Puritan church members in the Massachusetts Bay colony, and later, Congregationalists elsewhere in New England, believed that their contractual relationship with God required them to enforce proper behavior in their communities. This perceived requirement resulted in the enactment of a variety of laws designed to regulate the conduct of all members of society. By the time of the American Revolution, many of the personal conduct laws were no longer enforced. Some, however, have remained on the books to the present day. The blue laws also underwent a revival of sorts in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in the nationwide prohibition movement. Many communities also enacted Sunday closing laws, which prohibited businesses from operating on the Sabbath; other areas contented themselves with outlawing the sale of tobacco and liquor on Sundays. The origin of the term blue law is disputed. A number of authorities have argued that some of the early laws, or a book describing the regulations, were printed on blue paper. Others suggest that the name is associated with “blue blood,” a term conveying a disapproving view of common behavior. http://www.u-s-history.com/pages/h1164.html

The Mother of All Languages by Gautam Naik
The world's 6,000 or so modern languages may have all descended from a single ancestral tongue spoken by early African humans between 50,000 and 70,000 years ago, a study published in the journal Science suggests. The finding could help explain how the first spoken language emerged, spread and contributed to the evolutionary success of the human species. Quentin Atkinson, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of Auckland in New Zealand and author of the study, found that the first migrating populations leaving Africa laid the groundwork for all the world's cultures by taking their single language with them—the mother of all mother tongues. "It was the catalyst that spurred the human expansion that we all are a product of," Dr. Atkinson said. About 50,000 years ago—the exact timeline is debated—there was a sudden and marked shift in how modern humans behaved. They began to create cave art and bone artifacts and developed far more sophisticated hunting tools. Many experts argue that this unusual spurt in creative activity was likely caused by a key innovation: complex language, which enabled abstract thought. The work done by Dr. Atkinson supports this notion. His research is based on phonemes, distinct units of sound such as vowels, consonants and tones, and an idea borrowed from population genetics known as "the founder effect." That principle holds that when a very small number of individuals break off from a larger population, there is a gradual loss of genetic variation and complexity in the breakaway group. Dr. Atkinson figured that if a similar founder effect could be discerned in phonemes, it would support the idea that modern verbal communication originated on that continent and only then expanded elsewhere. In an analysis of 504 world languages, Dr. Atkinson found that, on average, dialects with the most phonemes are spoken in Africa, while those with the fewest phonemes are spoken in South America and on tropical islands in the Pacific. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704547604576262572791243528.html?mod=WSJ_World_LEFTSecondNews

Google buys Zagat to vie with OpenTable, Yelp
While much of Zagat's content is free and available to anyone, some content remains behind a paywall and it was unclear if Google would remove it. Founded by Tim and Nina Zagat, the eponymous service provides the familiar burgundy pocket-sized guides to restaurants in more than 100 cities. It may be one of the earliest forms of user-generated content, Google Vice President Marissa Mayer said in a blog post on Thursday. Zagat gave Google a tongue-in-cheek rating on its home page on Thursday, awarding the Internet company a maximum 30-point rating for its "local, social, mobile and usefulness" categories. Industry analysts regard the local, social and mobile markets as some of the fastest-growing areas of the technology sector. "We are thrilled to see our baby placed in such good hands and to start today as official 'Googlers,'" the founders said in a joint statement. http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/09/09/uk-google-zagat-idUSLNE78803320110909
The Senate has passed a patent reform bill that marks the biggest change to the patent process in decades. The America Invents Act has already been passed in its entirety by the House of Representatives, and will now go directly to President Obama for signature. The bill sees a shift from a first-to-invent system to a 'first-to-file' rule, bringing it in line with most of the rest of the world. It also makes it easier to challenge existing patents, and gives the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) the power to set fees. The bill also allows the USPTO to set its own fees, but senators voted against an amendment tabled by Senator Tom Coburn, M.D. (R-OK) allowing it to control those fees, rather than handing them over to Congress. Coburn has described it as 'outrageous' that fees paid for a specific service should be spent on other programs. "Since 1992, Congress has pilfered nearly $1 billion in user fees dedicated to the Patent and Trademark Office and spent those dollars elsewhere," he said in June. "As a result, we have 700,000 patents waiting for a first review that, if approved, could help get our economy moving again." The bill also includes two new measures for invalidating patents - both, according to critics, tailored to benefit specific groups. http://www.tgdaily.com/business-and-law-features/58359-patent-reform-bill-passed

Michael Stern Hart, whose vision of a literate society led him to pioneer the electronic book decades before the spread of the Internet, died at 64 on September 13 in Urbana, Ill. Hart was the founder of the online library Project Gutenberg,
Hart was a freshman at the University of Illinois in 1971 when he was granted free access to the campus' enormous mainframe computer. He was uncertain how to use the valuable computer time until inspiration struck in the form of a reproduction of the Declaration of Independence that had been stuffed in his grocery bag as part of a Fourth of July promotion. He keyed the historic text into the computer system, which linked 100 users at institutions such as Harvard, UCLA and the Department of Defense. It was downloaded by six members of this pre-Internet network, which was encouragement enough for Hart to continue. He transmitted the Bill of Rights, the Constitution, the Bible and the works of Shakespeare. Forty years later, Project Gutenberg, named after the inventor of the Gutenberg printing press, is one of the oldest online collections of literature, offering more than 33,000 free books in 60 languages. The vast majority are public domain, and all are digitized by volunteers scattered around the globe. http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-me-michael-hart-20110909,0,7536729.story

A Review of: Walters, W. H. (2009). Google Scholar search performance: Comparative recall and precision. portal: Libraries and the Academy, 9(1), 5-24.
Twelve databases were compared: Google Scholar, Academic Search Elite, AgeLine, ArticleFirst, EconLit, Geobase, Medline, PAIS International, Popline, Social Sciences Abstracts, Social Sciences Citation Index, and SocIndex.
The relevant literature on later-life migration was pre-identified as a set of 155 journal articles published from 1990 to 2000. The author selected these articles from database searches, citation tracking, journal scans, and consultations with social sciences colleagues. Each database was evaluated with regards to its performance in finding references to these 155 papers. Elderly and migration were the keywords used to conduct the searches in each of the 12 databases, since these were the words that were the most frequently used in the titles of the 155 relevant articles. The search was performed in the most basic search interface of each database that allowed limiting results by the needed publication dates (1990-2000). Search results were sorted by relevance when possible (for 9 out of the 12 databases), and by date when the relevance sorting option was not available. Recall and precision statistics were then calculated from the search results. Recall is the number of relevant results obtained in the database for a search topic, divided by all the potential results which can be obtained on that topic (in this case, 155 references). Precision is the number of relevant results obtained in the database for a search topic, divided by the total number of results that were obtained in the database on that topic. Google Scholar and AgeLine obtained the largest number of results (20,400 and 311 hits respectively) for the keyword search, elderly and migration. Database performance was evaluated with regards to the recall and precision of its search results. Google Scholar and AgeLine also obtained the largest total number of relevant search results out of all the potential results that could be obtained on later-life migration (41/155 and 35/155 respectively). No individual database produced the highest recall for every set of search results listed, i.e., for the first 10 hits, the first 20 hits, etc. However, Google Scholar was always in the top four databases regardless of the number of search results displayed. Its recall rate was consistently higher than all the other databases when over 56 search results were examined, while Medline out-performed the others within the first set of 50 results. To exclude the effects of database coverage, the author calculated the number of relevant references obtained as a percentage of all the relevant references included in each database, rather than as a percentage of all 155 relevant references from 1990-2000 that exist on the topic. Google Scholar ranked fourth place, with 44% of the relevant references found. Ageline and Medline tied for first place with 74%. https://ejournals.library.ualberta.ca/index.php/EBLIP/article/viewArticle/8543