Does your program require that you use APA Style for the research papers you write?
Did you go out and buy the brand new 6th Edition of the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association?
Yes? Well, I have some bad news for you.
It seems that the first printing of the 6th edition is riddled with errors. What’s worse is that many of the errors are in the very examples you count on to make sure that your own writing is error-free.
How do you know if your copy of the 6th edition Manual is from the first printing? Two ways:
- If you have the paperback and you bought it before November 2009 (in case you are reading this in the future), then you have one from the first printing.
- If you have the hardcover or spiral bound book, just look at the fourth (unnumbered) page of the book. It’s the same page as the copyright and cataloging-in-publication data. At the bottom of the page it will say “First Printing” or “Second Printing”.
So, what can you do to be sure you are looking at the correct examples? At the moment, all we can do is look at the two PDFs (here and here) of corrections that the APA has posted on their website.
At the moment, the APA has kindly decided that posting the errata in those PDFs is a better option than replacing the defective books with with the corrected second printing. Don’t agree? You could always contact APA Style to let them know how you think they should fix this problem.
Update: If you want to exchange your copy for a corrected “second printing” version they should be available after November 2 through the APA Service Center – 800 374-2721.
You can find an interesing story about this on the Inside Higher Ed blog.
The Wilson Center is, right at this moment, running a live webcast of its panel discussion of KGB officer turned journalist Alexander Vassiliev’s newly released notebooks. Drawn from the KGB archives, these notebooks offer an unprecedented look into Soviet espionage activities in the US from 1930-1950. Some topics discussed will be Alger Hiss, and I.F. Stone.
The webcast is available here. The agenda is available here (PDF).
English language translations of the notebooks (now held by the Library of Congress) and available as PDFs here.
Maritime Jurisdiction and Boundaries in the Arctic Region
Well, it looks like Denmark does. But why does that matter? Bragging rights aside, fixing the international boundaries around the actual North Pole may not be that important. What is far more important is who will control the vast amount of oil and gas thought to be sitting below the Arctic ocean.
The International Boundaries Research Unit, at Durham University has issued a new report, available in pdf from the website above, that that examines boundaries in the Arctic and discusses both likely boundaries and potential claims that the surrounding countries may make soon. The report and briefing notes are a good introduction to an issue that could have major international-relations and economic implications.
The IBRU’s website is also a good resource for boundary-related news and links, with searchable news and link archives.
Just Launched! ICED Video Game from Breakthrough: building human rights culture.
Not so much a research tool as an interesting use of technology to raise public awareness of a hot social issue, ICED: I Can End Deportation is a free video game that explores the immigration debate from the point of view of immigrant teens. The game, put out by human rights NGO Breakthrough, has sparked a bit of controversy in the news media lately.
The premise of the game involves moving immigrant teens through the maze of American daily life with the goal of obtaining citizenship. Along the way the teens must make the right choices and give the right answers in their interactions with Immigration authorities to avoid detention and deportation.
This isn’t the first time that a video game launch has fed debates over contentious social and political issues. What makes this game so interesting is that the game itself is being used as an issue-advocacy tool. Clearly the importance of video games as an informative and persuasive medium is growing.
With violence in Darfur back on the front page of yesterday’s New York Times, I was reminded of the Darfur mapping project that the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum puts out using Google Earth.
Called Crisis in Darfur, the project uses data from the U.S. State Dept. to locate damaged and destroyed villages and data from the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs and the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees to locate refugees and Internally Displaced Persons on the map.
Additional resources include photos, personal testimonies, and KML files.
This project can be used to help visualize the conflict and can be used in custom presentations.
Another interesting human rights/mapping project is the AAAS Science and Human Rights Program’s Geospatial Technologies and Human Rights which uses high resolution sensor data from satellites, GIS tools and analysis, and web-based map tools to create human rights case studies. There are currently case studies for Burma, Chad and Sudan, Eritrea, Gaza Strip, Lebanon, North Korea, Zimbabwe.
