Social science sites of the week
Scotland independence Referendum
the Scotsman announced 1,000 days to save scotland
The facts about the proposal can be found on the SNP Scotland Forward site. Deputy SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon has some historic discussion on Twitter. See more examples and press releases from the SNP on their website /
BBC news has some good summaries of newspaper reaction to this.
UK polling report has summaries of IPSO Mori Gallup polls of public opinion trends over several years. Ipsos also has polls relating to Scotland. UCL constitution unit had a major role in monitoring devolution in Scotland. Read its reports from 2006-9. Search the website for details of other recent interest in Scottish politics.
The Institute of Governance University of Edinburgh also has materials. Free online are working papers. Also worth browsing is the Political Studies Association Conference proceedings. Find conference papers from 1994 onwards. Quite a few cover Scottish politics.
Child Poverty Action group.
Launch 2011 poverty map of child deprivation in the Uk. Compiled by Donald Hirsch and JacquelineBeckhelling of the Centre for Research in Social Policy, Loughborough
University, for the Campaign to End Child Poverty. Find out about conditions in your area.The 44 page report has maps, tables and indicators for specific regions of the uk.
Also useful is the more general Poverty indicators website This is maintained by Gary Palmer and has general indicators for poverty taken from well-established sources. Another site which has a wealth of materials is the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. It publishes an annual report monitoring poverty and social exclusion in the Uk which you can download for free .Browse the income and poverty publications section for more useful examples
WHO Global Health Library
Worth revisiting as it provides free access to a number of regional health journal indexes. Cross search a number of leading regional indexes. These are excellent for tracing health reports from the developing world.
African Index medicus
LILACS – Latin America includes material from the PAHO
Index Medicus for South-East Asia Region (IMSEAR)
Western Pacific Region Index Medicus (WPRIM)
These are a good supplement to the western index PubMed which gives free access to references from Medline.
London Screen Archives
Virtual library hosted by a network of regional film archives and the British Film Institute. Search the catalogue by keyword for information. Not all entries are online. To restrict to those with audio visual content check the records with video only box from the main search screen. There are good examples of clips covering the Second world war. Good examples are also on a YouTube channel. Entries give copyright and access information.
India real time
Useful readable blog with contributions from staff at the Wall Street journal and Dow Jones newswire reporters. As you would expect a heavy emphasis upon the economy, industry and financial markets. However also coverage of social trends including the Bollywood entertainment industry.
2012twit
A project of Adam and Zach Green. It aims to provide real time coverage of the USA 2012 elections from Twitter. Look at trending topics and recent tweets.
They also have an interesting blog with coverage of twitter tools and metrics Currently it is covering controversy over the campaign to promote a minor candidate by retweeting. See the entries for Donate Tweets for Buddy Roemer on New Year’s Eve
Military archives.Ie
Preserves information relating to the history of the Irish Defence Forces and the Department of Defence. It is developing its free online library. see the maps collection for examples. Coming soon is the Bureau of Military History collection. This was established in January 1947 by Oscar Traynor TD, Minister for Defence The objective of the Bureau was ‘to assemble and co-ordinate material to form the basis for the compilation of the history of the movement for Independence from the formation of the Irish Volunteers on 25th November 1913, to the 11th July 1921.’
NBER to offer free access to its historic archive of working papers
National Bureau of Economic Research is a private, non-profit, nonpartisan research organization. Its working papers cover a range of economic topics. Series include trade, employment, economic policy. Older papers (3 year rolling wall) can now be downloaded from the SSRN website see the press release
series are located on the main SSRN website
Worldshapin.
The site which won the award for a competition for the best visualization of UNDP Human development data. See the press release for more details
created by Carlo Zapponi and Vasundhara Parakh it uses 6 indicators from the HDR (interdependence of Health, Carbon footprint, Workplace equality, Living standard, Population and Education) presenting them in a form of a graph. Create a shape for individual countries to show the interplay of factors.
And then compare them with other nations.
Remember that UNDP has an official open data site which includes a variety of other indicators.
Monmouthpedia
is the first Wikipedia project to cover a whole town – specifically, the Welsh town of Monmouth. It has official council backing. See more in this article from Head star it aims to create an online encyclopaedia of facts and features, using mapping facilities and QR Codes.
