Economic Policy Institute Fact Sheet, Labor Day by the Numbers, September 7, 2009 Note that all numbers are current as of September 4, 2009.
TOTAL JOBS LOST DURING THE RECESSION: 6.9 MILLION.
"New jobs needed per month to keep up with population growth: 127,000
Jobs lost in August 2009: 216,000
Jobs needed to regain pre-recession unemployment levels: 9.4 million
Manufacturing jobs lost since the start of the recession: 2.0 million (14.6% of sector’s jobs)
Construction jobs lost in the recession: 1.4 million (19%, nearly one in fi ve construction jobs)
Mass layoff s (50 or more people by a single employer) in July 2009: 2,157; jobs lost: 206,791"
Related postings on financial system

"The National September 11 Memorial & Museum is a private not-for-profit (501c3), responsible for oversight of the design, raising the necessary funds, programming and operating the Memorial & Museum being built at the World Trade Center site."
New York Times: Sept. 11 Steel Forms Heart of Far-Flung Memorials: "The best way we can honor the memory of those we lost on 9/11 is to find homes in the W.T.C. Memorial and in cities and towns around the nation for the hundreds of artifacts we’ve carefully preserved over the years..." [Port Authority’s executive director, Christopher O. Ward.]

Survey: pattern of North American daily Internet traffic
Arbor Networks: The Internet After Dark (Part 1), by Craig Labovitz: "After dark when the dinner dishes are put away and the kids are safely tucked into bed, the Internet subtly changes. Starting in the twilight of early evening, business traffic slows to a crawl, previously dormant applications flicker on home computer screens, and like clockwork, Internet activity begins its nightly climb towards a regular after hours bandwidth peak...In our last post blog post, we found (somewhat unexpectedly) that the pattern of North American daily Internet traffic differs from Europe and Asia. Unlike European Internet traffic which peaks around 7pm GMT and then quickly drops off until morning business hours, US Internet traffic reaches its peak at 11pm EDT and then stays relatively high until 3am in the morning (i.e. stays above 60% of peak or more). This uniquely American traffic pattern holds true across dozens of individual ISPs, tens of millions of subscribers, and petabytes of daily Internet traffic."

What is a petabyte? A petabyte (often referred to as a pebibyte) is 1,024 terabytes and precedes the exabyte unit of measurement. Since even the largest hard drives are measured in terabytes, petabytes are only used to measure the storage space of multiple hard drives or other collections of data. http://www.techterms.com/definition/petabyte

Microsoft Wins a Stay: Microsoft Corp. won't have to immediately alter its Word program or halt sales because of a patent-infringement case it lost. The Fifth Circuit on September 3 put on hold an order imposed last month that would have limited Microsoft's ability to offer some features in Word. The order won't take effect until an appeal of the underlying patent case is resolved. Oral arguments on the appeal are scheduled for September 23 in Washington. (Bloomberg)
Ratings firms have gotten sued left and right by investors who claim the firms issued misleading opinions about mortgage-backed securities and were partly to blame for the financial crisis. (Here's one post on the rash of litigation against ratings firms and another noting that the SEC chief favors lowering the barriers to suing ratings firms.)
Ratings firms often have cloaked themselves in the Constitution, claiming that their ratings are mere opinions protected by the First Amendment. And courts in the past have held that investors can not sue on the alleged grounds that ratings are too high or too low, unless, that is, plaintiffs can also show that particular ratings were issued with "actual malice." But on September 2, Manhattan federal Judge Shira Scheindlin dealt a blow to ratings firms, rejecting a free-speech defense asserted by Moody's Investors Services and Standard & Poor's. See the opinion here. WSJ Law Blog September 5, 2009

Banned Books Week (BBW) September 26−October 3, 2009
Observed since 1982, this annual American Library Association event reminds Americans not to take this precious democratic freedom for granted. BBW celebrates the freedom to choose or the freedom to express one’s opinion even if that opinion might be considered unorthodox or unpopular and stresses the importance of ensuring the availability of those unorthodox or unpopular viewpoints to all who wish to read them.
http://www.ala.org/ala/issuesadvocacy/banned/bannedbooksweek/index.cfm
Top ten most frequently challenged books of 2008
http://www.ala.org/ala/issuesadvocacy/banned/frequentlychallenged/21stcenturychallenged/2008/index.cfm
Librarians’ Internet Index on BBW http://lii.org/pub/subtopic/474
Banned books online http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/banned-books.html

Quote
When nothing is sure, everything is possible.
Margaret Drabble (b. 1939) British author

On August 31, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences took a long expected step to ensure that this year's best picture winner won't be hated by 90% of its members by going with a preferential voting system in which members rank their choices from 1-10. In a preferential voting system, votes for the least popular first choice movie are eliminated and those members' second choices are taken into account. The process continues until a nominee receives more than 50% of the votes. Academy spokesperson Leslie Unger confirmed that the organization will apply the same preferential voting system it uses in the Oscar nomination process to best picture voting starting this winter. The news was first reported by The Wrap. Such a move has been in the works since the academy decided in June to expand the number of best picture nominees from five to 10. At the time, academy Vice President Hawk Koch said that there would be a change in the voting process, stating, "We want to make sure that 11% does not win the best picture."
Under the old system, members simply voted for their first choice. With 10 nominees, that would mean a movie with one vote more than 10% could theoretically be named best picture. http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-et-quick1-2009sep01,0,823389.story

On September 4, 1998 Google was first incorporated as a company. Google was the brainchild of two Ph.D. students at Stanford University, Larry Page and Sergey Brin. They designed a search engine with one important difference from all the others: Instead of giving you results based on how many times your search term appeared on a Web page, they created software that would figure out how many times each relevant Web site was linked to from other relevant Web sites and sorted those and then laid them out for you, all on a clear, simple screen. In June of 2006, "Google" was added to the Oxford English Dictionary as a verb. The Writer’s Almanac