Choice Reads are research related articles, links and resources that we find trawling the internet - they are frequently updated, so check back regularly.
Government data from around the world
Data, data, data. There's loads of it out there and more coming your way as governments open their statistics vaults around the world.
First the US with data.gov, then Australia and New Zealand followed suit. Now it's the UK's turn with data.gov.uk.
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Data Visualisations - Global Financial Crisis
Different approaches to the same depressing subject - using a variety of media to simply demonstrate and compare complex data. One of the steepest bear market declines in history makes for some interesting infographics...
"Some visualizations attempt to explain it all while others focus on affected business. Others concentrate on how we, as citizens are affected. Some show those who are responsible. After you examine these 27 visualizations and infographics, no doubt you'll have a pretty good idea about what's going on."
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Pay DiRT
A wiki that collects information about tools and resources that can help scholars (particularly in the humanities and social sciences) conduct research more efficiently or creatively. Whether you need software to help you manage citations, author a multimedia work, or analyze texts, Digital Research Tools will help you find what you're looking for. We provide a directory of tools organized by research activity, as well as reviews of select tools in which we not only describe the tool's features, but also explore how it might be employed most effectively by researchers.
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Facebook for Academics
Academia is a tree of academics around the world displayed according to their departmental and institutional affiliations that enables academics to see news on the latest research in their area - the latest people, papers and talks.
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Are Ballot Order Effects Heterogeneous?
Past studies of ballot order effects have typically focused on the average benefit to a candidate from being placed at the top of the ballot. But it is possible that this simple average may mask systematic differences in how the ballot order effect varies across candidates and voters. To test this, we analyse all Australian federal elections from 1984-2004, a dataset that is an order of magnitude larger than those used in previous ballot order studies. We find that being placed first on the ballot increases a candidate’s vote share by about 1 percentage point. As a proportion of their total vote, the ballot order effect is much larger for independents and minor parties than for major parties. The ballot order effect appears to be similar for male and female candidates, and does not show strong trends upwards or downwards over the 20 year period covered by our study. Across electorates, the ballot order effect is higher in places where voters are younger and fluency in English is lower.
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A lucky country with its head in the sand
Organisations in Australia are lacklustre innovators, and their efforts deserve barely a passing grade of 64 points out of 100, according to research being released today. The dismal findings emerged from a report that surveyed 271 organisations in Australia and New Zealand - public, private, government and not-for-profit - and asked them to assess how innovative they were against 20 criteria.
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Become a Micro-Financier
Kiva (the word is Swahili for "unity"), in San Francisco, deals with potential borrowers through 68 microfinance companies in the Third World. These "field partners" charge the borrowers interest and take responsibility for identifying responsible entrepreneurs, disbursing the loan, collecting repayments and giving lenders periodic updates on how the business is going. The concept has been a modest hit in America. So far $US11 million ($12.5 million) has been lent by 119,000 people.
Read article | kiva.org
Research Beyond Google: 119 Authoritative, Invisible, and Comprehensive Resources
Do you think your local or university librarian uses Google? Sure, but certainly not exclusively. In order to start researching like a librarian, you'll need to explore more authoritative resources, many of which are invisible. Note: Although some of the following resources are visible and indexed, they have all been included here because of their authoritative nature.
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Choose a US Presidential candidate - without having to actually think. Perfect!
Here's how it works: If you agree with a candidate, he gets point(s). If you disagree, take point(s) away. Unkown/other results in no points. The number of points given or taken depends on the weight you set. "Meh" is worth 1 point, "important" 2, and "key" is worth 5. The items you disagree about will be listed directly underneath each candidate (if they score greater than zero).
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Why We Get Disgusted
Analysts who study shopping habits have already made some surprising discoveries about product placement. "Eye level," for example, used to mean, not surprisingly, "at the level of the eyes." But shoppers tend to keep their eyes aimed at cart level much of the time, making sure they aren't about to run over another customer. And because Americans read from left to right, shelf-stockers tend to put name brands like, say, Heinz, on the left side of the ketchup display, and the lesser known, more profitable in-house brand on the right.
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If It Feels Good to Be Good, It Might Be Only Natural
Marc Hauser, a Harvard researcher, has used cleverly designed psychological experiments to study morality. He said his research has found that people all over the world process moral questions in the same way, suggesting that moral thinking is intrinsic to the human brain, rather than a product of culture. It may be useful to think about morality much like language, in that its basic features are hard-wired, Hauser said. Different cultures and religions build on that framework in much the way children in different cultures learn different languages using the same neural machinery.
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Watching the brain 'switch off' self-awareness
Researchers (neurobiologists from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel) have found that prolonged concentration on a difficult task actually switches off a person's self awareness. They found that the brain assumes a robotic functionality when it has to concentrate all its efforts on a difficult, timed task – only becoming "human" again when it has the luxury of time.
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Data Visualisation: Modern Approaches
Data presentation can be both beautiful, elegant and descriptive. There is a variety of conventional ways to visualize data - tables, histograms, pie charts and bar graphs are being used every day, in every project and on every possible occasion. However, to convey a message to your readers effectively, sometimes you need more than just a simple pie chart of your results. In fact, there are much better, profound, creative and absolutely fascinating ways to visualize data. Many of them might become ubiquitous in the next few years.
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