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Request for Public Input on Open Access to Federally Funded Research

SUMMARY: With this notice, the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) within the Executive Office of the President, requests input from the community regarding enhancing public access to archi

Casinos & Federal Government

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I went to http://www.fdsys.gov first to search for any federal government documents published after January 20, 2009 (there is a way in the advanced search to search by dates), and typed in the keyword "casinos" to see what would come up in my list of search results. I did not get any results for 2009 by searching for "casinos state tax revenue". Only results from before 2005 were available using those keywords.

Information on casinos relevant to economic recovery came up under such results having to deal with the ARRA Act, Public Law 111-5 (see http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/PLAW-111publ5/pdf/PLAW-111publ5.pdf) where it states in 123 STAT. 303: "LIMIT ON FUNDS SEC. 1604. None of the funds appropriated or otherwise made available in this Act may be used by any State or local government, or any private entity, for any casino or other gambling establishment, aquarium, zoo, golf course, or swimming pool."

Also, it repeated this sentiment in the Presidential Memo, "Memorandum on Ensuring Responsible Spending of Recovery Act Funds" on page 2 (see http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/DCPD-200900177/pdf/DCPD-200900177.pdf) where it states: "Sec. 2. Avoiding Funding of Imprudent Projects. (a) Funds under the Recovery Act shall not be committed, obligated, or expended by any executive department or agency, and shall not be used by any State or local governmental or private grantee or awardee, to support projects of the type described in section 1604 of Division A of the Recovery Act, which states that "[n]one of the funds appropriated or otherwise made available in this Act may be used by any State or local government, or any private entity, for any casino or other gambling establishment, aquarium, zoo, golf course, or swimming pool."

Related Question

ANSWER: Corporations engaged in manufacture of nuclear weaponry

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One possibility is the EDGAR database in the Securities & Exchange Commission website. Its Advanced search gets 139 hits for the search: westinghouse AND nuclear (you have to put Boolean operators in all caps). The search: "china valves" AND nuclear, limiting to dates 09/01/2008 to 12/30/2008, gets 6 hits. Once you open one of these (frequently long) filings, you can use CTRL-F to find where "nuclear" is on the page. You would also want to try other words, such as fission, uranium, maybe even "pressure vessels", etc. But Edgar is a fairly crude search, and its "automatic" word stemming gets very unsatisfactory results if you try to search "containment", for example. The search: 3m AND "nuclear weapons" gets nothing related, in the past 4 years.

If you are near a large academic library, such as University of Maryland, or even some not so large community college ones, it would be wise to search Ebsco's Business Source, and newspaper full text databases such as Lexis Academic which offer "proximity search". At University of Maryland College Park, we subscribe to Business Source Complete, which gets 7 hits for: Exxon and "nuclear power". But even though the Ebsco default is title, subject words and abstracts only, these 7 hits find nuclear power apparently not related to Exxon. If you "select a field" TX-All Text, the search: exxon w5 "nuclear power" (Exxon within 5 words of the phrase "nuclear power") gets 4 hits, and CTRL-F in the HTML full text quickly finds the terms under separate companies, though very close together in a list.

Related Question

operation sabotage access to information about abortion

Those not regularly reading the Radreffies' blogs aggregator might have missed Lia Friedman's post about how POPLINE, a government funded "...database on reproductive health, containing citations with abstracts to scientific articles, reports, books, and unpublished reports in the field of population, family planning, and related health issues." (emphasis added) has made "abortion" a stop word. If you're not up on your library jargon, that means it treats "abortion" the same way it would the word "the"--ignores it.

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