Amy West's Public Library

“Business definitions have always been tricky for researchers,” said Brian Headd, economist for the Office of Advocacy and co-author of the working paper. “It’s hard to determine what counts as a business. For instance, is there a minimum employee or revenue requirement, a length of time in business, or a contribution to owners income? He added, “Definitions are often based on convenience, such as what data is available to the researcher.”

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small business administration nonemployers size social_science analysis summary_tables

“Business definitions have always been tricky for researchers,” said Brian
Headd, economist for the Office of Advocacy and co-author of the working paper.
“It’s hard to determine what counts as a business. For instance, is there a
minimum employee or revenue requirement, a length of time in business, or a
contribution to owners income? He added, “Definitions are often based on
convenience, such as what data is available to the researcher.”

13 Aug 08

Blueberry Genomics Database (BBGD)

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escience blueberries genomics database microarray publications maps

Panzea Home

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escience genomics maize database software publications panzea

07 Aug 08

CLIR Reports

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Libraries and consortia should press publishers hard
to enter into e-journal archiving relationships with bona
fide programs and to convey all necessary rights and responsibilities
for digital archiving as part of their license negotiations.
Research libraries should collectively agree not to sign
new licenses or renew old ones for access to electronic
journals unless these conditions are met.
Academic libraries of all sizes should act collectively
to press for digital archiving programs that meet their
needs. As a condition of support, they should request details
on the programs' ability to meet base-level requirements
for responsible stewardship of journal content and, ultimately,
insist on some form of accreditation to ensure the development
of full-fledged preservation programs.
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- Libraries should participate in developing a registry
  of archived scholarly publications that indicates which
  programs have preserved them
- Libraries should lobby e-journal archiving programs to
  participate in a network that shares information, codifies
  best practices, and promotes sufficient redundancy, and
  also shares responsibility for preserving peer-reviewed
  e-journals that are not currently included.
- Publishers should extend liberal archiving rights in
  their licensing agreements with content aggregators and
  consortia. Digital archiving of e-journals should be a
  distributed responsibility.

The Digital Preservation of e-Prints

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"E-prints" are being defined here as electronic versions of research papers or similar research output. They may be pre-prints (drafts of papers before they have been refereed) or post-prints (after they have been refereed). They may also include material such as chapters from scholarly books or conference papers, which may not be formally refereed but are nevertheless important research output.
E-prints are "duplicates" of the conventionally published literature. In other words, they do not replace the traditional journal literature but complement it.
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- E-prints are about "immediate access".
- preservation should not be a priority. In fact, it may be an unnecessary distraction.
- uch as insisting on particular file formats or metadata standards).
- When there is a critical mass of content, it can be "retro-fitted for more rigorous preservation."
- After all, the largest e-print repository, arxiv.org, was set up in 1991 and all of its contents are still accessible.
- Preservation efforts should be concentrated on the conventionally published versions of papers rather than on e-print repositories.
- It would be an irony if a paper in an open-access e-print repository could be accessed today and yet in ten years' time had been allowed to decay so that it was inaccessible.
- In some disciplines, citing e-prints may be the norm and so users would expect access to that e-print to be preserved so that citations to it would continue to be valid. Even after a paper has been formally published, researchers may expect to be able to cite the post-print in an e-print repository since access to it may be easier (and toll-free).
- In some cases, e-prints may have more detail or additional data associated with them, which means that they should be preserved in their own right.
- Repository managers may want to preserve e-prints which form part of a coherent collection and where the existence of the collection itself adds value.
- Guarantees of preservation may attract authors to submit papers.
- Perhaps the key point here is that filling repositories and digital preservation need not be mutually exclusive.
- As with any electronic resource, the key challenge of preserving e-prints is overcoming frequent hardware and software obsolescence, ensuring that information ultimately encoded in a very user-unfriendly way as a series of 0s and 1s can continue to be decoded into more human readable forms.
- This task is easier for e-prints than some other types of electronic resource because e-prints are, essentially, "paper documents made electronic".
- The costs of digital preservation in general are still difficult to calculate, and it is unclear as yet how much of the work will be funded.
- Models emerging from early digital preservation activity suggest that consortia or supra-institutional agencies may be better suited to manage the complex issues involved.
- One key question associated with the preservation of e-prints is "which ones should be preserved?"
- This last suggestion is interesting because, unlike the others, it bases selection on a technical characteristic of the e-print rather than the e-print's subject matter or publication status. Such a policy will itself have significant cost implications.

05 Aug 08

Zip Code level tax data

Display and download ZIP code-level tax return information for states, metro areas, counties, cities, and state legislative and congressional districts for tax years 1997 through 2005 from the Brookings Institution.

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social_science eitc tax zip_code states metropolitan_areas counties cities state_legislative_districts congressional_districts

04 Aug 08

Namespaces in XML 1.0 (Second Edition)

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[Definition: A namespace
(or more precisely, a namespace binding)
is
declared using
a family of reserved attributes.
Such an attribute's name must either
be xmlns or begin xmlns:.
These attributes, like any other XML attributes, may be provided
directly or by default.
]

Trend data showing the number of large trees (> 70 cm in southern and central Europe and > 50 cm in northern Europe) per 100 ha forest area for six European countries

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eea forestry environment trees charts european agency

01 Aug 08

Primer - Getting into the semantic web and RDF using N3

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a semicolon ";" introduces another property of the same
subject, and a comma introduces another object with the same predicate and
subject.
The identifiers are just identifiers - the fact that the letters p a t
are used doesn't tell anyone or any machine that we are talking about
anyone whose name is "Pat" -- unless we say <#pat> <#name>
"Pat".
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- he square brackets declare that something exists with the given
  properties, but don't give you a way to refer to it elsewhere in this or
  another document.
- The <#title> refers to the concept of #title as
  defined by the document itself. This won't mean much to the reader. However,
  a group of people created a list of properties called the Dublin Core, among which is their idea of
  title, which they gave the identifier
- When you want to define a new
  vocabulary you define new classes of things and new properties. When you say
  what type of thing something is, you say a Class it belongs to.
- Classes just tell you about the thing which is in them.
- An object can be
  in many classes. There doesn't have to be any hierarchical relationship --
  think of Person, AnimateObject, Animal, TallPerson, Friend, and so on
- If
  there is a relationship between two classes you can state it
- A property is something which is used to declare a relationship between
  two things.
- ubject
  of any property must be in a class, that class is a domain of the property
- object must be in a
  class, that class is called the range of a property
- Use other people's vocabularies when you can - it helps interchange
  of data.
- Writers need to see how a term is supposed to be used;
  readers need to see what it is supposed to mean. People developing software
  which uses the terms need to know in particular detail exactly what each URI
  means.
- The easiest way to help people find your documentation is to make the URIs
  you create as vocabulary terms also work in a web browser. This happens
  automatically if you follow the naming convention we use here, where the
  vocabulary definition document has a URI like
  http://example.com/terms and it refers to its terms like
  <#Woman>. With the @prefix declaration above, this gives
  the URI http://example.com/terms#Woman which should work in any
  browser to display the definition document.
- Ideally, you should publish your documentation on the web using a server
  and portion of URI-space which are owned by an organization which can commit
  to maintaining them well into the future.

31 Jul 08

UNCTAD 2008 Statistics Handbook

The UNCTAD secretariat on 29 July published the UNCTAD Handbook of Statistics 2008. The Handbook provides a broad range of statistics relevant to the analysis of international trade, investment and development, covering individual countries, regions and the world at large.

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social_science summary_tables trade merchandise commodity prices

30 Jul 08

NAEP - Frequently Asked Questions

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The NAEP sample in each state is designed to be representative of the students in that state.
Federal law specifies that NAEP is voluntary for every student, school, school district, and state. However, federal law also requires all states that receive Title I funds to participate in NAEP reading and mathematics assessments at fourth and eighth grades. Similarly, school districts that receive Title I funds and are selected for the NAEP sample are also required to participate in NAEP reading and mathematics assessments at fourth and eighth grades.
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- Under the National Assessment of Educational Progress Authorization Act (Public Law 107-279 III, section 303), the Commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) is charged with ensuring that NAEP tests do not question test-takers about personal or family beliefs or make information about their personal identity publicly available.
- NCES makes data available to researchers but withholds students' names and other identifying information
- names of all participating students are not allowed to leave the schools after NAEP assessments are administered. Because it might be possible to deduce from data the identities of some NAEP schools, researchers must promise, under penalty of fines and jail terms, to keep these identities confidential.
- Unless specifically stated otherwise, all information on the U.S. Department of Education's NCES website at http://nces.ed.gov, including the NAEP website, is in the public domain, and may be reproduced, published or otherwise used without NCES' permission.
- The questions in the NAEP Questions Tool may be reproduced as long as any copyright restrictions are observed for third-party copyrighted material. These restrictions are noted on the applicable questions.
- Since its inception in 1969
- In the national-only sample, there are approximately 10,000 to 20,000 students. In a combined national and state sample, there are approximately 3,000 students per participating jurisdiction from approximately 100 schools. Typically, 45 to 55 jurisdictions participate in such an assessment.
- Data for the national and state NAEP are collected at the same time during the winter. Data for the national long-term trend assessments are collected in the fall for 13-year-olds, in the winter for 9-year-olds, and in the spring for 17-year-olds.
- Developing the assessment instruments—from writing questions to analyzing pilot test results to constructing the final instruments—is a complex process that consumes most of the time during the interval between assessments
- Examples of accommodations that would not be allowed in NAEP are administering the reading assessment in a language other than English, or reading the reading passages aloud to the student. Also, extending testing over several days is not allowed for NAEP because NAEP administrators are in each school only one day.
- For example, students at grade 12 might be given a bag containing three different metals, sand, and salt and asked to separate them using a magnet, sieve, filter paper, funnel, spoon, and water and document the steps they used to do so.
- Subject-matter achievement is reported in two ways—scale scores and achievement levels—so that student performance can be more easily understood.
- Achievement levels categorize student achievement as Basic, Proficient, and Advanced, using ranges of performance established for each grade.
- results cannot be compared across subjects
- reporting metrics greatly facilitate
- one group of students to another in the same grade
- within a subject from year to year
- Explore NAEP Questions links users to the Questions Tool and Item Maps that provide student responses, scoring guides, and other information on the questions that have been released to the public.
- printed reports
- technical reports that contain psychometric details of a national or state assessment

28 Jul 08

NAEP - Overview

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) is the only nationally representative and continuing assessment of what America's students know and can do in various subject areas.

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naep social_guide guide about

Assessments are conducted periodically in mathematics, reading, science, writing, the arts, civics, economics, geography, and U.S. history. Assessments in world history and in foreign language are anticipated in 2012.
common metric for all states and selected urban districts
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- There are two NAEP websites: one for program and technical information, and the other for the Nation's Report Card results.
- provides results on subject-matter achievement, instructional experiences, and school environment for populations of students
- does not provide scores for individual students or schools
- The Governing Board is a bipartisan group whose members include governors, state legislators, local and state school officials, educators, business representatives, and members of the general public.
- Main NAEP includes assessments in mathematics, reading, science, writing, the arts, civics, economics, geography, and U.S. history
- assessed at grades 4, 8, and 12
- For national assessments, students in public and private schools are assessed, but at the state level, assessment is in public schools only.
- State assessments began in 1990
- The long-term trend (LTT) assessments are given at the national level only, and are administered in a manner that is very different from that used for main NAEP assessments.
- Twelfth-grade data from the main national assessment are used in the High School Transcript Study (HSTS) every four years

11 Jul 08

Profile of Hired Farmworkers, A 2008 Update

Hired farmworkers make up a third of the total agricultural labor force and are critical to U.S. agricultural production, particularly in labor-intensive sectors such as fruits and vegetables. The hired farmworker labor market is unique because it includes a large population of relatively disadvantaged and often unauthorized workers, a portion of whom migrate to, and within, the United States.

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social_science summary_tables analysis economics farms labor undocumented farmworkers

Amy West's Public Library

The Emergency Economic Stabilization Act and Current Financial Turmoil: Issues and Analysis

Presentation on NBII Metadata / Databases

The Global Burden of Snakebite: A Literature Analysis and Modelling Based on Regional Estimates of Envenoming and Deaths

OptimalScholarship: Doing things with data

Python for Newbies

United States. Bureau of Immigration Annual Reports

Digitized Historical Criminal statistics for United States

Making The Best Use Of Employer, Non-Employer Data”