MetaFilter posts tagged with research and government

Information Wants to be Free

l33tpolicywonk — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 15:18:59 -0800

WikiLeaks: every current Congressional Research Service report in a Torrent (2.2 GB). h/t Jessamyn's twitter. Americans spend $100 million a year on the Congressional Research Service, a private think tank for members of Congress and their staffs. While technically available to the public, their reports were never posted on the Internet by the government. In the past, we've counted on the painstaking, one-at-a-time collection efforts of folks like the Open CRS Network (previously). Now, WikiLeaks and the Pirate Bay (legally) delivers to your desktop some fine research on mountain pine beetles, China's role in the global financial crisis, NATO in Afghanistan, and anything else you can think of. The 110th Congress' HR 2545 would have required that CRS give the public the same (relatively) easy access to its reports Congressional staff has.

Can We Cure the Health Care Crisis?

kliuless — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 20:43:26 -0800

Search for an Rx - We asked Johns Hopkins administrators, physicians, and researchers about the health of a system Americans rely on to keep them healthy. Afterall, an ounce of prevention...

Can we improve quality while driving costs down? As contradictory as the notion might seem, there is a precedent for doing better work at a lower cost. "The thing that is so hard for people to understand, but that was proven in the auto industry, is that when you focus on cutting costs, you automatically reduce quality. But when you focus on increasing quality, as we've done with safety measures here at Hopkins, you almost always reduce cost. It's counterintuitive," Brody says.

and in addition to finance (and the auto industry) it's probably also applicable to education as well...

There Could Be Blood

kliuless — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 18:36:53 -0800

Andy Grove on Our Electric Future - "Energy independence [viz.] is the wrong goal. Here is a plan Americans can stick to." Perhaps some infrastructure spending^1,2 is in order? [etc., &c., cf.] also see :P - "Tesla Motors Is Delivering Cars" - "Superconducting Power Grid Launches In New York" - "New heights reached in polymer based solar cell efficiency"

[S]pray a sheet of glass with a mixture of dyes combined with a substance called tris(8-hydroxyquinoline) aluminium. In combination, the dyes and the glass act as the waveguide, preventing light from escaping. Meanwhile, the interaction between the different dye molecules and those of the tris(8-hydroxyquinoline) aluminium allows a quantum-mechanical phenomenon, called Förster energy transfer, to come into play. This eliminates the reabsorption loss by ensuring that light is re-emitted at a frequency which the dye molecules cannot then reabsorb. On top of this—literally—Dr Currie and Dr Mapel have come up with another trick: placing a second sandwich of dye and glass over the first. The upper layer of dye intercepts high-energy light, such as ultraviolet. The lower one captures longer wavelengths that have passed unperturbed through the upper, and also any lower-energy light that has been re-emitted within the top layer and somehow escaped. The upshot is a device that, even as a prototype, converts ten times more of the incident light into electricity than a conventional solar cell. [and btw]

cheers!

Brok en Pip e l ine

Gyan — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 03:46:32 -0800

An unprecedented five consecutive years of stagnant funding for the National Institutes of Health is putting America at risk - a few prominent research institutions get together to voice their concern over flat funding of the National Institutes of Health over the past 5 years, in their report The Broken Pipeline (pdf). Bloggers comment [1, 2, 3].

terrorism knowledge base

ab3 — Wed, 17 Aug 2005 14:14:37 -0800

we may not know where they are - but here's where they've been... An incredible amount of information - current and historical - well indexed and with about a billion options for searching through it. pretty impressive for what is at least unofficially a quasi-federal government site despite protestations to the contrary.

mattpusateri — Wed, 18 Sep 2002 12:45:58 -0800

Paging Winston Smith... Not content with mere cynical doublespeak, the Bush Administration is now trying to shape government reports and research to agree with the President's beliefs: an EPA report omits a section on global warming for the first time in six years; the Department of Health and Human Services is being "restructured," eliminating committees that were coming to conclusions at odds with the president's views; and at the Department of Education, old studies that contradict the current administration's policies are being removed from the agency's web site. When you add this trend to the administration's "permanent war," I suspect George Orwell is smiling somewhere...

swift — Thu, 15 Aug 2002 22:16:27 -0800

Don't say nobody told you. Here is NARA's Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, showing every comment, every bill signing, every communication, executive order, and interview the president has made: everything that goes into the history books...