Mon 27 Apr 2009
Here is an useful compilation of tips and tools to research the Deep Web from the Online College Blog.
What is the Deep Web (or Invisible Web)? It’s the Internet content that typically will not appear after a Google or Yahoo search. This content is harder to access for various reasons: it’s dynamically generated, it comes from scripted or contextual pages, or is protected by password, for example.
The USF Libraries do give you access to great Deep Web resources as we provide the subscriptions to hundreds of databases and thousands of electronic journals, on campus or off-campus. That means that not only you can identify documents of interest, you can actually access the full-text or files themselves. That’s not always the case, even for some of the resources listed in the link. Don’t forget that alumni and community members can visit a USF Library to access most of those resources on-site as well. Look for the public access workstations.
Fri 24 Apr 2009
Graduating this May and afraid you might miss being in class and following lectures? Give a look at Academic Earth, a new website giving access to hundreds of video lectures and courses by faculty from some of the top universities in the US.
Academic Earth is an organization founded with the goal of giving everyone on earth access to a world class education.
Wed 22 Apr 2009
The USF Bookstore will come to campus on the following dates for the textbook buyback
- Wednesday, May 6th - 2:00 PM to 6:00 PM
- Thursday, May 7th - 2:00 PM to 6:00 PM
Location: LTB 1120
Tue 21 Apr 2009
Check out the brand new World Digital Library - 10,000 yrs worth of significant primary documents online, from around the world.
The World Digital Library (WDL) makes available on the Internet, free of charge and in multilingual format, significant primary materials from countries and cultures around the world.
The principal objectives of the WDL are to:
- Promote international and intercultural understanding;
- Expand the volume and variety of cultural content on the Internet;
- Provide resources for educators, scholars, and general audiences;
- Build capacity in partner institutions to narrow the digital divide within and between countries.
Content providers are mainly libraries, archives, or other institutions that have collections of cultural content. The project is supported by UNESC and the US Library of Congress.
Mon 20 Apr 2009
As we are well implanted in the Web 2.0 era, there are now different ways of enjoying news and content from the USF Poly Library:
Sat 18 Apr 2009
I thought I was so straightforward and careful, going through the 2700 records of the dataset for participants who were born in July 1963 or later (i.e., plausibly in 8th or 9th grade), adding variables for each year to recode the attendance, grade, and graduation to 1s and 0s, and then adding summary variables to indicate total years of observed attendance, regular high school graduation sometime in the first decade of the study, retentions in K-12 grades, and retentions specifically in 9th grade.
Then I filtered the set for only those participants who were in 9th grade for the first time in 1980 (i.e., in 8th in 1979 and 9th in 1980). And when I divided those participants into graduates vs. nongraduates, the average number of years with observed attendance fit roughly with what I expected: an average of 2.5 observed attendance years for nongraduates, an average of almost precisely 4 observed years of attendance for graduates, with the number of years distributed widely for nongraduates and the vast majority of graduates attending for 4 years. Wonderful! Great! Good step forward to the simulation process!
And then I thought I’d be clever and figure out how many participants had left school and then returned. So I calculated “return” variables for each year after 1979, summed them up, and then realized the problem: about 85% of participants “returned,” at least by this method.
No, that’s not what happened. I realized instantly that this was an artifact of a flawed assumption I had made a few steps above: recoding a year of survey nonparticipation as nonattendance. It’s easy for someone to skip a year of participation, be counted as nonattending, and then come back into participation and have an artifactual “return.” That sounds like a “so what? big deal” situation, except that it also screws up my estimates of years of attendance, because I am artificially deflating the number of years (or cycles) attending by counting survey nonparticipation as nonattendance. Shoot shoot shoot.
This is a standard problem of data censorship with nonparticipation, both right censorship (censorship on the right end of the study timeline) with study attrition and middle censorship when participants at the beginning of the survey and in later years skip a year or more of participation. But it creates some interesting problems and requires that I reread the NLSY79 interview protocols so I know how to interpret the vast majority of missing-variable codes (valid skips and skip-interview codes).
Tue 14 Apr 2009
There is something new in your inbox! The Library has been working for a long time trying to get both loan and return receipts to be sent by email to our users. We had the loan receipts working first, and now the return receipts are functioning.
The system will also send out courtesy notices notifying you of upcoming due dates, as well as overdue notices when items are returned late. Please let us know if you see automated notices from the Library that do not make sense to you.
Mon 13 Apr 2009
Walking down the new wide sidewalk on Bruce B. Downs, I see two older people on scooter-style wheelchairs headed towards me. I mosey over to the right hand side of the sidewalk, so there will be plenty of room to pass. The older gentleman, leading the way, with a woman behind him in her own scooter, veers towards the middle of the sidewalk, and then the left side of the sidewalk. I wonder if he has a visual-perceptual or other visual problem, or maybe an attentional disorder that makes him tend to go towards any landmark. I scoot a little more over, and he heads right for me. I step off the sidewalk and stand still in the grass, to let them pass. The man pulls his scooter right up alongside me and stops. He holds out his hand and says, “I had to make you stop or you wouldn’t accept this pet rock!” He hands me a small rock, a pebble really, something about the size that some people would wear on a necklace. Glued to the small rock were two of those little black and white movable eyes, the kind we used to glue to things when we were kids. There was a mini blue pompom on top of the rock for hair. “Thank you”, I say. Immediately the man turns his attention back to his handlebars, and takes off. Coming up behind him, but never slowing down, the woman calls out as she passes by, “It will give you a lot of good luck!”
I am standing on Bruce B. Downs holding a small pet rock. Was this rock meaningful to them, in some way? Was this their idea of a “random act of kindness”? Were they carrying a scooter-basket full of pet rocks, giving them out to anyone who crossed their path? Did they have many family and friends to give pet rocks to, or nobody to give anything to? Would they remember that they had given me the pet rock? Would it be out of their heads as fast as they had driven away?
I don’t know what this pet rock meant to them, but it must have meant something; otherwise, why do it? The pet rock has a place of honor on my desk. It seems to exude a very good karma.
Mon 13 Apr 2009
This week, from April 12 to the 18, is National Library Week. It has a great theme this year: “Worlds Connect@your library”. Please come make a connection at the USF Poly Library!
Note: Tuesday April 14, is National Library Workers Day. While you are enjoying catalogs, databases, books or a full-text article from a library, please remain aware that those are available to you because people are working hard every day to make them so. Visit your campus or public library and share some love for your favorite library workers!
Mon 13 Apr 2009
Due to essential site maintenance, access will be temporarily unavailable for Wiley InterScience on Tuesday, April 14, 2009 for approximately one hour, starting at 4:00 AM.
Fri 10 Apr 2009
The USFP Library parking lot dropbox is now reopened!
It has moved to its new location, next to the motorcycles parking lot, just off the main entry way unto campus via Winter Lake Rd.
The dropbox is checked daily, Monday through Friday, at around 9:30 AM. Books put in the drop box after that time will be checked in the library system the following day (or the next day the library is open in case of week-ends and holidays). Please take this into consideration if you are returning items near their due date.
You can use the dropbox to return books from any USF library (and only USF library books 
). Please return ILLs, reserves, and A/V materials at the front desk.
Fri 10 Apr 2009
Informaworld will be down Friday, April 10th, 7AM to Saturday, April 11th, 3AM.
Another round of downtime will take place Friday, April 17th, 11PM to Saturday, April 18th, 7AM.
Informaworld is a platform that gives us full text access to the Francis & Taylor and Routledge journals.
Wed 8 Apr 2009
Dear family and friends
I have been slow in keeping up with the blog and have not communicated with most anyone since the holidays. So, here is a bit of a catch up to get everyone up to speed.
We moved into our new house on Thursday the 26th of March. It was a whirl wind weekend [...]