A while ago we participated in an on-line project to test the small world hypothesis — the idea that people are connected by only six degrees of separation.



Some of the results from that project have been published in the journal Science.  You can download a copy of the results here, http://smallworld.columbia.edu/results.html and also examine the methodology.



This study has some interesting implications, not just about “social connectedness” but how one can use the internet and, Gasp!, “self-selecting respondents” to do what seems to be valid social science research, at least of a specific sort.

By Alex Knott

“WASHINGTON, April 7, 2005 —
Special interests and the lobbyists they employ have reported spending,
since 1998, a total of almost $13 billion to influence Congress, the
White House and more than 200 federal agencies. They've hired a couple
thousand former government officials to influence federal policy on
everything from abortion and adoption to taxation and welfare. And
they've filed—most of the time—thousands of pages of disclosure forms
with the Senate Office of Public Records and the House Clerk's Office….”

The folks at LII (“Librarian's Index to the Internet“) delivered good works again this week.



jux2

———————————————————————-

  
Test version for this “comparative research tool” designed to answer
these questions: how different are the major Internet search engines,
and is one any better than the others? The site is a search engine
aggregator that simultaneously queries Yahoo, Google, and Ask Jeeves.
Results include the rankings from the various search engines and other
comparative and statistical

information.

* http://www.jux2.com

* http://www.jux2.com/stats.php



Also:


Marion Brechner Citizen Action Project (CAP)

———————————————————————-

  
This project's goal is to allow citizens “to better understand public
access to local government information in all 50 states.”

  
Includes ratings that are based on the analysis of statutes,
constitutions, and case law. Also includes summaries of “sunshine”
laws, and comparisons of state laws. The “I can help you get started”
section is not very useful; use the categories to the left instead.
From the University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications.

* http://www.citizenaccess.org



Copyright 2005 by Librarians' Index to the Internet, LII.

The Search Engine Report is yet another valuable tool that serious researchers use as a “heads up” device.  It's a monthly newsletter that covers developments in the search engine industry [Industry?  Who would have thought it?] and changes to the Search Engine Watch web site, http://searchenginewatch.com/.  You can subscribe at http://searchenginewatch.com/sereport/

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

Elliott Parker, and the Journet listserv, tips us to a NewScientist.com report….
“Governments and big business like to indulge in media spin, and that means knowing what is being said about them. But finding out is becoming ever more difficult, with thousands of news outlets, websites and blogs to monitor.
“Now a British company is about to launch a software program that can automatically gauge the tone of any electronic document. It can tell whether a newspaper article is reporting a political party’s policy in a positive or negative light, for instance, or whether an online review is praising a product or damning it. Welcome to the automation of PR. ” http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn7210&feedId=online-news_rss20)–at
Interesting perhaps in its nuance, but hardly new in concept. Here at the IAJ we've long been impressed with the work done at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory around “information visualization.”
“Information Visualization is the direct visualization of a representation of selected features or elements of complex multi-dimensional data. Data that can be used to create a visualization includes text, image data, sound, voice, video – and of course, all kinds of numerical data.” See http://www.pnl.gov/infoviz/about.html and http://www.pnl.gov/infoviz/technologies.html

As believers in the RRAW-P process well know, it all good journalism starts with the first “R” – Research. And good research starts with regular tips and pointers from professional researchers, a class to which journalists are usually adopted cousins. That’s why we look forward to Thursdays, when e-mail newsletters come from some of the best in the business.