Miscellaneous Resources

This page is comprised of a series of annonatated links to other sites containing resources that might be of interest to the sort of person I expect to visit my site.

Making It Matter

Probably where I’m least unbiased on this site, these sites are nonetheless ones I’ve found to be very useful.

• GuideStar

  Having worked for a top-tier non-profit, I know the real challenges of having one’s bottom line something other than shareholder profit: Not all the donations can go to programs even though that’s what donors and GuideStar want to see. Nonetheless, I believe GuideStar does a good job separating the wheat from the chaff.



• CharityWatch

  CharityWatch is “a nationally prominent charity rating and evaluation service dedicated to helping donors make informed giving decisions.” I personally find the criteria by which they rate a charity as objective and thorough as one could hope for a very general measuer that doesn’t attempt to measure the actual efficacy of a charity’s work. Unfortunately, they aren’t able to make their most useful information avaiable for free online.



• Idealist

  A hub for non-profit and volunteering information and networking, Idealist has grown and evolved from being a simple list of non-profit jobs to quite a nexus of activity and collaboration.



• Guide to Volunteering While in School

  Noting that “[v]olunteering strengthens both those who give their time and the organizations they support,” this page helps students helps students understand how and why to volunteer.



• Student Activism Guide for Making a Difference

  The final resource in the triology from the Community for Accredited Online Schools, this article discusses help students learn how to be effecitve activists. It includes a timeline to “help budding activists develop a measured approach to achieving their goals.” .



• Mayfirst.org

  A group of people who use the Internet to “pool our resources to assure ourselves quality equipment and staff support and to improve our access to the Internet, enhance its function as a tool for mass communication and organizing, develop new technologies and uses for it, and help social justice movements use it effectively to communicate with each other and with the world.”



• College Degrees Useful for Non-Profit Organizations

  A listing of various degrees that non-profits may find useful, and why.



• Guide to Home Remodeling for Disability and Special Needs

  Guide to funds to help people with special needs remodel their homes.



• Ultimate Disability Accommodation Guide

  This is an excellent article referred to me by a colleague. It covers many aspects of how to make homes more accommodating and inviting to people with different disabilities.

Online Education Resources

Higher education is slowly becoming more accessible to those outside the “system,” and a growing number of sites help with that access. Right now, I’m only posting a few of them, though.

• “Oops! The 20 Most Common College Freshman Mistakes”

  Information and advice about common mistakes freshmen make and how to avoid them. Covers academic, financial, and personal issues; an extra section also covers correcting any mistakes already made.

• SuperSummary

  This site prodives “In-depth study guides at your fingertips” that are “written by experienced teachers, professors, and literary scholars for a wide range of fiction and non-fiction titles.”

Nursing Education

So far (and maybe forever) only some stuff from affordablecollegesonline.org, but it’s still worth re-posting.

• Certified Nursing Assistant Scholarships


• NCLEX Study Guide

  Know the NCLEX. Fear the NCLEX! Use this to help pass the NCLEX.



• Women in STEM

  An increasingly good set of career choices for women—at long last!



• Guidebook to Nursing School


• Resources for Nursing Students

Publicly-Accessible, Peer-Reviewed Journals and Research Clearing Houses

Accessing peer-reviewed journals outside of the ivory tower of academe is difficult. Although understandable given the business model of journals, this stymies the dissemination of research and the guidance it can offer. Scirus offers a rather useful search of scientific terms and open access articles.



• Academic Journals

  Since 2002, Academic Journals “provides free access to research information to the international community without financial, legal or technical barriers. All the journals from this organization will be freely distributed and available from multiple websites.”



• The Future of Children: A Collaboration of The Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University and The Brookings Institution

  Excellent, scholarly, balanced, creative-commons-righted reviews of issues pertaining to children and child development. Each issue presents articles focused on a given theme. A one-page summary of their mission is here. A list of the issues is here.



• What Works Clearinghouse

  Maintained by the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences, this site digests educational research for use by educators. The articles themselves are not available, but their précis are quite clear.



• eScholarship at the University of California

  The main purpose of eScholarship is to be a resource for U of California-affiliated scholars, but their publication of postscripts allows some to be available to those in the general community.



• Open Educational Resources at the Centre for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI)

  As per their mission, CERI provides links and resources concerning publicly accessible research documents.



• The Educator’s Reference Desk

  “The Educator’s Reference Desk builds on over a quarter century of experience providing high-quality resources and services to the education community. From the Information Institute of Syracuse, the people who created AskERIC, the Gateway to Educational Materials, and the Virtual Reference Desk, the Educator’s Reference Desk brings you the resources you have come to depend on. 2,000+ lesson plans, 3,000+ links to online education information, and 200+ question archive responses.” Does have several dead links (maybe even as many as I have!), but does have good resources, including bazoodles of lesson plans.



• Research and Statistics from the U. S. Department of Education

  Includes summaries of federally-funded evaluations, statistics on educational performance (e.g., student performance in math and science, demographics on adult learners, SAT scores, etc.)

Methods and Statistics

It means so much more when you know how much it matters.

• Table of critical t-values

  A table of t-values indexed by degrees of freedom and error rates, the original version of which was created by Allan Chang, Ph.D. The one linked to here is simply tweaked it a bit to fit my own preferences.

• The R Project

  R is a free statistical software on par with the likes of SPSS, SAS, and Stata. It isn’t as immediately user-freindly as, say, SPSS, but is as reliable and powerful as the “big three.” Being neither a “power user” nor computer demigod, I prefer RStudio, but there are more interfaces for R, such as RKWard, R commander, and Emacs Speaks Statistics.

• Typology of Analytical and Interpretational Errors in Quantitative and Qualitative Educational Research by A. J. Onwuegbuzie and L. G. Daniel

  “The purpose of this paper is to identify and to discuss major analytical and interpretational errors that occur regularly in quantitative and qualitative educational research.”

• Research Methods Knowledge Base


• Formatting a Paper-Based Survey Questionnaire: Best Practices


• StatPages.org

  “The web pages listed here comprise a powerful, conveniently-accessible, multi-platform statistical software package. There are also links to online statistics books, tutorials, downloadable software, and related resources.” Highlights of StatPages.org are:

  • A large list and description of free and nearly free statistical software
  
  
  • Statistical Decision Tree
    
    
    • Cautionary notes associated with the decision tree


• Selecting Statistics


• Create a Graph


• Graph types and online graph creator


• Flexible online graph creator


• PsychNet UK List of Online Statistical Calculators

  A nice selection of online stat calculators, including some that conduct such advanced tests as multivariate regression.



• Daniel Soper’s Statistical Calculators


• David Walker’s Statistical Calculators


• Random Number Generator


• Lee Becker’s Effect Size Calculator


• Creative Research Systems’ Sample Size Calculator
  
  
  • Definitions of confidence interval and confidence level


• Harshbarger’s (1977) Introductory Statistics: A Decision Map

Counselling and Therapy

I am not a trained therapist nor at all expert in this area. The few links I’m including below are to trusted resources for further information (I’ve reviewed them, and checked with other sources, e.g., Check Wedsite Safe). Nonetheless, please be sure to screen any technique or professional well. It is important to get help and to stick with a regimen, so be sure you find someone you can trust.



• SAMHSA Treatment Facility Locator

  The SAMHSA Treatment Facility Locator is “the most comprehensive database of treatment providers available.”



• Rehabinfo

  Rehadinfo seeks compliment the information available through SAMHSA Treatment Facility Locator by providing “answers for many of the practical questions that individuals and families” and “to be the best resource to address these common issues in the journey to treatment.” Their stated mission is “to edcuate our visitors through research-based, expert written content. We are dedicated to providing comprehensive information about addiction, treatment options and the path to full recovery.”

Word Smithing

Resources for writing, editing, etc.



• Guidelines for Writing in APA Style

  This site created and hosted by Purdue is an excellent resource for writing in the style prescribed in the American Psychological Association’s Publication Manual



• The Elements of Style

  Strunk and White’s little book about English writing is quite clear and user-friendly. This site by Bartleby.com contains much of use from that guide.



• College Student Writing Guide

  A site with a lot of well-organized information and guides for what it (should) take to write at the college level, as well as information on various styles (APA, “Chicago” style, etc.).



• How to Become a Writer

  This aticle discusses writing as a career—what writers do (beyond the obvious), salaries and job growth projections, and how to go about pursuing it as a career.



• Student Guide to Academic Writing and Research

  “This guide provides information on the types of essays they may be required to write, how to conduct research and strategies for effective proofreading.”

Productivity/General Computer Use





• Open Source Software and Operating Systems

  The Internet can be considered to be the first fully man-made environment. The fact that a group of those “inhabiting” this environment have created a vast supply of free and open resources demonstrates that we are still capable of caring about the common good. The fact that these resources are in many ways superior to their proprietary analogs is neat to see, too.

  • LibreOffice.org

  
  
  • GNU/Linux

    I’ve been using Ubuntu as the sole OS on both my home and work machines for years and love it. OSs are one of the few times the grass is always greener on this side, I guess, but now whenever I use a Windows machine, I keep missing functions and shortcuts from Ubuntu.

  
  
  • Creative Commons

    A brilliant alternative to copyright that maintains rights without utterly squashing creativity, as has happened, e.g., to a large extent in the distribution of Sita Sings the Blues.

  
  
• MultiMon

  I stuck an extra monitor into both my home and work desktops. Sometimes I don’t use the other monitor at all; other times I find it utterly indispensible. This tight, little program makes sending things from one monitor to another very easy.



• TOR and Privoxy

  I believe strongly in responsibly exercising and advocating freedom of speech and expression. These help keep information available, give voice to oppressed people, and keep expression/civic involvement safe.

Web Creation

Probably a worthless section as anyone who knows how to create websites knows much better than I where to look for info on it. Nonetheless writing this website on little more than Notepad, I’ve have had to learn some html, java, etc. Below are the sites I’ve found most useful in helping teach myself web design; including them here may help give a little more attention to them as thanks for the help they’ve given me.



• Mozilla Firefox

  To browse, first you need a browser. To browse well (and more securely), you need something better than Internet Explorer. For those of us on PC machines, this pretty much means Firefox—although Opera is also one of the other viable browser options for PCs.



• W3 Schools

  These tutorials have taught me most of what I know about web design. Granted, that’s not much of an endorsement, but I still think they’re very useful. The “Try It Now” function is a great, experiential way to learn and tinker with code.



• HTML Tutorials

  Another very nice series that not only explains things well, but also gives quite sound recommendations about the topics—which to use, which to ignore in place of better options, etc.



• Hex Color Code Chart & Generator

  Simply a fantastic way to figure out what colors to use for nearly anything online. The snazzy and posh color scheme that graces my site is courtesy of this site. Again, not the best endorsement, but I really do recommend playing around here.



• Web Monkey

  I found this through a link in Wired—thank you, Wired!. Useful, tongue-in-cheek, user-generated articles that are often very informative on a wide range of simple and advanced web/Internet topics.

Photo Gallery

This is simply an online collection of snap shots I’ve taken as I wander about. I am in no way a professional (or even very good) photographer. Nonetheless, I decided to link to it here just for fun.

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This website, created 2007 – present by William Ellery Samuels, Ph.D., is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.