A Round-up on How to Find Cheap Text Books

'The Bucks Guide to Finding Cheap Textbooks: 3rd Edition,' by New York Times reporter Tara Siegel Bernard. A few nice info nuggets from the article:

Textbook "prices increased 22 percent over the last four years, according to the Student PIRGs, or more than four times the rate of inflation. On average, students at four-year public colleges were estimated to spend $1,137 on books and supplies during the 2010-2011 academic year, according to the College Board."

Makes me wonder what's the latest with the Kno Table and if anyone is using it or buying "their" books for the iPad.

Students 'Lousy Searchers' for Info (Surprise?)

But, really, can we blame Google? The Ethnographic Research in Illinois Academic Libraries (ERIAL) Project, a two-year study of the student research process involving five US universities, found that — surprise! — students have crude research skills and are typically unwilling to ask university librarians for help. The study, to be published by the American Library Association and titled "Libraries and Student Culture: What We Now Know," included interviews with students, librarians, and academics in hopes of better understanding the research habits of college kids.

Google has been called out for essentially allowing students to remain clueless about their poor searching abilities, but Steve Kolowich, a reporter for Inside Higher Ed, cuts straight to the chase. The key finding from the ERIAL studies was perhaps "the most predictable": When "it comes to finding and evaluating sources in the Internet age, students are downright lousy." But again, is anyone surprised?

Only seven out of 30 students observed at Illinois Wesleyan “conducted what a librarian might consider a reasonably well-executed search,” wrote Lynda Duke, an academic outreach librarian at Illinois Wesleyan and Andrew Asher, an anthropologist at Bucknell University who leaded the research effort. “While the interface of Google and other similar search engines might be more intuitive," explained Asher, "what’s going on behind the scenes isn’t intuitive at all, and very few students had a clear conception of how search engines work. This lack of understanding compounds the problem of building an effective search strategy." Fortunately, that can be taught, both inside and outside of a library. Also, I am hoping that the final report includes a historical perspective. Do we really think that college kids from 20 years ago were better at searching databases? At least now, most students have even easier access to a librarian thanks to online chat.

The Cost of Eating Healthy: $2.38

Mother Jones has a nice wrap-up on the cost of eating healthy: Yes, there's a price, but one that's not too bad, assuming you and your family plans ahead. The article, along with a slew of others, stem from this week's federal Dietary Guidelines for Americans, 2010, a report from Health Affairs that emphasized the need for Americans to consume more potassium, dietary fiber, vitamin D, and calcium, and to get fewer calories from saturated fat and added sugar.

Two writers at Grist report that they were able to eat healthily for $2.38 per person, per meal (cooked at home) while eating "plenty of organic produce ... local eggs, buffalo meat and un-homogenized milk in glass bottles."

Word Play: Google's Ngram Viewer

For those who enjoy tracking name trends on the Baby Name Wizard, there's a similar offering for books from Google’s Ngram Viewer (via VSL).

Google has digitized millions of books, and Ngram Viewer lets you follow the evolution and occasional extinction of words. "Hella"? Its usage spiked around 1810 to 1820, when people wrote about it in reference to a town along the Tigris with big religious significance. Or that "hobo" — most popular in the 1930s — is back on the rise (same goes for "tuberculosis," which was off the charts in usage at the turn of the century)? And that references to "Internet" actually show up prior to 1950? (Oops, explains the Google crew, wisely ruling out time-traveling software engineers. That "usage" is credited to faulty optical character recognition (OCR) errors that couldn't be filtered out.) Oh, and for the kids in the back of the class: Yes, you can search dirty words. Not surprisingly, their usage spiked in the 1960s.

Of course, Ngram Viewer could prove useful for genuine research (when did "Latino" gain popularity, or usage of "Negro" trend toward "African American"?). The Google Labs crew highlights another interesting word trend: usage of "nursery school," "kindergarten," and "child care" from 1950 to 2000:

What the y-axis shows is this: of all the bigrams contained in our sample of books written in English and published in the United States, what percentage of them are "nursery school" or "child care"? Of all the unigrams, what percentage of them are "kindergarten"? Here, you can see that use of the phrase "child care" started to rise in the late 1960s, overtaking "nursery school" around 1970 and then "kindergarten" around 1973. It peaked shortly after 1990 and has been falling steadily since.

And for people wanting to use data from the Ngram Viewer for scholarly research, the staff at Harvard University's Cultural Observatory offers some tips.

Sources: VSL, Google (Jean-Baptiste Michel*, Yuan Kui Shen, Aviva Presser Aiden, Adrian Veres, Matthew K. Gray, The Google Books Team, Joseph P. Pickett, Dale Hoiberg, Dan Clancy, Peter Norvig, Jon Orwant, Steven Pinker, Martin A. Nowak, and Erez Lieberman Aiden*. Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books. Science [Published online ahead of print: 12/16/2010])