ResearchBuzz

This is how much of a nerd I am: I have the CIA World Factbook on my Kindle. Pretty nerdy, huh? But it’s not a bad thing; I’ve been fascinated with the Factbook for years. So much information. So easily navigable. Recently the CIA announced what it called “the first major redesign of the Factbook site in over a decade.”

The Factbook is still available at https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/index.html. The front page looks a lot different, with a color-coded Flash map (zoom in to the region in which you’re interested and pick a country) and quick links to things like a gallery of flags of the world.

But what I’m really interested in is the country information. I took a look at Iceland. The country’s information page starts with a flag of the country, a geographic context map, and then a closer map of the country itself. A few feature of the site makeovers is country photos, though not all the countries have them (currently Iceland has 14 photographs. All country photos in the Factbook are in the public domain and there is a link for image downloads.)

Beneath this initial data you’ll find the categories of information provided on each country: introduction, geography, people, government, etc. I hate that these are all “collapsed” by default. Look for the “Expand All” link and you can uncollapse all of them at the same time. You’ll see that there are lots of data fields here, covering everything from the economy to the literacy rate to natural hazards to number of airports.

One of the new features of the Factbook is that many of the data fields now contain world rankings. So looking at Iceland’s life expectancy at birth, I can see that it’s 80.67 years for the total population, but I can also see it ranks 14th in the world. If I click on the 14 I can get the full ranking of all countries for this statistic (Macau ranks #1 in case you wondered.)

If you just want to get a list of a single data point for all countries, look for the “Field Listing” icon to the right of each data heading. This’ll give you all countries in alphabetical order. This is handy when you want to get an overview for unrankable information like natural resources or international disputes.

The CIA World Factbook updates every two weeks, which I keep having to remind myself is NOT slow in the age of Wikipedia. No it isn’t. There’s also a “changelog” of sorts available at https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/docs/whatsnew.html. This’ll give you information on both broad changes (census data being entered) and some country-based changes (leadership changing, etc.)

I’m not a big fan of lots of Flash, and I personally would have the categories uncollapsed, but the site has seemed to strike a good balance between adding more data and functionality without making things either overly-complicated or heavy to load. (And if you DO find it too heavy to load, there’s a low-bandwidth text-based version that dispenses with the Flash and the graphics and loads like lightning in my browser.)

UPI had a brief article on CiteSeerX, the article and citation search engine, on June 2 so I thought I’d mosey over and see how it was doing.

Pennsylvania State University runs CiteSeerX and it’s available to anybody at http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu. It’s in beta, but isn’t everything?

The front page notes how many article and citations are searched on the engine, with the nice extra of how many articles and citations have been added in the last month. Actually you can search three different ways by this front page — by documents, by authors, and in tables. (the document search has an advanced feature that allows you to narrow your search by title, abstract, date, etc.)

I ran a documents search for autism and got 593 results. (If you choose to include citations you’ll get over 3300 results.) There’s an RSS feed for search results – nice! Click on the title of a paper and you’ll get lots of additional information on it, including citations (which take you usually to other papers of similar subject), actual related documents, and a version history. There is a function to add tags to the document (though none of the documents I looked had tags.) If you have a “My CiteSeer” account you can monitor for changes to the article as well.

I actually had a little trouble finding the actual ARTICLE amidst all the information. Look in the upper right corner. There’s a direct link to the article as well as a PDF of a cached version. Every article I looked at had the full text available.

Though the advanced search allowing me to find articles that had adults in the title and Asperger’s in the text was DEPRESSINGLY SMALL next to the regular search results for autism, the CiteSeerX RSS feeds will allow me to keep an eye out for new articles. Great engine.

Wow, I haven’t covered one of these in a while. TechTarget has launched another information site for a technology: cloud computing. SearchCloudComputing.com (http://www.searchcloudcomputing.com”>) was made available on June 5.

The site includes information on several aspects of cloud computing (including security, data management, infrastructure, and applications) as well as news. There’s also a webcast and some white papers available.

What I was really looking for was a “What the Heck” document — you know, “What the heck is cloud computing” — which would have given everything else more context. I didn’t find it. What I DID find was an overview of key cloud computing platforms, which did answer a few of my questions.

I think I might start with the overview from Dave Taylor or this presentation from Justin Souter to get my head sufficiently wrapped around cloud computing before I go back to TechTarget.