We
have long thought that the newspaper industry fails itself by not
funding enough deep psychological research into why people buy, or
don't buy, its product.  Consider, for example, all the research
into what motivates people to by certain types of cars.  It sure
isn't because they need transportation.

It turn out that even that isn't digging deeply enough.  Recent
studies suggest that we could be doing more in terms of
neurochemistry.  The Telegraph, in the UK, reports….

“A
chemical found in under arm sweat could help to encourage men to buy
magazines, according to a new study out this week. 

“The research carried out on 120 students found that when men were
exposed to the pheremone androstenol they were more likely to buy
magazines. The research by Dr Michael Kirk-Smith, from the University
of Ulster and Dr Claus Ebster, from the University of Vienna did not
however find that there was any effect on women.

“Previous studies have found that women exposed to pictures of men
sprayed with androstenol found them more attractive but this is the
first time evidence has shown that consumer behaviour can be influenced
with pheremones.”



Source: The Telegraph newspaper

Nils Mulvad, one
of the early champions of analytic journalism in Europe and founder of the Danish Institute for Analytic Reporting, demo-ed
a fast web-scrapping tool at the IRE conference this week.  Web-scrapping?  It’s a way to get just the data you need from a web site that has
a dynamic search engine.  The FECinfo site is an example: the user enters
the search terms and the site’s server returns the desired results. 

As a one-off, that works OK.  But what if you need all the data on the
server?  Turn to “RoboSuite.”  It’s a point-and-shoot, build-your-own-script
application.  A good PERL coder can do
the same thing, of course, but if you can afford it, RoboSuite is a fast
solution to data harvesting.

While
Google digitizes the masterworks of English literature, a Seattle
company has begun digitizing newspapers from the smallest towns in the
U.S. and offering them on the web. SmallTownPapers
has been digitizing newspaper archives for free and giving them a
presence online, while preserving a rich – and searchable – historical
record. Through the project's website, browser can see an archived
newspaper as it was printed and can also search through articles and
advertisements, and look for photos.

Introduction to social network methods

Table of contents

This on-line textbook introduces many of the basics of formal approaches to the analysis of social networks. 
The text relies heavily on the
work of Freeman, Borgatti, and Everett (the authors of the UCINET software package). The materials here, and their
organization, were also very strongly influenced by the text of Wasserman and Faust, and by a graduate seminar
conducted by Professor Phillip Bonacich at UCLA.  Many other users have
also made very helpful comments and suggestions based on the first
version.   Errors and omissions, of course, are the responsibility
of the authors.

You are invited to use and redistribute this text freely
— but please acknowledge the source.

Hanneman,
Robert A. and Mark Riddle.  2005.  Introduction to social network
methods.  Riverside, CA:  University of California, Riverside (
published in digital form at http://faculty.ucr.edu/~hanneman/
)

Preface
1.   
Social network data
2.   
Why formal methods?
3.   
Using graphs to represent social relations
4.   
Working with Netdraw to visualize graphs
5.   
Using matrices to represent social relations
6.    Working with network data
7.    Connection
8.    Embedding
9.    Ego networks
10.  Centrality and power
11.  Cliques and sub-groups
12.  Positions and roles: The idea of equivalence
13.  Measures of similarity and structural equivalence
14.  Automorphic equivalence
15.  Regular equivalence
16.  Multiplex networks
17. Two-mode networks
18.  Some statistical tools
After word
Bibliography

Paul Walmsley, a programming wiz at IRE, has developed a
neat PERL script for doing a bit of Social Network Analysis online at the IRE
site.

“JustLooking” is a members-only tool that has been up for a
year, Walmsley said, but lacking publicity, it’s been pretty much
backstage.  The app is a relatively
basic, yet impressive tool whose results are designed to be integrated/imported
into UCInet, an early SNA tool.

“JustLooking” comes, so far, with two network templates to
save time in common situations.
  * Campaign Finance:
for tracking campaign dollars
  * Rolodex: for
entering basic networks of people and organizations

 Dig out your IRE membership number and check it out.

We were glad to see the release last week of the Carnegie/Knight
foundations' executive summary of their study, “Improving
The Education Of Tomorrow's Journalists.”  It’s often a good
sign when financial heavyweights like these organizations recognize there is a
problem and change needs to be forthcoming. 

And we are grateful the study’s conclusion reports that journalists need
to be trained to have greater analytic abilities.  This study, for
example, goes so far as to say, “Developing news judgment and analytical skills,
including the ability to separate fact from opinion and use
statistics   But the report, at least the summary,
fails to break any new ground (the Carnegie Foundation has tried
this before, at least with the J-school at Columbia Univ.) in articulating
just which statistics some or all journalists should be using.” 
(This is no surprise: the Accrediting Council on Education in
Journalism and Mass Communications, the accrediting body for journalism
education, says students should be able to “apply basic
numerical and statistical concepts,” but then fails to describe criteria an
accrediting team could use to measure that objective.)

But and but….

First, we are struck by the U.S.-centric perspective of the
study.  Yes, yes, “five leading U.S. research
universities with journalism schools.”  And, after all, Carnegie
and the Knight family made their fortunes in the U.S.  But the
Digital Revolution is global, and so should be many aspects of journalism
education and practice. 
Japanese police, for example, use the same numerals in their GIS systems
as do the Brits or Brazilians.  Ergo, journalists in all nations
need to know things like how GIS is being applied in their jurisdictions to
“monitor the centers of power” or understand and illustrate a variety of
phenomena.

Second, as much as we would like to take comfort in this research
effort, we can only conclude that it’s the same old Classic
Journalists talking to each other.  Consider this: 
The summary lists 40 individuals interviewed for the report. 
Any American journalist or journalism educator will recognize most of the
names because they are all high-profile individuals of a certain age,
individuals deeply invested in, it would seem, practicing and perpetuating
classic journalism, i.e. pre-Digital Age journalism.  (There is a
handful of major exceptions, people who have either been deeply involved in
practicing journalism in the new infosphere or learning to leverage the new
environment:  Michael Bloomberg, James Fallows, Richard Kaplan,
Donald E. Newhouse, and Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr.)

But by talking to 40 mostly high-profile types, along with these five
deans, what specific directions for change in journalism are likely to
result?  If the study’s efforts were thorough, interviewees would
have included people entrenched in managing information and data in the digital
infosphere.  People like Dave Winer, one of the early
inventors of blogging software, or Craig Newmark of “Craig’s List” or Andy Lehren at
NBC Dateline or Dan Gillmor,
formerly of the San Jose Mercury-News, or Rich
Meislin at The New York Times or just about anyone at Google.  All of these
people are changing the way journalism is practiced and delivered.

Third, we are taken aback by the rationale for the “Summer
Institute at ABC News” internships.  We can’t follow the logic
here.  We are told that all forms of journalism are in trouble in
terms of quality and readership/viewership.  Yet this initiative is
sending 10 carefully selected students into one of the very places that is in
trouble, ostensibly to learn something.  Huh? 

These students, and the future of journalism, would be far better served
if the ten were given financial support to spend a summer working as an
administrative assistant to a city manager in a medium-sized city; spend a
summer working with a crime analyst in a major city police department; spend a
summer working as an aide in the congressional IT division office; spend a
summer working in the field with Oxfam or Catholic Charities or similar
organizations; spend a summer working at Community Viz to learn how simulation
modeling can generate insights and tell stories; spend a summer working at WHO
or the CDC to learn how data is collected and analyzed.  Then, at
the end of the summer, have those students submit a how-to-implement-the-process
paper describing what they learned that can be applied to journalism and how
those lessons and skills could be taught in J-school.

Finally, we are concerned that the study seems to look at
journalism education as a unique species without appropriate attention to the
information environment, the rapidly changing environment, in which the species
lives.  On one hand, Hodding Carter III, president of the Knight
Foundation, seems to recognize the change:  “Virtually
everything in journalism is, at the moment, insufficient and in a state of
flux,” he said. “Basic principles do not change, but the environment in which
they must be applied is changing radically. So should the education of those who
must work within that environment.“  Yet the report of the
study so far doesn’t address these changing-environment issues in any specific
manner.

We hope that in the next phase, the foundations and deans consider
investigating issues like these:

· 
What proportion of a J-faculty has participated in a research
project in the past 24 months involving colleagues in other disciplines on the
same campus?  Or colleagues in other disciplines from any other
campus?  And how did those interdisciplinary participants organize and manage
the project in the digital environment?

·  What proportion of the J-faculty subscribes to listservs other
than those for their department, school or university?  If the
number is between one and six, how many of those are related to academic
disciplines other than journalism? 

·  What proportion of the J-faculty has attended a scholarly
conference in the past 24 months related to a discipline other than
journalism?

·   What proportion of the J-faulty has used a spreadsheet or database
to analyze data pertaining to a story the faculty member worked on or used a
spreadsheet or database to build a mini data base for personal or department
use?  What proportion of the J-faculty teaching writing or editing
courses have taught students to use a spreadsheet or database to analyze data
related to a story?

·  What proportion of the J-faculty has downloaded or installed a
computer utility in the past three months, just to see how it works and to
explore how it might be helpful to journalists?

          · 
What proportion of the J-faculty have posted their course syllabi
and calendars to a website, one designed to facilitate communication between and
among faculty and students?  What proportion of the J-faculty
typically expects their students to always submit written and imagery
assignments in digital form and via e-mail or similar
tools?

We do hope something comes out of this
initiative, but it’s taken two or three years to get to this point. 
Can democracy afford to wait much longer?

Griff
Palmer, of the San Jose Mercury-News, reminded us today of something
called a “DOD-compliant wiper.”  (Yeah, yeah.  Hold your
jokes.)  These software utilities are intended to really clean
data sets from hard drives.  Why do we care?  Read this piece, “Hard Disk Risk,” by  Simson Garfinkel wherein he does the equivalent of HD dumpster diving.

But here's the related message from Griff Palmer:



“Here's a by no means comprehensive list:



http://buy.cyberscrub.com/csutility/compare.html



I used an evaluation copy of BC Wipe and found it very easy to use. After installation, you can right-click on a file and choose “erase by wiping” from the pop-up menu. It does the ostensibly DOD-compliant wipe on the

file and also on the virtual memory.



If
you're serious about the subject, Peter Gutmann's seminal paper on the
topic is worthwhile reading, particularly the caveats about achieving
secure deletion from journaling filesystems (which NTFS is, I believe)
and RAID systems:



http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/secure_del.html



If
you search for “5220.22-m” and “dod 5200.28-std” you can find
information on software that claims to meet the standards. The search
will also turn up lots of technical info on the standards, themselves.“

From a story in the San Francisco Chronicle:



Does
this proposed legislation have implications for what we do?  For
example, what if your county is licensing tax assessor data to a
reseller?  Yet another barrier to public access to our data? 
How about what the good guys at http://www.fecinfo.com/ do, commercially, with the FEC data?



Wednesday, April 6, 2005 (SF Chronicle)

Another incident for UC

By David Lazarus

   The University of California has suffered yet another potential data breach, this one involving the names and Social Security numbers of about 7, 000 students, faculty and staff at the San Francisco campus.

   For Sen. Diane Feinstein, D-Calif., enough is enough. She told me Tuesday that she'll introduce federal legislation within the next few days requiring encryption of all data stored for commercial purposes.

   “What this shows is that there is enormous sloppy handling of personal data,” Feinstein said.

   This latest incident involving UCSF follows news that UC Berkeley lost control of personal info for nearly 100,000 grad students, alumni and applicants last month when a laptop computer was stolen from an unlocked

campus office.

   It also follows a flurry of other security lapses, including San Francisco's Wells Fargo, the nation's fourth-largest bank, experiencing no fewer than three data breaches due to stolen computers over the past year and a half….



More at http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/04/06/BUGEOC3L5N1.DTL

The
National Criminal Justice Reference service maintains a helpful page of
resources related to crime mapping and crime analysis.  See
http://virlib.ncjrs.org/lawe.asp?category=48&subcategory=79