As millions of American workers come down with March Madness, an annual affliction resulting from excitement over the NCAA men’s college basketball championship tournament, the cost to employers in lost productivity could exceed $1.2 billion over the course of the 19-day event that begins March 15. The championship game will be played on April 2 in Atlanta, Georgia.
Al Tompkins of the Poynter Institute for Media Studies -- friend of ResourceShelf and DocuTicker -- identified several interesting resources in his "Morning Meeting" column Wednesday. For example, this new report from the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport at University of Central Florida "takes a look at Federal Graduation Rates, Graduation Success Rates, and the Academic Progress Rates (APR) for the tournament teams, as reported by the NCAA." If statistics like this are useful and/or interesting to you, you'll find a number of other reports about race and gender diversity, graduation rates, etc., for both college and professional sports here.
We've posted direct links to full text record books and rule books from the media section on DocuTicker, ResourceShelf's sister site. They include:
+ 2007 NCAA Men's and Women's College Basketball Record Book
+ 2007 Men’s and Women's Final Four Records Book
+ 2007 Men’s and Women’s Basketball Rules
+ Men’s and Women’s Illustrated Basketball Rules
+ Database of Direct Links to All School and Conference Web Sites
and many more documents including archived editions of the ones listed above.
Also worth some attention while you're here:
+ 2007 NCAA Backgrounder -- Sports Wagering ("The NCAA opposes all forms of legal and illegal sports wagering on college sports. Sports wagering has become a serious problem that threatens the well-being of the student-athlete and the integrity of college sports.")
+ NCAA's Double-A Zone weblog, which is currently focused on tournament coverage.
+ NCAAsports.com is "the official web site for NCAA sports," and you'll find complete tournament coverage here, as well as stories about other NCAA sports, including multimedia.
+ Background information on the controversial "Native American Mascot" issue.
+ If you want to follow NCAA news on an ongoing bases, an RSS feed is available.
One of your editor's favorite time sinks, the Deadspin weblog ("sports news without access, favor, or discretion"), offers lots of witty NCAA coverage, including a downloadable 2007 NCAA Men's Bracket (PDF; 860 KB), that prints out nicely.
The blog is also running its own pool, via ESPN. (Free registration required.) Not that we would ever encourage sports wagering here on ResourceShelf, but helpful statistics are widely available, as are tips for winning your office pool. Or take advantage of this java applet.
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? 
