Tuesday, August 30, 2011

National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC)

 

National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC)

In a nutshell

The National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) supports research into our world's frozen realms: the snow, ice, glaciers, frozen ground, and climate interactions that make up Earth's cryosphere.

NSIDC manages and distributes scientific data, creates tools for data access, supports data users, performs scientific research, and educates the public about the cryosphere.

NSIDC distributes more than 500 cryospheric data sets for researchers, from both satellite and ground observations. See Data at NSIDC to browse our holdings, get information, and download or order data sets.

 

Also a cool photo gallery -- http://nsidc.org/gallery/coppermine/displayimage.php?album=26&pos=80

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APPS from USA.gov

APPS

 

Government apps provide information when you're on the go. Find instant notification of recalls to the status of veterans benefits. USA.gov is working hard to make government easy, convenient, and accessible.

What is an app?

An app, short for "application," is a tool that helps you accomplish a task or find information. The apps in the USA.gov app store are designed to work on your mobile phone. Some need to be downloaded to your phone while others can be accessed using your phone's web browser.

How much do apps cost?

All the apps featured currently are free. Charges from your cell phone carrier may apply.

Can apps access my personal information?

Review the terms of services page or privacy policy for each app to learn if and how it uses personal information. Most apps cannot access your personal information.

Are your apps available for iPhone, Blackberry, Android, Nokia, etc.?

The apps featured in our gallery were developed by government agencies on a variety of platforms. Currently, we have apps for iPhone, Android and Blackberry. A lot of our apps are mobile-friendly websites, which means they can be accessed by any device. Each agency works one-on-one with the separate platform and signs a terms of service agreement with them, so it is up to the individual agency to decide which platform to use. At this time, there is no coordinated plan to offer each and every app on every platform.

Whom do I contact if I have problems with an app?

If you have problems with an app from the U.S. government, please send us an e-mail.

Whom do I contact if I have an idea for an app or would like to submit an app to this site?

If you have a suggestion, please send us an email. We review suggestions according to our Apps Policy.

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eXtension - Objective. Research-based. Credible.

 

eXtension - Objective. Research-based. Credible.

 

eXtension is an interactive learning environment delivering the best, most researched knowledge from the smartest land-grant university minds across America. eXtension connects knowledge consumers with knowledge providers - experts who know their subject matter inside out.

eXtension offers:

  • Credible expertise
  • Reliable answers based upon sound research
  • Connections to the best minds in American universities
  • Creative solutions to today's complex challenges
  • Customized answers to your specific needs
  • Trustworthy, field-tested data
  • Dynamic, relevant and timely answers

eXtension is unlike any other search engine or information-based website. It's a space where university content providers can gather and produce new educational and information resources on wide-ranging topics. Because it's available to students, researchers, clinicians, professors, as well as the general public, at any time from any Internet connection, eXtension helps solve real-life problems in real time.

eXtension Foundation: The eXtension Foundation is a non-profit entity that exists to support the work of eXtension. Learn more about how you can support or sponsor this work at our eXtension Foundation.

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Monday, August 29, 2011

Measure of America: American Human Development Project

 

Measure of America: American Human Development Project

The American Human Development Project provides easy-to-use yet methodologically sound tools for understanding the distribution of well-being and opportunity in America and stimulating fact-based dialogue about issues we all care about: health, education, and living standards.

The hallmark of this work is the American Human Development Index, an alternative to GDP and other money metrics that tells the story of how ordinary Americans are faring and empowers communities with a tool to track progress over time. The Index is comprised of health, education, and income indicators and allows for well-being rankings of the 50 states, 435 congressional districts, county groups within states, women and men, and racial and ethnic groups.

Through national and state reports, thematic briefs, and the project’s interactive website, the American Human Development Project aims to breathe life into numbers, using data to create compelling narratives that foster greater understanding of our shared challenges and greater support for people-centered policies. The Project was founded in 2006, and became an initiative of the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) in 2008.

The Project is made possible through the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation‘s matching grant, which will match every dollar you donate–effectively doubling your contribution. Click on this secure link to donate today (please note this will direct you to the SSRC website).

 

The maps are the great interactive part….

http://www.measureofamerica.org/maps/

The Measure of America

How is opportunity distributed in America? Are we falling behind other affluent democracies? Which groups are surging ahead and which face the greatest risks? Which congressional districts enjoy the highest—and lowest—levels of well-being?

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CDC - Injury - WISQARS (Web-based Injury Statistics Query and Reporting System)

 

Welcome to WISQARSTM

WISQARS logoWISQARSTM (Web-based Injury Statistics Query and Reporting System) is an interactive database system that provides customized reports of injury-related data. Learn more about WISQARSTM >>

CDC - Injury - WISQARS (Web-based Injury Statistics Query and Reporting System)

CDC’s WISQARS™ (Web-based Injury Statistics Query and Reporting System) is an interactive, online database that provides fatal and nonfatal injury, violent death, and cost of injury data from a variety of trusted sources. Researchers, the media, public health professionals, and the public can use WISQARS™ data to learn more about the public health and economic burden associated with unintentional and violence-related injury in the United States.

Users can search, sort, and view the injury data and create reports, charts, and maps based on the following:

  • Intent of injury (unintentional injury, violence-related, homicide/assault, legal intervention, suicide/intentional self-harm)
  • Mechanism (cause) of injury (e.g., fall, fire, firearm, motor vehicle crash, poisoning, suffocation)
  • Body region (e.g., traumatic brain injury, spinal cord, torso, upper and lower extremities)
  • Nature (type) of injury (e.g., fracture, dislocation, internal injury, open wound, amputation, and burn)
  • Geographic location (national, regional, state) where the injury occurred
  • Sex, race/ethnicity, and age of the injured person

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A List Apart

 

A List Apart

“For people who make websites”

A List Apart Magazine (ISSN: 1534-0295) explores the design, development, and meaning of web content, with a special focus on web standards and best practices.

Steal our code? Copy our content?

ALA’s content is protected by copyright shared jointly by the magazine and its writers, but our source code is freely available to all. We also welcome translation. See Permissions & Copyright for details.

Maybe you can be one of us...

...the few, the proud, the ALA contributing authors. A List Apart is written by the community it serves: designers, developers, architects, producers, project managers, and assorted specialists. Publishing in ALA confers prestige and has helped some of our authors gain book deals or find favor with the editors of print magazines. Interested in writing for us? See the Contribute page for guidelines

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Esri Training | Library

 

Esri Training | Library

GIS Bibliography

This bibliography covers the literature of geographic information systems, science, and technology. It indexes journals, conference proceedings, books, and reports from the origins of GIS to the present. There are currently 111,052 entries in the Esri GIS Bibliography. Follow ESRI library on Twitter

Search

All words Phrase Title Only Use boolean operators (AND/NOT) Search Tips

Advanced Search

Browse (by materials)

Books | Journals | Conference Proceedings | Magazines | Reports | Other Materials

Need the definition of a GIS term? Find it in the GIS Dictionary

Look for workbooks, industry-specific, and case study books from ESRI Press.

Esri Training | Library

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Friday, August 26, 2011

Racial bias revealed in NIH funding grants from Daily Kos :: State of the Nation

 

Racial bias revealed in NIH funding grants

by Laurence Lewis

Reposted from Laurence Lewis by Laurence Lewis

NIH Logo

NIH Logo (Wikimedia Commons)

If any aspect of our society had evolved beyond racial bias one would have expected it to be the world of science, particularly government-funded science. Not so. A new study published in Science Magazine begins with this extract:

We investigated the association between a U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) R01 applicant’s self-identified race or ethnicity and the probability of receiving an award by using data from the NIH IMPAC II grant database, the Thomson Reuters Web of Science, and other sources. Although proposals with strong priority scores were equally likely to be funded regardless of race, we find that Asians are 4 percentage points and black or African-American applicants are 13 percentage points less likely to receive NIH investigator-initiated research funding compared with whites. After controlling for the applicant’s educational background, country of origin, training, previous research awards, publication record, and employer characteristics, we find that black applicants remain 10 percentage points less likely than whites to be awarded NIH research funding. Our results suggest some leverage points for policy intervention.

The study was conducted by Donna K. Ginther of the Department of Economics and Center for Science, Technology & Economic Policy, Institute for Policy & Social Research, at the University of Kansas, Lawrence. Her team included Raynard Kington, who was deputy director of the NIH and is currently president of Grinnell College, and Walter Schaffer, who is senior scientific adviser for extramural research at the NIH. They reviewed 83,188 applications for funding from 40,069 unique investigators during the 2000-2006 Fiscal Years, and controlled for several possible explanatory factors.

Throughout the education pipeline, blacks are less likely to graduate from high school, attend college and major in biomedical science, and obtain a Ph.D. in biomedical science. Nevertheless, upon entering the biomedical academic career track, black and white faculty members are equally likely to be tenured at institutions that grant doctorates and at Research I institutions. (3). Given our previous results, we expected to find that black scientists who made it to the stage of principal investigator would have similar chances of obtaining NIH funding, all other things being equal. We find it troubling that the typical measures of scientific achievement—NIH training, previous grants, publications, and citations—do not translate to the same level of application success across race and ethnic groups. Our models controlled for demographics, education and training, employer characteristics, NIH experience, and research productivity, yet they did not explain why blacks are 10 percentage points less likely to receive R01 funding compared with whites.

Although our models do not fully explain the funding gap, the greatest differences between blacks and whites that we observed were in the effect of previous training and the probability of receiving a priority score. Although more research is needed to discern the basis for the award differences, it is possible that cumulative advantage may be involved (15). Small differences in access to research resources and mentoring during training or at the beginning of a career may accumulate to become large between-group differences. This suggests that more analysis on the impact of NIH training may be warranted. In addition, further research into the review process could help to understand why variables that increased the likelihood of an application receiving a priority score for the full sample did not have the same impact for applications from black investigators.

More bluntly, as reported by Mará Rose Williams of the Kansas City Star:

“It wasn’t just a gap, it was a huge unexplained gap despite the best efforts of me and my research team trying to pound it into submission,” Ginther said.

The only good news also comes from Williams:

NIH Director Francis Collins told Science magazine he was “deeply dismayed” by the study findings. “This is simply unacceptable,” he said.

“As uncomfortable as it makes us, we must acknowledge that the differences observed may reflect biases that are insidiously interwoven into the basic fabric of the merit/reward system of science,” Collins said.

Institutional racism in the heart of academic science. And while Collins no doubt will conduct his own investigations, this also demands attention from the White House and Congress.

Daily Kos :: State of the Nation

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Thursday, August 4, 2011

AIP Creates New App for Authors and Reviewers

 

AIP Creates New App for Authors and Reviewers

iPeerReview provides mobile access to submitted papers

Melville, NY, August 03, 2011 - AIP Publishing, a division of the American Institute of Physics (AIP) (www.aip.org), announces the release of its new app, iPeerReview. The new app allows authors and reviewers to use their iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch devices to access a broad range of information on papers submitted to any of AIP's journals in Peer X-Press, AIP's manuscript submission and review system.

"iPeerReview is an integral part of our comprehensive strategy to make all AIP content - both live and in production - more accessible to our users," said Evan Owens, AIP's chief information officer, publishing. "We recognize that our authors and reviewers need fast, convenient access to their papers during the review process, and now we've created an app with a clean, streamlined design, which can deliver these papers - anytime and anywhere they need them."

Once logged in, users can perform a number of activities related to their papers. They can access a list of all active and completed papers, view the status history of a paper, view and save a paper in PDF format, email a paper, and link to a paper on AIP's Scitation platform if it is in production or to Peer X-Press if it is under review.

When users access iPeerReview, they can either log in or access papers that they have previously saved to their device. The app will determine if they are an author, a reviewer, or both. In the event that they are both an author and a reviewer, iPeerReview will allow them to access both sets of papers under separate tabs.

To download the app, search for iPeerReview in the iTunes App Store http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/ipeerreview/id385565904?mt=8# or visit AIP Labs http://labs.aip.org/.

About AIP

The American Institute of Physics is an organization of 10 physical science societies, representing more than 135,000 scientists, engineers, and educators and is one of the world's largest publishers of scientific information in physics. AIP pursues innovation in electronic publishing of scholarly journals and offers full-solution publishing services for its Member Societies. AIP publishes 13 journals; two magazines, including its flagship publication Physics Today; and the AIP Conference Proceedings series. AIP also delivers valuable resources and expertise in education and student services, science communication, government relations, career services for science and engineering professionals, statistical research, industrial outreach, and the history of physics and other sciences.

AIP Creates New App for Authors and Reviewers

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