Open budget data: mapping the landscape

This report offers analysis of the emerging issue of open budget data, which has begun to gain traction amongst advocates and practitioners of financial transparency. Issues and initiatives associated with the emerging issue of open budget data are charted in different forms of digital media. The objective is to enable practitioners – in particular civil society organisations, intergovernmental organisations, governments, multilaterals and funders – to navigate this developing field and to identify trends, gaps and opportunities for supporting it. How public money is collected and distributed is one of the most pressing political questions of our time, influencing the health, well-being and prospects of billions of people. Decisions about fiscal policy affect everyone - determining everything from the resourcing of essential public services, to the capacity of public institutions to take action on global challenges such as poverty, inequality or climate change. Digital technologies have the potential to transform the way that information about public money is organised, circulated and utilised in society, which in turn could shape the character of public debate, democratic engagement, governmental accountability and public participation in decision-making about public funds. Data could play a vital role in tackling the democratic deficit in fiscal policy and in supporting better outcomes for citizens

How to Cut a Third of Your Journal Subscriptions (and Keep Faculty Happy)

When faced with a 0% budget increase for fiscal year 2010, librarians at Gettysburg College designed a comprehensive review of journal subscriptions. Library staff began by gathering data about format(s), price, publisher, and more. Then subject librarians consulted with academic departments and asked faculty to review titles for relevance to current research and curriculum. 100% of departments cooperated with the review with a mixture of enthusiasm and concern; in the end, most offered to cancel about a third of their journal titles. By trimming multiple format subscriptions, relying on aggregator databases for full text content, cancelling titles that no longer support the curriculum, and cancelling a small number of high-cost subscriptions in favor of document delivery, the library met – and exceeded – its savings target. More importantly, by involving the faculty in every stage of the review process and sharing all available information, the library received absolutely no complaints about cancellations. This poster presentation will include a flow chart of the entire review process, sample review spreadsheets used by faculty in academic departments, and graphs showing cancellations by department. This journal review model is transferable to other academic libraries

The Physics of ALICE HLT Trigger Modes

We discuss different physics cases, mainly of the ALICE TPC, such as pile-up, jets in pp and PbPb, Bottonium and Charmonium spectroscopy, and there corresponding demands on the ALICE High Level Trigger (HLT) System. We show that compression and filter strategies can reduce the data volume by factors of 5 to 10. By reconstructing (sub)events with the HLT, background events can be rejected with a factor of up to 100 while keeping the signal (low cross-section probes). Altogether the HLT improves the discussed physics capabilities of ALICE by a factor of 5-100 in terms of statistics.Comment: 25 pages, 4 figure