social science sites of the week.
This week security company G4s have been in the news
The British Parliament website has links to the discussion with CEO Nick Buckles.
See our blog for other recommended links including the New Statesman which focuses upon the corporate song.
Continuing on the Olympic theme
London 2012 fact pack
Useful for finding tricky statistics from the London 2012 Organising Committee (LOCOG), this media pack. Designed to promte the games they give data on number of events comprtitors, tickets etc.
The website also has schedules and annual reports on the organisation.
For a more historic viewpoint try the UK National Archives timeline of Olympic events which has key documents from their holdings.
The fourth work-life balance employee survey Department for Business Innovation & Skills
The report provides the findings of the Fourth Work-life Balance Employee Survey, which was carried out in early 2011. It benchmarks key policy changes since the 2006 survey including the Work and Families Act 2006which offered the extension of the ‘right to request’ flexible working to parents of children under the age of 17 (2009)
See more publications on this topic from the UK government.
The TUC also has a trade union perspective with news items and worksheets online on its website.
The Work Foundation is another good place for full text research reports.
Great for French language research documents.
OpenEdition site
Which offers the academic community free access to a number of French language services. OpenEdition is run by the Centre for open electronic publishing (Cléo ), a unit that brings together the Centre National de la Recherché Scientifique (CNRS), the université d’Aix-Marseille, the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) and the Université d’Avignon et des Pays de Vaucluse. It includes three key services:
• Revues.org- which mainly focuses upon back files of academic journals. These usually operate on a rolling wall of coverage with new content being added periodically. Abstracts are provided for more recent content, with the facility for subscribers to access the full text. It currently includes 337 journal titles and 22 book series. These originate from major French university publishers, covering a broad range of social science and humanities subject areas.
Calenda is a handy calendar of forthcoming events such as conferences, courses and workshops. Users can subscribe via RSS feeds to receive continuous alerts.
Hypotheses-links to academic blogs. These are becoming increasingly important to academic publication and as such it is an excellent complement to the established academic journal articles.
For those seeking access to French materials another excellent service is Persée . This also focuses upon electronic publication in the social sciences and humanities and was initiated by Le Ministère de l’Enseignement supérieur et de la Recherche – Direction Générale de l’Enseignement Supérieur (MESR-DGES) in 2003 and is currently managed at the Université Lumière Lyon 2. It focuses upon free access to historic set of titles from a complementary, but different set of academic publishers who include: Collections Numériques de la Sorbonne and EHESS
How far will technology companies go in helping repressive regimes. Interesting report on corporate responsibility from pew Internet and American Life and Elon University
Based on over 1000 response from executives to questions relating to the issue
How will technology firms around the world operate when they are confronted by situations in which optimal product sales and profits can be made only when they follow restrictive rules set by autocratic governments? Interesting thoughts about the future for online citizen protests.
Tokyo war crimes trial material Virginia Law Library
Free access to a wealth of materials includes background information on the purpose and organisation of the court.It includes biographies of the accused, videos of questioning and links to research guides and references the latter also links to other online collections.
Data science: Free online text book
Professor Jeffrey Stanton has made freely available on his website a basic course book for introducing the concepts and methods of data science.an interactive version is also available on the Syracuse U. iSchool: it includes an introduction to what is data, data sampling and getting started with R.
Rousseauonline.ch
A beta test of a site which aims to offer free open access to the full text of the complete works Jean-Jacques Rousseau Collection complète des oeuvres, 17 vol., in-4°, Genève, 1780–1788). Produced by infoclio.ch, le portail professionnel suisse des sciences historiques in collaboration with la Bibliothèque de Genève et le projet e-rara.ch . Site in French. Keyword searching is possible.
For those interested in free access to online philosophy see the Stanford encyclopedia of Philosophy which contains high quality articles on major thinkers and theories.
Reith Lectures 2012
Keynote annual lecture series sponsored by the BBC.
This year the The economic historian Professor Niall Ferguson presented the 2012 BBC Reith Lectures, entitled The Rule of Law and Its Enemies. 4 programmes covered aspects including the Arab spring. Podcasts can be downloaded from the website.
The main web site also has transcripts.
There is an online archive of all lectures from 1948 onwards on the website. They cover key historic and social topics. Key contributors include Ralf Dahrendorf
Learn to Communicate with Crisis-Affected Communities
Infoasaid Launches E-Learning Course on Humanitarian Communication a new, free online learning course, Communication is Aid, aims to raise awareness and build basic skills for communicating effectively with crisis-affected communities, before and after an emergency breaks. Topics covered include crafting messages. Useful example of how social media can be used for crisis communication
