Data on employment

I don’t know why, but Mercer County Ohio seems to have the lowest unemployment rate in the state, 2.4. It’s on the Indiana border, which seems to have a lower unemployment rate than Ohio, and did all during the very slow recovery. The highest unemployment rate in November 2018 was Monroe County, at 7.1. It is located on the eastern border of  of Ohio, across the Ohio River from West Virginia. As of the 2010 census, the population was only 14,642, making it the second-least populous county in Ohio. If you want to be alone, this is your county--the county averages thirty-three people per square mile. Major employers are the county government, the schools and nursing homes.

I found this by looking at “Local Area Unemployment Statistics Map” of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and clicking on Ohio, then placing the cursor over the various counties which were shaded according to unemployment rates, with the lightest color being the least unemployment.  https://data.bls.gov/map/MapToolServlet    From there you can go to https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/PST045218 and type in the county name in the search window for more facts about the county.

Since I’ve never applied for unemployment I do wonder why some counties that are high are right next to counties that are low, but generally those counties in Appalachia are higher than the counties next to Indiana. Poor transportation?  Low education rates?  Monroe’s graduation rate is 87.9 and Mercer’s 92.7—both above the national average.  Health insurance?  Monroe County has 7.8% who don’t have insurance, and Mercer 5.6%.  Both counties are over 97% white.  But the poverty rate in Monroe is 15.2 and Mercer is 6.9, and disability is much higher in Monroe, 13.7 compared to 6 for Mercer.

See?  Even with the employees furloughed, there’s a lot of information out there from the U.S. Census.

NTIS/NTRL data base for searching

“The National Technical Reports Library (NTRL – U.S. Department of Commerce) has become an open access resource, following a decision made by the National Technical Information Service (NTIS).

The National Technical Information Service serves as the largest central resource for government-funded scientific, technical, engineering, and business related information available today. For more than 60 years NTIS has assured businesses, universities, and the public timely access to approximately 3 million publications covering over 350 subject areas.

The search window. https://ntrl.ntis.gov/NTRL/

More on fish oil--tips from a librarian--me

Several days ago when I posted about bursitis and Fish Oil someone asked me about brand or dose. I've found 2 good articles, and if you're linked to a Public Library with databases, here are the titles, "Groundbreaking study reveals new mechanism behind fish oils' health benefits," Life Extension, Sept. 2012; and "Report: Maximizing Omega-3 health benefits," Life Extension, June 2014. Both articles have extensive bibliographies--over 200 citations between them. Covers metabolic syndrome, asthma, COPD, cardiovascular disease, cognition (happy to know it might stop cognitive decline of aging), and cancer. The 2nd article talks about using both fish oil and Krill oil (I thought they were the same). 

Penny pincher tip: when I print from a database off site, I always check the page arrangement, and sometimes depending on layout, you can save 4 pages of printing. 

The database I used was Ebsco's Alt Health Watch, and the only limiter I used was Full Text because I don't like to read on screen and knew I'd print if I found something.

Or he could have asked me a vet med librarian

I had noticed this back in the 1990s when I was writing my own articles and/or helping professors do their research. On-line didn’t mean better research, and sometimes it didn’t mean faster.

James Evans writes for Britannica Blog: “For a report published in Science (July 18, 2008), I used a database of 34 million articles, their citations (1945 to 2005) and online availability (1998 to 2005), and showed that as more journals and articles came online, the actual number of them cited in research decreased, and those that were cited tended to be of more recent vintage. This proved true for virtually all fields of science. (Note that this is not a historical trend…there are more authors and universities citing more and older articles every year, but when journals go online, references become more shallow and narrow than they would have been had they not gone online.)

Moreover, the easy online availability of sources has channeled researcher attention from the periphery to the core—to the most high-status journals. In short, searching online is more efficient, and hyperlinks quickly put researchers in touch with prevailing opinion, but they may also accelerate consensus and narrow the range of findings and ideas grappled with by scholars.”

When professors came to the library, sat down with their favorite, generalist journal on medicine, biochemistry, nutrition, or cancer, they would scan the table of contents, and couldn’t avoid seeing areas of interest outside their own, something to perk a brain cell in a new direction. On-line database searching narrows and refines, but it also imprisons the mind.

Unintended consequences of having too much

Not money, but information.

". . .we have found that no matter where students are enrolled, no matter what information resources they may have at their disposal, and no matter how much time they have, the abundance of information technology and the proliferation of digital information resources make conducting research uniquely paradoxical: Research seems to be far more difficult to conduct in the digital age than it did in previous times." Project Information Literacy Progress Report, Feb. 2009

I used to teach research skills and methods--whether it was called BI (bibliographic instruction), User Education, or graduate research seminar. Here was my method. Begin with a wide survey using tertiary sources (textbooks, essays, encyclopedias), narrow and redefine your topic, move on to secondary sources (bibliographies, databases), further refine, then tackle the primary sources (original research). What I didn't usually include in my lectures and handouts is that I myself never used that method. Oh, I suppose if you assigned me a topic on how to hit a golf ball, I might read up on it first, but for my own self-selected topics, I started with my own conclusion then worked backwards to justify it. If it had to be changed along the way, so be it; if not, I was happy. Then I relied as a fallback on serendipity--those items I might have on my office shelves, or which spoke to me ("here I am, take a look") as I wandered through the stacks in a particular call number range. One of my most successful projects, from which I got a number of published articles and which lead to further research, was a box of my grandmother's scrapbook clippings and a box of handwritten index cards for my grandparents' library. That pushed me into all kinds of areas about 19th century publishing, church history, serials and farm magazines, and reading patterns of rural people.

The only time I really relied heavily on information technology to write and publish an article was in writing about how to do it, and I tracked what I did to prepare for a speech at a conference (even where I was and how long it took to receive off campus material) and then wrote about it. It helped me in my teaching, however, I've since forgotten what it was I wrote about.

Research--it's tough to explain to people who don't do it or like it.