that "secrecy in 2004 extended to more classified activity, more federal advisory meetings, more new patents deemed 'secret,' more domestic surveillance, and more new state laws restricting public access to information."
- Secrecy Report Card, 2005, (pdf, 12pp.) "Quantitative Indicators of Secrecy in the Federal Government" A Report by OpenTheGovernment.org Americans for Less Secrecy, More Democracy.
The report documents that more is being classified and kept secret and that fewer documents are being declassified. It also notes that the federal government "has greatly expanded its ability to control unclassified, public information through vague restrictions that give government officials wide latitude to declare information beyond the public's reach."
Continue readingArizona Gets It
Recently, GladysAnn Wells and Richard Pearce-Moses of the Arizona State Library, Archives and Public Records presented From Bibliographer to Curator: Archival Strategies for Capturing Web Publications at the August 2005 IFLA Conference in Oslo Norway. This paper is a ringing call to action to libraries and archives across the globe to take a leading role in preserving government information. To those who say that we don't have the capabilities or we have to wait for outside agencies and webmasters to save us, Wells and Pearce-Moses say [bolding mine]:
A fundamental tenet of the work we have done in Arizona, through our three professions, has led to what is now called the Arizona Model. The Arizona Model, which will be discussed later in this paper, recognizes that our success cannot be predicated on someone outside our own organization. We cannot expect web masters (or others) to send us documents, to remember our job when they are caught up doing their own. We cannot expect them to embed metadata to empower us to serve users they may never meet or report Continue reading