“On 20 October, 2010 [20.10.2010] the World will celebrate the first World Statistics Day, to raise awareness of the many achievements of official statistics premised on the core values of service, professionalism, and integrity.” For more information and resources, see: http://unstats.un.org/unsd/wsd/
Michael Witt, assistant professor of library science and interdisciplinary research librarian at Purdue University, has been awarded a Fulbright scholarship. He will spend January to May of 2011 at the Bibliotheca Alexandria in Egypt. Michael’s research focuses, in part,on the roles of librarians in data curation and managing electronic resource collections. See this Purdue Libraries June 16 press release for all the details.
It appears that the Federal Government has decided to no longer have the mandatory long form in the upcoming census (2011). This is the list of detailed questions filled out by about 20% of households. It will be replaced with another voluntary survey. This has many potential implications, especially for those using the census ’longitudinally’. It may have some positive spinoffs, since the replacement has a potentially larger sample size. The disturbing part is that we are not aware of any consultation with the research community.
Welcome to the new (May, 2010) IASSIST website, based on Drupal open source technology and hosted by LIS-host. The new logo and website artwork was commissioned by the Publications Chair, Walter Piovesan, and done by Josh Laidlaw, from British Columbia. Harrison Dekker, from University of California-Berkeley, is our ‘drupal guru’ who has done the lion’s share of the work, porting over the old content and setting up the new format.
In the March 27, 2010 issue of Science News, this article talks about how “widespread misuse of statistical methods makes science more like a crapshoot”. The problem appears to be based in the misunderstanding and misuse of the concept of statistical significance. The comments at the end of the article make interesting reading, as do those at the end of the Slashdot posting on the same article.
Congratulations to IASSIST members Kevin Schürer and Matthew Woollard! Professor Schürer has announced he’ll be leaving the directorship of the UK Data Archive in order to take up a new post at the University of Leicester as Pro-Vice Chancellor of Research later this year. Dr. Woollard, currently Associate Director and Head of Digital Preservation and Systems, will become Director-Designate from the beginning of March 2010. Read more at UKDA news.
The US Open Government Directive, released on December 8, 2009, instructs all federal agencies to provide high-value information to the public online in open, accessible, machine-readable formats. This adds to the momentum already in place at Data.gov to “increase public access to high value, machine readable datasets generated by the Executive Branch of the Federal Government.” The Open Knowledge Foundation blog describes progress to date and milestones to come. The UK government also recently announced similar plans to open up data, and the imminent launch of a new Data.
U-M’s Gutmann to head NSF Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences Directorate, University of Michigan News Service, July 27, 2009. Gutmann, who specializes in historical demography and population-environment relationships, currently directs the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research at the U-M Institute for Social Research (ISR). He begins his NSF position Nov. 2. Jim Jacobs
There was a lot of hype when the new search engine WolframAlpha was launched earlier this year. An article in the current issue of Technology Review does a better job of explaining how it works and how it fits in with other search engines. It notes that the numeric information it uses is “curated” by Wolfram|Alpha employees – by which they mean the data are selected and acquired, not just contributed as with sites like Swivel.
As you may have heard during last week’s wonderful IASSIST meeting in Tampere, there are still spaces available in the ICPSR Summer Program course on DDI, to be held at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, on July 13-16. The course is titled “Documenting Data Using DDI 3.0: Supporting Research, Collection Management, and Access,” and instructors are Wendy Thomas (Minnesota Population Center, University of Minnesota) and Arofan Gregory (Open Data Foundation).
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