News and Announcements

Data Video at Gapminder

By jajacobs

January 21, 2007

At Gapminder there is a link to a video of Hans Rosling’s TED Talk Recorded February, 2006 in Monterey, CA. Rosling is professor of international health at Sweden’s world-renowned Karolinska Institute, and founder of Gapminder, a non-profit that brings vital global data to life. The video is definitely worth watching! It is interesting technically as a demonstration of data-visualization that is way beyond what we usually see. But it is also interesting because of the content of the data and how Rosling uses data visualization to “debunk a few myths about the ‘developing’ world.

More on Open Data

By jajacobs

December 23, 2006

Bill Hooker has written a nice article about ensuring that the data behind published scientific literature are made openly available. Where are the data? Can I have them? What can I do with them? (17 Dec, 2006). He takes a practical approach based on the perspective of a researcher. His title says it all. …an Open Data addendum must at least answer my opening questions: it must point to the online, freely accessible location of the raw, un-hamburgered data; it should make clear that yes, you can have them; and it should state clearly what you can do with them.

New Database for Business Questions

By jajacobs

September 20, 2006

The MIT Dewey Research Advisor is a database of business and economic FAQs and answers. The focus is definitely business and economics, but for those areas it is a useful and easy to use resource for finding quick answers to common data (particularly aggregate data and time series data) and statistical reference questions. jajacobs

New Search Engine

By jajacobs

August 24, 2006

GovMine is a new search engine that might become useful in searches for data and statistics. Features that look particularly promising: categorized grouping of search results, including a category “Statistical Data” (try this sample search). I didn’t find this category frequently, but its appearance at all is tantalizing! a search of .gov sites relevance ranking (which they make a point of being different from “popularity”) boolean search operators “disambiguation” hints An article (Convera releases beta of gov’t search engine) says that it is an “engine designed to help U.

Intute: the Best of the Web

By San

July 19, 2006

Intute was launched on 13 July 2006 at an event held at the Wellcome Trust, London. Intute is the new face of the Resource Discovery Network (RDN), and is a free national service enabling lecturers, researchers and students to discover and access quality Internet resources. Intute exists to advance education and research by promoting the most intelligent use of the Internet. Caroline Williams, Executive Director of Intute said, “the environment in which we operate is rapidly changing.

Statistical software in the news?

By jajacobs

June 13, 2006

The Washington Post reports that the personal information recently stolen from the VA “was stored in a format that could make it difficult for thieves to use, according to an internal VA memo.” In the May 5 memo, VA privacy officer Mark Whitney wrote that the critical data “may not be easily accessible” because most of it – including names, birth dates and Social Security numbers – was stored in a specialized, standard format used for data manipulation and statistical analysis.

Blog the Conference!

By robin

May 25, 2006

Welcome to the 2006 IASSIST Conference in Ann Arbor! For those who can’t join in the fun, we (the Pubs committee and the Admin Committee) have decided it’s a good idea for us to blog the conference! (See San’s fine example below.) Use this post to comment with your thoughts on a session that really got you thinking. And, (IASSIST members only): become an editor if you would like to post more frequently - contact San.

ESS wins prestigious Descartes prize

By robin

January 17, 2006

The European Social Survey (ESS) has won the prestigious Descartes prize, awarded by the European Commission for “excellence in scientific research”. This is the first year that a social science project has won this prize. (from ESDS News)IASSIST-ers who attended the May 2005 conference in Edinburgh will remember the keynote speech by Roger Jowell, from the Centre for Comparative Social Surveys, City University, on ‘The Need for Rigour and Accessibility in Comparative Research.

New IASSIST Quarterly and 2006 Paper contest details

By San

December 15, 2005

The IASSIST Quarterly (IQ Vol. 28 issue 4) is now available on the web: The issue has articles about the following topics: Wikipedia. Oliver Watteler from the data archive (Zentralarchiv) in Cologne in Germany – part of GESIS – presents us for the fundamentals of Wiki: The Wikipedia is a Web-based encyclopedia that has quickly grown in substance and in use. It is a free and copyleft product to be used, read, updated and improved by anyone.

Papers from First E-Social-Science Conference Online

By San

August 29, 2005

The papers from the first conference on e-social science, which was held in late June of 2005 in Manchester, England, are now online. -Contributed by Jim Jacobs

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