ResearchBuzz

School’s back in session! Looking for educational offerings for your kids? Family Education has launched a new “printables” center, available at http://printables.familyeducation.com/ .

The site allows you to pick an age range (from 0-3 to 12-18 — 12-18 is kind of a wide range, isn’t it?) and a category (including Art & Music, Skill Builders, and Coloring Pages) to get a list of available pages. You can also look at lists of popular pages that are available at the front of the site.

I looked at Forms & Charts for 7-11 years old and found charts in a variety of categories, including Genealogy, Learning Disabilities (including a symptoms chart for Asperger) and even lunchbox notes. Click on the name of a printable and you’ll get a little description of the chart and an invitation to view/download it.

Unfortunately in order to get to the printable you do have to register. This is more annoying than invasive but it IS annoying. You’ll have to provide an e-mail address. The site’s privacy policy is here; nothing is untoward but the site has one of those annoying deals where they precheck newsletter boxes, presuming on your behalf that you want to read what they have to offer. EIGHT newsletters. Um.

After (providing an e-mail address, carefully unclicking all eight newsletter boxes, and) registering, I clicked on View Printable and got a PDF file that was, in fact, printable.

I found a surprising variety of resources here, though some of them seemed rather out of the stated scope (why do the 7-11 year olds need the “Appreciating Your Spouse Quiz”?) and the registration process is annoying. If you’re a teacher and a homeschooler you might find some cool stuff here.

This post came from ResearchBuzz, a site with news and information about online data collections. Visit us at ResearchBuzz.com .

This is a great idea. Wikirage ( http://www.wikirage.com/ ) tracks the Wikipedia entries with the most edits per unique editor over given periods of time. So it’s somewhat about what people are interested in, but also what they’re interested in revising…

The default view from the front page is for the most edits in the last day. But you can check a time window as narrow as the last hour or as wide as the last month. No matter what time span you’ll check you’ll get a list of the entries that have had the most unique editor edits in that time period.

I checked out the last day. I saw that the number one listing on that page was Richard Jewell (who, as you might remember, was wrongly accused of being involved with the bombing at the 1996 Summer Olympics. “Why in the world,” I thought, “is his page high on the edits list?” I clicked on it and got a summary of the page from Wikipedia, as well as a graph of the number of unique editors for that page (which had spiked in the last day.)

But I did not get the whole story until I clicked through to the Wikipedia page itself (which is linked through the “Summary from Wikipedia” line; it’s a bit hard to find.) Richard Jewell passed away today. Despite checking in with multiple news sites through the day, I did not get the news on this until I saw the link in Wikirage (and confirmed with a check of CNN.)

Not everything on the list was a person. There were several people, but I also noticed video games, historical events, sports teams — even films and TV shows.

What an interesting perspective to track. The only thing I’d add would be a way to make the linkthrough to the actual Wikipedia article more obvious, and perhaps add a direct link to the history page (so you can get some idea of what edits are being made and at what speed.)

I can’t believe I’m writing this in August 2007, but if you’re busy thinking about November 2008 you’ll have lots of fun over at Wonkosphere ( http://wonkosphere.com ), a site which is tracking buzz on the major presidential candidates. (I saw only Republican and Democratic candidates represented.)

The site tracks with a graph the candidates and their level of buzz in the blogosphere. It also pulls out particular posts and provides stats for chatter in different sections of the ’sphere — conservative, liberal, and neutral. Dennis Kucinich, clocking in at number 10 on the list of 12, has a list of recent blog posts mentioning him and the tone among liberal and conservative blogs (Tone measures how positive the content of the blog postings was.) (Why not list the tone among politically-neutral blogs? In some ways I would find that the most interesting stat.)

Each candidate, as you might expect, also has their own page. Here is John McCain’s page. Graphs show buzz and tone over time (with a comparison to the candidates overall) and a list shows the most recent blog posts dealing with the candidate. And here’s where there might be a slight problem. On McCain’s page (and several other candidate pages) there are a lot of stories about Larry Craig. I don’t know if that’s because there are brief candidate mentions, or if because there’s been such a huge amount of coverage of that particular story so quickly, but they have very little to do with the candidates in whose lists they are appearing.

I found I got more out of the blog posts when it was very obvious (via the headline) that they were about a particular candidate, or about a particular issue that candidate was known for. I got the data and the current discussion points from there and relied on the graphs for an overview on where the candidate is buzzwise.

If you’re wondering exactly what blogs are being mined for this data, you can get a breakdown at http://wonkosphere.com/directory.htm . There are something over 1200 blogs here. I was very surprised at how many more conservative (over 700) blogs there were compared to liberal (just over 400.) There were a tiny number (45) of independent blogs.

Despite the fact that the hype machine is gassing up and pulling out onto the highway, the elections are still over a year away, and because of that news political coverage is still unformed, speculating about possible presidential candidates (even longshots), focusing on the current administration, and getting easily distracted by scandal. That makes Wonkosphere’s job tough. I expect as we get closer to the election, narrow down the candidates, etc, the buzz reporting and post lists will get a lot better. Worth a look.