If you haven’t yet tried Zotero, a free, open source citation management system (CMS) for the Firefox browser that is similar to RefWorks and Endnote, this would be a good time to give it a shot.
The Zotero 2.0 beta already syncs citations and notes remotely and, if you have a webDAV account, can even sync your PDFs. This weekend’s update to 2.0b3 has now added (partial list):
This can be a very power research tool. If you have any questions about using it I’d be happy to talk with you about it.
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
The New York Times has an interesting web feature up right now that presents a timeline of all of the presidential Inaugural addresses from 1789 on. While that is pretty useful in itself, this site is particularly interesting because it shows you a tag cloud of the frequently used words in each speech. It’s a great way to quickly survey the changing language and themes.
The page is available here: Inaugural Words: 1789 to the Present.
Or just the results?
With the Roper Center’s iPoll, you not only get to see the results, you can also see the actual questions asked and the results for each one.
iPoll can be searched by keyword. Say, maybe something like “Sarah Palin AND Tina Fey” and we can see the question, “How much if anything have you heard about each of the following? Have you heard a lot, a little or nothing at all?…Skits on Saturday Night Live with actress Tina Fey playing Sarah Palin?” That question was reported by the Pew Weekly News Interest Index Poll this October.
By the way, 42% of those asked heard a lot about it, 30% heard a little, 27% heard nothing at all, and 1% didn’t know or refused to answer (Survey by Pew Research Center for the People & the Press. Methodology: Conducted by Opinion Research Corporation, October 3-October 6, 2008 and based on telephone interviews with a national adult sample of 1,006.)
Looking at individual questions is pretty nice but that’s not all. There is also a section of the site devoted to browsing poll results by topic. Broad topics include the economy, the government, personal beliefs, education and, of course, the election! All of this adds up to an important tool for following public opinion on issues that matter to you.
And if you want even more political and elections information don’t forget to look at the growing number of links in my Delicious collection. Try the terms elections or politics for example.
Click here to search PsycINFO and PsycARTICLES (EBSCOhost)
It’s a trusted and familiar resource for finding scholarly articles, book chapters, books and dissertations in Psychology but could a different interface make it easier to use? That’s exactly what I want to find out.
Now through November 21st, 2008 we have a trial of PsycINFO and PsycARTICLES on the EBSCOhost database platform. It’s the same content that we have on the OvidSP platform, just a different interface.
Try it out, compare how you do the same search on both platforms, you know, kick the tires. And then let me know what you think! Your feedback matters!
