Thursday, August 19, 2010

Librarians Save The Day! 11 Great Movies In Which They Star

Librarians Save The Day! 11 Great Movies In Which They Star
Posted 08-16-2010
Huffington Post
"While writers might seem more glamorous, librarians are the quiet heroes of the literary world. They stand up against censorship, they uncover ancient mysteries, they laugh in the face of computerization and stop the corporate world dead in its tracks. From Katharine Hepburn to Rachel Weisz, we've rounded up films that give librarians the center stage. Remember these?"

Saturday, August 7, 2010

Are we going to get that big table? Kids in the Hall - Brain Candy


"So how are we on that, Marv?"

"You mean that thing you just mentioned...just now?"

"Yeah."

(pause)

"Oh we're on top of that, Don!"

Kids in the Hall: Brain Candy (1996)
Directed by Kelly Makin
Writing credits:
Norm Hiscock, Bruce McCulloch, Kevin McDonald, Mark McKinney, and Scott Thompson.

John W. Tukey quotations on Statistical Analysis

Far better an approximate answer to the right question, which is often vague, than the exact answer to the wrong question, which can always be made precise.
John Wilder Tukey. Ann. Math. Stat. 33 (1962)

If we need a short suggestion of what exploratory data analysis is, I would suggest that
  1. It is an attitude AND
  2. A flexibility AND
  3. Some graph paper (or transparencies, or both).
John Wilder Tukey. American Statistician 40 (1986)

In a world in which the price of calculation continues to decrease rapidly, but the price of theorem proving continues to hold steady or increase, elementary economics indicates that we ought to spend a larger and larger fraction of our time on calculation.
John Wilder Tukey. American Statistician 40 (1986)

The combination of some data and an aching desire for an answer does not ensure that a reasonable answer can be extracted from a given body of data.
John Wilder Tukey. American Statistician 40 (1986)

John Wilder Tukey.
The best thing about being a statistician is that you get to play in everyone's backyard.

Thursday, August 5, 2010

Economic and Social Returns on Investment in Open Archiving Publicly Funded Research Outputs (SPARC)

Economic and Social Returns on Investment in Open Archiving Publicly Funded Research Outputs (SPARC)

The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) provided support for a feasibility study, to outline one possible approach to measuring the impacts of the proposed US Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA) on returns to public investment in R&D. The aim is to define and scope the data collection requirements and further model developments necessary for a more robust estimate of the likely impacts of the proposed FRPAA open archiving mandate.

The study was authored by John Houghton with Bruce Rasmussen and Peter Sheehan of the Centre for Strategic Economic Studies at Victoria University.

The model and this report can be found at http://www.cfses.com/FRPAA/.