The web is cluttered. There’s a pantload of information out there and it’s hard to sift through. Google does a fabulous job at being your virtual Swiss Army Knife for finding what you’re looking for. But even the likes of Google Scholar and Google Books are not perfect. Quickly finding and skimming abstracts, learning about authors, and surfacing new publications is tricky. That’s where Scholr.ly comes in. It’s expected to open in beta later this summer but we have a sneak preview already. Scholr.ly is being designed for researchers. It’s basically Google Scholar but a different format. The biggest difference from a standard Google-based search is that Scholr.ly’s results are instantly sorted into two columns: publications and authors. The publications page shows titles, authors and other meta information, as well as excerpts that are easy to skim. The right-side column shows authors. Each author can have a profile that includes career information, affiliations, publication listings, common co-authors, top publishing venues, and impact metrics.
The study: Over the span of five summer weeks, 18 second-graders were divided into two groups; one group read aloud to another person for 30 minutes once a week, and the other group read aloud to a dog.
Guess which group saw a decrease in their words-per-minute reading rate…
I know this without looking. Reading to the dog is better because they feel less worried about mistakes.
In an accompanying PDF I have listed studies that are currently seeking children (both female and male) with Emotional of Behavioral Disorders (especially autism spectrum disorders) as participants (some include adults, as well) that are registered with ClinicalTrials.gov, a service of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH). The studies have diverse purposes… (Click the link to continue reading)
I know that I don’t normally post things on this end of research, but I thought that there might be people in Tumblr that might be looking for such opportunities. Just passing the info along.
Resource suggested by The Education Technology Blog.
“SearchEdu.com is a reference based search engine that allows you to search education sites, government sites, online books, dictionaries, biographies and more. Think of it as a more user friendly advanced Google search. Simply enter your search terms and choose your source site category from the dropdown menu. It also has some useful links to popular, and reliable, reference sites, conversions sites and calculators.”
The Obama administration issued long-awaited, long-delayed guidelines on Friday to insulate government scientific research from political meddling and to base policy decisions on solid data.
Under the guidelines, government scientists are in general free to speak to journalists and the public about their work, and agencies are prohibited from editing or suppressing reports by independent advisory committees.
And the agencies are instructed that when communicating a scientific finding to the public, they should describe its underlying assumptions. For instance, they are told to describe “probabilities associated with both optimistic and pessimistic projections” — a guideline that, had it been in place last summer, might have helped the administration avoid overly optimistic estimates of the BP oil spill.
In a blog entry on the White House Web site, John P. Holdren, President Obama’s science adviser, said the guidelines set “minimum standards” that federal agencies will be expected to meet.
The agencies are to report to Dr. Holdren within 120 days, detailing how they will carry out the policy.
Some scientists praised the new guidelines. “I think they represent several steps in the right direction,” said Albert H. Teich, director of science and policy programs at the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington.
But others were disappointed that the four-page document did not provide more specifics. “The guidelines are substantively quite thin,” said Roger A. Pielke Jr., a professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado.
The guidelines have their roots in a series of scientific controversies that erupted during the administration of President George W. Bush.
Officials were repeatedly accused of suppressing or even altering research findings, particularly on climate change, to match the political views of the White House. So in March 2009, when Mr. Obama overturned Bush administration limits on stem cellresearch, he set out several principles to “guarantee scientific integrity throughout the executive branch” and added, “We make scientific decisions based on facts, not ideology.”
But though the president called on Dr. Holdren to come up with recommendations within four months, the guidelines did not emerge for over a year and a half.
(Click the link to read the entire article)
Now, journal articles aren’t exactly hard to come by on the web. You can always search Google Scholar for whatever you’re looking for, some universities offer their own search tools, and there are plenty of topic-specific sites that can help you find relevant material. The problem, according to Academia.edu founder Richard Price, is that this content and the communities around them are very fragmented. So Academia.edu built a directory of as many journals as it could find.
The feature is pretty straightforward: head to Academia.edu, and you can browse through over 12,500 journals sorted by topic (here’s a listing of publications related to biology). You can opt to ‘follow’ your favorite publications, and relevant stories will start popping up in your Academia.edu news feed, so you don’t have to worry about looking them up yourself every month. Price also says that this feature ranks journals by how many followers it has, which could be used to gauge how influential (or at least, how popular) a given journal is.
» via TechCrunch
Just the facts ma’m.
This website for kids is run by Information Please. There is a homework center, dictionary, encyclopedia, atlas, and almanac. Other sections of the site include information about different parts of the world, the United States, science, important people from history, sports, science, authors and books, and math.
This would be a good site to have students look up informations, find definitions, or to introduce different units.
