Tag: tools
Federal Reserve Economic Data – FRED
Welcome to FRED® (Federal Reserve Economic Data), a database of 25,176 U.S. economic time series.

Pinboard: A Social Bookmarking Tool That Literally Archives Your Web
Imagine: You are working on something; suddenly you remember that some time back you stumbled across a piece of information that could save you hours of work. Wait, you saved the bookmark! A brief moment of exhilaration. TNW Couch Conferences Join industry leaders to define new strategies for an uncertain future REGISTER NOW You go …
The Next WebPinboard, a minimalist social bookmarking service by Maciej Ceglowski and Peter Gadjokov (one of the co-founders of delicious), tries to solve this problem. Their service that launched in late 2009 allows you to automatically store a copy of all the pages that you bookmark. Even if the original site goes offline, or the page is removed, you can still find the information in your Pinboard’s cache. The service, priced $25 per year, is not dirt cheap, but can be quite useful at times; moreover, whatever amount you paid to subscribe to Pinboard in the first place, is deducted from the first payment (there is a one-time subscription fee, depending on the current number of users; this fee is now around $6 and allows Pinboard to remain ad-free).
Pinboard: A Social Bookmarking Tool That Literally Archives Your Web
FDA scientists complain to Obama of ‘corruption’
kaytee:
WASHINGTON (AP) — In an unusually blunt letter, a group of federal scientists is complaining to the Obama transition team of widespread managerial misconduct in a division of the Food and Drug Administration.
“The purpose of this letter is to inform you that the scientific review process for medical devices at the FDA has been corrupted and distorted by current FDA managers, thereby placing the American people at risk,” said the letter, dated Wednesday and written on the agency’s Center for Devices and Radiological Health letterhead.
[…]In their letter the FDA dissidents alleged that agency managers use intimidation to squelch scientific debate, leading to the approval of medical devices whose effectiveness is questionable and which may not be entirely safe.
Unfortunately, this is not shocking at all to me. In college, one of my profs was married to a scientist that was part of FDA studies on NutraSweet. Said spouse told my prof that in those studies, not one single colleague signed off on this toxic chemical compund that had, at that time, been found to cause brain tumors in rats (this was covered up).
Of course, NutraSweet hit the markets. By the time all the big legal shit hit the fan, the company was dissolved and the people behind all of this were very wealthy.
I later worked for a company that sponsored a QA lab and frequently ate lunch with the food scientist there. He occasionally mentioned (with only barely repressed disgust) how the people selling (my company) would dictate the desired outcome. Tests can be set up to produce any result. It’s just a matter of fixing the data, right?
As I’ve written here before, that’s how the world we live in has always worked. Can we change it? I think we should. In fact, I think we have to change or die!
The story – from Rumplestiltskin to War and Peace – is one of the basic tools invented by the human mind, for the purpose of gaining understanding. There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories.
The waterproof laser case!
Ninjawords – a really fast dictionary
fast like a ninja!
If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.