Google Scholar

INFO SCIENCE: Another great tool from Google, Google Scholar searches stuff like peer-reviewed papers, books, and the like.



Hey, look, it's my brother's paper, "Solvent-resistant photocurable liquid fluoropolymers for microfluidic device fabrication." Those chemists, always making everyone else feel dumb. ;-)

30 Million Newspaper Pages Online

INFO SCIENCE: The Library of Congress is putting 30,000,000 newspaper pages online over the next several years.

The government promises anyone with a computer will have access within a few years to millions of pages from old newspapers, a slice of American history to be viewed now only by visiting local libraries, newspaper offices or the nation's capital.



The first of what's expected to be 30 million digitized pages from papers published from 1836 through 1922 will be available in 2006.

I must say, this is awesome. However, the current interface leaves a bit to be desired.

World Doesn't Trust Politicians

Data: Global feelings about business and government are shown to be pretty poor in a recently conducted global survey.

Worldwide, 63 percent of the 50,000 people questioned believe politicians are dishonest while 43 percent think the same term applies to business leaders, according to the survey, titled "The Voice of the People."



Some 52 percent feel politicians behave unethically, and 39 percent believe the same of business chiefs. But while 39 percent think politicians are not capable or competent, only 22 percent viewed their business counterparts in the same way.



Least trusted by their peoples, the survey indicated, are the political leaders of Latin America, West Asia and Africa with dishonesty ratings of 87 percent for the first, 84 percent for the second and 82 percent for the third.



Although in Western Europe as a whole 46 percent of the survey sample described their politicians as dishonest, in Germany 76 percent held that view, while 70 percent of Germans thought business leaders were dishonest too.

Hmmm, I wonder what kind of confidence interval this study has. A quick and dirty calculation shows that they sampled 0.0000083% of the population size. In other words, each person surveyed represents 120,482(*) peoples' opinions.



This sounds more like research looking for trends rather then looking for a precise figure of public sentiment.



Update: Migurski comments:

One thing to remember is that the relative confidence level of a truly random sample increases quickly with population size at first, then much more slowly. Or, as my intro-to-stats professor explained in college: if you know your sample is random, you may never need more than 1000 data points to represent any size population.



So the question is: how did they choose survey participants?

Good point. I wonder how one goes about finding a truley radom sampling of the entire population of the planet? I'm glad I didn't work on that study. :-)

TiVo / Congress Suxx0rz

INFO TECHNOLOGY: Want to skip TV commercials? Then you're going to have to skip Tivo too. The company has decided that your Tivo interface is a great spot for banner ads. Ugh, banner ads, the most annoying and ineffective ads on Earth. Wtf Tivo?

Coming soon to the standalone TiVo OS: when you hit fast forward to skip past commercials, small banner ads will show up on your screen. You'll be able to click them to get more info, see an infomercial, or send your home address details to get more info about a product mailed to you.

I was thinking of buying a new Tivo for Christmas, but I sure won't consider it anymore.



In other news, the MPAA is pressuring congress to make fastforwarding through commercials illegal.

Several lobbying camps from different industries and ideologies are joining forces to fight an overhaul of copyright law, which they say would radically shift in favor of Hollywood and the record companies and which Congress might try to push through during a lame-duck session that begins this week.

Well, if either of these stories comes to pass, it'll be a good day to be a BitTorrent user. Honestly, it's like the MPAA and Television industry wants to drive their customers away. We all know how well being unabashedly anti-customers has worked out for the RIAA.

GIS Bonanza!

VISUAL COMMUNICATION: Well, it's been a few days since I last blogged. Basically, I've been busy with a big project of my own (I'll be posting deliverables here as they become available), class work and work work.



While I've been seeing the litany of election visualizations out there, I didn't want to just re-blog the already blogged-to-death. But I found these comprehensive visualizations a few days back and thought they were interesting. Of course, they were presented in Flash (ugh) so I stripped them out and put them here in Jpg format.



So, in short, if you want GIS readouts, you gott'em baby. If you don't have a clear and comprehensive understanding of the US by the end of this post, I've failed! ;-)























Richest Counties (By average wage):



Poorest Counties (By % below poverty line):





















Voting Type:

Red State, Blue State

INFO VISUALIZATION: BoingBoing posts this map:

Reader Jeff Culver in Seattle says:



"I was thinking today about how the 'red v. blue' states graphic is really misleading considering the slim margins that the candidates won some of those states by, so I sat down and created the map that's attached. In the dozens of hours I've been watching the news I haven't seen one like it, but thought that you and the BoingBoing readers might find it interesting. I think it definitely portrays our fellow states far differently than the extreme way we've been seeing to date."

The winner take all electoral college has to go.

The 5 Stages of Grief

ASSEMBLEME:



* DENIAL

* ANGER

* BARGAINING

* DEPRESSION

* ACCEPTANCE



I think I hit acceptance this morning. Back to your regularly scheduled blog...

Dems and Divorce Data

DATA: The Boston Globe is running an op-ed that shows the hypocrisy of the Bible Belt lecturing the rest of the country about the sanctity of marriage.

The state with the lowest divorce rate in the nation is Massachusetts. At latest count it had a divorce rate of 2.4 per 1,000 population, while the rate for Texas was 4.1.



But don't take the US government's word for it. Take a look at the findings from the George Barna Research Group. George Barna, a born-again Christian whose company is in Ventura, Calif., found that Massachusetts does indeed have the lowest divorce rate among all 50 states. More disturbing was the finding that born-again Christians have among the highest divorce rates.



The Associated Press, using data supplied by the US Census Bureau, found that the highest divorce rates are to be found in the Bible Belt. The AP report stated that "the divorce rates in these conservative states are roughly 50 percent above the national average of 4.2 per thousand people." The 10 Southern states with some of the highest divorce rates were Alabama, Arkansas, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Texas. By comparison nine states in the Northeast were among those with the lowest divorce rates: Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Vermont.

Again, sorry for the light posting. With the election, my personal project, educational projects, and work I've been a little too busy for blog land. I'll be back again shortly.

Edu Hits On Electoral-Vote.com

DATA: How politically active is your school? The University of Washington takes third place by this not-so-indicative-of-reality metric: .edu hits on Electoral-Vote.com.

1 - 4431 - harvard.edu

2 - 3782 - umn.edu

3 - 3087 - washington.edu

4 - 2901 - columbia.edu

5 - 2428 - yale.edu

This list is just of raw hits though; it's not adjusted for size. Harvard is just under 20,000 students and Columbia is just over 20,000, but the UW is just shy of 40,000 students -- so per capita (per studenti?) we're not so hot. And the University of Minnesota? Just under 50,000 students. That's just shy of Ohio State University's 50,995 -- which I hear is the largest university in the US. Damn there's a lot of students out there.

Life vs. Bloging

ASSEMBLEME: It's going to be a slow couple days. Working with MoveOn is taking more of my time then I originally thought. Add school and work, and you have a busy busy bee. I'll be posting only occasionally through November 3rd.