Archive | October, 2008

A slice of American PIE

31 Oct

Alas this will be pretty much my last contribution to the Intute: Social Sciences US election coverage on this blog, as I will be away for election week itself.

During the next few days our Politics and Government editor Heather Dawson will be supplying you with further updates, some of them centred around various themes and issues, as well as the more news and results based updates.

I thought that this may be a good opportunity to review how my own Internet habits have changed over the last few months and see which sites have had a good campaign. A final chance to see which ones made it into my own Personal Information Environment or my bit of American PIE!

If the 2004 campaign saw the rise of blogging then the 2008 campaign has been the YouTube election or at least the one where online video has come to the fore. While I have enjoyed the daily updates from Hotline TV and the focus on hard polling numbers from Dr. Frank Newport of Gallop, it’s been Kotecki TV that has helped to keep me sane.

Kotecki started recording videos for YouTube from his college bedroom, getting responses from a number of the candidates who ran in the early primaries, before being signed up by Politico.com. His irrevent style and fast paced delivery are a welcome break from the at times all too serious debate, plus it’s all done with inside three minutes. I think there is a gap in market for a British Kotecki in the run-up to the next UK general election.

In terms of textual analysis, my weapon of choice has been Electoral-Vote.com with a single daily summary of the issues, backed up with an easy to understand map of the make-up of the electoral college based on current polls. A more considered view that filters out the buzz from other sites that feel the need to update themselves dozens of times a day, makes Electoral-Vote.com required reading.

For more in-depth analysis of various polling issues, I’ve been heading over to FiveThirtyEight.com on a regular basis, where those of you who get drawn deep into the numbers can find an analysis of just about every nuance and shift in the tracking polls.

I have been impressed by the coverage of the election from some of the non-election sites I keep track of as part of my job. TechCrunch and Mashable have both kept an eye on the role of the election online, while the daily round-up from TechPresident has been invaluable in terms of keeping up-to-date.

Finally, I have tried to keep any pro-Obama tendencies in check and one of the ways I have been doing that is by reading The New Nixon blog every day. I’m a bit of Watergate buff and so I’ve enjoyed their roll-call of the various mentions of candidate x or pundit y as the “New Nixon” – there have been quite a few!

Well, that’s all from me – I’ll see you again, sometime on the other side of the results – have a great election night!

Intute: Social Sciences features more Internet resources on the US elections.

Photo from Flickr by Su-Lin under a Creative Commons license.

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US Election latest link round-up

30 Oct

DSC00098 What’s unusual about this photo?

Not an awful lot at first glance – seeing an Obama 08 sticker on a lamp post is probably a very common site.

Except this photo was taken a couple of streets away from where I live (by me).

Unless Barack is running for Bristol City Council as a back-up in case he loses, I can’t see it swinging too many votes.

After all the data from If The World Could Vote seems pretty much in his favour!

Here’s a run down of the latest links relating to the US Elections:

Download:

Tomorrow – a small slice of American pie!

Intute: Social Sciences features more Internet resources on the US Election.

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Landslides, post-mortems and tightening races

28 Oct

This time next week … yep, the finishing post is in sight and there’s just one more week of hard campaigning left before we get to the fun part where we get to count the votes. But isn’t it already over and the in-fighting already starting or is there a genuine tightening of the race?

In general the candidate that is ahead at this point should go on to win the Presidency, but that does not mean a late surge cannot happen or has not happened in the past. The Gallop Poll takes us through some examples from history and looks at how Late Upsets are Rare but Have Happened perhaps most famously in 1980.

Talk of landslides is really ridiculous – try perusing this timeline of US Presidential Election maps and see that there will have to be a major implosion of the Republican vote to be in the same ballpark as the virtual Electoral College wipeouts of 1984 or 1968.

While post-mortems in to the McCain campaign are probably premature, the question of damage limitation is important in terms of stopping Democratic momentum that could lead to a filibuster proof margin in the Senate, if they secure 60 seats – the Republican cause has not been helped by the conviction of Alaska Senator Ted Stevens on corruption charges.

The narrative from the McCain campaign appears to be that the race is tightening, but this does not seem to be backed up by the polls. It has been pretty much dismissed by Nate Silver at 538.com and my own examination of the poll of polls data at Electoral-Vote.com shows the gap growing rather than tightening in the last week.

Getting back to how the campaign is playing out on the web – TechCrunch reports on a make-over for Politics.com which seems a little late in the day and Mashable highlights a few election poll and projection sources, which should be largely familiar to long time readers of this blog.

If 2004 was the blogging election, then it could be argued that 2008 is the YouTube election – or at least the election where online video came to the fore. TechPresident ponders How Much YouTube is Worth to Obama and McCain? before coming to the conclusion that it could be millions of dollars and hundreds of hours of free video views.

Intute: Social Sciences features more Internet resources on the issue of the US election.

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Good polls, bad polls and real polls

24 Oct

With just over a week to go, what you might call “poll fever” is descending on the race for the White House – which polls should be trusted and why? Plus does it matter when real polling ie voting has already begun?

Tracking polls or polls where the same sample for example the same group of voters are followed over time to assess shifts in political preferences – are a vital tool in the pollsters arsenal. FiveThirtyEight.com has a great analysis of eight of the most in/famous tracking polls you may encounter and considers their various strengths and weaknesses.

Gallup analysts have been polling citizens from around the world and their analysis shows that residents of other countries favour Barack Obama by a nearly 4-to-1 margin, however the majority of those surveyed did not express an opinion on the subject.

So much for the perspective of the polling experts, what about an academic viewpoint? Well Stanford University are offering a course on the Geography of U.S. Presidential Elections over the next few weeks, with freely available lectures online – showing that the picture is much more complicated than headline poll numbers may imply and demonstrating that things have certainly changed a lot over time.

… and finally, there’s a timely reminder that early voting has already begun in many states, with estimates that over 30% of votes could be cast before election day – plus there’s no shortage of ways to vote with roadside access for disabled voters, absentee ballots (postal votes) for those who will be away from their home state and even drive through voting for fast food addicted voters!

Intute: Social Sciences features more resources on the issues of polling, voting and the US elections.

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Best of the blog

17 Oct

It’s been a week of very interesting blog contributions, so I thought that it may be worth while rounding them up for occasional visitors who may have missed some of them.

With the global financial crisis still going on, we’ve seen a range of perspectives on this biggest of big issues.

Suzanne Barbalet, our Sociology editor asked the question – Was the Current Economic Crisis Predicted? – and looked at what the work of Emile Durkheim may have to say about it, as well as considering the best predictions of this economic turmoil from the past – you can find more resources on this in the Economic Performance and Development (inc. Economic Sociology) part of the Sociology section.

Talking of predictors of the economic tsunami, the news that Paul Krugman won the Nobel prize for Economics was an opportunity to reprise his warnings about the state of the economy although others have pointed out his important work in the areas of Bubbles, Starships and Mushy Peas.

Indeed out friends from the Economics Network have been trying to help if You Don’t Understand the Credit Crunch, or by trying to explain Why we need economic growth? There are more resources on these topics in the Economic Growth, Business and Management and Economics sections – as well as resources on the credit crunch.

Away from the world of high finance, Ian Hocking, our Psychology Editor reported on the latest attempts to get us closer to the world of I, Robot with links to resources related to the Turing Test.

And there was a timely reminder that America is not the only place holding elections, when Heather Dawson produced an excellent round-up of links relating to the Canadian Elections earlier in the week, part of a much larger range of resources on Elections in North America.

Although from the web stats, it seems as though you were nearly as interested in the new Image Searching Tutorial from Intute and Tasi as everything else from Intute: Social Sciences.

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Paul Krugman wins the Nobel prize for Economics

13 Oct

Paul Krugman has been awarded the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2008 for his work in the analysis of trade patterns and location of economic activity.

The Nobel site includes a press release, academic scientific background information and information for the layman on his work.

The Nobel site features information on previous winners of the prize in Economics, including video interviews and videos of the prize lectures (Krugman will deliver his lecture in December).

Krugman is Professor of Economics and International Affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University, where he specialises in international trade / finance, urban economics and the study of Japan.

Krugman is perhaps best known outside of Economics circles as a columnist / blogger for the New York Times at The Conscience of a Liberal, where his writings on public policy are widely read.

Krugman spoke as part of the Authors@Google series late last year.

The Unofficial Paul Krugman Archive contains details of his older writings, while users may be interested in some of his writings that are available via EconPapers, although many more papers cite or analyse his work.

Intute: Social Sciences features more Internet resources on the topic of Economics.

Understanding Society – taking the long view

13 Oct

Understanding Society, is the world’s largest ever household longitudinal study and it launches on Monday 13th October 2008. It will provide valuable new evidence to inform research on the vital issues facing communities.

It will collect information from 100,000 individuals, across 40,000 households from across the country. It will assist with the understanding of the long term effects of social and economic change, and will provide tools to study the impact of policy interventions on the well being of the UK population.

Understanding Society will be based at and led by the Institute for Social and Economic Research (ISER) at the University of Essex, together with colleagues from the University of Warwick and the Institute of Education. The survey work will be undertaken by the National Centre for Social Research (NatCen). It will be a major advance on the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS).

Intute: Social Sciences features more Internet resources on the topics of Research Tools and Methods, Statistics and Data and longitudinal studies.

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Blogging, publishing, institutions and the media

10 Oct

This is the fourth and final post in a series of blog posts this week taking a closer look at blogging, asking why you may want to blog (part one and part two), picking out some of what is happening in the UK blogosphere and looking at how blogging can interact with other arenas, such as the academic publishing process, institutions and the mainstream media.

An article in the latest THE – By the Blog: academics tread carefully – suggests that there is a reluctance amongst academics to write publicly and take part in the blogosphere – a topic that I’ve touched on before. But it highlights the idea that the intersection of blogging and other arenas may be a barrier to those in the academic community taking the plunge – this is probably worth a little exploration.

The academic publishing process – blogging is very different from the traditional academic process, with no peer review etc., but this brings advantages too – the ability to respond quickly to events, the chance for ideas to evolve and be improved by the wisdom of crowds, plus the freedom to change your mind! While the article is right to point out that there is a chance that research ideas may be stolen if they are shared publicly, it also raises the possibility that being the first to blog a result could lead to getting some credit for it.

Relations with institutions – there isn’t anything inherently dangerous or evil about blogging – it is just a quick and easy web publishing platform – but that does mean academics need to be as careful what they blog about, as they would be on a hand crafted web page or in a publicly archived email list – Derek Morrison’s advice that you “don’t affect the share price” in what you say online, is a fair summation of the limits of academic freedom – or the equivalent of telling students that what they say online could be read by their parents!

The media – let’s say that you are pretty keen on blogging, have been for quite a while and you get the chance to talk about it to someone from the mainstream media and apparently you say:

“Some academics are dipping their toes in the water but many aren’t entirely comfortable with using the medium to voice their opinions.”

Rather than being disappointed that the least positive thing you said about blogging is the one thing that makes it into the article or having a vague feeling that you may well have said those words, but not necessarily in that order – relax in the knowledge that as you are a blogger, you have the chance to express yourself in words of your own choosing, without being edited!

So while there are indeed pros and cons, rights and responsibilities, pluses and minuses to the world of blogging – don’t be afraid of dipping your toes in, the water’s lovely!

Intute: Social Sciences features more UK based blogs and our editors reviewed Our Favourite Social Science Blogs earlier this year, plus there are more blogs featured elsewhere on Intute.

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The State of the UK Academic Blogosphere

8 Oct

This is the third in a series of blog posts this week taking a closer look at blogging, asking why you may want to blog (part one and part two), picking out some of what is happening in the UK blogosphere and looking at how blogging can interact with other arenas, such as the academic publishing process, institutions and the mainstream media.

A couple of weeks ago I took a brief look at the State of the Blogosphere in light of the recent report from Technorati – while it appears that the blogging is in good health overall, can the same be said of academic blogging especially in the UK as opposed to the US?

It’s safe to say that there are fewer blogging UK academics than US academics – after all there are 300 million people in the US and only about 60 million here in the UK. But in the past when I have asked Where are the UK academic bloggers – people have always asked for good examples of current practise, so I thought I should try to track some down.

An undoubted favourite here at Intute: Social Sciences is the Crooked Timber blog, which is an international collaboration which covers a range of Social Science subjects, inclduing contributions from Chris Bertram, a Professor of Social and Political Philosophy at the University of Bristol.

This team approach is a good way of sharing the burden of blogging, as unless you build blogging into your normal workflow it can become an extra thing to do. This is perhaps best exemplified by Vox a policy portal set up by the Centre for Economic Policy Research which may not look like a traditional blog, seems to feature pretty highly in all the rankings of economics blogs.

On an institutional level there are innovative communities growing around specific universities, for example the Warwick Blogs service or across the sector as a whole with the JISC Involve service. Indeed a current consultation exercise on The Future of Higher Education by the DIUS is being carried out using a blog.

But looking at the various blogs that have been added to Intute: Social Sciences, of the 500 or so blogs we feature, only about 150 are from the UK and the vast majority of these are from sources that may be of interest to the academic community rather than from the academic community themselves.

And perhaps that is something we should just accept as Kirby and Cameron put it, when talking about the Canadian academic blogosphere:

The academic blogosphere is far from uniform, and not necessarily directed toward academic audiences.

… but that may be something that could change in the future, although Web 2.0 and blog evangelists should take note that currently most workplace Internet use is rudimentary and there is a danger that people who like technology, will just carry on talking to other people who like technology, about how great technology is – the blogosphere needs to be more than just an echo chamber.

On Friday more on how blogging can interact with other arenas, such as the academic publishing process, institutions and the mainstream media.

Intute: Social Sciences features more UK based blogs and our editors reviewed Our Favourite Social Science Blogs earlier this year, including our pick of the leading economics blogs, plus there are more blogs featured elsewhere on Intute.

Why blog – part two

7 Oct

This is the second in a series of blog posts this week taking a closer look at blogging, asking why you may want to blog, picking out some of what is happening in the UK blogosphere and looking at how blogging can interact with other arenas, such as the academic publishing process, institutions and the mainstream media.

Yesterday, I started on the topic of why you may want to blog and said that I’d outline a few more reasons why you may want to blog today.

Teaching and learning – blogs can be used to support courses, in a way that is easier to use and more accessible than your institutional VLE – some academics have written up their experiences of doing just that, while others are just getting on and using them – supplementing blogging with online polls assessing lectures, podcasts, Twitter updates and links to related resources.

Main Stream Media (MSM) – sadly, I have met too many academics who are great at what they do, but refuse point-blank to get involved with newspapers, TV or radio as they fear or have experience of their work being distorted or mis-represented. Blogs can enable you to represent your work as you would wish and give you the opportunity to sidestep the MSM by expressing yourself in your own words.

Telling a story – most academic work has an interesting story behind it – a process story about the ins-and-outs of research life or the human consequences of what has been found out or how it can effect everyday life – to take some examples from my own University. If we want a better informed citizenry, then perhaps we should engage with them more, as after all we are spending “their” money most of the time – why wait until the research is over and summed up in press release, tell the story as it unfolds, via a blog.

Helping evolve ideas – a key part of interacting in the blogosphere are the comments that you get from readers – some blogs attract comments that are as good as the blog posts! Call it the wisdom of crowds, crowdsourcing or just recognising that there are plenty of smart people out there you’ve never met, blogging is a great way to learn from your readers by asking questions and trying out your ideas in public.

Build a reputation – the rise of blogging has produced a shift towards a world where commentary is content, to the point where particular blogs may become required reading for those wishing to keep up-to-date in certain subjects. For academics this means that you can build a brand and use it to market your latest book.

So that’s a few ideas as to why you may want to blog and I’m sure that you will have more suggestions on why blogging may be of interest to you – if you are particularly keen to find out more, try the Guide to Using Blogs in Economics which may have some tips that are also applicable to your subject.

Tomorrow, a few thoughts on the State of the UK Academic Blogosphere.

Intute: Social Sciences features more blogs of interest to the academic community and more on blogging.

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