From the category archives:

Standardization

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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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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The Public Domain Manifesto

5 February 2010
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“The Public Domain Manifesto” has been released by COMMUNIA, the European Thematic Network on the digital public domain. If you would like to show your support for this cause, after you have read “The Public Domain Manifesto”, you may sign it. You may choose whether or not you would like your signature displayed online. Below, [...]

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What is Your Digital Fingerprint?

4 February 2010
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As a result of Data Privacy Day last week, I have spent the past few days poking around online to see what data about myself I could discover that I didn’t know existed. Before I try to tame others’ data, perhaps I should try taming my own?
I searched under various versions of my name. Now, [...]

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A History of the Internet

4 February 2010
A History of the Internet, c. 1957-2009.

The following animation is a concise, high-level technical history of the Internet, c. 1957-2009. This ~8 minute animation covers its early development and concepts, including the creation of the commercial, military, and scientific networks. This history describes how the politics of the times, such as the Cold War, influenced the decentralized, distributed design and development [...]

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Roger Magoulas Defines a Data Scientist

18 January 2010
Roger Magoulas Discusses Big Data and Data Science

Roger Magoulas, the director of market research at O’Reilly Media, defines a Data Scientist in the short video Big Data (part one), which is part of O’Reilly’s “The Future at Work” video series.

First, he sees a Data Scientist as someone with an amalgamation of skills that used to be reserved only for academic institutions [...]

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“A Data Deluge Swamps Science Historians”

14 January 2010
Server cabinets at a data center

A few months ago, Robert Lee Holtz wrote an article in the Science Journal section of the Wall Street Journal where he discussed how the data deluge is swamping scientists and researchers.
The author addressed the particular issue of how curators store data for current and future access so that other scientists may access the data [...]

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‘What part of “Give us our damn data” do you not understand?’

14 January 2010
Medical records on a shelf

CNN posted an article a few days ago that gives examples of patients and former patients who have had problems accessing (getting copies of) their patient data. I did not find any of the information about the difficulties in accessing personal data to be surprising.
I thought the author’s advice on how to gain access [...]

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World Wide Mush? An Argument Against the “Internet as a Collective”

10 January 2010
Jaron Lanier, You are Not a Gadget

Researcher Jaron Lanier has an interesting article in last Friday’s Wall Street Journal entitled “World Wide Mush“. The article is a plug for his book, You Are Not a Gadget. Although the author does not specifically discuss large-scale data management, I am including it because he addressed “the collective” work of the Internet, upon which [...]

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Ensuring the Integrity, Accessibility, and Stewardship of Research Data in the Digital Age

7 January 2010
Ensuring the Integrity, Accessibility, and Stewardship of Research Data in the Digital Age

I just finished reading the Executive Summary of a report out by the National Academy of Sciences Committee on Ensuring the Utility and Integrity of Research Data in a Digital Age. The report is entitled, “Ensuring the Integrity, Accessibility, and Stewardship of Research Data in the Digital Age“. The full report is available online for [...]

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