Meryl Rose, a spokeswoman for the Rose family, a Rose Museum Board member and an art collector, read a statement condemning Brandeis University to faculty and students, about 20 members of the Rose family, Rose museum staff and members of the intellectual community at symposium titled "Preserving Trust: Art and the Art Museum" Amidst Financial Crisis. Boston attorney Edward Dangel III, who has been hired by Chair of the Rose Board of Overseers Jonathan Lee to pursue legal blocks to the administration's decision to close the museum, said that the administration needs to address the "very serious question" of "if Brandeis is allowed to break up this collection and close this museum, [whether] other people in America who have important collections and important things to give and a specific intent in mind for that gift will give in the future." Prior to Meryl Rose's presentation of the statement, Michael Rush, the director of the Rose Art Museum, told the audience that "the Rose Art Museum as we know it will not exist after the middle of May [because] the University saw the museum as a plan to assist its fiscal crisis." http://media.www.thejusticeonline.com/media/storage/paper573/news/2009/03/17/News/Rose-Family.Condemns.University-3673802.shtml

Gov Docs Open Source Advocate Seeks Job As Public Printer
Columbia Journalism Review: In just the last two years, Malamud, as the sole staffer of Public.Resource.Org, a 501c3 nonprofit based in Sebastopol, California, has posted over 80 million pages of legal documents on his Web site, many of them federal appeals court decisions. He’s also freed from private control the only remaining copy of a massive Navy-created database of legal decisions, placed building codes from all fifty states online, and convinced the Oregon legislature to cease claiming copyright over the state’s laws. It’s all been done by pointing out that documents created at public expense are, under U.S. law, considered the property of the public." Now he is campaigning for the position of Public Printer with a "platform for revitalizing the GPO and rebooting .gov spelled out in a detailed series of policy papers submitted to the Presidential Transition Team."

An HSUS Report: Human Health Implications of Non-Therapeutic Antibiotic Use in Animal Agriculture
"In 1951, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the addition of penicillin and tetracycline to chicken feed as growth promoters, encouraging pharmaceutical companies to mass-produce antibiotics for animal agriculture. By the 1970s, nearly 100% of all birds commercially raised for meat in the United States were being fed antibiotics. By the late-1990s, poultry producers were using 5 million kg (11 million lb) of antibiotics annually, more than a 300% increase from the 1980s. The thousands of tons of antibiotics used in animal agriculture are typically not for treatment of sick and diseased animals. Rather, the drugs are used for non-therapeutic purposes. More than 90% of U.S. pig farms, for example, feed the animals antibiotics for such non-treatment reasons as promotion of weight gain."

USDA Agricultural Projections to 2018
Source: U.S. Department of Agriculture Economic Research Service
This report provides long-run (10-year) projections for the agricultural sector through 2018. Projections cover agricultural commodities, agricultural trade, and aggregate indicators of the sector, such as farm income and food prices.
Download by chapter (PDFs) or as full report (PDF; 472 KB).

Blogging While (Publicly) Employed: Some First Amendment Implications
Source: University of Louisville Law Review
While private-sector employees do not have First Amendment free speech protection for their blogging activities relating to the workplace, public employees may enjoy some measure of protection depending on the nature of their blogging activity. The essential difference between these types of employment stems from the presence of state action in the public employment context. Although a government employee does not have the same protection from governmental speech infringement as citizens do under the First Amendment, a long line of cases under Pickering v. Bd. of Education have established a modicum of protection, especially when the public employee blogging is off-duty and the blog post does not concern work-related matters. Describing the legal protection for such public employee bloggers is an important project as many employers recently have ratcheted up their efforts to limit or ban employee blogging activities while blogging by employees simultaneously continues to expand. It should therefore not be surprising that the act of being fired for blogging about one’s employer has even led to a term being coined: “dooced.”

New Resource from NASA: ‘Eyes on the Earth 3-D’ March 13th, 2009
From the News Release: Source: NASA/Jet Propulsion Lab
New interactive features on NASA’s Global Climate Change Web site give the public the opportunity to “fly along” with NASA’s fleet of Earth science missions and observe Earth from a global perspective in an immersive, 3-D environment. Developed using a state-of-the-art, browser-based visualization technology, “Eyes on the Earth 3-D” displays the location of all of NASA’s 15 currently operating Earth-observing missions in real time. These missions constantly monitor our planet’s vital signs, such as sea level height, concentration of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere, global temperatures and extent of sea ice in the Arctic, to name a few.
Direct to “Eyes on Earth 3D”

Amid the economic recession's job losses and layoffs, the number of commuters on Long Island's rails and roads has taken a noticeable drop, statistics show. And experts say the decline could strike a considerable blow to a complex transit system already struggling with an unprecedented financial deficit. Two of Long Island's biggest carriers of commuters--the Long Island Rail Road and the Long Island Expressway--showed declines in usage during the last quarter of 2008 when compared, month by month, with the same period in 2007.
While common logic holds that fewer people having jobs to go to would mean fewer people on the roads and trains, some experts said the effects of the downward trend may not be easily reversed, even after the economy turns around. The numbers on the LIE, one of the Island's highest-volume traffic arteries, are a stark sign of the shift. With the advent of high gas prices last summer, the number of vehicles on the expressway fell. But they kept falling during the last quarter of 2008, and for the entire year the LIE carried 3,500 fewer cars each day than in 2007. That 1.93-percent drop was the biggest year-to-year drop in the last 13 years, according to the state Department of Transportation. Because the decline in LIE traffic persisted even after gas prices began dropping in September, DOT spokeswoman Eileen Peters said state planners believe "this could very well be the result of the economic downturn."
http://www.newsday.com/services/newspaper/printedition/monday/news/ny-licomm1512524018mar16,0,2217659.story

March 19 is the birthday of the 14th chief justice of the United States, Earl Warren, born in Los Angeles (1891). In 1953, President Eisenhower appointed Earl Warren as chief justice. He led the Supreme Court to many landmark decisions, including Brown v. Board of Education (1954), which banned segregation in public schools; Gideon v. Wainwright (1963), which ruled that poor people are entitled to a free lawyer in all criminal cases; Miranda v. Arizona (1966), which required that a person being arrested be read his or her rights; and Loving v. Virginia (1967), which made interracial marriage legal across the country. Warren retired from the Supreme Court in 1969. He said, "Everything I did in my life that was worthwhile I caught hell for."
The Writer’s Almanac