Miscellaneous Resources

This page contains two things. First, a series of links to other sites containing resources that might be of interest to the sort of person I expect to visit my site. Second, a link to an online gallery of photos I’ve taken.

Links to Further Resources

The following are series of annotated links to other sites that provide information visitors to my site might find useful.

 

Making It Matter

Probably where I’m least unbiased on this site, these sites are nonetheless ones I’ve found to be very useful.

• GuideStar

  Having worked for a top-tier non-profit, I know the real challenges of having one’s bottom line something other than shareholder profit: Not all the donations can go to programs even though that’s what donors and GuideStar want to see. Nonetheless, I believe GuideStar does a good job separating the wheat from the chaff.



• Idealist

  A hub for non-profit and volunteering information and networking, Idealist has grown and evolved from being a simple list of non-profit jobs to quite a nexus of activity and collaboration.



• Mayfirst.org

  A group of people who use the Internet to “pool our resources to assure ourselves quality equipment and staff support and to improve our access to the Internet, enhance its function as a tool for mass communication and organizing, develop new technologies and uses for it, and help social justice movements use it effectively to communicate with each other and with the world.”

 

Publicly-Accessible, Peer-Reviewed Journals and Research Clearing Houses

Accessing peer-reviewed journals outside of the ivory tower of academe is difficult. Although understandable given the business model of journals, this stymies the dissemination of research and the guidance it can offer. Scirus offers a rather useful search of scientific terms and open access articles.

• Academic Journals

  Since 2002, Academic Journals “provides free access to research information to the international community without financial, legal or technical barriers. All the journals from this organization will be freely distributed and available from multiple websites.”



• The Future of Children: A Collaboration of The Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University and The Brookings Institution

  Excellent, scholarly, balanced, creative-commons-righted reviews of issues pertaining to children and child development. Each issue presents articles focused on a given theme. A one-page summary of their mission is here. A list of the issues is here.



• What Works Clearinghouse

  Maintained by the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences, this site digests educational research for use by educators. The articles themselves are not available, but their précis are quite clear.



• eScholarship at the University of California

  The main purpose of eScholarship is to be a resource for U of California-affiliated scholars, but their publication of postscripts allows some to be available to those in the general community.



• Open Educational Resources at the Centre for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI)

  As per their mission, CERI provides links and resources concerning publicly accessible research documents.



• The Educator’s Reference Desk

  “The Educator’s Reference Desk builds on over a quarter century of experience providing high-quality resources and services to the education community. From the Information Institute of Syracuse, the people who created AskERIC, the Gateway to Educational Materials, and the Virtual Reference Desk, the Educator’s Reference Desk brings you the resources you have come to depend on. 2,000+ lesson plans, 3,000+ links to online education information, and 200+ question archive responses.” Does have several dead links (maybe even as many as I have!), but does have good resources, including bazoodles of lesson plans.



• Research and Statistics from the U. S. Department of Education

  Includes summaries of federally-funded evaluations, statistics on educational performance (e.g., student performance in math and science, demographics on adult learners, SAT scores, etc.)

 

Methods and Statistics

It means so much more when you know how much it matters.

• The R Project

  Nearly required to be the first link in any list of statistical resources, R is a free statistical software on par with the likes of SPSS, SAS, and Stata. It isn’t as immediately user-freindly as, say, SPSS, but is as reliable and powerful as the “big three.” Being neither a “power user” nor computer demigod, I prefer RKWard, but there are more interfaces for R.

• Typology of Analytical and Interpretational Errors in Quantitative and Qualitative Educational Research by A. J. Onwuegbuzie and L. G. Daniel

  “The purpose of this paper is to identify and to discuss major analytical and interpretational errors that occur regularly in quantitative and qualitative educational research.”

• Research Methods Knowledge Base


• Formatting a Paper-Based Survey Questionnaire: Best Practices


• StatPages.org

  “The web pages listed here comprise a powerful, conveniently-accessible, multi-platform statistical software package. There are also links to online statistics books, tutorials, downloadable software, and related resources.” Highlights of StatPages.org are:

  • A large list and description of free and nearly free statistical software
  
  
  • Statistical Decision Tree
    
    
    • Cautionary notes associated with the decision tree


• Selecting Statistics


• PsychNet UK List of Online Statistical Calculators

  A nice selection of online stat calculators, including some that conduct such advanced tests as multivariate regression.



• Daniel Soper’s Statistical Calculators


• David Walker’s Statistical Calculators


• Random Number Generator


• Lee Becker’s Effect Size Calculator


• Creative Research Systems’ Sample Size Calculator
  
  
  • Definitions of confidence interval and confidence level


• Harshbarger’s (1977) Introductory Statistics: A Decision Map

 

Word Smithing

Resources for writing, editing, etc.

• Guidelines for Writing in APA Style

  This site created and hosted by Purdue is an excellent resource for writing in the style prescribed in the American Psychological Association’s Publication Manual



• The Elements of Style

  Strunk and White’s little book about English writing is quite clear and user-friendly. This site by Bartleby.com contains much of use from that guide.

 

Productivity/General Computer Use

• Open Source Software and Operating Systems

  The Internet can be considered to be the first fully man-made environment. The fact that a group of those “inhabiting” this environment have created a vast supply of free and open resources demonstrates that we are still capable of caring about the common good. The fact that these resources are in many ways superior to their proprietary analogs is neat to see, too.

  • OpenOffice.org

    I’m a big proponent of open source software for both product quality and ideological reasons, and Microsoft’s launch of both Vista and Office 2007 have both only helped reinforce this view.
    
    Being open to development, there are a few macros, etc. I recommend adding to OpenOffice for research uses:

    • David Hitchcock’s Statistics Package

      Quoted from OOoMacros.org, a great source for, well, OOo Macros:

      This is a suite of macros to perform basic statistical analysis within OpenOffice. These macros give OpenOffice Calc the functionality which Analysis ToolPak gives Microsoft Excel, and many of these routines are unavailable in Excel.
      
      OOoStat routines are dialog-driven and can be installed in their own menu.
      
      There are three modules of user-called macros:

      • Basic Statistics: 1-way ANOVA, Kruskall-Wallis test, t-test, 2-way ANOVA, chi-square contingency table test, Wilcoxon sign-rank test, Correlation, Rank Correlation, Simple Regression, Multiple Regression.
      • Multivariate Statistics: Principal Components Analysis, Correspondence Analysis, Multidimensional Scaling, MANOVA, Canonical circleriminant Analysis.
      • Applications: Histogram, Text-to-Columns, Latin Square generation, Patterned data

      These files are released under the GNU General Public License (GPL)

    • Andrew Lewis’s Box Plots and Histograms

      Also from OOoMacros.org, “This is a Calc spreadsheet into which the user can type or paste data, and then display that data using box plots or histograms, which are drawn in a newly created Draw document.”

  
  
  • Linux

    I only recently installed Ubuntu on my home machine, so I can’t comment much on it except to say that it works well and is quite stable. It’s easy to install and very easy to switch between OSs if you want to give it a try without utterly committing yourself to it.

  
  
  • Creative Commons

    A brilliant alternative to copyright that maintains rights without utterly squashing creativity, as has happened, e.g., to a large extent in the distribution of Sita Sings the Blues.

  
  
• MultiMon

  I stuck an extra monitor into both my home and work desktops. Sometimes I don’t use the other monitor at all; other times I find it utterly indispensible. This tight, little program makes sending things from one monitor to another very easy.



• TOR and Privoxy

  I believe strongly in responsibly exercising and advocating freedom of speech and expression. These help keep information available, give voice to oppressed people, and keep expression/civic involvement safe.

 

Web Creation

Probably a worthless section as anyone who knows how to create websites knows much better than I where to look for info on it. Nonetheless writing this website on little more than Notepad, I’ve have had to learn some html, java, etc. Below are the sites I’ve found most useful in helping teach myself web design; including them here may help give a little more attention to them as thanks for the help they’ve given me.

• Mozilla Firefox

  To browse, first you need a browser. To browse well (and more securely), you need something better than Internet Explorer. For those of us on PC machines, this pretty much means Firefox—although Opera is also one of the other viable browser options for PCs.



• W3 Schools

  These tutorials have taught me most of what I know about web design. Granted, that’s not much of an endorsement, but I still think they’re very useful. The “Try It Now” function is a great, experiential way to learn and tinker with code.



• HTML Code Tutorial

  Another very nice series that not only explains things well, but also gives quite sound recommendations about the topics—which to use, which to ignore in place of better options, etc.



• Hex Color Code Chart & Generator

  Simply a fantastic way to figure out what colors to use for nearly anything online. The snazzy and posh color scheme that graces my site is courtesy of this site. Again, not the best endorsement, but I really do recommend playing around here.



• Web Monkey

  I found this through a link in Wired—thank you, Wired!. Useful, tongue-in-cheek, user-generated articles that are often very informative on a wide range of simple and advanced web/Internet topics.

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This website, created 2007 – present by William Ellery Samuels, Ph.D., is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.