Resource of the Week
By Shirl Kennedy, Deputy Editor
Your tax dollars at work again this week. Something interesting from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Maybe you're thinking...agriculture? Has nothing to do with me. Oh, but you are wrong...
Agriculture--United States--Economics
Source: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service (ERS) Amber Waves
The subtitle of this site is: "The Economics of Food, Farming, Natural Resources, and Rural America." It's actually an online magazine, published five time a year (February, April, June, September, and November) by the ERS. You can subscribe to the dead tree version (through NTIS) for $49.95 per year, or read it on the Internet for free. The Internet version "offers additional articles and data between scheduled issues," and you can sign up for e-mail alerts. The full Internet version is available for download in PDF format. An archive is available, and the site is searchable.
Now, don't go thinking the content here is largely cattle-and-soybean oriented. The November 2005 issue, which is the most current one online right now, features such general interest articles as:
+ Where You Shop Matters: Store Formats Drive Variation in Retail Food Prices ("Just 20 years ago, traditional grocery stores claimed nearly 90 percent of Americans' at-home food purchases. Today, their share has dropped to 69 percent.")
+ U.S. Food Consumption Up 16 Percent Since 1970 ("...Americans are eating more food every year.")
+ Education as a Rural Development Strategy ("Researchers at Clemson University found that counties in the rural South with a 5-percentage- point higher share of adults attending college in 1980 reported, on average, 3.5 percent faster growth per year in per capita income over the next 20 years and 5.5 percent faster growth in employment.")
You'll also find a "data feature" that answers the question: How Much Time Do Americans Spend Preparing and Eating Food? (No surprises here; women spend more time than men in grocery shopping and food preparation.) And there are a variety of shorter articles under several topic headings: Markets and Trade, Diet and Health, Resouces and Environment. Some information is of specialized interest -- e.g., Financial Assistance to Farmers is Evolving.
Oh, and the magazine offers a service that translates the content into Spanish, French, German, Italian or Portugese.
A family of resources to help information workers be more effective, raise the value of information in their organisations and contribute to success. Read more »
Recently I have found myself cooing over visualisation maps (and heat maps) of health and well being resources. The content rich data is overlayed with mapping technologies, and some interesting themes and patterns are emerging.
A lot of the talk around social media in the last year has been around information overload. Social media has provided us with new and exciting ways to create content. But it has also meant learning new ways to manage and engage with social media tools. Are we teetering on the edge of an information overload precipice?
Information overload is a figment of your imagination. Or a failure of your filter. Or a symptom of your technological submissiveness. Depends on who you ask.
What if you had to sort through 3.5 million articles and social media posts a day and try to pull out the most relevant items for your organisation? What if you then had to cobble it all together into something readable for your top groups and executives in your organisation?
Alacra Compliance saves time by aggregating information from both free and fee-based sources and enabling users to conduct an accurate federated search across these sources (coined “simultaneous search” by Alacra).
FreePint Family
Quilting big data threads
The fallacy of information overload
Information overload: fact, fantasy or filter failure? 
