I first learned and practiced systems analysis back in the 1970s, and it's a skill that seems neglected in the training of many young professionals I come in contact with.

"Thinking in Systems: A Primer" is a book I hoped would be informative and accessible for people who need to develop the skill or just refresh their own talents. It does present its subject systematically and without confusing jargon.

While I found the writing clear and well-organized in its development and presentation of the subject, I found many of the illustrations less than helpful. I would have liked a less holistic and more concrete development of the analysis of the examples in the book.

For use as a textbook, an appendix with a glossary of terms of art and sybols would be very helpful. Nonetheless, reading this will give the novice an appreciation of what systems analysis is, and why it is critical to problem solving. Its informal approach may be more suited for young people today than a more formal and rigidly structured treatment.

Visualizing the insertions/deletions of text through the six editions of The Origin of Species.

Any business analytics system dealing with moderate amounts of data can be built following this approach.

Apache CouchDB is the central data store
All data is stored as JSON-LD entities
NoFlo handles all data imports
Analytics based on the data are done with CouchDB map/reduce
Visualization happens with a CouchApp using JavaScript InfoVis Toolkit

pandas is a python package providing convenient data structures for time series, cross-sectional, or any other form of “labeled” data, with tools for building statistical and econometric models.

This book is intended to have three roles and to serve three associated audi- ences: an introductory text on Bayesian inference starting from first principles, a graduate text on effective current approaches to Bayesian modeling and com- putation in statistics and related fields, and a handbook of Bayesian methods in applied statistics for general users of and researchers in applied statistics.

The NodeXL Template for Microsoft Excel 2007 is a free and open source extension to the widely used spreadsheet application that provides a range of basic network analysis and visualization features. NodeXL uses a highly structured workbook template that includes multiple worksheets to store all the information needed to represent a network graph. Network relationships (i.e., graph edges) are represented as an “edge list”, which contains all pairs of vertices that are connected in the network. Other worksheets contain information about each vertex (i.e., node) and cluster. Visualization features allow users to display a range of network graph representations and map data attributes to visual properties including shape, color, size, transparency, and location.

Lippmannian device is named after Lippmann, and provides a coarse means of showing actor partisanship.

"The good people from sociomatic have prepared a nice little slideshow on how to use gephi to analyze social network data extracted from Facebook (using netvizz). This is a great way to start playing around with network analysis and the slides should really help with the first couple of steps…"

Popularity bias (”the inherent democratic nature of the web”) might actually prevent more information from ever being seen, because it never appears at the top of anyone’s query list.

Drop the scientism, HCI! It’s not going to meet our needs and it’s lousy science anyway (all dogmatism is). Good science and good critique should complement and reinforce each other. But as long as we categorically dismiss non-scientific strategies, we’re only fake-interdisciplinary and we’re going to botch our work.

This two-part article is a step-by-step guide for those wishing to create new taxonomies for their business unit, or client. It will outline the many different elements that make up a quality taxonomy and the pitfalls you should be aware of when starting a new project.

The United States economy has grown faster, on average, under Democratic presidents than under Republicans. If history is a guide, an Obama victory in November would lead to faster economic growth with less inequality, while a McCain victory would lead to slower economic growth with more inequality.

The aim of the CREEN project is to develop new methods to recognize emerging critical events in evolving complex networks, coupled networks and active agent networks.

Under what conditions is decentralization of facilities rational for a client-centered system of service or administration, and when is great centralization more cost-effective?

My immediate intention in presenting these is to suggest a list of functions (recursive functions) that could be the basis for a manageable but also useful tool-building enterprise in humanities computing.

An easy to use data access system was developed that meets UNSD’s vision of providing an integrated information resource with current, relevant and reliable statistics free of charge to the global community.

The music analyzer API can help power music visualization, music games, artistic installations, and DJ applications with a much deeper level of music structure understanding.

The complexity of many organisational/social problem situations defeats attempts at defining a problem: in many such situations the problem is 'what is the problem?'. SSM provides a framework for tackling such situations.

Publish or Perish is a software program that retrieves and analyzes academic citations. It uses Google Scholar to obtain the raw citations

WikiPrep is a preprocessing script written in Perl that takes an XML dump of Wikipedia, and infers some information that was implicitly present there.

Data is organized into tables, rows and columns, but a query language like SQL is not supported. An Iterator-like interface is available for scanning through a row range (and of course there is an ability to retrieve a column value for a specific key).

The highest abstraction layer in Pig is a query language interface, whereby users express data analysis tasks as queries, in the style of SQL or Relational Algebra.

This paper describes how to use Amazon Web Services and Hadoop to run an ad hoc analysis on a large collection of web access logs that otherwise would have cost a prohibitive amount in either time or money.

OCRopus is a state-of-the-art document analysis and OCR system, featuring pluggable layout analysis, pluggable character recognition, statistical natural language modeling, and multi-lingual capabilities.

iStockphoto.com has a search engine that can sort images based on where you could place text or a logo.

The LIRE (Lucene Image REtrieval) library is a simple way to create a Lucene index of image features for content based image retrieval (CBIR).

Tools for entity recognition, extraction and linking.

The paper argues, that Wikipedia can be understood as a discursive formation that regulates and structures the production of statements.

Developing content analysis algorithms and systems to generate meta-data locally on mobile/ubicomp platforms.

Research interests in content analysis, information extraction, statistical machine learning and graphical modeling and detection and representation of semantic information.

Research interests include automatic content analysis and annotation of still images, videos and sound for content-driven multimedia archiving and retrieval.

Understanding and thereby manipulating, multimedia content at the semantic level is the only way towards realizing the full potential of emerging digital media technologies.

Although the participants -- citizen journalists and commenters -- are essential, it's even more important to remember that publishing is about the audience in the end. Most people who come to the site are not participants.

This is a fully documented collection of R routines for social network analysis; utilities included range from hierarchical Bayesian modeling of informant accuracy to logistic network regression.

Statnet is a software package for social network analysis based on recent advances in the statistical modeling of random graphs. Runs in R.

GNU Octave is a high-level language, primarily intended for numerical computations.

To search for your own words or phrases, or to compare the occurrence of two words in Bush’s State of the Union Addresses, please try the State of the Union Parsing Tool.

A "google bomb" is indirectly an example of global network building and collective action of website owners and bloggers based on a common idea or opinion.

Open source qualitative transcription/analysis tool for OSX.

NVivo 7 is ideal for team projects and research involving multiple methods.

Supports qualitative data analysis and helps you systematically evaluate and interpret your texts. It is also a powerful tool for developing theories as well as testing theoretical conclusions of your analysis.

Transcriva transform the process of transcribing interviews from a tedious chore into a graceful process with an efficient chat-like interface using keyboard shortcuts.

Transana is designed to facilitate the transcription and qualitative analysis of video and audio data. It provides a way to view video or play audio recordings, create a transcript, and link places in the transcript to frames in the video.