At the same time, economists have been documenting the loss of work opportunities and earning power by workers without college degrees as manufacturingemployment has declined. In 2013, David Autor, David Dorn, and Gordon Hanson published a study that estimated the labor market impacts resulting from increased trade competition following China’s entrance into the World Trade Organization, an effect often referred to as the “China shock.” Dozens of studies have since used the regional variation in job and income losses caused by the China shock to measure the adverse impacts of job displacement on family structures, crime, health, and other social indicators. Some supporters of industrial subsidies and higher tariffs have expressed the hope that these dynamics can be put into reverse.
by Karlye Dilts Stedman, Amaze Lusompa & Phillip An
Disentangling how the economy responds to a monetary policy decision from its response to macroeconomic conditions at the time of the decision is an ongoing challenge. One popular method researchers use to measure the effect of a monetary policy announcement—high-frequency identification—analyzes the reaction of fast-moving financial variables immediately following the policy announcement, using a time window long enough for markets to respond but not so long that the response is contaminated by other information.
Since high-frequency identification was introduced in the early 2000s, policymakers have introduced tools such as forward guidance and large-scale asset purchases. Karlye Dilts Stedman, Amaze Lusompa, and Phillip An examine how the evolution of monetary policy has changed high-frequency identification and assess whether additional changes might be necessary to better capture the effect of modern monetary policy surprises. Although researchers have continually updated the asset mix used in high-frequency identification over time, they have not updated the measurement window. Because the timing of monetary policy communication has changed significantly in recent years, refining the length of this measurement window may be necessary going forward.
Federal Reserve policymakers need current information about economic conditions to make well-informed monetary policy decisions. But hard data, such as GDP and the unemployment rate, is released with a significant lag, making it difficult to get a precise, real-time read on the economy, especially during times of rapid change.
Hard data is based on precise quantitative measurements, such as sales figures or the specific prices firms are charging. By contrast, soft data is qualitative, focusing on trends, expectations, and sentiment around economic activity. And while hard data looks backward, soft data from the regional surveys can look forward—providing important information about expectations for the future and emerging trends.
The surveys are sent to over 300 business executives and managers at firms across industries during the first week of every month. While about two-thirds of participating firms have 100 or fewer employees, some have hundreds or thousands of workers.
Leaders at the firms fill out a short questionnaire asking if business activity has increased, decreased, or stayed the same compared to the prior month. The surveys ask about indicators such as prices–yielding insights into inflationary pressures–as well as employment, orders, and capital spending. Respondents answer questions about how they expect these indicators to change over the next six months, offering a forward-looking perspective on the economy’s trajectory.
From the responses, New York Fed researchers construct diffusion indexes by calculating the difference between the percentage of firms reporting increased activity and those reporting decreased activity. Positive values indicate that more firms say activity increased than decreased, suggesting activity expanded over the month. Higher positive values indicate stronger growth, while lower negative values indicate stronger declines.
The surveys include local businesses, like restaurants and car dealerships, as well as firms with national and global reach, such as software manufacturers and shipping enterprises. As a result, the economic indicators derived from the surveys are often early predictors of national economic patterns, frequently aligning with hard data released later.
In addition to providing data to track economic conditions, the regional surveys also provide a channel to hear directly from local business leaders. Every month, survey respondents are asked for their comments, offering the opportunity for businesses to share their thoughts, concerns, and experiences with the New York Fed. This helps researchers and policymakers understand how businesses are being affected by economic conditions.
The surveys act as one of the bridges between the New York Fed and the business community, ensuring the voices of regional businesses are considered in economic assessments and policy discussions as well as enhancing the ability of policymakers to make informed decisions to respond effectively to economic challenges.
Executives, owners, or managers of businesses in New York, northern New Jersey, or Fairfield County, Conn., interested in participating in the New York Fed’s monthly business surveys can find more information here. The next survey results will be released on Oct. 15 and 16.
Robert Orttung, Debra Javeline, Graeme Robertson, Richard Arnold, Andrew Barnes, Edward Holland, Mikhail Troitskiy, Judyth Twigg, and Susanne Wengle argue that the renewed U.S.–Russia alignment under Trump and Putin prioritizes fossil fuel development over climate action, and undermines international climate negotiations.
In a statement to The Kyiv Independent, Peter Rutland echoes the contrast between the West’s diplomatic quarantine of Russia and the possibility of implementing policies without its permission, articulating how differing attitudes between Europe and Putin discourage any kind of escalation. In her recent article, Margarita Zavadskaya explores the “White Coat” narrative, explaining the origin and manipulation of Russian attitudes towards those who have left.
In a recent interview, Volodymyr Dubovyk explains why he believes Putin “wins” the Alaska summit, sharing his perspective on the meeting’s implications and concluding that the dynamics of peace negotiations shift somewhat. Richard Arnold marks the Donbas’ significance, stating that Russian control of the “Fortress Belt” enables havoc on all areas to the west.
Ryhor Nizknikau speaks with TVP World, interpreting the significance of Ukrainian Parliamentary Speaker Parubiy’s assassination. Tymofii Brik’s recent study, together with Oleksii Sereda, Anna Kokoba, and Alina Shmaliuk, appears in Vox Ukraine, covering the participants and reasoning behind the protest against the bill to limit SAPO and NABU’s independence.
In the context of Russia’s recent nuclear developments near the Pan’kovo testing range, Pavel Podvig comments that “Skyfall”, the new weapon’s NATO nickname, has likely undergonetesting already. During an interview withDW News, Mikhail Alekseev addresses the goals pursued by the Sino-Russian partnership, which range from the tangible benefits of constructing gas infrastructure to the more ideological advantage of presenting an alternative to the U.S.-led world order.
When objects interact with light in particular ways — by absorbing or reflecting it — we see in color. A sunset’s orange hues and the ocean’s deep blues inspire artists and dazzle observant admirers. But colors are more than pretty decor; they also play a critical role in life. They attract mates, pollinators and seed-spreaders, and signal danger. And the same color can mean different things to different organisms: A red bird might attract a mate, while a red berry might warn off a hungry human.
For color to communicate meaning, systems to produce it had to evolve, by developing pigments to absorb certain wavelengths of light or structures to reflect them. Organisms also had to produce the machinery to perceive color. When you look out into a forest, you might see lush greenery dappled with yellowish sunlight and pink blooms. But this forest scene would look different if you were a bird or a fly. Color-perception machinery — which include photoreceptors in our eyes that recognize and distinguish light — can differ between species. While humans can’t see ultraviolet light, some birds can. While dogs can’t see red or green, many humans can. Even within species there’s some variation: People who are colorblind have trouble distinguishing some combinations, such as green and red. And many organisms can’t see color at all.
Within one planet, many colorful worlds exist. But how did colors evolve in the first place?
What’s New and Noteworthy
To pinpoint when different kinds of color signals may have evolved, researchers recently reviewed many papers, covering hundreds of millions of years of evolutionary history, to bring together information from the fossil record and phylogenetic trees (diagrams that depict evolutionary relationships between species). Their analysis across the tree of life suggested that color signals likely evolved much later than color vision. It’s likely that color vision evolved twice, developing independently in arthropods and fish, between 400 million and 500 million years ago. Then plants started using bright colors to attract pollinators and animals to disperse their seeds, and then animals started using colors to warn off predators and eventually to attract mates.
One of the most common colors that we see in nature is green. However, this isn’t a color signal: It’s a result of photosynthesis. Most plants absorb almost all the photons in the red and blue light spectra but only 90% of the green photons. The remaining 10% are reflected, making the plants appear green to our eyes. But why did they evolve to do this? According to a model, this makes photosynthetic machinery more stable, suggesting that sometimes evolution favors stability over efficiency.
The majority of colors in nature are produced by pigments that absorb or reflect different wavelengths of light. While many plants can produce these pigments on their own, most animals can’t; instead, they acquire pigments from their diet. Some pigments, though, are hard to acquire, so some animals instead rely on nanoscale structures that scatter light in particular ways to create “structural colors.” For example, the shell of the blue-rayed limpet has layers of transparent crystals, each of which diffracts and reflects a sliver of the light spectrum. When the layers grow to a precise thickness, around 100 nanometers, the wavelengths in each layer interact with one another, canceling each other out — except for blue. The result is the appearance of a bright blue limpet shell.
While economic activity in the United States has remained resilient, recent data show some softening in the labor market. Swings in net exports affected GDP in the first half of 2025, with imports surging in the first quarter followed by imports declining in the second quarter. Inflation remains above the Fed’s 2% goal, and a near-term rise from tariffs appears likely. Job gains in recent months have slowed. Downward revisions for recent job growth estimates have been large, but the magnitudes of these revisions are not out of line with historical values. Job growth estimates remain reliable despite data collection challenges. With the balance of risks surrounding the Fed’s dual mandate now shifting, market participants are projecting an easing of monetary policy in coming months.
Fourth District contacts reported a slight increase in overall business activity in recent weeks and expected activity to rise modestly in the months ahead. Consumer spending was flat, with retailers noting continued affordability concerns among consumers. Manufacturers also reported flat demand for goods, citing trade policy uncertainty as the main driver. Demand for professional and business services grew moderately, albeit at a slower pace than in the past three reporting periods. Contacts generally reported flat employment levels and modest wage pressures. Nonlabor cost pressures remained robust, and selling prices continued to grow modestly.
The neutralinterest rate (r-star) is an important input in monetary policy discussions and is commonly used to assess the stance of monetary policy. This Economic Commentary presents estimates of the neutralinterest rate from a recently developed model and provides a high-level description of this new model. With data through 2025:Q2, the model estimates the implied (medium-run) nominal neutralinterest rate to be 3.7 percent, with a 68 percent coverage band ranging from 2.9 percent to 4.5 percent. Given that the effective nominal federal funds rate is currently in the range of 4.25 percent to 4.5 percent, this model estimates with a high level of certainty (77 percent probability) that the policy stance is in restrictive territory.
“Oh that. We just took some undergraduate history students on board as interns. They provided the content and it was done.”
The co-founder of a digital heritage initiative promoting interactiveuser interfaces offered these opening remarks. Speaking at a Delhi-based museum, he had been asked about the information provided to users as they moved their hands across an interactive board, revealing images and narratives relating to the Indian freedom movement. His response clarified that the physical and digital components of such installations—for example, the 3D-modelingsoftware and hardware, scanning equipment and its resolution and the user interface—were more carefully designed and calibrated than the content they provided.
Contemporary cultural heritage (CH) is rife with digital innovation. The COVID pandemic accelerated this transformation as archivists and curators worked to develop content that would reach remote, locked-down audiences. Within significant limits, digital platforms can democratize and facilitate access to materials previously inaccessible. Instead of being physically siloed, digitized material—as data components and not just content on culture—can be reproduced, combined, and circulated infinitely to achieve a reach previously considered impossible. Accessibility and malleability remain one of the great boons of digital formats. But here, we consider the information economy of CH practice as it exists—and not its extraordinary and often hypothetical potential—in two, overlapping realms of digitized CH: for-profit business enterprises and academic side-hustles, related to more mainstream academic research.
In the former, questions of what is shared are often less significant than the appeal of the format. In the latter, innovation is often the result of short-term projects that languish, abandoned after project completion, and rarely find audiences. Our research builds on our individual experiences and the findings of a scoping exercise examining a number of India-based heritage projects conducted in 2021-22. It suggests the need for more careful consideration of the implications of transforming CH materials into forms of data; the change impacts everything from how we understand “originality” to the reliance on for-profit services to deliver heritage material to the public.
As digitized representations of CH and access to such formats become more widespread, are we, as CH practitioners and academics, giving enough thought to how digital technologies are reshaping the nature of CH and its audience? Beyond questions of wider reach, are we sufficiently acknowledging how these changes challenge a continued focus on originality and notions of academy as primary controllers of access to knowledge and its validity, both in research and practice?
Digitizing for Dissemination
In 2019, one of us—Deborah Sutton—developed a software platform, Safarnama, including an app and authored experiences around Delhi’s CH. The project subsequently extended to Karachi. Generating “original” content, such as audio-visual clips and old photos, to be hosted on the app platform, was key to its attractiveness and usefulness, but permissions proved tricky. Some collaborators who were initially keen to contribute content quietly withdrew, likely due to the unfamiliar format and unknown reach. The app format also raised other questions. Would incorporating content from non-digital but publishedscholarship require authorial permission or only acknowledgement?
In 2020, Krupa Rajangam held a sponsored incubation at the NSRCEL, a business incubator located at the Indian Institute of Management-Bangalore, to develop a web interface that would host geo-locationed stories of marginalized histories by drawing on both historical facts and lived experiences. Corporate mentors remained skeptical of her ability to source “original” content on an ongoing basis, i.e., content that was both authenticated and validated. They repeatedly advised her to focus on the format, user experience, and appeal for “mass markets” so her prototype would find audiences. Both projects equally raised questions over who would consume the content and what constitutes the public or audience.
Our exploratory surveys firmly established the divergence in interpreting both CH and digital technologies, which was not surprising. Some projects defined and treated CH as fixed pre-existing material, to be interpreted and presented to audiences through digital technologies. Others re-framed digital formats of CH as components of data, assembling, manipulating, and representing extant archival and other materials. The rest generated digitizedCH, effectively altering its nature. Typically, such projects dealt with more ephemeral or less conventional forms of CH.
Fundamental Transformations
Notions of originality remain central to art, architectural and art historical training, and CH practice. Digitization transforms the access and retrieval value of “original” material in physical archives, such as old maps and letters, much lauded in traditional “analog” scholarship, to use value as data. Once the end-user (audience) accesses this data (whether historical facts or stories), it becomes nothing more than bytes occupying valuable space, to be deleted once consumed rather than stored, making it easy to overlook or disregard the source and its context.
For example, in the Safarnama project, the app contained carefully collected and authenticated narratives on “partition memories” in Delhi and Karachi. However, the bite-sized media format meant that users would only explore content once, as snippets. This realization led the team to develop the software and incorporate the ability to download content, which at least meant that users could collect, organize and store (archive) the assembled media.
Digitization also takes away the materiality of the archive, making it more ephemeral. Non-digital materials through, and into which we render CH can (in endless combinations and cycles) be lost, forgotten, sold, recovered, collected, displayed, and stored. Such capacities of digital files are obvious, but maintaining access depends on varied and dynamic software ecologies for existence and sustained end-user access. Digital files created within one software-architecture can be incompatible with, and therefore rendered obsolete, by another. The ethos of software development is constant change.
In another paper, we examined questions of quantity, quality, and reusability of data related to digitization of building-crafts knowledge alongside CARE and FAIR principles of data management. The principles were proposed and adopted by an international consortium of scholars and industry, the former focused on responsible collection, use, and dissemination of data, especially related to vulnerable people and the latter on sustainable data management.
As an example, one AHRC project experimented with methods to capture detailed 3D images of heritage sites and structures in dynamic crowded environments. They used one set of methods to capture the interiors and another for the exteriors, hoping to merge both together and develop holistic imagery for audiences. This proved impossible at first due to issues of software compatibility. Once that was partially resolved, the new software couldn’t handle the sheer volume of data captured—and it was unclear where and for how long such volumes of data would be stored.
New realms of intellectual property remain fuzzy. While the content on digital platforms is governed by licensing and proprietary legal frameworks, it is often hosted on open platforms, through web repositories such as GitHub. Prima facie, such openness appears to challenge the proprietorial nature of archives and other repositories as keepers of knowledge. However, it raises a host of questions about how to maintain a critical understanding of archives.
Digitization may, and should, transform access but should it obliterate the regimes through which the materials were generated and organized and what’s included or excluded? For example, a local coordinator of one project that engaged with artists commented that digital technologies are typically used to document technical skills as forms of intangible heritage and develop artistencyclopedias, saying that “they are hardly used to interrogate the reality that many ‘traditional’ artists hail from marginalizedcastes.” Similarly, the local coordinator of another project that engaged with communities living in and around a protected heritage site commented on how digital technologies often end up being used to create a record of heritage structures without any reference to their day-to-day setting.
Any and all digital enterprise in CH, we argue, needs to integrate the ambition to use digital methods to not just present but also counter and interrogate the material, its creation, and purpose. Digital platforms and web- and app-based software are now able to manipulate and re-situate information in unprecedented ways. The novelty of such formats can displace original, provocative, and timely considerations of the material. Often, we are so taken by the visual and structural attributes of these formats, that we accept it at face value and lose sight of the tone and content of heritage as a curated message about the past and the present.
Alongside this, digital augmentations and iterations of CH, including storage, have significant financial and infrastructural implications. The creation and maintenance of digital platforms requires either developing “in-house” digital specialization or, more commonly, reliance on private, for-profit platforms. Paying for external provision introduces complexities. Funders, including the AHRC, struggle to devise guidance or policy in relation to software licensing. However, a persistent challenge to projects, and partnerships between academic and non-academic partners, is devising data and software strategies that subsist beyond the life of the funded-research project. Often, the adverse effects of the paucity of longer-term planning around IP issues, sustainability, and data archiving falls disproportionately on the non-academic stakeholder.
While digitization foregrounds the potential and promise of complete openness and equity, maybe this is lost in practice. Or digitization may merely mark the displacement of one set of ethics with another. There is a need for more careful consideration of the implications, complexities, and risks of taking CH materials out of boxes and off shelves and transforming and generating it into data files, which are, in turn, dependent on digital platforms to provide end-user access. However, the question remains of whether heritage-related disciplines are adequately prepared and willing to confront such new ways of working, which have begun to dislodge some of the privileges extant in current forms of research and practice.
Krupa Rajangam is nearing the end of her tenure as a Fulbright Fellow at the Historic Preservation Department, Weitzman School of Design, University of Pennsylvania. Her permanent designation is Founder-Director, Saythu…linking people and heritage, a professional conservation collective based in Bangalore, India.
B-422666.2 [archived PDF], Perimeter Security Partners, LLC—Costs, August 8, 2025
Perimeter Security Partners, LLC (PSP), a small business of Brentwood, Tennessee, requests that our Office recommend that it be reimbursed for the costs of filing and pursuing its protest challenging the issuance of a task order to Low Voltage Wiring, Ltd. (LVW), a small business of Colorado Springs, Colorado, under request for quotations (RFQ) No. W912DY-24-R-0008, issued by the Department of the Army, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (Corps), for preventative and corrective maintenance services for access control points at 19 Army installations in the northeast region of the United States. PSP argues that it should be reimbursed its protest costs because the agency unduly delayed taking corrective action in response to its clearly meritorious protest.
The Congressional Review Act (CRA) requires that before a rule can take effect, an agency must submit the rule to both the House of Representatives and the Senate, as well as the Comptroller General. CRA adopts the definition of “rule” under APA but excludes certain categories of rules from coverage. We conclude that the 2025 Policy Statement is a rule for purposes of CRA because it meets the APA definition of a rule, and no CRA exception applies. Therefore, the Policy Statement is a rule subject to CRA’s submission requirements.
