Open Culture

... is "your guide to smart media":

Open Culture explores cultural and educational media (podcasts, videos, online courses, etc.) that’s freely available on the web, and that makes learning dynamic, productive, and fun. We sift through all the media, highlight the good and jettison the bad, and centralize it in one place. Trust us, you’ll find engaging content here that will keep you learning and sharp. And you will find it much more efficiently than if you spend your time searching with Google, Yahoo or iTunes.

Here's a nice list of "Free Online Courses from Great Universities", organized by subject, you can download as podcasts.

Social Research Update

... is published quarterly by the Department of Sociology at the UK's University of Surrey. Previous issues include articles on "Computer Assisted Personal Interviewing," "Telephone interviewing," "Visual research methods," and "Using e-mail as a research tool."

Overcoming Bias blog

Overcoming Bias is a blog from the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University:

How can we better believe what is true? While it is of course useful to seek and study relevant information, our minds are full of natural tendencies to bias our beliefs via overconfidence, wishful thinking, and so on. Worse, our minds seem to have a natural tendency to convince us we that are aware of and have adequately corrected for such biases, when we have done no such thing.

In this forum we discuss whether and how we might avoid this fate, by spending a bit less effort on each specific topic, and a bit more effort on the general topic of how to be less biased. Here we discuss common patterns of bias and self-deception, statistical and other formal analysis tools, computational and data-gathering aids, and social institutions which may discourage bias and encourage its correction. Other topics may be discussed to the extent they exemplify important biases and correction issues.

Institutional Review Board Watch

... describes its reason for being this way:

Institutional review boards have been set up at nearly all research institutions in the US, to protect the welfare of human research participants.

Over the past decade, IRB's have grown greatly in power and range of authority. The home institutions have, however, largely abrogated their responsiblity to oversee and control the procedures followed by IRB's. As a consequence, the IRB's have increasingly harrassed researchers and slowed down important research, without protecting any human research participants.

The purpose of this site is to chronicle the abuses by IRB's.

I'd say one of the first rules of being a watchdog is to explain who you are, which this site doesn't do as far as I can see. Or at the very least, you should explain why you can't explain who you are.

I learned of this site from a posting on Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science, which agrees the process can "get a bit Kafka-esque."

Transparency = less corruption

The Social Science Statistics blog writes about a Brazilian study that concludes "the dissemination of information on corruption, which is facilitated by media, does indeed have a detrimental impact on the incumbent’s electoral performance."

Digital History Hacks blog

I learned about How to Read a Book, mentioned previously, on Digital History Hacks, a blog about applying a geek's tools to history. The author is William J. Turkel, an assistant professor at the University of Western Ontario. If journalism truly is the first rough draft of history, then journalists have something to learn from historians. Posts I liked included "Teaching Young Historians to Search, Spider and Scrape" and "On N-gram Data and Automated Plagiarism Checking." And check out his recently posted "Readings for a Field in Digital History."

Injecting science into the social

When I was a political science and economics major in the early 1980s, both fields typically constructed elaborate theories on sand -- whether it was Marxists spinning elaborate superstructures whose inner contradictions soon became only too apparent, or economists building economic models that always assumed away everything interesting and difficult about the world. It's heartening, therefore, to read that both fields are becoming more empirical, a trend driven by cheap computers and the vast quantities of data now being generated:

The quantitative social sciences are in the midst of a revolution in understanding the world and solving real problems. A dramatic increase in progress is now achievable because: 1) changes in technology enable us to collect and store unprecedented amounts of far more informative data about human populations and institutions; 2) new policies encourage the collection of data and its provision to researchers, including the computerization and automation of many government services, new data collection requirements, e.g., the No Child Left Behind Act, and the growing movement in science to make data publicly available; and 3) the development of novel methods of data collection and analysis that make it possible for scholars to extract information from new data, such as from the rise of social experiments that enable reliable causal inferences in major issues of public policy, natural language processing that enables scientists to extract information from millions of Web sites, newspapers, emails or other textual sources, and new informatics techniques that provide instant and reliably persistent, access to the world's data.

So says Gary King, the directory of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard, in an interview for the Data Mining Review. Some of that data and a tiny fraction of the techniques he discusses may one day be adopted by journalists, who are the protozoa of the fact-based universe. More than a few gut-trusting editors, incidentally, would just guffaw at this quote from King: "The central conclusion of research in hundreds of fields and most of the hundreds of thousands of applications is the same: Whenever a sufficiently important fraction of information can be quantified, statistical analysis beats qualitative human judgment. There is just no contest."

Academic Blog Portal

The Academic Blog Portal is a directory of academic blogs. It's a wiki, so anyone can contribute a listing.

Zotero, the "personal research assistant"

A while ago I wanted to make a bibliography and explored various inexpensive software and Web sites to help me. I didn't want to pay the $240 it costs for Endnote, the standard in this category. Everything I tried was unsatisfactory, if only because each required the tedious typing of each citation. Now there's the free and open source Zotero, a Firefox extension that only works with the just-released version 2.0 of the browser. The sterling part of Zotero is that it grab citations directly from online library catalogs and from Web sites such as Google Scholar and Amazon. Let's say you do a search on Google Scholar for writings on computer-assisted reporting: A small icon will appear on the Firefox address bar with your results. Click on the icon and you have the option of making a bibliographic citation out of one or more of the books or articles you found. Or you can look up a book in Amazon or your local university's online catalog, click on the icon and add a citation to Zotero. Zotero does more than that, though. You can also save copies of Web pages, make notes from selected text, store attachments such as PDFs and images, tag your entries, link related items, save searches and export your bibliographies in multiple formats. This is beta software - the first time I installed it, it didn't work until I deleted my Firefox profile and started fresh. Once I did that, though, it worked as advertised. Zotero is from the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University and its sponsors include the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Alfred E. Sloan Foundation and the Institute of Museum and Library Services, and they recently began recruiting a new developer, so presumably it will only get better.