Thursday, June 28, 2007

Running CDs or DVDs on horsehoe computers

Problem:

A student has a text book companion disk (DVD) that she said runs from the disk without loading files to the computer. However, it doesn’t work that way on our computers. You get the software restrictions message. I viewed some of the files on the disk and noticed that many have .exe extensions. She was able to run it in the computer lab.

Berrie's response:
Unfortunately we don’t allow students to run software from our computers, even if it is from an external drive. The reason is that malware, viruses, as well as Instant Messenger clients, etc can be run from that location. We have had a rash of these types of threats lately, so the risk is very real. If the prof can get a site license for the software we might be able to add it to our next cloning operation, but it is better run from the Computing labs.

Give me a call if you want me to go over the differences between us and CCS labs, as to why they are able to run exe programs there.

Tuesday, June 26, 2007

Tampa Bay demographics

Dear Colleagues:

I rarely pass around copies of our special collections finding aids because they often target “my usual suspects” (history, Am studies, and Fla studies). However, I have a collection that may be of broader interest to students in business administration or business management. In the old library, we used to maintain a vertical file of market surveys and research conducted by the St. Petersburg Times. These reports were kept in large red binders and were very clunky but useful.

We have kept some of the most important marketing research materials from these surveys as a distinct (and compact) collection in my area. Here’s a brief description:

The various reports and profiles residing in this collection offer an excellent account of commercial, demographic, media-related, and transportation trends in the Tampa Bay region. Some data sets examined individual municipalities or counties, while other sets included information about Standard Metropolitan Statistical Areas (SMSAs) or Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs) of Florida.

Materials in this collection include summaries of surveys, charts, and statistical information about residents and visitors to the Suncoast. Items reside in folders arranged into seven broad subject series: Business/Retail, Demographics, Economics/Finance, Media, Real Estate, Transportation, and Travel. The bulk of the collection covers the period from 1978 through 1997, though a few items include quantitative information from earlier years (from 1960 forward).

So, the next time a student needs to develop datasets for topics such as Pari-mutuel wagering trends, household growth in Florida, or television channels usually watched in western Pasco County in the late 1980s that may not be found in other sources (Florida Statistical Abstract, census), please send them my way!

JIM

Wednesday, June 20, 2007

Update on student faxing

As of June 20, 2007, The Campus Activities Center discontinued their faxing service for students.

Monday, June 11, 2007

Locating raw data sets

We have had a few questions about obtaining raw data sets for analysis. If you go to databases by title/subject and enter Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research or ICPSR, you can access a database that "supplies data files for use with statistical software, such as SAS or SPSS"