Well it’s been lots of bits recently. Sorted out the SCONUL library access and familiarised myself with the Cov Uni library. Think I’ve done enough for now on statistics, apart from realising there is a lot to know and analysing the data appropriately is going to be important. Feel more aware of what’s involved and the provided text book (“Management of student research project”, Sharp etal) has a nice section on data and its processing, but I’m not going to claim I can do multivariate analysis… yet :) At least I’ve heard of it. Found a cheap copy of “Software Evolution and Feedback” - so yippe- more reading! Did a quick test to prove I can read/write data to my palo DB, rather simple in fact. Watched some of the Southampton complexity vids - not a lot of info in them, but good overviews and do provoke interesting thoughts. Guess my big thought this week is around the tools for research, or rather the lack of them. For instance what I’d really like is something that given a starting paper automatically produces a map of the references and the citations from that paper. Following useful avenues you would quickly build a tree and see the important ‘must read’ papers in a field. There’s plenty of researchers who have done that to mine the social information therein but they all seem to obtain the data and then use custom tools to visualise and analyse. Surely with the likes of Siteseerx providing an OAI interface to access records it seems like a no brainer tool, but I can’t at the moment find anything ‘off the shelf’. Oh well they say if you have an itch scratch it, perhaps I’ll start a FOSS project.