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]
From The Chronicle of Higher Education:http://chronicle.com/temp/reprint.php?id=t1n20rynvsqvbk0g14g8pth0vlnbl1yd
Social scientists create maps of online interactions
Multimedia: Maps and audio charting human interactions in cyberspace
By JEFFREY R. YOUNG
Philadelphia
If the Internet is a new kind of social space, what does it look like?
That's a question of particular interest to social scientists eager to see what cyberspace might reveal about the nature of human behavior.
Researchers, after all, have long sought to map social groupings and interactions in the physical world. Now, with so much activity on computer networks, scientists can collect vast amounts of hard data on human behavior. Each blog points to other blogs in ways that reveal patterns of influence. Online chats can be tallied and parsed. Even the act of clicking on links can leave trails of activity like footprints in the sand….
“The (Ongoing) Vitality of Mythical Numbers<http://www.slate.com/id/2144508/ >This article serves as a valuable reminder that we should viewall statistics, no matter how frequently they are used inpublic arguments, with skepticism until we know who producedthem and how they were derived.” From: Neat New Stuff I Found This Week <http://marylaine.com/neatnew.html> Copyright, Marylaine Block, 1999-2006.
Steve Bass, a PC World columnist, had an item this week that reminds us that a good analytic journalist is always thinking about what is NOT in the data. He writes:
Risky Business: Stealth Surfing at Work
Not long after I told my buddy about Anonymizer, I heard from another friend, an IT director for a fairly large company. It may not be such a good idea to surf anonymously at the office:
“I recently had an employee, an MIS employee at that, fired. He was using Anonymizer at work. We have a tracking system (Web Inspector) and I kept noticing that he was leaving no tracks.
“I consulted with my supervisor and he decided that I should analyze the employee's system. I found footprints, hacking, and a batch file he used to delete all Internet traces. So I sent the system off to forensics and they found all the bits, each and every one. We're now in legal limbo. The employee is being fired, not for the hacking or the batch file, but for using the Anonymizer.
“Thought maybe you'd be interested in hearing about the dangers of using the Anonymizer in the workplace. They claim the Anonymizer hides your tracks at work–but I guess not all of them.”
–Name Withheld, Network and Computer Systems Administrator
I asked George Siegel, my network guru, what he thought. Here's what he said: “It's interesting to note how the user was initially discovered — by the absence of anything incriminating. Network professionals have logs showing just about everything that goes on and they look for any deviation from the norm. I can always tell who is up to no good… their computers are scrupulously clean.“
From the good folks at Internet Scout:
Kudos this morning to National Public Radio's reporting on a Duke professor who thought the numbers on Chinese engineering grads seemed a little off kilter.
by Adam Davidson
Morning Edition, June 12, 2006 · A report cited in The New York Times and quoted on the House floor claimed China graduates nine times as many engineers as the U.S. Skeptical, a Duke professor had students check the numbers.
