Issue link: http://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/111663
Europe Launches ���Board-Ready��� Database THE EUROPEAN BUSINESS Schools Women on Boards Initiative has launched a searchable database that highlights women in senior executive positions with the skill sets to serve on corporate boards. The Financial Times NonExecutive Directors��� Club oversees the Global Board Ready Women (GBRW) via a group on the LinkedIn network. GBRW now includes more than 8,000 pro���les of women who have served as former board chairs, C-suite executives, controlling shareholders of family companies, directors of government or nonpro���t agencies, entrepreneurs, or academics. The goal is to help connect corporations with women who have the right kind of experience to serve on their boards. The database is one response to the European Commission���s new proposed legislation to achieve greater gender equity on corporate boards. The legislation would require European companies to ���ll at least 40 percent of nonexecutive board positions with women by 2020. Currently, women ���ll 15 percent of non-executive positions and 8.9 percent of executive positions on European boards. For more information about the initiative, visit www.linkedin.com/groups/Global-Board-ReadyWomen-4677558/about. Tweet Archive Not Ready For Research IN APRIL 2010, the U.S. Library of Congress entered an agreement with Twitter to archive public tweets sent through the service since 2006. Using Gnip, Twitter���s delivery agent, the Library of Congress automatically receives tweets in real time and organizes them into hourly ���les���which adds up to nearly 500,000,000 tweets each day. So far, more than 400 researchers have requested access to the ���les, but the Library has not opened the archive to them because the technology is not yet available to support ef���cient searches. ���It is clear that technology to allow for scholarship access to large data sets is not nearly as advanced as the technology for creating and distributing that data,��� the Library noted in a public statement. ���Even the private sector has not yet implemented cost-effective commercial solutions because of the complexity and resource requirements of such a task.��� Only in December did Twitter roll out a feature that allowed users to access an archive of their own tweets (it���s not yet available to all users). But creating an archive of all the tweets ever written? That���s a much more sophisticated problem, noted Twitter���s CEO Dick Costolo in a July 2012 interview with The New York Times. ���It���s a different way of architecting search, going through all tweets of all time,��� he said. ���You can���t just put three engineers on it.��� A single search of the Library���s current archive can take up to 24 hours. The Library and Gnip are now working to develop a functional research-focused search interface. As of December 1, 2012, the Library of Congress had archived 170 billion tweets���133.2 terabytes of compressed data���for the historical record. BizEd March/April 2013 63