Reaction to The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You by Eli Pariser and identical searches done on Google by two Toledo area librarians bringing different results
Search engines are studying our online activity, and the easy answer is that they are targeting us for advertising, but that doesn't explain the difference in news articles, and the difference in sources--some nonpartisan and some not. Why
would news be tailored to what we agree with already? Something that I find of great interest is how willing people are to share their personal and professional lives with the entire world. You thought credit card ID theft was bad? Wait until folks begin assuming identities based on Facebook and LinkedIn profiles. Plus with Facebook, as I understand it, everything posted on Facebook is owned by the company, not the poster. Not only is Facebook amassing a huge amount of data on people, again, as I understand it, they then can use that data as they wish. For example that cute picture of your child on your Facebook page could be used on a billboard advertising lice treatment.

Hamilton Grange National Memorial, located in St Nicholas Park at West 141st Street and St Nicholas Avenue in Hamilton Heights - West Harlem, preserves the home of founding father Alexander Hamilton. Born and raised in the West Indies, Hamilton came to New York in 1772 at age 17 to study finance at King's College (now Columbia University). Hamilton became a supporter of the cause of the American patriots during the political turmoil of the 1770s. Commissioned as a Captain of Artillery at the beginning of the American Revolution, he soon became an aide-de-camp to George Washington. After the war, as a member of Congress, Hamilton was instrumental in creating the new Constitution. As co-author of the Federalist Papers he was indispensable in the effort to get the Constitution adopted. As the first Secretary of the Treasury (1789-1795) he devised plans for funding the national debt, securing federal credit, encouraging expansion of manufacturing and organizing the federal bank. Hamilton commissioned architect John McComb Jr. to design a Federal style country home on a sprawling 32 acre estate in upper Manhattan. This house was completed in 1802 and named "The Grange" after the Hamilton family's ancestral home in Scotland, but served as his home for only two years. The home reopens to the public on September 17. http://www.harlemonestop.com/organization.php?id=7

In recent years, few museums have weathered rough times as publicly as the National Academy Museum on Manhattan's Upper East Side. Lackluster exhibitions, low attendance, annual operating deficits and a dearth of donors were suddenly compounded in 2008, when the NAM sold two Hudson River School paintings from its collection to help pay bills. In swift response, the Association of Art Museum Directors, a professional group of North America's largest museums whose ethics standards prohibit art sales for any reason other than buying more art, barred its nearly 200 members from lending art to the NAM. These sanctions forced the museum to cancel shows and made ambitious exhibitions impossible. This month, Carmine Branagan, the National Academy's petite, self-assured director, hopes to put all that behind her. Over the past year, the National Academy has been renovated to give its Beaux Arts townhouse museum on Fifth Avenue a more welcoming lobby, upgrade its galleries and create more exhibition space in its adjacent National Academy School. The museum, which will reopen September 16 with six exhibits, is no longer a pariah, though it remains on probation until 2014 while it meets other stipulations, notably more fund raising. http://www.judithdobrzynski.com/10312/the-academy-dilemma

The real threat of contagion by W. Ian Lipkin
I ADMIT I was wary when I was approached, late in 2008, about working on a movie with the director Steven Soderbergh about a flulike pandemic. It seemed that every few years a filmmaker imagined a world in which a virus transformed humans into flesh-eating zombies, or scientists discovered and delivered the cure for a lethal infectious disease in an impossibly short period of time. Then I discovered that Mr. Soderbergh and the screenwriter on the project, Scott Z. Burns, agreed with me. They were determined to make a movie — “Contagion,”— that didn’t distort reality but did convey the risks that we all face from emerging infectious diseases. Those risks are very real — and are increasing drastically. More than three-quarters of all emerging infectious diseases originate when microbes jump from wildlife to humans. Our vulnerability to such diseases has been heightened by the growth in international travel and the globalization of food production. In addition, deforestation and urbanization continue to displace wildlife, increasing the probability that wild creatures will come in contact with domesticated animals and humans. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/12/opinion/the-real-threat-of-contagion.html

September 13, 2011 Contact: David Sellers, 202-502-2600
The Judicial Conference of the United States today adopted a national policy that encourages federal courts to limit those instances in which they seal entire civil case files. Any order sealing an entire civil case should contain findings justifying the sealing, and the seal should be lifted when the reason for sealing has ended, the policy says. The Conference also endorsed modifying the Judiciary's Case Management/Electronic Case Files system to include a mechanism "that would remind judges to review cases under seal annually." In separate action, the Conference responded to inflationary pressures by increasing, effective November 1, certain miscellaneous fees for federal courts. The newly approved court fee schedule, the first inflationary increase in eight years, is expected to result in an estimated $10.5 million in additional fee revenue for fiscal year 2012. Fees in appeals, district, and bankruptcy courts are affected. The income the Judiciary receives through miscellaneous fees allows it to reduce its annual appropriations request to Congress. The Conference also authorized an increase in the Judiciary's electronic public access fee in response to increasing costs for maintaining and enhancing the electronic public access system. The increase in the electronic public access (EPA) fee, from $.08 to $.10 per page, is needed to continue to support and improve the Public Access to Court Electronic Records (PACER) system, and to develop and implement the next generation of the Judiciary's Case Management/Electronic Case Filing system. http://www.uscourts.gov/News/NewsView/11-09-13/Conference_Approves_Standards_Procedures_for_Sealing_Civil_Cases.aspx

A new fossil crocodile species has turned up in the same Colombian coal mine as the world’s largest known snake. Sixty million years ago, the 20-foot freshwater crocodile shared the rivers of South America’s forests with the Titanoboa, a snake that could grow over 40 feet long, also extinct. The crocodile described in Palaeontology Sept. 15, has a long, narrow snout full of sharp teeth. Paleontologists believe it hunted lungfish and bonefish relatives, making Acherontisuchus guajiraensis the first tropical New World land animal specialized to eat fish, both a competitor to the giant boa and possibly its prey. http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/09/ancient-crocodile-uncovered/