From the category archives:

Policy

Oxford Launches Research Data Management Website

16 November 2010
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The following announcement was posted to the Research Data Management listserv on 14 November 2010 via S. Hodson. I thought it might be on interest to some of you.

The University of Oxford has recently launched a new Research Data Management Website: www.admin.ox.ac.uk/rdm
The development of this resource was ‘a close collaboration between Research Services, Computing [...]

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Preservation Policies, Forbes, and an Email Time Capsule

12 November 2010
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I’m often asked why the preservation of digital materials is so complicated. After all, isn’t it simply about the storage and migration, or emulation, of digital objects and metadata? Why do you need all of these policies and procedures around a data or digital archive? Why can’t you just store the digital files and leave [...]

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A Brief History of Weed. Yes, “That” Weed

3 November 2010
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Have you ever wondered when people first began growing (and smoking) marijuana? When it became illegal to smoke in the United States? How many people are arrested for possession each year? Now, let’s say you research and gather this data…how would you present it to the public?
One way is to create an animation of that [...]

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ICPSR Releases “Guidelines for Effective Data Management Plans”

27 October 2010
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The Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) has released their Guidelines for Effective Data Management Plans.
On the web site ICPSR writes this about these guidelines:

Many federal funding agencies, including NIH and most recently NSF, are requiring that grant applications contain data management plans for projects involving data collection. To support researchers in [...]

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War Data: Visualization of Afghanistan Hotspots Using Wikileaks Data

26 October 2010
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How would you take a data set released by Wikileaks and visualize it to see activity in Afghanistan over time? As part of this week’s theme of war data, I present a visualization based on leaked war data.
Mike Dewar, Drew Conway, John Myles White, and Harlan Harris used R code (the scripts, etc., are available [...]

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The Internet of Things and a System of Systems

21 October 2010
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We are drowning in a sea of data. There are more things on the Internet than there are people; currently about 1 billion people use the Internet.
We are learning to take data, create information, gain knowledge, and achieve wisdom. We are able to do this by using The Internet of Things to create a [...]

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Google Not Being Evil

20 October 2010
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Why does Google want to know so much about you?
The company provides us with services ranging from maps to email, phones to video, books to social media — all free. Why do they do this, and how can the company afford to do this?
The more products and services the company provides for [...]

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Denial of Service Attacks — Cyber Vandals and Cyber Activism Explored

19 October 2010
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When a Denial of Service attack occurs, is it vandalism and mischief, an act of war, or a new form of democratic protest? The answer to that question might depend on which side you are on — it is a bit like the quote that “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter“. Regardless of [...]

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How Advertisers Use Internet Cookies to Track Your Online Habits

18 October 2010
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What is behavioral targeting? Is it a violation of your privacy for businesses to track your movements online via cookies? What are cookies, anyway? Are cookies helpful, or do they provide too much information? Should you worry about how much digital exhaust you trail?
Christina Tsuei of the Wall Street Journal explains how advertisers use cookies [...]

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How to Tame Your Data When Mom is on Facebook

13 October 2010
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What do you do when your mom gets on Facebook? Do you not “friend” her, do you become more careful about what you post, or do you put her into a special group with limited access to your page? If you do the latter, what do you do when she asks why she can’t [...]

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