Tools, techniques and research for public affairs reporting.

Krebs has researched purchasing trends on Amazon and the clustering habits of people on social networks for years, and his research shows what psychological research into confirmation bias predicts: you want to be right about how you see the world, so you seek out information which confirms your beliefs and avoid contradictory evidence and opinions.

Half-a-century of research has placed confirmation bias among the most dependable of mental stumbling blocks.

Over het privacybeleid moet nog wel nagedacht worden, maar onderzoekers van het Japanse KDDI zijn alvast trots op hun ontdekking: het team ontwikkelde software voor de gsm die werkgevers in staat stelt personeelsleden op ieder moment te monitoren.

Creativity is commonly thought of as a personality trait that resides within the individual. We count on creative people to produce the songs, movies, and books we love; to invent the new gadgets that can change our lives; and to discover the new scientific theories and philosophies that can change the way we view the world. Over the past several years, however, social psychologists have discovered that creativity is not only a characteristic of the individual, but may also change depending on the situation and context. The question, of course, is what those situations are: what makes us more creative at times and less creative at others? One answer is psychological distance.

Skim is a PDF reader and note-taker for OS X. It is designed to help you read and annotate scientific papers in PDF, but is also great for viewing any PDF file.

The first alarms about the sudden widespread disappearance of honeybees came in late 2006, and the phenomenon soon had a name: colony collapse disorder. In the two years that followed, about one-third of bee colonies vanished, while researchers toiled to figure out what was causing the collapse. A study published last week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences surmises that there may not be a single pathogen involved but a collection of culprits. What have entomologists and beekeepers learned in the last few years of dealing with the crisis? We asked May R. Berenbaum, an author of the study, and other experts for an update.

"Functional visualizations are more than innovative statistical analyses and computational algorithms. They must make sense to the user and require a visual language system that uses colour, shape, line, hierarchy and composition to communicate clearly and appropriately, much like the alphabetic and character-based languages used worldwide between humans." Matt Woolman Digital Information Graphics Goal VisualComplexity.com intends to be a unified resource space for anyone interested in the visualization of complex networks. The project's main goal is to leverage a critical understanding of different visualization methods, across a series of disciplines, as diverse as Biology, Social Networks or the World Wide Web. I truly hope this space can inspire, motivate and enlighten any person doing research on this field.

Make or explore Freedom of Information requests

A place where you can collaborate with other people to investigate things 1. Start an investigation 2. Invite other people to help you investigate it 3. Collaborate and share answers

research also seems to support Ms. Boyd’s contention that social media “mirrors and magnifies” our social divisions, rather than removes them. “We can use technology as a tool to connect with people, but we can’t assume that it will eliminate all of the serious issues we have to face in this country,” Ms. Boyd said at PDF. “Pervasive social stratification is being reified in a new era.

Een internationaal team met onder andere Leidse onderzoekers bouwde en analyseerde een lichtvangend systeem dat lijkt op het fotosynthetisch systeem van groene bacteriën. Dit systeem absorbeert licht zeer efficiënt en zet het om in bruikbare energie. Met meer kennis over de structuur van dit systeem komt de dag steeds dichterbij dat we deze natuurlijke zonnecellen op grote schaal kunnen gaan produceren.

A new sequencing service aims to take whole-genome sequencing mainstream.

Easterlin offered an appealing resolution to his paradox, arguing that only relative income matters to happiness. Other explanations suggest a “hedonic treadmill,” in which we must keep consuming more just to stay at the same level of happiness. Either way, the policy implications of the Paradox are huge, as they suggest that economic growth may not raise well-being by much. Given the stakes in this debate, Betsey Stevenson and I thought it worth reassessing the evidence. We have re-analyzed all of the relevant post-war data, and also analyzed the particularly interesting new data from the Gallup World Poll. Last Thursday we presented our research at the latest Brookings Panel on Economic Activity, and we have arrived at a rather surprising conclusion: There is no Easterlin Paradox.

In recent years, cognitive scientists have turned in increasing numbers to the study of human happiness, and one of their central findings is that we are not very good at predicting how happy or unhappy something will make us. Given time, survivors of tragedies and traumas report themselves nearly as happy as they were before, and people who win the lottery or achieve lifelong dreams don't see any long-term increase in happiness.

Voor wie nog niet overtuigd is van de zinloosheid van kleine windturbines in een stedelijke omgeving: hieronder de gedetailleerde resultaten van twee recente praktijktests in Nederland en in het Verenigd Koninkrijk. Beide tests vullen elkaar door een verschillende aanpak zeer goed aan, en laten overtuigend zien dat kleine turbines in bijna alle gevallen zowel vanuit financieel als ecologisch oogpunt een zeer slecht idee zijn. De toekomst is aan zonne-energie en grote windturbines.

CommentPress is an open source theme for the WordPress blogging engine that allows readers to comment paragraph by paragraph in the margins of a text. Annotate, gloss, workshop, debate: with CommentPress you can do all of these things on a finer-grained level, turning a document into a conversation. It can be applied to a fixed document (paper/essay/book etc.) or to a running blog.

At last a book that comprehensively reveals the true facts about sustainable energy in a form that is both highly readable and entertaining.

C,mm,n is een open-source community voor duurzame individuele mobiliteit. Met de c,mm,nity wordt een nieuw soort auto en een nieuw mobiliteitsconcept ontwikkeld. C,mm,n biedt een oplossing voor mobiliteit in de toekomst. De c,mm,nity is een groeiende gemeenschap; momenteel zijn meer dan 800 mensen betrokken bij c,mm,n, waarvan circa 80 actief een bijdrage leveren.

I think that there's something to be said for how today's youth are thinking differently than their parent's generation. But I don't think that it's simply "caused" by new technologies. I think that we're living in a society that has different priorities and I think that multi-tasking is more deeply prioritized than sustained attention by professional circles today. I think that we are being trained to be "creative" thinkers rather than productive doers and I think that this means that we are encouraged to draw connections between new things. I think that we are living in an environment that is structurally divided and that sociality is increasingly mediated. But I don't think that the technology is to blame. I would argue that we're addicted to our friends, not the computer.

A googol of Googlers published a paper at VLDB 2008, "Google's Deep-Web Crawl" (PDF), that describes how Google pokes and prods at web forms to see if it can find things to submit in the form that yield interesting data from the underlying database.

The digital revolution that has been undermining in-depth reportage may be ready to give something back, through a new academic and professional discipline known in some quarters as "computational journalism." James Hamilton is director of the DeWitt Wallace Center for Media and Democracy at Duke University and one of the leaders in the emergent field; just now, he's in the process of filling an endowed chair with a professor who will develop sophisticated computing tools that enhance the capabilities — and, perhaps more important in this economic climate, the efficiency — of journalists and other citizens who are trying to hold public officials and institutions accountable.

Does your computer interrupt you at inopportune moments? Does your software distract you when it wants attention? Do you wish that it could help you out with routine tasks at home and work?

Search millions of photographs from the LIFE photo archive, stretching from the 1750s to today. Most were never published and are now available for the first time through the joint work of LIFE and Google.

Spontaneous, unobtrusive usability testing software for designers and developers.

One of the topics that came up while I was having lunch last week w/ Swissmiss was our systems for checking stuff out on the web. For me one of the ways of getting around using an rss feed reader which I deplore is to use tabs.

23andMe offers a high-density, custom genome scan. A small saliva sample of you DNA is processed The resulting data is then presented on a secure website using interactive tools that offer information about ancestry, inherited traits and disease risk. It provides you with hundreds of insights into your genetics, and these are regular updated.

Eight-year-old children have a radically different learning strategy from twelve-year-olds and adults. Eight-year-olds learn primarily from positive feedback ('Well done!'), whereas negative feedback ('Got it wrong this time') scarcely causes any alarm bells to ring. Twelve-year-olds are better able to process negative feedback, and use it to learn from their mistakes.

I’ve learned that the World Bank now offers an API for several of its data sets on development, governance, and business conditions, plus a collection of photos.

Can money buy you happiness? Yes—so long as you spend the money on someone else. According to new research, giving other people even as little as $5 can lead to increased well-being for the giver.

Maybe you've felt it - the buzz in a room, the tension in the air, the accelerating pace at which people are connecting and the realization that we're all in this together, even if we don't quite know what "this" is. At least in my small pocket of the world (wide web), something is brewing. That something is The Future of Science.

GovTrack.us is a tool for you to keep tabs on the U.S. Congress. Use our feeds or research pending and past legislation. GovTrack is a community & open source project.

"Today I want to bring to your attention an approach you can use personally if you really haven't a clue what you are meant to do -- if you don't even know where to start. It's an exercise in acquiring self-knowledge, designed by Otto Scharmer's Presencing Institute."

This website is a survey of new projects and ideas from around the world. They share a common interest in using new media technology to help people in developing countries face the challenges in their lives.

Follow the Oil Money is an interactive tool that tracks the flow of oil money in US politics.

A peer reviewed open access journal for empirical findings, methodology, and theory of social and behavioral science concerning the Internet and its implications for individuals, social groups, organizations, and society.

SurveyMonkey has a single purpose: to enable anyone to create professional online surveys quickly and easily.

With the latest release of Ubuntu, I was interested to see how far Linux had come since then in terms of being used easily by the mainstream. So, I tricked my grudging girlfriend Erin into sitting down at a brand new Ubuntu 8.04 installation and performin

Een vlieg in het email van een urinoir is ook innovatie. Maar niet voor het kabinet, dat zich blindstaart op onvolledige r&d-statistieken en dus vooral geld uittrekt voor stamcelonderzoek en nanotechnologie.

De RFID Guardian is een klein apparaat dat werkt op een batterij waarmee de signalen van RFID-lezers, alsmede die vanuit actieve chips, kunnen worden geblokkeerd.

Mirage is a ready-to-try implementation of the latest research in automatic playlist generation and music similarity. Mirage analyzes your music collection and computes similarity models for each song. After your music has been analyzed, Mirage is able to

Zotero [zoh-TAIR-oh] is a free, easy-to-use Firefox extension to help you collect, manage, and cite your research sources.

Ian Ayres, Yale Law School professor, Forbes columnist, and data fanatic has now written a book on data mining, Super Crunchers: Why Thinking-By-Numbers Is the New Way to Be Smart.

Open-source knowledge base speeds discovery, research and networking with more than 110 best practice documents and a secure directory of participating government officials from over 450 cities, counties and US states.

Reference list by Danah Boyd

De scheiding tussen een prive sfeer en een publieke ruimte hoort tot de grondbeginselen van een moderne en democratische samenleving. (conferentie 1 juni 2007)

A call to action for all worldchanging people everywhere.

Gapminder turns boring statistics into something new and interesting, using visualizations and animateions. The Gapminder Goal: enable you to make sense of the world by having fun with statistics.

"The positive effects of homework are largely mythical. In preparation for a book on the topic, I’ve spent a lot of time sifting through the research. The results are nothing short of stunning. For starters, there is absolutely no evidence of any aca

De Nationale Proefschriftensite biedt een eenvoudige manier om te zoeken naar proefschriften van promovendi van Nederlandse universiteiten.