The Federal Trade Commission on Nov. 30 issued the National Do Not Call Registry Data Book for Fiscal Year 2011. The FTC's National Do Not Call Registry provides consumers with an easy way to stop unwanted telemarketing calls. In its third year of publication, the Data Book contains a wealth of information about the Registry for FY 2011, including: The number of active registrations and consumer complaint figures since the Registry began in 2003; FY 2011 complaint figures by month and complaint type; FY 2011 registration and complaint figures for all 50 states and the District of Columbia by population; The number of entities accessing the Registry by fiscal year; and An appendix on registration and complaint data by consumer state and area code. According to the Data Book, at the end of FY 2011 (September 30, 2011), the Do Not Call Registry contained 209,722,924 actively registered phone numbers, up from 201,542,535 at the end of FY 2010. In addition, the number of consumer complaints about unwanted telemarketing calls increased from 1,633,819 at the end of FY 2010 to 2,272,662 at the end of FY 2011.
http://www.ftc.gov/opa/2011/11/dnc.shtm

Congress passed the National School Lunch Act in 1946 to support commodity prices after World War II by reducing farm surpluses while providing food to schoolchildren. By 1970, the program was providing 22 million lunches on an average day, about a fifth of them subsidized. Since then, the subsidized portion has grown while paid lunches have declined, but not since 1972 have so many additional children become eligible for free lunches as in fiscal year 2010, 1.3 million. The number of students receiving subsidized lunches rose to 21 million last school year from 18 million in 2006-7, a 17 percent increase, according to an analysis by The New York Times of data from the Department of Agriculture, which administers the meals program. Eleven states, including Florida, Nevada, New Jersey and Tennessee, had four-year increases of 25 percent or more, huge shifts in a vast program long characterized by incremental growth.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/30/education/surge-in-free-school-lunches-reflects-economic-crisis.html?_r=1

The Beige Book, Nov. 30, 2011, a summary Overall economic activity increased at a slow to moderate pace since the previous report across all Federal Reserve Districts except St. Louis, which reported a decline in economic activity. District reports indicated that consumer spending rose modestly during the reporting period. Motor vehicle sales increased in a number of Districts, and tourism showed signs of strength. Business service activity was flat to higher since the previous report. Manufacturing activity expanded at a steady pace across most of the country. Overall bank lending increased slightly since the previous report, and home refinancing grew at a more rapid pace. Changes in credit standards and credit quality varied across Districts. Residential real estate activity generally remained sluggish, and commercial real estate activity remained lackluster across most of the nation. Single family home construction was weak and commercial construction was slow. Districts mostly reported favorable agricultural conditions. Activity in the energy and mining sectors increased since the previous report. Read more at: http://www.federalreserve.gov/FOMC/BeigeBook/2011/20111130/default.htm

Law schools know all about the tough conditions that await graduates, and many have added or expanded programs that provide practical training through legal clinics. But almost all the cachet in legal academia goes to professors who produce law review articles, which gobbles up huge amounts of time and tuition money. The essential how-tos of daily practice are a subject that many in the faculty know nothing about — by design. One 2010 study http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1646983 of hiring at top-tier law schools since 2000 found that the median amount of practical experience was one year, and that nearly half of faculty members had never practiced law for a single day. Christopher Langdell was appointed dean of the Harvard Law School in 1870 and began to rebrand legal education. Mr. Langdell introduced “case method,” which is the short answer to the question “What does law school teach you if not how to be a lawyer?” This approach cultivates a student’s capacity to reason and all but ignores the particulars of practice. Consider, for instance, Contracts, a first-year staple. It is one of many that originated in the Langdell era and endures today. In it, students will typically encounter such classics as Hadley v. Baxendale, an 1854 dispute about financial damages caused by the late delivery of a crankshaft to a British miller. Here is what students will rarely encounter in Contracts: actual contracts, the sort that lawyers need to draft and file. “We should be teaching what is really going on in the legal system,” says Edward L. Rubin, a professor and former dean at the Vanderbilt Law School, “not what was going on in the 1870s, when much of the legal curriculum was put in place.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/20/business/after-law-school-associates-learn-to-be-lawyers.html

ARL is a nonprofit membership organization of 126 research libraries in North America. The Association operates as a forum for the exchange of ideas and as an agent for collective action. Membership in ARL is institutional. http://www.arl.org/arl/membership/members.shtml

OCLC is Online Computer Library Center, Inc. of Dublin, Ohio
In 1967, the presidents of the colleges and universities in the state of Ohio founded the Ohio College Library Center (OCLC) to develop a computerized system in which the libraries of Ohio academic institutions could share resources and reduce costs. OCLC’s first offices were in the Main Library on the campus of The Ohio State University (OSU), and its first computer room was housed in the OSU Research Center. It was from these academic roots that Frederick G. Kilgour, OCLC’s first president, oversaw the growth of OCLC from a regional computer system for 54 Ohio colleges into an international network. In 1977, the Ohio members of OCLC adopted changes in the governance structure that enabled libraries outside Ohio to become members and participate in the election of the Board of Trustees; the Ohio College Library Center became OCLC, Inc. In 1981, the legal name of the corporation became OCLC Online Computer Library Center, Inc. Today, OCLC serves more than 72,000 libraries of all types in the U.S. and 170 countries and territories around the world. http://www.oclc.org/uk/en/about/history/default.htm


WorldCat is a union catalog which itemizes the collections of 72,000 libraries in 170 countries and territories which participate in the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC) global cooperative. It is built and maintained collectively by the participating libraries. Created in 1971, it contains more than 246 million different records pointing to over 1.77 billion physical and digital assets in more than 470 languages. It is the world's largest bibliographic database. OCLC makes WorldCat itself available free to libraries, but the catalog is the foundation for other fee-based OCLC services (such as resource sharing and collection management). WorldCat was founded by Fred Kilgour in 1967. In 2003, OCLC began the "Open WorldCat" pilot program, making abbreviated records from a subset of WorldCat available to partner Web sites and booksellers, to increase the accessibility of its member libraries’ collections. In 2006, it became possible to search WorldCat directly at its website: http://www.worldcat.org/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WorldCat

The Top 25 US Public Libraries’ Collective Collection, as Represented in WorldCat by Brian Lavoie, OCLC Research Taken together, all US public library holdings in WorldCat comprise a collective collection of 22.7 million distinct publications. Nearly 15 million of these are also held by at least one ARL member library, leaving about a third of the US publics’ collection that is exclusive of ARL holdings. The addition of the collective holdings of non-ARL US academic libraries to the ARL collection yields a collection of more than 71 million publications, of which more than 16 million are also held by at least one US public library. This still leaves 28 percent of the US publics’ collective collection distinct from US academic library holdings.
http://www.oclc.org/research/publications/library/2011/lavoie-ndpl.pdf

The eyes of the world's media have been focused on Burma this week, for the first visit from a US Secretary of State since since 1955. Mrs Clinton used the term "Burma" but only sparingly, preferring to say "this country", but never apparently using the word "Myanmar", which is its official name. Why does the US not recognise the country's name? Nations and news organisations differ in what they call the country. The ruling military junta changed its name from Burma to Myanmar in 1989, a year after thousands were killed in the suppression of a popular uprising. Rangoon also became Yangon. The Adaptation of Expression Law also introduced English language names for other towns, some of which were not ethnically Burmese. The change was recognised by the United Nations, and by countries such as France and Japan, but not by the US and the UK.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-16000467