New E-Resource: Handbook of Statistics

From the Penn Libraries News:

Handbook of Statistics is now available online to the Penn Community. The Handbook devotes single volumes to a specific topic in statistics. Special emphasis is placed upon applications-oriented techniques, with the applied statistician as the primary reading audience. Seven Penn authors have contributed to this handbook series. Topics covered include:

Bayesian Thinking, Modeling & Computation	Robust Inference
Bioenvironmental & Public Health Statistics	Sample Surveys: Design
Computational Statistics	Sample Surveys: Inference and Analysis
Design & Analysis of Experiments	Sampling
Econometrics	Signal Processing & its Applications
Environmental Statistics	Statistical Methods in Biological & Medical Sciences
Epidemiology & Medical Statistics	Statistical Methods in Finance
Order Statistics: Applications	Statistics in Industry
Order Statistics: Theory & Methods	Stochastic Processes: Modeling & Simulation
Psychometrics	Survival Analysis
Quality Control & Reliability	Time Series in the Frequency Domain
Reliability	Time Series in the Time Domain

Media Cloud, MemeTracker, and PEJ

I've written here about Media Cloud before, but thought I'd revisit since the August 4 New York Times profile. To review with the assessment of NYT writer Patricia Cohen, Media Cloud "tracks hundreds of newspapers and thousand of web sites and blogs, and archives the information in a searchable form. The database at mediacloud.org will eventually enable researchers to search for key people, places and events--from Michael Jackson to the Iranian elections--and find out precisely when, where and how frequently they are covered...the findings, which can be graphed or mapped, can demonstrate the evolution of a report and variations in coverage." Harvard law professor, Yochai Benkler, sees Media Cloud as the "next generation of tools that actually look at what people are saying," as opposed to the fairly exhausted method of link analysis which can only track what sites people click on and infer influence from that.

But the main reason I bring up Media Cloud again, and this article in particular, is that the article mentions some other media trackers on the block, namely MemeTracker (from Cornell University).

MemeTracker builds maps of the daily news cycle by analyzing around 900,000 news stories and blog posts per day from 1 million online sources, ranging from mass media to personal blogs.We track the quotes and phrases that appear most frequently over time across this entire spectrum. This makes it possible to see how different stories compete for news and blog coverage each day, and how certain stories persist while others fade quickly.

Click into their website to see a colorful graph showing the frequency of the top 50 quotes in the news and blogs over time, during the U.S. presidential election. These findings come from a paper by the creators of MemeTracker that, according to the NYT, "was hailed by experts as a landmark piece of work."

J. Leskovec, L. Backstrom, J. Kleinberg. Meme-tracking and the Dynamics of the News Cycle. ACM SIGKDD Intl. Conf. on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, 2009.

Another news-coverage index cited in the NYT piece is the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism, which tracks leading media outlets.

Citizen Journalism E-Resources

Searcher Magazine does a series on user-generated content and this month's installment is on citizen journalism. As author Nicholas Tomaiuolo points out, CitJ, is also referred to as open source, grassroots, networked or distributed journalism, so you have a compliment of key words to keep in mind if you're searching this trend in databases. The full article is available at the ASC Library (see me) but Information Today (publisher) provides a handy list of the urls appearing in the article at its website.

These URLs appear in the article: UCONTENT: CITIZEN JOURNALISM by Nicholas Tomaiuolo Instruction Librarian, Central Connecticut State University Searcher, the Magazine for Database Professionals Vol. 17, No. 9 • October 2009

http://fort-greene.blogs.nytimes.com http://maplewood.blogs.nytimes.com/ http://timespeople.nytimes.com/home http://online.wsj.com/community http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree http://www.reddit.com/ http://digg.com/ http://www.topix.com/ http://www.newsvine.com/ http://www.courant.com/community/ http://www.kcnn.org/citmedia_sites REFERENCES http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/bestoftv/2009/ 06/23/gps.social.media.iran.cnn?iref=videosearch http://www.mediaweek.com/mw/content_display/news/ digital-downloads/broadband/e3i71cdc4be5311379d1ed5a4d5aa4437b0 http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/08/07/ 060807fa_fact1?currentPage=all http://www.britannica.com/blogs/2008/04/when-i-hear- the-term-citizen-journalist-i-reach-for-my-pistol-the-blogging-rage/ http://www.netmag.co.uk/zine/discover-interview/andrew-keen http://www.stateofthemedia.org/2009/printable_special_chapter.htm http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2006/ may/31/pressandpublishing.business http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/06/16/iran.twitter.facebook/ index.html?iref=newssearch#cnnSTCVideo http://twitter.com/EthanZ/status/2333139296 CITIZEN JOURNALISM IS THE MAIN SOURCE OF CONTENT http://www.allvoices.com/ http://www.cjreport.com/ http://globalvoicesonline.org/ http://www.nowpublic.com/ http://english.ohmynews.com/ http://www.yourarlington.com/ U-CONTENT COMPONENTS OF LARGER NEWS SITES http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/talking_point/default.stm http://www.cbseyemobile.com/ http://www.ireport.com/ http://ureport.foxnews.com/ http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6639760 http://fort-greene.blogs.nytimes.com/ http://maplewood.blogs.nytimes.com/ http://www.newsvine.com/ http://news.yahoo.com/you-witness-news SITES WITH A LOCAL FOCUS THAT ACCEPT CONTENT SUBMISSIONS FROM USERS http://www.chitowndailynews.org/ http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/citizen-journalism http://www.courant.com/community/ http://www.minnpost.com/ http://www.newwest.net/ LEGACY NEWS SITES WITH MARGINAL USER INTERACTION http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree http://online.wsj.com/community http://timespeople.nytimes.com/ CITIZEN AGGREGATION SITES http://digg.com/ http://www.reddit.com/ http://www.topix.com/ THE REST OF THE STORY http://news.google.com/archivesearch/advanced_search http://www.globalvoicesonline.org/2006

Mobile Marvels (Special report in The Economist)

The September 24 issue of The Economist devotes a section to mobile phones in developing countries. The multi-article report is called Mobile Marvels: A Special Report on Telecoms in Emerging Markets. The Economist is available from Penn Libraries' E-Resources.

In the report:
The mother of invention: How a luxury item became a tool of global development
Up, up and Huawei: Huge strides in China
Beyond voice: New uses for mobile phones
Internet for the masses: Mobile-phone access will soon be universal; the next task is to do the same for the internet

October CommQuote

Sarah Nardi's comment on the virtual lives of Japanese youth in the November/December (#86) Adbusters on The Virtual/Natural World:

"In his seventh book, Last Child in the Woods, journalist Richard Louv speaks to a young boy who sums up the sentiment of younger generations with one sentence: "I like to play indoors better 'cause that's where all the electrical outlets are." Louv cites several studies-one shows children are better able to identify Japanese cartoon characters than common animals and plants; another reports that the radius from the home which children were able to roam freely was nine times greater in 1970 than today -as evidence of a nature deficit disorder. He argues that disconnecting children from the natural world, through overwrought parenting, urbanization and a reliance on electronic distraction, has resulted in generations of children prone to obesity, depression and attention deficit disorder. Their intellectual, creative and even physical development is stymied by a sedentary existence. Far from striking out into nature and discovering the world and themselves, they are leashed to their home by cords-seemingly as umbilical as they are electrical."--Sarah Nardi

IZI-Datenbank.de

IZI-Datenbank.deIZI-Datenbank.de is the literature database of the International Central Institute for Youth and Educational Television (IZI). This international bilingual (English/German) database gathers research on

* children's television
* youth television
* educational television

The IZI documentation center researches, collects, and uses controlled vocabulary for indexing internationally relevant sources (books, journal articles, university publications, research reports, conference papers and grey literature).

The database is updated regularly. A search for our own Dr. Amy Jordan results in 25 documents ranging from 1992 to 2008, more hits than the search I did on her name in EBSCO's Communication and Mass Media Complete (12 hits). For students and researchers of children and youth television, this database should definitely not be overlooked. Some of the best things in life are open source!