Curving Normality

Today, Researchblogging.org has been thoroughly updated; a good moment to reflect some on the initiative of researchblogging.org itself, my participation in it, and on the phenomenon of blogging on peer reviewed research itself.

Researchblogging.org is a non-profit initiative, and provides in a web-based gathering of posts from weblogs on science. Not all posts are gathered (‘aggregated’) though, only the ones that explicitly address research that has been published in a peer-reviewed journal. In that, it distinguishes clearly from similar (collections of) scientists’ blogs, for everything else but the research itself is left out. This is achieved by having bloggers to administer their posts on the researchblogging.org website manually, after which some PHP-code is provided. This code is added to the blog-post, resulting in a bibliographic reference to the article that is discussed, as well as the aggregation of the article to the researchblogging database.

For me, this results in a very interesting collection of blog-posts, that are nicely categorised and stored in a searchable database accessible though the web. And this is where the new version of researchblogging.org becomes really interesting, because next to a visual update, new features have been added. Bloggers now can categorise their posts manually, making them easier to find by prospective readers.

Neighborhoods are hot in the Netherlands. Especially the problems that have arisen in some neighborhood have attracted a lot of governmental attention the last couple of years. Reason for me dive into some of the literature on residential segregation, troubled neighborhoods, and obviously the people living in these neighborhoods.

I have argued elsewhere that to understand the state that neighborhoods are in on account of whatever characteristic, it is crucial to focus on the individual residential mobility histories of the inhabitants of the neighborhood. The paper discussed today does exactly that by attempting to answer two research questions: (1) “what are the main differences between the migration histories and dwelling careers of different socio-economic groups?” and (2) “what is the relation between dwelling careers and urban structure?”