Science.gov now offers the ability to search for federal regulations.

NPR now offers RSS feeds. Their page explains what RSS feeds are.

Public Roads "is the bimonthly magazine of the Federal Highway Administration ... Reading Public Roads is the easiest way to keep up-to-date on developments in federal highway policies, programs, and research and technology."

Here's a 20-page Census report (PDF) that "examines the levels of voting and registration in the November 2002 Congressional election and the characteristics of people who reported that they voted or were registered for the election, as well as the reasons why registered voters did not vote." It includes state-by-state statistics.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics has an online glossary of terms used by the agency.

Indiana releases its latest No Child Left Behind scores today and Kentucky's come out next week. The Education Commission of the States offers a database that lets you compare how all 50 states are doing complying with it.

The Iraq Index compiles statistics on such things as crime, telephone and water service, troop fatalities, unemployment, and so on - to judge how reconstruction there is going.

"The IRE and NICAR Database Library has just updated its IRS migration database. This database allows you to track movement of people in and out of counties. The data also includes financial information, so you can gauge if your county is gaining or losing wealth. The data includes about 2.3 million records and is current through 2003. It includes geographic codes allowing the data to be used with mapping software."

Here's an online book on "Making Table Wine at Home."

This is the most useful Census page I've come across yet: Enter an address and find any Census information available for that address.

At Indiana's state data center, STATS Indiana, you can instantly find out, for any state, how one county ranks against all the others using Census data .

John Blodgett of the University of Missouri's Office of Social & Economic Data Analysis has a good page of links to his favorite demographic and mapping sites.

The Transnational Crime and Corruption Center at American University "is the first center in the United States devoted to teaching, research, training and formulating policy advice in transnational crime, corruption and terrorism."

Here's a list of "Official DNC bloggers" at the Democratic National Convention, courtesy of Feedster.com.

Vivisimo lets you search the entire 9/11 Commission report. It's a good way to check out this search engine's use of "clustering" to make search results more meaningful.

IRE/NICAR has updated its National Highway Transportation Safety Administration database. "The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration car recalls and complaints database is broken down into a series of tables that can be cross referenced to find out information about vehicles that have been recalled by manufacturers as well as consumer complaints about vehicles," the organization says. "This database includes records from 1977 through June 2004. There are some records for earlier years, but they are incomplete." The cost is $105 for members, that plus another $25 for non-members.

You can read the Indiana Magazine of History online free. There are free copies of other history journals, including journals on environmental and education history, at this site too. It's called "History Cooperative," "a pioneering nonprofit humanities resource offering top-level online history scholarship."

Mary Ellen Bates - in her Tip of the Month - writes about specialized search engines you should consult instead of always relying on Google.

Here are three sites I didn't know about she mentions:

• BrainBoost "is a Question Answering search engine. It was specifically designed to answer questions, asked in plain English."
• Geniusfind "categorizes thousands of topic-specific search engines and databases."
• Beaucoup lists high-quality, free information sites.

HazardMaps lets you create maps of potential hazards - tornadoes, floods, earthquakes, hailstorms, landslides, Tsunamis, etc. - for anywhere in the U.S. It will color code the map showing how likely such events are for any location.

This government site, meanwhile, makes available lots of free "geologic hazards photos."

The Medicaid Resource Book tells "how the Medicaid program operates -- who it covers, what it covers, how it is financed, and how it is administered. It was written to assist the public and policymakers in understanding the structure and operation of the Medicaid program."

Copyscape "finds copies of your content on the Web. You can use Copyscape to identify sites that have copied your content without permission. Copyscape will also show you who is quoting your site. Simply type in the URL of your original content, and Copyscape does the rest."

The Google toolbar now lets you find Web sites just by typing in a name instead of a Web address, as this PC World article explains.

It was once my dream to join an equivalent club for journalists: Check out the "Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists."

You can find out which U.S. House and Senate hearing transcripts are available online at GPO Access. This includes such thrillers as "Harmful Algal Blooms And Hypoxia: Strengthening The Science."

Bill Dedman of Powerreporting.com has put online an Excel "Electoral college calculator" that lets you play around with various presidential election scenarios. "You change the winner of any state, and the electoral math changes along with you," Dedman told various mailing lists. "There are fancier ones on the Web, but this one has the advantage of showing the actual votes from 2000, and the winners in each state in 2000 and 1996. And so-called battleground states are marked. So you can make your predictions quickly."

The Census has a Web page for Congress that makes it very easy to find Census facts about a particular congressional district.

HotelChatter specializes in hotel gossip, including "which celebrities are staying where," where to find good deals and "the hotels you should stay away from." USA Today wrote about it this month.

The Federal Railroad Administration keeps a searchable database on railroad accidents and other incidents. It allows you to "to dynamically search the accident/incident and inspection files using a variety of selection criteria to produce maps, charts, summary tabulations or individual reports of incidents."

IRE/NICAR has updated its FBI uniform crime reports database, which covers 1980-2002.

The librarian Gary Price keeps a very good list of free state databases for public record searches, statistics and more.

Most leading news sites are no better at using pictures than magazines were in the 1920s, according to one of the world's leading experts on photojournalism.

"Google Spawn: The Culture Surrounding Google," from Searcher magazine. A look at the Google phenomenon, with lots of links to other sites that explain or use Google in some way.

Surfpack Startpage "is a real lifesaver for people who know what they want on the Internet and regularly visit the same web sites. Basically, it builds a single HTML page that contains all your favorite web resources displayed in whatever way, form or shape you might like - favorite URL links, newsfeeds, entire web pages etc. The page you create also comes with search tools, horoscopes, current weather conditions, LiveJournal diaries, humor, and other web modules. There are dozens of tools to make your online experience with Surfpack much more enjoyable than simple web surfing cluttered with unwanted banners and pop-up ads. Unlike online portals, no registration required to open or modify your startpage! Surfpack Startpage resides locally on your computer, so it loads instantly even if you don't have an Internet connection established."

Here's another reason why you should always assume your email is in the public domain: Did They Read It is a service that tracks, without the recipient's consent, whether email was received, whether it was opened, how long it was open, the number of times it was viewed, whether it was forwarded to others, and whether those it was forwarded to opened it. It has already been declared illegal in France (but then again, what do the French know about freedom, anyway?)

The American Customer Satisfaction Index "tracks trends in customer satisfaction."

"The Military Law Review ... is the premier U.S. Armed Forces journal of military legal scholarship. It has been published quarterly by The Judge Advocate General's Legal Center & School (JAGS), U.S. Army, Charlottesville, Virginia since 1958."

Congressional reports on terrorism and crime studies.

The Environmental Working Group analyzed the House tobacco buyout bill and concluded that a few well-to-do growers and companies would collect the lion's share of the money if it passes, while most tobacco farmers will walk away with just $1,000 a year. You can search the EWG's database by name to find out who gets what. Jim Malone, who suggested this site, found that B.C. Jones (as in Brereton C. Jones, former Kentucky governor), would collect $446,582.58, and Scotty Baesler, former Kentucky congressman, would collect $837,466.00. Thank God someone's looking out for the interests of the rich and powerful.

For Your Political Information is a free Web site, "by invitation only" for journalists and others, that monitors "press release activity on more than 650 web sites." It gives you a the title and link from all those those sites, organized by topic, on a single page. "There is no litmus test--partisan, ideological or otherwise--that is applied to news releases that are selected for the daily FYPI web page," the site says.

If you know a location's latitude and longitude you can use this site to calculate the sunrise and sunset for any day past or future . Could be useful if you're testing the truthfulness of someone's account of what happened that day. There's a dropdown for some cities (but not Louisville) if you don't have the lat and long, and a link to other sites where you can find lats and longs for anywhere.

At OnlineConversion.com you can "Convert just about anything to anything else." It promises "50,000 conversions" - length, speed, temperature, weight, dates and times, cooking, area, power, energy, density, force, pressure, finance and much more.

This is now my favorite excuse for why a government agency can't turn over its data: The Justice Department says it can't hand over a database on foreign lobbyists to the Center for Public Integrity because just copying the data would crash their computer system, according to an AP story. This generated a lot of comment on Slashdot.

News University offers a free training module that "deconstructs four successful online projects that were finalists for the Online Journalism Awards, taking you through the five steps of the production process for each one in specific detail. The module is a must-see for producers and Web editors who are wondering how to accomplish good work online under real-world time and budget constraints."

This page tells you which search strategy to use depending on the information you need.