In case the various existing modern-version Haggadahs out there are not modern enough for you, try this. Thanks to Carl Elkin for CC-licensing this, see his page for the rest of the story.

I spent a few days in Qatar earlier this week and got to go to the recently-opened Museum of Islamic Art. The building itself is stunning (to the right here is the ceiling) and the art inside was wonderful.

In college, one of my favorite courses was Smith’s famous “Art 100” (since discontinued, * sniff *), a year-long course that covered art through the ages and across cultures. The time we spent on Islamic art was one of the highlights for me so I was thrilled to have the opportunity to see this wonderful museum in Doha.

Here’s a sampling of my collection of photos taken in and around the museum, click the various thumbnails for larger versions or see the Flickr set for more.

• ASA Research Department
  (tags: blogs sociology)
• Google Translate Search
  search Google in one language, get results in another, translated
  (tags: search language)

The Pew Internet & American Life Project (PIP), a very important source on data about Americans’ Internet uses, has completely revamped its Web site. Among other things, it is now even easier to download their data than before. These are made available in SPSS format only. I use StatTransfer in such cases (for conversion to Stata), any other tools that have worked well for folks?

They also have a handy tool for searching their data base of questions. We’ve been working on something similar in my lab for a bunch of Internet-related surveys although stopped the process due to lack of funding. Pew was smart to work with the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research at UCONN on this since they have so much experience in this domain. Perhaps worthy of note is the fact that a search on the same term on the Roper and the PIP sites does not yield the same results. While some Pew data seem to be available through the Roper site, these seem to originate from the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press and not from PIP. That’s something to keep in mind when looking for Internet-related data.

For those not interested in accessing the raw data directly, PIP’s full reports continue to be easily available by topic on the site as are some stand-alone figures from these. Overall, the amount of material PIP is making easily available is a wonderful resource so many thanks to the great folks there!

• Tell3
  the importance of talking to people about LGBT rights and Prop 8 in particular
  (tags: rights gayrights policy activism politics)

• Bristol Palin, Levi Johnston call off engagement: Gov. Sarah Palin
  does something count as news when it was obviously going to happen?
  (tags: news politics article)
• Audio Sound File Converter Software
  (tags: software freeware audio)
• 童声合唱《草泥马之歌》
  a video that seems completely innocent, but apparently isn't quite so if you understand the language nuances
  (tags: video politics china)

• The Economic Value of Popularity
  (Freakonomics Blog, NYTimes) – some thoughts on a paper using Wisconsin Longitudinal Study data
  (tags: research friends earnings economics sociology blogpost)
• Report from Workshop on Interdisciplinary Standards for Systematic Qualitative Research
  [pdf!]
  (tags: report research howto nsf)

• Meet the Millennials
  (FLYP)
  (tags: youth technology resource stats)

• San Francisco in Jell-O
  (tags: art photos colors)

• The Printed Blog
  daily printed newspaper "comprised entirely of blogs and other user generated content"
  (tags: news blogs)
• SSSH cards
  From the "Society for HandHeld Hushing":) come these cards to help when encountering a loud person using a cell phone
  (tags: tools design cell phones)

• 2007 Circumvention Landscape Report: Methods, Uses, and Tools | Berkman Center
  "As the Internet has exploded over the past fifteen years, recently reaching over a billion users, dozens of national governments from China to Saudi Arabia have tried to control the network by filtering out content objectionable to the countries for any of a number of reasons. A large variety of different projects have developed tools that can be used to circumvent this filtering, allowing people in filtered countries access to otherwise filtered content. In this report, we describe the mechanisms of filtering and circumvention and evaluate ten projects that develop tools that can be used to circumvent filtering"
  (tags: filtering report privacy security)
• Surveillance Self-Defense Project from the Electronic Frontier Foundation
  "The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has created this Surveillance Self-Defense site to educate the American public about the law and technology of government surveillance in the United States, providing the information and tools necessary to evaluate the threat of surveillance and take appropriate steps to defend against it."
  (tags: privacy eff howto)

I’m back at NU for a few days with about 20 (no, really, I counted) meetings in the next two days so no time to comment at length on the following, but I thought they were definitely worth a mention. Here are two recently released resources from a couple of great organizations:

* The Electronic Frontier Foundation has created a resource on Surveillance Self-Defense.

* The Berkman Center for Internet & Society (my host for the year) has released a 2007 report on circumvention tools.

Both are carefully-written, interesting and helpful documents worth a look.

• The Internet and Local Wages: Convergence or Divergence?
  NBER Working Papers
  (tags: research internet labormarket)

• *Social* media literacy: The new Internet safety
  interesting blog post
  (tags: digital literacy skills blogpost)
• How to create a custom chart format in Excel 2007
  helpful info from Microsoft, saved me tons of time formatting some charts for a paper
  (tags: excel edit)
• Creative "file not found" page
  (tags: creativity 404)
• More ideas , less stuff, Let's get creative
  (The Guardian)
  (tags: article creativity publishing)

• Writing the Book on Clickers
  (Inside Higher Ed)
  (tags: article teaching technology)