-taken from Wired.com
Visit Social Dimension, a blog devoted to the math behind understanding society and civilization. Mathematics can be used to understand all aspects of our society: sports, movies, history, and even how ideas spread around the world.
Hysterically funny for a stressful time of year.
Graduate School Barbie comes in two forms: Delusional Master’s Barbie (TM) and Ph.D. Masochist Barbie (TM).
Visit http://ceejandem.blogspot.com/2010/02/graduate-school-barbie-tm.html for the full description (and an excuse to procrastinate on that final paper…!)
The below is taken directly from: Bates Information Services, www.BatesInfo.com/tips . Author is Mary Ellen Bates, of Bates Information Services, Inc. Reprinted with permission.
Hitwise, a firm that studies web market share and consumer activity, reported that the “success rate” of searches was significantly higher for Bing (80%) than Google (68%).
Google has made its search results page attractive to info pros and researchers; the left margin is full of ways to filter or spin your search. Try it on blogs! Search discussion groups! Limit to the last six months! Narrow it to your local area! It’s hard to resist the impression that you are conducting a comprehensive search as you work your way through all of Google’s search options.
Bing has some search features worth considering, though. In addition to the usual specialized searches — news, images, video, map and shopping — it has an interesting Visual Search <http://www.bing.com/browse?FORM=L8SP19> feature. Right now, there are 90 “galleries”, collections of information on topics ranging from world leaders to US stocks and the top Twitterers. Within each gallery is a browsable collection of images representing each item in the collection; in the World Leaders gallery, for example, there are close to 350 photos of heads of state, each linked to a profile compiled from the CIA World Factbook. You can further filter the gallery by region, title or type of leader, or skim the images to identify a particular person. These galleries may turn into valuable tools for quick answers, particularly if info pros could create their own galleries.
text taken from Pinterest: A Social Catalog, by Erin E. Templeton. The Chronicle of Higher Education, accessed July 5, 2011.
Pinterest is an electronic bulletin board that allows users to pin images from around the web onto one communal space. Users can manage several different categories on their boards, and you can use either the default categories (eg. “For the Home,” “Recipes,” “Quotes,” etc.) or create your own.
“If you talk in your sleep, don’t mention my name.”
Isn’t that a great line? This 1911 recording is now available along with many others thanks to The National Jukebox, a Library of Congress project which which makes historical sound recordings available to the public free of charge.
Learn more>>http://www.loc.gov/jukebox/
Goodbye 3 x 5 cards. Zotero is a free, easy-to-use tool to help you collect, organize, cite, and share your research sources. It lives right where you do your work—in the web browser itself. Collect, organize, cite, synch, collaborate (text from Zotero).
the below is taken from “Amazon Cloud Drive and Cloud Player: A Hands-On Tour,” By Jared Newman, PCWorld , Mar 29, 2011 9:01 AM.
Amazon’s doing its part to usher in cloud computing with Amazon Cloud Drive and Cloud Player. Users get 5 GB of free storage for a general purpose online storage locker and a Web-based music player for desktop computers and Android phones.
Learn More:
from Village Voice, from YouTube, from Bloomberg.
Have fun using the new Google N-gram viewer to explore cultural trends.
http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/
Read the guide linked below for good tips and parameters for using the N-gram viewer.
http://www.culturomics.org/Resources/A-users-guide-to-culturomics
Interested in doing a little genealogical research to prepare you for your mystifying family encounters over the holiday season?
One free source includes:
Commercial sources are:
-ancestry.com
-footnote.com
-genealogybank.com