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Current Issue: Vol. 18, no. 8  (April 29, 2013)
A Current Awareness Service of Cornell Law Library
ISSN 1521-9046   RSS FeedsRSS FEED [What is RSS?]   Printer friendly version Printer friendly version  

Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation
    URL: http://armscontrolcenter.org/
    The Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation's mission is to increase non-proliferation efforts, halt the spread of biological and chemical weapons, and optimize national security spending. To fulfill its mission it monitors national spending in these areas, educates and disseminates information on non-proliferation and weapons reduction to academics and public. The website is part of the education and information dissemination endeavor of the Center. This site provides policy and legislation analysis in the areas of Afghanistan and Iraq, Biological and Chemical Weapons, Iran, Missile Defense, Non-Proliferation, North Korea, Nuclear Terrorism, Nuclear Weapons, Recent Policy Analysis and Security Spending. The resources include Center fact sheets, reports, newspaper columns or op-ed pieces and a select number of papers and reports from other sources (government reports, academic journal articles, etc.). The “Top Topics” rubric lists Legislation Analysis, Iran Negotiations, Sequestration, New START and Nuclear Weapons Spending. Each of these links takes the user to a page that gives a short description of the issue and a series of center publications with analysis. The policy and legislation analyses are intended for both academics and the general public.
    [Author: J. Luke]
Docket Wrench
    URL: http://docketwrench.sunlightfoundation.com/
    Docket Wrench is a tool for discovering special interest groups' involvement in the development of federal rules and regulations. Like OpenCongress, LittleSis, and Influence Explorer, Docket Wrench was created by the Sunlight Foundation, which is dedicated to using technology to make government transparent and accountable. Docket Wrench has two primary uses: analyzing the comments submitted in response to a proposed rule and tracking comments submitted by individual interest groups. First, the comments analysis feature groups similar comments together so users can see what percentage of the comments submitted for a given rule were drafted using a form letter from a lobbying group; for many proposed rules more than 90% of comments were drafted using the same form-letter text. This analysis can lead to the discovery of the organization that drafted the form text. Users can search for proposed rules and comments of interested parties using keywords and further refine the results. Second, users can search for an interest group, such as the National Rifle Association or the ASPCA, to see all comments that group has submitted to various proposed rules. Docket Wrench has some limitations. Docket Wrench extracts all of its data from Regulations.gov. Many significant federal agencies ranging from the FCC to the SEC do not use Regulations.gov as a platform for submitting comments, with the result that comments submitted to rules proposed by those agencies are not available for analysis. The clustering analysis technology struggles with large dockets of comments and may not load properly. Matching for organization names and their variants is not always accurate. These issues may be resolved or at least improved in the future. Despite its faults, Docket Wrench is another excellent, user-friendly tool from the Sunlight Foundation.
    [Author: I. Haight]
IssueLab
    URL: http://www.issuelab.org/
    IssueLab is a database run by the Foundation Center, a leading source of information about philanthropy worldwide whose mission is to strengthen the “social sector” by advancing knowledge about philanthropy in the U.S. and around the world.  The IssueLab website gathers, indexes, and shares collective intelligence about the world’s most important and pressing social problems. It offers free access to case studies, evaluations, white papers, and issue briefs. The site’s user-friendly interface has both a basic and advanced search option, and allows users to search by a specific topic (e.g. aging, energy and environment, housing and homelessness, immigration, etc.), publication type (e.g. whitepaper, presentation, case study), organization, and author’s name. Users can create free accounts, allowing them to add resources to the IssueLab collection; the site says that “[a]s long as your materials are free and available to the public we accept annual reports, case studies, datasets, evaluations, fact sheets, issue/policy briefs, literature/research reviews, presentations, reports/white papers, surveys, congressional testimony, and toolkits”.  Users can also sign up to receive the monthly E-newsletter and a wide variety of Weekly Issue Alerts.  There are social media links for Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and RSS feeds. 
    [Author: S. Leers]

InSITE contributors: I. Haight, S. Leers. J. Luke, J. Pajerek (editor)

 

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