Kind of awesome: Peer-to-peer in bricks-and-mortar (literally).

Mint (Quicken-like online personal finance program) has released anonymized user data. Might make for some fun studies.

I vaguely remember reading about Songbird a few years ago when it came out, but it looks like it has matured into something that would be quite fun to play around with.

Seminar Series: Law and Economics
http://www.law.upenn.edu/currently/seminars/lawandeconomics/
Hal R. Varian, Chief Economist, Google
“Copyright Term Extension and Orphan Works”
4:30-6:00 pm in Tanenbaum 145 at the Law School
Contact for more information: David Abrams dabrams@law.upenn.edu

http://researchremix.wordpress.com/2010/10/04/sig-use-2010-proposal-award-for-tracking-data-reuse/

"I propose to follow one thousand datasets from data repositories into the published literature. Studying the reuse patterns of 100 datasets from 10 repositories will facilitate analysis across domains, datatypes, and repository structures. Analysis will focus on the relative levels and timing of data reuse, attributes of investigators who reuse data compared to those who deposit data, and topics studied through data reuse."

Wow. I'm looking forward to seeing the results of this in a few years, hopefully with some well-done poster-size visualizations to make sense of it all.

In related news, I've finally got Sweave set up and so my research is finally reproducible. Between that and being committed to entirely avoiding Excel even for graphs after an embarrassing copy-paste error, I'm quite happy with my research setup going into this whole PhD shindig. Now if only R did symbolic manipulation ad I could avoid Matlab/Maxima entirely!