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.
As part of it’s very interesting “Remade in America: The Newest Immigrants and their Impact” series, the New York Times has put up a fascinating interactive map that displays the country of origin for the foreign-born population by county.
This is pretty cool in itself but the demographics fun is multiplied when you notice the slider that lets you look at the map using data from every census back to 1880. Want to see how the population of your home county has changed over the last 128 years? Just move the slider and watch the color coding shift. Want to see where people from a particular county settled, and when? Just choose one of the countries a drop-down menu and you can see what counties they settled in. Sadly the list of countries isn’t very long but does cover the most common countries of origin.
A mouse-over of the county will cause the county, it’s number of foreign-born residents, and total population — all for the selected census–to be identified in a bubble.
New York Times–Immigration Explorer
Silobreaker
Silobreaker provides a new way to read, search, and use information from thousands of international news sources, blogs, and even academic, company, and government websites.
Provides customizable mapping for local or global news stories, graphs trends in news coverage for topics or people, and shows relationship networks for topics or people. Here (below) is a Network search for Barack Obama:
This resource can be especially useful for tracking media coverage of topics of interest over time, looking at connections between topics, or examining how news stories are discussed in other countries.
OECD Statistics Portal
The OECD (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development) is beta testing OECD.Stat, it’s new statistical data browser.
What does that mean to you? Well, between now and mid-2008 access to OECD statistical data is free while they test out the new browser.
This is an opportunity to look at high quality social and economic datasets related to development and international aid, health, education, energy, and finance.
This page provides a table that lets you browse by topic. A good example of what you will find further inside is the database OECD Gender, Institutions and Development Statistics.
This is a terrific resource and I encourage you to try it out. As always, I’d like to hear what you used it for and what you think it.
Note: Parts of the database may be offline at times. This is a beta test, after all.
