Over the past several years, RAND has been building a research capability in the arts to provide useful data and analysis to policymakers, arts practitioners, and the academic community. This downloadable brochure features several of these titles, with links to each of the publications on the RAND web site.
+ Full Document (PDF: 700 KB)
Source: RAND Corporation
Review of the European Data Protection Directive
The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) asked a multidisciplinary international research team led by RAND Europe with time-lex and GNKS-Consult to review the strengths and weaknesses of the European Data Protection Directive 95/46/EC and propose avenues for improvement.
The Directive can be regarded as a unique legal instrument in how it supports the exercise of a right to privacy and rules for personal data protection. Its principles are regarded in many quarters as a gold standard or reference model for personal data protection in Europe and beyond. However, the Directive must remain valid in the face of new challenges, including globalisation, the ongoing march of technological capability and the changing ways that personal data is used. Although the flexibility of the Directive helps it to remain current, its effectiveness is undermined by the complexity of the cultural and national differences across which it must operate.
In order to understand the strengths and weaknesses of the Directive and to suggest ways in which European data protection arrangements may remain fit for purpose, the study team reviewed the relevant literature, conducted 50 interviews with privacy practitioners and regulators, experts and academics, and ran a scenario-based workshop to explore and evaluate potential avenues for improvement.
The ideas presented here provide some food for thought on how to improve the data protection regime for citizens living in European countries and are intended to spark debate and interaction between policy-makers, industry and experts. Such a review cannot claim to be the last word.
+ Summary (PDF; 200 KB)
+ Full Document (PDF; 700 KB)
Source: RAND Corporation
As more legal research is conducted online, it is reasonable to conclude that there will be a corresponding increase in citations to the Internet by judges in their opinions. With the widespread public use of the Internet to access information along with the constant changes and impermanence of websites, citing to the Internet should be an issue of increasing concern to the legal community across the country. This paper surveys the types of Internet sources the Washington state Supreme Court and Appellate Court justices are citing. It discusses the interrelated issues of link rot and the impermanence of web pages, citation format, authentication and preservation of online electronic legal information.
Several options available for retrieval of full text.
Source: Journal of Appellate Practice and Process (via SSRN)
Hat tip: Law Librarian Blog
To monitor the H1N1 outbreak, we have established the H1N1 Influenza Center. The Center presents original research reports and other commentary, as well as news updates, summaries from Journal Watch, and an interactive map of H1N1 influenza cases worldwide. The Center also includes articles from our archive on the 1918 influenza epidemic and the “swine flu” epidemic of the 1970s.
Source: New England Journal of Medicine
Hat tip: PW
From a WWW 2009 Conference Report by Christoph Wieser
According to Tim Berners-Lee the Web is still static and consists mostly of archived HTML and PDF documents. There is still a need for a read/write Web and the standards are still not used to a sufficient extend. Changes in the Web are the ‘move to mobile’ and the climb up of ‘advertizing to being a science’.
Beside the still existing challenges of the current Web, additional ones arrived. Web Applications as well as Open Social Networking and Open Linked Data count to the area of current interest.
See Also: Review the Key Points of Tim Berners-Lee Presentation
See Also: Direct to WWW 2009 Conference Home Page
Source: The Semantic Puzzle
Legally Speaking: The Dead Souls of the Google Booksearch Settlement
This short article argues that the proposed settlement of the Authors Guild v. Google lawsuit is a privately negotiated compulsory license primarily designed to monetize millions of orphan works. It will benefit Google and certain authors and publishers, but it is questionable whether the authors of most books in the corpus (the “dead souls” to which the title refers) would agree that the settling authors and publishers will truly represent their interests when setting terms for access to the Book Search corpus.
Several options available for retrieval of full text.
Source: Communications of the ACM, forthcoming (Pamela Samuelson), via SSRN
A Layered United States Universal Service Fund for an Everything-over-IP World
Support through the United States Federal Universal Service Fund for high-cost areas has been principally defined in terms of telephone service. Fund growth due to increases in wireless lines and implicit support for broadband infrastructure has created an untenable situation, and fundamental reform is expected. The cause underlying this growth is convergence between the telephone network, wireless networks, the Internet, and cable networks. This convergence will pose additional serious long term challenges to the Fund. This paper proposes a restructuring of the high-cost funds based on a layered model. Both contributions and distributions are focused on network infrastructure, without distinction between voice and broadband. The proposal uses a new definition of communication services to guarantee technology neutrality, and includes service area reform and cost efficiency measures. This layered approach repositions the Fund for future converged networks.
+ Full Paper (PDF; 359 KB)
Source: Telecommunications Policy (via eScholarship Repository, University of California)
This paper presents a library-community convergence framework (LCCF) to extend the library’s role to participate more fully in community action and enhance its role as a proactive catalyst of social change, as compared to a sometimes perceived role of bystander. The LCCF for community action is relevant in the contemporary context of changing public demographics and an increasing need for library interactions with ethnic and multicultural publics. It provides a holistic approach for libraries to extend their existing functionalities and serve as catalysts for community-wide advocacy for people on the margins. The paper discusses select application of the LCCF for community action in two qualitative research studies with local immigrant communities and sexual minorities, that use methods pioneered in ethnographic outreach and participatory action research (PAR) respectively. We briefly present our field-based research in these two cases and connect them to our advocacy of the LCCF.
Ethnographic methods in the first study provide understanding of cross-cultural issues and uncover how local immigrant classifications can be induced from an ethnographic perspective to generate library classifications and information services that are locally relevant and empowering. PAR ideologies in the second study underlie implementation of library and information interventions and community action while partnering with local sexual minorities and their allies, to address specific and contextualized community facets in ways that may promote community-wide social changes. Points of intersection from the two studies help identify key elements in the LCCF framework that extend the role of libraries as leaders and cultural planners of progressive community-based action.
+ Full Paper (PDF; 432 KB)
Source: Bharat Mehra and Ramesh Srinivasan (via eScholarship Repository, University of California)
More Than 9,000 National Academies Reports Now Available in Open Access
The National Academies today announced the completion of the first phase of a partnership with Google to digitize the library’s collection of reports from 1863 to 1997, making them available – free, searchable, and in full text – through Google Book Search. The Academies plan to have their entire collection of nearly 11,000 reports digitized by 2011.
“Much has changed since the National Academy of Sciences began advising the government in the late 1800s,” said Victoria Harriston, manager of library and information services at the National Academies’ George E. Brown Jr. Library. “Our early reports are essential to understanding the scientific advances made in this country as well as the science and technology issues the government struggled with in the 19th and 20th centuries.”
Notable reports from the library’s archives that are now available include:
- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Vol. 1 (1863–1894). This was the first NAS publication series, and it includes information about the Academy’s early work for the government on topics such as how to prevent compass deviation which sent iron warships off course, whether the metric system of weights and measures should be adopted, and how the new U.S. Geological Service should be organized.
- Investigation of the Scientific and Economic Relations of the Sorghum Sugar Industry (1882). This report was the Academy’s first self-initiated study, produced by the first committee to include non-Academy members.
- Proposed U.S. Program for the International Geophysical Year, 1957-1958. American participation in the International Geophysical Year – a historic, worldwide scientific effort that investigated the workings of the Earth and saw the launch of the first satellites – was guided and coordinated by a committee of the Academy.
- The Polar Regions and Climatic Change (1984) Changes in Earth’s polar regions are widely covered in the news today, but the Academies have been studying this phenomenon for more than 20 years.
Prior to this project, the Academies digitized more than 4,000 books and made them available online through the National Academies Press; most of those can also be found in Google Book Search. However, researchers who needed to gain access to hard copies of older reports, part of a legacy collection in the library, could not always find what they wanted. Many of these reports exist as single copies, and the library feared potential damage or loss of this important collection. These older reports have been digitized and are now accessible through Google. In addition, the “digitizing of these materials will add another dimension to the preservation of our reports,” said Harriston. The Academies hope that wider availability of its reports will be of use to scientists in developing countries, who often rely on the Internet to gather information.
Source: The National Academies
Our analysis employs a broad interpretation of publication bias, which we define as the outcome that occurs when, for whatever reason, publication practices lead to bias in the published parameter estimates. We examine the effect of the 0.05 significance level on the pattern of published findings using a “caliper” test, a novel method for comparing studies with heterogeneous effects, and find that we can reject the hypothesis of no publication bias at the 1 in 32 billion level. Our findings therefore raise the possibility that the results reported in the leading political science journals may be misleading due to publication bias. We also discuss some of the reasons for publication bias and propose reforms to reduce its impact on research.
Source: Quarterly Journal of Political Science
Deep Packet Inspection Puts Open Internet at Risk
The uncertainty surrounding Net Neutrality has given rise to a technology known as Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) that offers Internet service providers unprecedented control over Internet content, according to a new paper released today by Free Press. Deep Packet Inspection: The End of the Internet as We Know It? argues that the use of DPI technology by Internet service providers should raise serious concerns for both users and lawmakers.
…
The paper asserts that the emerging DPI business model, marketed for its ability to monitor, control and ultimately charge subscribers for every use of an Internet connection, poses a major threat to the open Internet. In just one of many examples, DPI manufacturer Allot describes how its DPI product “enables service providers to project potential revenues and profits from setting up a tiered service infrastructure” and allows providers to “reduce the performance of applications with negative influence on revenues (e.g. competitive VoIP services).”
+ Full Report (PDF; 2 MB)
Source: Free Press
Demographics, Career Concerns or Social Comparison: Who Games SSRN Download Counts? (PDF; 645 KB)
We use a unique database of every SSRN paper download over the course of seven years, along with detailed resume data on a random sample of SSRN authors, to examine the role of demographic factors, career concerns, and social comparisons on the commission of a particular type of gaming: the self-downloading of an author’s own SSRN working paper solely to inflate the paper’s reported download count. We find significant evidence that authors are more likely to inflate their papers’ download counts when a higher count greatly improves the visibility of a paper on the SSRN network. We also find limited evidence of gaming due to demographic factors and career concerns, and strong evidence of gaming driven by social comparisons with various peer groups. These results indicate the importance of including psychological factors in the study of deceptive behavior.
Source: Harvard Business School Working Papers
Los Alamos Researchers Create ‘Map of Science’
Los Alamos National Laboratory scientists have produced the world’s first Map of Science—a high-resolution graphic depiction of the virtual trails scientists leave behind when they retrieve information from online services. The research, led by Johan Bollen, appears this week in PLoS ONE (the Public Library of Science).
+ Clickstream Data Yields High-Resolution Maps of Science
Source: Los Alamos National Laboratory/PLoS ONE
Document summarization using Wikipedia
Although most of the developing world is likely to first access the Internet through mobile phones, mobile devices are constrained by screen space, bandwidth and limited attention span. Single document summarization techniques have the potential to simplify information consumption on mobile phones by presenting only the most relevant information contained in the document. In this paper we present a language independent single-document summarization method. We map document sentences to semantic concepts in Wikipedia and select sentences for the summary based on the frequency of the mapped-to concepts. Our evaluation on English documents using the ROUGE package indicates our summarization method is competitive with the state of the art in single document summarization.
+ Full Paper (PDF; 97 KB)
Source: HP Labs
STAIR : A System for Topical and Aggregated Information Retrieval
Web content has exploded dramatically in the last decade and search is becoming increasingly complex. In the current search paradigm, the user has to enter the query and is immediately presented results that are typically accessed sequentially. However, there are scenarios where the above model is not appropriate, either because results being in consumable form is more important than immediacy of results, or because the it is difficult and time consuming to navigate the results in sequential fashion. In this work, we describe the architecture, implementation and utility of STAIR- The System for Topical and Aggregated Information Retrieval, that uses a variant of focused crawling and retrieves relevant information from the web. We present a new interface that selects search results from different search engines, ranks the results and presents the most relevant results as an aggregated PDF document.
+ Full Paper (PDF; 248 KB)
Source: HP Labs
Towards an Open Source Legal Operating System
An informed democratic society needs open access to the law, but states’ attempts to protect copyright interests in their laws are a major roadblock. This article urges broader access, analyzes the implications and legal arguments for and against copyright in the law, and considers strategies for access advocacy.
Several options available for retrieval of full text.
Source: Social Science Research Network (Katie Fortney)
Hat tip: LibraryLaw Blog
Detecting influenza epidemics using search engine query data
Seasonal influenza epidemics are a major public health concern, causing tens of millions of respiratory illnesses and 250,000 to 500,000 deaths worldwide each year. In addition to seasonal influenza, a new strain of influenza virus against which no previous immunity exists and that demonstrates human-to-human transmission could result in a pandemic with millions of fatalities. Early detection of disease activity, when followed by a rapid response, can reduce the impact of both seasonal and pandemic influenza. One way to improve early detection is to monitor health-seeking behaviour in the form of queries to online search engines, which are submitted by millions of users around the world each day. Here we present a method of analysing large numbers of Google search queries to track influenza-like illness in a population. Because the relative frequency of certain queries is highly correlated with the percentage of physician visits in which a patient presents with influenza-like symptoms, we can accurately estimate the current level of weekly influenza activity in each region of the United States, with a reporting lag of about one day. This approach may make it possible to use search queries to detect influenza epidemics in areas with a large population of web search users.
Source: Nature
Towards Web-based representation and processing of health information
The authors of this study designed a HEalth Representation XML (HERXML) schema that consists of the semantic (e.g., health activity description, the data sources description, the statistical methodology used for analysis), geometric, and cartographical representations of health data. A case study has been carried on the development of web application and services within the Canadian Geospatial Data Infrastructure (CGDI) framework for community health programs of the New Brunswick Lung Association. This study facilitated the online processing, mapping and sharing of health information, with the use of HERXML and Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) services. It brought a new solution in better health data representation and initial exploration of the Web-based processing of health information.
+ Full Paper (PDF; 885 KB)
Source: International Journal of Health Geographics
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