Alfredo Covaleda,
Bogota, Colombia
Stephen Guerin,
Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA
James A. Trostle,
Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut, USA
Least any of us think that Social Network Analysis is something new, please take the time to read this wonderful, albeit personal, history of the field. Edward O. Laumann, of the University of Chicago, has been swimming in these waters for more than 40 years. His address to the International Network of Social Network Analysis, 26th Annual Sunbelt Conference in Vancouver, Canada, April 2006, tells much about how we have arrived at the current level of SNASee “A 45-Year Retrospective of Doing Networks”http://www.insna.org/Connections-Web/Volume27-1/8.Laumann.pdf
Pete Weiss sends the following helpful tip to the CARR-L listserv:
Abstracted from Genie Tyburski's TVC-Alert list:
Use the search box above to query our database of resources for finding legal or factual information or information about companies or people. Use the site search engine to expand your query to other resources available on The Virtual Chase.
Company Information Guide – find annotated resources for conducting company research
People Finder Guide – find annotated resources for conducting people research
Legal Research Guide – find annotated resources for finding legal or factual information
Regular readers know that the IAJ has long been interested in the quality of the data in public records databases. The NY Times of 12 July 2006 carries a front-page story by Eric Lipton on just how bad the data is in the “National Asset Database.” As Lipton's story points out:
“The National Asset Database, as it is known, is so flawed, the inspector general found, that as of January, Indiana, with 8,591 potential terrorist targets, had 50 percent more listed sites than New York (5,687) and more than twice as many as California (3,212), ranking the state the most target-rich place in the nation….
“But the audit says that lower-level department officials agreed that some older information in the inventory “was of low quality and that they had little faith in it.
“The presence of large numbers of out-of-place assets taints the credibility of the data,” the report says.”
Sigh. This is not a new problem, or even one that we can hang on the Bush Administration. It started with the Clinton Administration in 1998. “In 1998, President Clinton issued Presidential Decision Directive No. 63 (PDD-63), Critical Infrastructure Protection, which set forth principles for protecting the nation by minimizing the threat of smaller-scale terrorist attacks against information technology and geographically-distributed supply chains that could cascade and disrupt entire sectors of the economy.” [Source here.]
Link to the PDF of the Inspector General's Report at http://www.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/politics/20060711_DHS.pdf
This week Mark Hartnett, of the Palm Beach Post, alerts us to a map he and his paper recently published, a map of the hometowns of the U.S. troops killed as a result of the U.S. invasion of Iraq and Afganistan. They did a similar map a year ago, but one that reflected the gross numbers of the dead from each city. This year they put those numbers in context by displaying the rate of deaths per 100,000 population. It makes a difference and raises new questions. Note that the height of the columns reflects, as Mark Hartnett points out in his comment below, the number of deaths while the color indicates deaths-per-100,000 residents ages 18-64.
Many of us have long-recognized that a top-flight team of news researchers is the marrow of any good news operation. So it is that we point you to a recent column in The Washington Post.
The Post's Unsung Sleuths
By Deborah HowellSunday, July 2, 2006; B06
The reporting that appears in The Post is supported by an infrastructure of research that readers do not see, except as credited in the occasional tag line at the end of a story.
Those tag lines don't begin to acknowledge the work done for reporters and readers by the News Research Center. The musty newspaper morgue of lore, brimming with crumbling clippings in tidy little envelopes, is now full of computers and researchers that Post journalists can't live without. Yes, there's still paper — about 7,500 books, 30 periodicals a month and 15 daily newspapers.
Center director Bridget Roeber said the researchers are “news junkies, who see themselves not just as librarians but journalists finding and analyzing original documents, tracking people down, finding leads, using obscure databases.” [more]
