Wednesday, December 16, 2009
Charity Navigator
Charity Navigator uses a numbers-based rating system to assess the financial health of over 5,000 of America's best-known charities. Each charity receives a rating of one to four stars. At their web site they now have up their Top 10 lists. You can also search their database by keyword or charity name.
Tuesday, December 01, 2009
Accessing a million pages
Govpulse allows you to use filters, search and respond to the mounds of documents that the federal government releases. Browse the Federal Register from 1994.
Wednesday, November 25, 2009
More research material on Google Scholar
You can now find and read full text legal opinions from U.S. federal and state district, appellate and supreme courts using Google Scholar. Click the button, Legal opinions and journals, and type in a subject. The search seems to be full text searchable. The "how cited" link gives you list of other opinions that cite a particular opinion. The major cases are there as well as lesser known ones.
Tuesday, November 24, 2009
Mark your calendars
Sunshine Week celebration has been set for March 14-20, 2010. The N.C. Open Government Coalition will host a workshop on Tuesday, March 16th in Greensboro at Elon Law.
North Carolina's Creative Industry
According to a recent study prepared by the Policy, Research and Strategic Planning Division of the N.C. Department of Commerce, North Carolina has a $41 billion creative industry that employs almost 300,000 people or more than 5 1/2 percent of the state's total employment.
The creative industry includes arts, design and entertainment and new media.
The creative industry includes arts, design and entertainment and new media.
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
Trends in Higher Education
The College Board just released a series of reports:
Trends in College Pricing 20 page report includes the latest information on tuition, fees, room & board and other expense.
Highlights: Published tuition and fees at public four-year colleges and universities rose at an average annual rate of 4.9% per year beyond general inflation from 1999-2000 to 2009-10, more rapidly than in either of the previous two decades. The rate of growth of published prices at both private not-for-profit four-year and public two-year institutions was lower from 1999-2000 to 2009-10 than in either of the previous two decades.
Trends in Student Aid - 20 page report has the latest data on grants, loans and other avenues to help pay for college.
Highlights: 2008-09, undergraduate students received an average of $10,185 in financial aid per full-time equivalent (FTE) student, including $5,041 in grant aid and $4,585 in federal loans. Graduate students received an average of $22,740 in aid, including $7,558 in grant aid and $14,598 in federal loans.
Education Pays - 48 page report shows private and public benefits of a college education
Trends in College Pricing 20 page report includes the latest information on tuition, fees, room & board and other expense.
Highlights: Published tuition and fees at public four-year colleges and universities rose at an average annual rate of 4.9% per year beyond general inflation from 1999-2000 to 2009-10, more rapidly than in either of the previous two decades. The rate of growth of published prices at both private not-for-profit four-year and public two-year institutions was lower from 1999-2000 to 2009-10 than in either of the previous two decades.
Trends in Student Aid - 20 page report has the latest data on grants, loans and other avenues to help pay for college.
Highlights: 2008-09, undergraduate students received an average of $10,185 in financial aid per full-time equivalent (FTE) student, including $5,041 in grant aid and $4,585 in federal loans. Graduate students received an average of $22,740 in aid, including $7,558 in grant aid and $14,598 in federal loans.
Education Pays - 48 page report shows private and public benefits of a college education
Monday, October 19, 2009
Useful Twitter Searches
From: Bates Information Services, www.BatesInfo.com/tip.html
Seeing the word "useful" next to the word "Twitter" might seem oxymoronic to some... kind of like jumbo shrimp or deafening silence. We forget that the main complaint of Twitter -- that the signal-to-noise ratio is so low -- can be said of the web as a whole. Go to ten web pages at random and see how few web pages are even remotely relevant to what you do. What differentiates the web from the Tweetosphere is the existance of robust finding tools. Search engines play that role in the general web, enabling us to avoid most of the web pages that would not interest us. Most Twitter interfaces overload new users with unfiltered tweets, leading sensible people to throw up their hands and walk away.
However, I have found several real-life uses for Twitter lately, with just the search feature on Twitter. Let me know what other ones you come up with.
Use one of the word-cloud generators (I use Search Cloudlet, an add-on for Firefox) and see what words are most frequently used in conjunction with a news event. I searched Twitter to see what words most frequently came up in the context of health care reform. Right now, the buzzwords are public option, doctors, congress and include. Interesting that insurance companies aren't being mentioned very frequently.
Monitor live news, as reported by people nearby. If, for example, I want to see if there's a jump in the mentions of the H1N1 virus near me, I might search for "swine flu" OR h1n1 near:denver within:25mi
Monitor mentions of your organization's names, particularly those when the tweet includes an outbound link. If I was monitoring Crocs, the shoe company, I might search for #crocs filter:links
Gather hightlights from a conference. Within a week of the conference, just search for the hashtag for the conference on the Twitter web site ( for example, I'll soon be speaking at Internet Librarian, which has #IL2009 as its "official" hashtag). Keep clicking the "Older" link at the bottom of the search results page until you have all the tweets on one screen. Copy and paste that to a word processor, and you can easily skim through it to see key ideas. In fact, take all the words and throw them into Wordle.net, which generates a word cloud from any body of text you give it. You'll see the dominant themes of the conference, and can identify the key speakers.
Seeing the word "useful" next to the word "Twitter" might seem oxymoronic to some... kind of like jumbo shrimp or deafening silence. We forget that the main complaint of Twitter -- that the signal-to-noise ratio is so low -- can be said of the web as a whole. Go to ten web pages at random and see how few web pages are even remotely relevant to what you do. What differentiates the web from the Tweetosphere is the existance of robust finding tools. Search engines play that role in the general web, enabling us to avoid most of the web pages that would not interest us. Most Twitter interfaces overload new users with unfiltered tweets, leading sensible people to throw up their hands and walk away.
However, I have found several real-life uses for Twitter lately, with just the search feature on Twitter. Let me know what other ones you come up with.
Use one of the word-cloud generators (I use Search Cloudlet, an add-on for Firefox) and see what words are most frequently used in conjunction with a news event. I searched Twitter to see what words most frequently came up in the context of health care reform. Right now, the buzzwords are public option, doctors, congress and include. Interesting that insurance companies aren't being mentioned very frequently.
Monitor live news, as reported by people nearby. If, for example, I want to see if there's a jump in the mentions of the H1N1 virus near me, I might search for "swine flu" OR h1n1 near:denver within:25mi
Monitor mentions of your organization's names, particularly those when the tweet includes an outbound link. If I was monitoring Crocs, the shoe company, I might search for #crocs filter:links
Gather hightlights from a conference. Within a week of the conference, just search for the hashtag for the conference on the Twitter web site ( for example, I'll soon be speaking at Internet Librarian, which has #IL2009 as its "official" hashtag). Keep clicking the "Older" link at the bottom of the search results page until you have all the tweets on one screen. Copy and paste that to a word processor, and you can easily skim through it to see key ideas. In fact, take all the words and throw them into Wordle.net, which generates a word cloud from any body of text you give it. You'll see the dominant themes of the conference, and can identify the key speakers.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
