Improve PACER – Sign the Petition
Folks, We crafted a very short petition directed at the Administrative Office of the US Courts to improve PACER. The petition is online here: http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/improve-PACER. It reads:
We ask the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts to improve PACER by enhancing the authenticity, usability and availability of the system. We the undersigned, urge the Administrative Office of the US Courts (AO) to make the following changes to the PACER system: For verification and reliability, the AO should digitally sign every document put into PACER using readily available technology. PACER needs to be much more readily accessible if it is to be usable for research, education, and the practice of law. Improved accessibility includes both lowering the costs for using PACER and enhancing the web interfaces. Depository libraries should also have free access to PACER.Please sign the petition, comment on the ideas and share the petition with your friends and colleagues! I encourage you to sign the petition. And if you have any questions about it, please don't hesitate to contact me. Thank you, Erika Wayne e-mail: evwayne AT stanford DOT edu Continue reading
State dept asks Twitter to be eyes and ears of Iranian elections
Twitter, the 140 character social media micro-blog, was scheduled to go down for maintenance on monday night. But, according to the CNN blog, a little thing called the Iranian elections and a request from the US State Department caused them to change their scheduled downtime to yesterday afternoon from 2-3 PST (middle of the night Tehran time) in order to ensure that the flow of information from Iran remains open and that Iranians can continue to communicate internally and with the rest of the world. This is a pretty amazing development in that, despite the Iranian restrictions on journalists and news organizations, the world is still able to get up to the minute accounts - complete with video on youtube, hashtags on twitter and facebook. Now libraries just have to figure out how to collect, preserve and organize this massive flow of information ;-) Mashable has more on why this matters as well as a HOWTO guide on following the elections. Continue reading
The Census and Politics
This article does an excellent job of explaining the issues involved in picking someone to head the Census Bureau.
- Census Pick Illustrates Broader Obama Strategy, by Michael J. O'Neil, The Huffington Post, June 15, 2009.
If you need a non-statistician's explanation of why sampling and estimation is as accurate as an actual enumeration, consider your last blood test: did they remove and test ALL your blood?. These matters are beyond any scientific dispute. Yes, sampling is theory -- the same way gravity is theory.Continue reading
Lunchtime Listen: Catch up on your Internet History
The UK Open University has a series of 9 short interviews with Internet pioneers available on iTunes:
- The Internet at 40 [iTunes link].
Indiana University’s National Government Statistics Collection
The Indiana University Bloomington Libraries are one of the leading academic research library systems in North America, providing strong collections, quality service and instructional programs, and leadership in the application of information technologies. Indiana University has created an Archive-it collection of National Government Statistical Websites. This comprehensive collection contains web sites of statistical agencies of 150 countries from Sub-Saharan Africa, Central Eurasia, East Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, Oceania, Russia and Eastern Europe, South Asia, and Southeast Asia. These web sites may include data, reports, statistical yearbooks, press releases, methodological guides, and other information of continuing interest to social scientists and historians. Indiana University has also been using Archive-it to document their own website as well as Indiana state and local government websites since 2005. A portal to all their collections can be found here. Enjoy! -Lori Continue reading