Sweetadeline

1. The position I interviewed for at CCTV is full-time, not part-time.

2. DocumentCloud is a useful tool for journalists and researchers that allows you to pull the most from primary source documents.  http://www.documentcloud.org/home. This also led me to learn about OpenCalais, a web service that rips through your content and spews out metadata that can be used to find entities.

For example, I copied and pasted the first paragraph from a NYTimes Article- “The French military assault on Islamist extremists in Mali escalated into a potentially much broader North African conflict on Wednesday when, in retribution, armed attackers in unmarked trucks seized an internationally managed natural gas field in neighboring Algeria and took at least 20 foreign hostages, including Americans.”

From it, I was able to pinpoint social tags, entities, and topics. OpenCalais uses language processing for this. DocumentCloud and OpenCalais are open-source. 

Thanks Wikipedia for the following…

3. An open-access mandate is a policy—adopted by a research institution, research funder or government—that requires researchers (e.g., university faculty or research grant recipients) to make their published, peer-reviewed journal and conference papers open access (OA) by self-archiving their final, peer-reviewed drafts in a freely accessible central or institutional repository.

4. The Research Works Act, also known as H.R. 3699, is a bill that was introduced in the United States House of Representatives on December 16, 2011. The bill contains provisions to prohibit open-access mandates for federally funded research and effectively revert the NIH’s Public Access Policy that requires taxpayer-funded research to be freely accessible online.  If enacted, it would also severely restrict the sharing of scientific data (all very, very bad)^{. It died in 2/12.}

“Back in April, the Senate approved VAWA reauthorization fairly easily, with a 68 to 31 vote. The bill was co-written by a liberal Democrat (Vermont’s Pat Leahy) and a conservative Republican (Idaho’s Mike Crapo), and seemed on track to be reauthorized without much of a fuss, just as it was in 2000 and 2005.

But House Republicans insisted the bill is too supportive of immigrants, the LGBT community, and Native Americans — and they’d rather let the law expire than approve a slightly expanded proposal. Vice President Biden, who helped write the original law, tried to persuade House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) to keep the law alive, but the efforts didn’t go anywhere.

And so, for the first time since 1994, the Violence Against Women Act is no more. Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), the Democratic point person on VAWA, said in a statement:

“The House Republican leadership’s failure to take up and pass the Senate’s bipartisan and inclusive VAWA bill is inexcusable. This is a bill that passed with 68 votes in the Senate and that extends the bill’s protections to 30 million more women. But this seems to be how House Republican leadership operates. No matter how broad the bipartisan support, no matter who gets hurt in the process, the politics of the right wing of their party always comes first.”

Advocates for clean energy will rejoice in 2013, since, according to Lux Research, the cost of producing solar modules (which make up solar panels) is going down. In fact, the report claims that they’re on track to drop as low as 50 cents per watt in the coming years. Currently at 70 cents per watt, the incoming price drop is due to increasingly efficient manufacturing and module technology.