Data Sets/Data Curation

A lot of us have been thinking about data curation for some time, and some of us are just starting…I don’t want to even think about twitterarchiving! I have had a few links over on Diigo and am now thinking about where we find data. I came across this interesting page by a graduate student on where he finds data.  He lists University places:

DATA SOURCES:

• Data and Story Library – An online library of datafiles and stories that illustrate the use of basic statistics methods, from Carnegie Mellon
• Berkeley Data Lab – Part of the UC Berkeley library system. Hey, they’ve even on Twitter.
• UCLA Statistics Data Sets – Some of the data that UCLA stat uses in their labs and assignments.

It seems there must be more universities with public data banks.  I’m going to look for more.

EBooks

Looking for places that have free ebooks? There are several great apps out there–my favorite currently is Stanza. The native iPhone/iPod Touch Stanza application (available for free from the Apple App Store) can share books with Stanza Desktop wirelessly, so you can take your books on the road and read them wirelessly — no internet connection required! I’m currently reading Accelerando by Charles Stross. He is regarded as being part of a new generation of British science fiction writers who specialize in hard science fiction and space opera.

Looking for more? There is a great page from Penn. Also, try FreeTechBooks – a list of free online computer science, engineering and programming books, ebooks, texts, textbooks, lecture notes, documentations and references. And, of course, the invaluable:  Project Gutenberg.

Happy online reading!

Dapp Factory

I taught a “Creating Information Portals” class on Wednesday to Dr. Natelson’s Experimental Physics class. A very bright undergrad taught me about this tool: DapperFox. He learned about it when he was working in IT at an Oil & Gas company. DapperFox is a Firefox extension that sits next to the RSS icon in your browser.
Whenever you visit a website DapperFox will show you RSS feeds that other people have created, as well as allow you to create a new feed to share with the community. This is perfect when a site does not have its own RSS feed, or when its feed doesn’t meet your needs. It is really useful in that it can create all of the following at the DappFactory:

• Dapp XML
• RSS feed
• Google Gadget
• Netvibes Module
• Google Map
• iCalendar
• Image Loop

It also has a demo feature, so you can see what you created, before it is launched. So, now, you can RSSify any website.

Mobile Apps/ m.sites

The past week has seen the launch of two mobile sites from well-known publishers. Late last week, AIP launched iResearch. It contains links to all of the AIP journals, including the freely-available open access journal: Journal of Renewable and Sustainable Energy (JRSE). iResearch requires a Wifi or cellular connection when you access the journals for the first time and to download any PDF articles. Once the articles are in the “My Articles” screen, they can be accessed without an Internet connection. Any new journals, issues, volumes or content that is available, or content that you did not previously access will not be available without an Internet connection. iResearch caches only the content you have previously accessed and the PDF files you have saved.

And earlier this week the IEEE Xplore Mobile (Beta) site was released. http://m.ieeexplore.ieee.org

It is interesting to see the app versus m.site decision. I like apps, but I am starting to get too many, and even with the ability to organize them in the new iTunes, it still is a lot to scroll though. That is one reason I like Papers (although not the price!) which combines multiple archive sites in one app.

iresearch app

IEEE mobile