From Clement C. Maxwell Library...

Location: Maxwell Library 3rd Floor

By Jeffrey R. Young
From The Chronicle of Higher Education

Borrowing a technique from Hollywood, historians at the University of Richmond have created animated maps that chart voting patterns in U.S. presidential elections since 1840.

The maps show county-by-county data for every major election year in which data are available, and that information shifts over time. One map, for example, highlights counties where the victor won by only a small margin. It reveals how "battleground states" have changed over the years. The maps are displayed as video montages, with each election year shown sequentially. A slow-fade effect—that's the Hollywood-inspired part—is used between maps, which helps highlight the changes.

Read more: http://chronicle.com/free/2008/08/4335n.htm?utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

August 19, 2008

Source: Internal Revenue Service

The Internal Revenue Service today released the summer 2008 issue of the Statistics of Income Bulletin, which features tax year 2005 data on the growth in profits and tax liability reported by foreign-controlled domestic corporations.

According to 2005 data, there were 61,820 foreign-controlled domestic corporations (FCDCs), accounting for 1.1 percent of the total of all U.S. corporations. However, FCDCs generated $3.5 trillion of total receipts with $9.2 trillion of total assets, accounting for 13.7 percent of receipts and 13.9 percent of assets reported on all U.S. corporation income tax returns.

Profits, or net income less deficit, reported by FCDCs for tax purposes were $165.2 billion, an 81.9 percent increase from $90.8 billion reported in 2004. The U.S. tax liability for FCDCs, total income tax after credits, was $42.4 billion for 2005, a 41.7 percent increase since 2004.

Full Document (PDF; 2.9 MB)

Source: National Fatherhood Initiative

This study, the first of its kind, provides an estimate of the taxpayer costs of father absence. More precisely, it estimates the annual expenditures made by the federal government to support father-absent homes. These federal expenditures include those made on thirteen means-tested antipoverty programs and child support enforcement, and the total expenditures add up to a startling $99.8 billion.

Full Report (PDF; 1.6 MB)

Source: National Center for Education Statistics

This report presents the number of high school graduates, the Averaged Freshman Graduation Rate (AFGR), and dropout data for grades 9 through 12 for public schools in school year 2005-06. The counts of graduates, dropouts, and enrollments by grade (which serve as the denominators for the graduation and dropout rates) are from the Common Core of Data (CCD) nonfiscal surveys of public elementary/secondary education. These data represent high school graduates receiving regular diplomas for the 2005-06 school year and dropouts from the 2005-06 school year.

Full Report (PDF; 208 KB)

August 10, 2008By Elizabeth Royte
From The New York Times

Before I left New York for California, where I planned to visit a water-recycling plant, I mopped my kitchen floor. Afterward, I emptied the bucket of dirty water into the toilet and watched as the foamy mess swirled away. This was one of life's more mundane moments, to be sure. But with water infrastructure on my mind, I took an extra moment to contemplate my water's journey through city pipes to the wastewater-treatment plant, which separates solids and dumps the disinfected liquids into the ocean.

A day after mopping, I gazed balefully at my hotel toilet in Santa Ana, Calif., and contemplated an entirely new cycle. When you flush in Santa Ana, the waste makes its way to the sewage-treatment plant nearby in Fountain Valley, then sluices not to the ocean but to a plant that superfilters the liquid until it is cleaner than rainwater. The ''new'' water is then pumped 13 miles north and discharged into a small lake, where it percolates into the earth. Local utilities pump water from this aquifer and deliver it to the sinks and showers of 2.3 million customers. It is now drinking water. If you like the idea, you call it indirect potable reuse. If the idea revolts you, you call it toilet to tap.

Opened in January, the Orange County Groundwater Replenishment System is the largest of its type in the world. It cost $480 million to build, will cost $29 million a year to run and took more than a decade to get off the ground. The stumbling block was psychological, not architectural. An aversion to feces is nearly universal, and as critics of the process are keen to point out, getting sewage out of drinking water was one of the most important public health advances of the last 150 years.

The full article is available in the Library's LexisNexis database. Off-campus users Need to log in first.

August 10, 2008
By Faye Flam
From The Philadelphia Inquirer

Its use in distinguishing bacteria is limited. Some scientists want to know what else implicated Bruce Ivins.

DNA evidence alone wasn't a smoking gun in the case against Bruce Ivins as the perpetrator of the 2001 anthrax attacks, say microbiologists and other experts who have read details of the investigation released last week.

Genetic sleuthing was useful in narrowing the list of suspects, they say, but it wasn't conclusive since DNA from bacteria doesn't often carry a unique genetic fingerprint the way human DNA does.

At first, prosecutors seemed to suggest that forensic DNA had solved the case. U.S. Attorney Jeffrey Taylor said science had enabled the government to link the anthrax spores in the 2001 attack to a flask "created and solely maintained by Dr. Ivins" in his federal lab.

But at least eight other anthrax samples gathered from researchers in the investigation carried the same genetic signature as Ivins' batch at Fort Detrick, Md., court documents say.

Investigators used other lines of evidence, including his e-mails, to bolster their case against Ivins, who committed suicide July 29.

Randy Murch, a former FBI expert on bioforensics, said investigators hadn't relied on DNA alone. "Rarely does a case get solved by only forensic evidence," he said. "Here the science is highly informative, but it's also limited."

The full article is available in the Library's LexisNexis database. Off-campus users Need to log in first.

From WhoFish.org

Highlights for this weekend include:

. Marshfield, Marshfield Fair

. Boston, Sorrento Cheese Fisherman's Feast

. Gloucester, 2008 Gloucester Waterfront Festival

. Lowell, Southeast Asian Water Festival

. Boston, Restaurant Week Boston

More...

August 8, 2008
By Linda McKee
From Belfast Telegraph

NORTHERN Ireland is leading the nations in a ground-breaking project aimed at uncovering the bones of the earth.

Striking images of the earth stripped bare of plants, soils, water and man-made structures have gone on display at the launch of OneGeology, the world's biggest ever geological mapping project.

Earth and computer scientists from 70 nations joined forces to produce the UNESCO-supported global project to design the first ever digital geological map of the world.

The organisers say it will do the same for the rocks beneath our feet that Google Earth has done of maps of the earth's surface.

Internet users can visit the OneGeology website and delve into maps of the nations, uncovering the rocks that lie beneath their surface and a new web language has been written for geology, allowing nations to share data across international boundaries and with the public.

And the country at the head of the race to map its geological structures is Northern Ireland - which earlier this year launched the initial results of its ground-breaking Tellus project to map the geological bones of the Province, revealing intriguing structures that may yield gold and platinum.

Garth Earls, director of the Geological Survey of Northern Ireland, said the province is ahead of the rest of the countries with the geological detail it has gathered.

The full article is available in the Library's LexisNexis database. Off-campus users Need to log in first.

August 1, 2008
By Nicholas Wade
From The International Herald Tribune

Can you enjoy the benefits of exercise without the pain of exertion? The answer may one day be yes - just take a pill that tricks the muscles into thinking they have been working out furiously.

Researchers at the Salk Institute in San Diego report that they have found two drugs that do wonders for the athletic endurance of couch potato mice.

One drug, Aicar, increased the mice's endurance on a treadmill by 44 percent after just four weeks of treatment. The second drug, GW1516, supercharged the mice to a 75 percent increase in endurance, but had to be combined with exercise to have any effect.

''It's a little bit like a free lunch without the calories,'' said Dr. Ronald Evans, leader of the Salk group.

The results, Evans said, seem reasonably likely to apply to people, who control muscle tone with the same underlying genes as do mice. And if the drugs work and prove to be safe, they could be useful in a wide range of settings.

They should help people who are too frail to exercise and those with health problems like diabetes that are improved with exercise, he said.

The full article is available in the Library's LexisNexis database. Off-campus users Need to log in first.

July 24, 2008
By Matthew L. Wald
The New York Times

After years of false starts, a new industry selling motor fuel made from waste is getting a big push in the United States, with the first commercial sales possible within months.

Many companies have announced plans to build plants that would take in material like wood chips, garbage or crop waste and turn out motor fuels. About 28 small plants are in advanced planning, under construction or, in a handful of cases, already up and running in test mode.

For decades scientists have known it was possible to convert waste to fuel, but in an era of cheap oil, it made little sense. With oil now trading around $125 a barrel and gasoline above $4 a gallon, the potential economics of a waste-to-fuel industry have shifted radically, setting off a frenzy to be first to market.

''I think American innovation is going to come up with the solution,'' said Prabhakar Nair, research chief for UOP, a company working on the problem.

The full article is available in the Library's LexisNexis database. Off-campus users Need to log in first.

July 24, 2008
Robert C. Cowen, The Christian Science Monitor

It's only a humble hum or an undistinguished grunt or growl. But to a midshipman fish, it's effective social communication. Hums help the boys get the girls. Grunts and growls warn off would be trespassers.

Scientists have studied animal communication for decades. Now, for the first time, a research team has traced the underlying neurobiology that makes the fish talk possible.

It's an early step in an emerging research field that seeks insight into the evolution of behavior from the perspective of neurobiology. In recent years, visiting scientists have pursued this quest at the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) in Woods Hole, Mass. Last week, MBL reported the results of work by Andrew Bass of Cornell University, Edwin Gilland of Howard University, and Robert Baker of New York University.

The full article is available in the Library's LexisNexis database. Off-campus users Need to log in first.

August 8, 2008
From The Deal

Searching for information on venture capital firms and their professionals? Give this new database, designed by Chrysalis Ventures associate Matt Winn, a spin. He says the service, simply called Venture Capital Database, or VCDB, can be useful, among other things, for entrepreneurs looking for funding, VCs seeking info on an entrepreneur’s prior startups, limited partners researching potential investments, and aspiring VCs hunting for jobs.

To read more: http://www.thedeal.com/techconfidential/vc-ratings/vc-events/new-and-free-vc-database-is-us.php

Strange Fruit is a Melbourne-based performing arts company that produces and performs a remarkable style of work that fuses theatre, dance and circus, using a unique elevated medium.

Perched atop 4 metre high flexible poles of original design, the troupe delivers a sublime performance, bending and swaying in the air, captivating and engaging the audience in absolute fascination. more. . .

August 1, 2008
By Michael Rogers, Library Journal

-- The Tales of Beedle the Bard being released December 4
-- Proceeds will be donated to the Children's High Level Group

Reuters reports that J.K. Rowling is releasing a book of wizard fairy tales December 4 with all profits going to charity. The title, The Tales of Beedle the Bard, is briefly mentioned in The Half-Blood Prince as having been left to Hermione Granger by Professor Dumbledore, Reuters said. Bloomsbury Publishing in the UK and Scholastic domestically are publishing the book, which includes an intro by Rowling, for $12.99, while Amazon reportedly will produce up to 100,000 leather-bound collector’s editions for $100.

“The new edition will include the Tales themselves, translated from the original runes by Hermione Granger, and with illustrations by me, but also notes by Professor Albus Dumbledore, which appear by generous permission of the Hogwarts Headmasters’ Archive,” Rowling said. Proceeds from the book will be donated to the Children’s High Level Group, a charity she founded in 2005.

July 30, 2008
Washington D.C.
FBI National Press Office

The FBI and its partner, the Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3), have received reports of recent spam e-mails spreading the Storm Worm malicious software, known as malware. These e-mails, which contain the phrase “F.B.I. vs. facebook,” direct e-mail recipients to click on a link to view an article about the FBI and Facebook, a popular social networking website. The Storm Worm virus has also been spread in the past in e-mails advertising a holiday e-card link. Clicking on the link downloads malware onto the Internet connected device, causing it to become infected with the virus and part of the Storm Worm botnet.

A botnet is a collection of compromised computers under the remote command and control of a criminal “botherder.” Most owners of the compromised computers are unsuspecting victims. They have unintentionally allowed unauthorized access and use of their computers as a vehicle to facilitate other crimes, such as identity theft, denial of service attacks, phishing, click fraud, and the mass distribution of spam and spyware. Because of their widely distributed capabilities, botnets are a growing threat to national security, the national information infrastructure, and the economy.

Read more: http://www.fbi.gov/pressrel/pressrel08/stormworm073008.htm