social science sites of the week

Here is the latest round up of new and interesting sites for social scientists

Emoji has been voted the word of the year
Find out more by checking our latest blog posting which has examples of recent research on its impact on language and the emotions

Ofcom Communications Market international report 2015
Download the full text to get useful data on mobile phones TV, radio usage comparing the Uk and other nations. It includes pricing , revenue access and usage. The report states that British viewers are more likely to se catch up Tv than elsewher
Around 44% had used catch up in the last week

See more reports on the Internet and changing nature of media on our scoop.it page

Also in the news this year elections in Venezuela
Get the results and research from our blog

Employability and UK students

interesting reports this week. The Higher Education Academy annual engagement survey asks students how they have developed. How much effort they put into study, how much support they received and what skills they developed. This includes such factors as becoming an independent learner
It is based on 24 institutions and over 24,000 students. It found employability skills relatively low
Hepi also published Employability: Degrees of Value, an occasional paper calling for higher education to improve graduate employability.
Research by the UK government has tried to understand what employers want from graduates. They also maintain the official Graduate Market statistics.
For a different perspective from CIPD see a recent report on over qualification in the graduate jobs market.

For a worldwide ranking of graduate employability see the QS site which also has details of its methodology.
Our higher education scoop.it page provides regularly updated links to recent free reports online. http://www.scoop.it/t/higher-education-news-for-libraries-and-librarians


Royal Voluntary Service bulletin archive 1939-1974
Free access to over 400 issues covering post World war two from this major NGO which has been involved in refugee relief poverty relief in the post war period.
All 419 issues of the Bulletin/Magazine can be found on the online catalogue and are free to search view and download find out more about the history of the magazine from their blog posting. They include vintage recipes accounts of women’s charitable work during WWII. and post war work with refugees and the poor. See this example from the 1940s which describes recipes for night workers including cheese crispies, corned beef rissoles and turnovers! .

The magazine closed in 1974 with a final issue which advertised Christmas gifts including 10 wrvs cards with stamps for 37 for 10 including postage and a pocket diary for 33 and a half pence

The best way to discover the Bulletins is to do an advanced search on the catalogue.
You can pull up a list of all 419 issues by choosing “WVS Bulletin” from the category drop down, and then pressing the search button. This way lets you pick issue and you can browse through

World pollution map
Following on from the Paris climate change conference (still time to check our resources) Plume Labs has released a world pollution map which visualises the state of air quality worldwide. It is updated every day with open access environmental data from 11,000 weather stations worldwide. Ad covers 40 nations. Full access via a specialist website see this example from Shanghai for the visually pleasing disaply for the public and some data on trends.

National Socialism in Austria: Ephemeral films archive project
Based on the collections of the Austrian Film Museum, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for History and Society, Ephemeral Films Project: National Socialism in Austria has digitized, annotated, and made accessible 50 ephemeral films related to the history of the Nazi period and the Holocaust in Austria they include amateur films from holocaust victims. Austrian newsreel films and adverts. The latter show examples of propaganda . The site has a wealth of supporting materials setting the items in context including timelines, maps and factual information on places and events. Many films are searchable and have transcripts.



The national domestic abuse charity Women’s Aid has launched a free coercive control toolkit
supported by Avon, to coincide with the Home Office’s implementation of the coercive control law download this tool kit which explains to parents and children the signs of coercive control and how to report it. Find more about the law


Who are the most powerful disabled people in the Uk?
Find out by consulting the new top 100 power list just compiled by the Shaw Trust and Powerlist it has categories for the arts, business and media. Each entry has a brief biography

Also just launched our scoop.it page on disability issues which will be linking to stories. Reports relating to disability, students and education


Finally Christmas puzzles for spies !


This year GCHQ has created a cryptograph card for its members which it has released to the public solve the cryptograph and donate to charity