Directions Magazine has a Web page that collects all the GIS discussion lists in one place

TOXMAP, from the National Library of Medicine, lets you explore data from the EPA's Toxics Release Inventory by clicking on a map of the U.S. It helps you zero in on toxic pollutants released by individual companies, as well as study trends over time.

Creative Nonfiction is "the journal devoted exclusively to the creative nonfiction genre."

You can now search for videos on Yahoo.

Get a life dept.: Somebody has created "The Encyclopedia of Fake Bands." "Finally, all the fictional bands and singers from TV and movies listed in one convenient, scarily obsessive place," the site explains. "Why? It's the Internet, stupid! The Internet was created for such things as this!"

New York City plans to createa database that will let the public search for campaign contributors who hold city contracts. The goal is to limit "pay to play."

Five cell phone companies are creating a directory assistance database, but you won't be able to get a cell phone directory or look up numbers online.

Two companies are teaming up to market a database of employees accused of theft. You don't have to be convicted to appear in the database, or, it seems, to be denied a job, although the press release says the records "contain admissions of theft":

The USMA National Theft Database began by retailers who started sharing theft data to prevent the hiring of known thieves. Today, thousands of locations throughout the United States, including one-third of the nation’s largest retailers, contribute and share information through the USMA National Theft Database. The database houses information on nearly one million cases of theft and fraud, which include employee theft, shoplifting, refund/credit card fraud and the passing of bad checks. According to the National Retail Security Survey, as many as 86 percent of retail theft is not criminally prosecuted. Retailers gain value from the product because they are able to identify individuals who have admitted to stealing, but whose incidents may not show up in a typical criminal search.

DesMoinesRegister.com has an online database where you can look up state worker salaries.

eWeek reports that a California company is using data mining to help retailers target shoppers who abuse store return policies:

Here’s how it’s supposed to work: A customer walks in and attempts to return a product. The clerk asks for identification and enters that into the system so that all of that customer’s purchases can be linked.
The identification information and the return data is automatically sent (either using dial-up, a broadband VPN or a direct T1 connection) to a database that The Return Exchange has set up exclusively for that particular retail chain. That database can be accessed—on The Return Exchange’s server—by anyone in that company’s IT department.
When that database (called Verify-1) sees what it considers to be a return abusive pattern, it will reject that return, in the same way that a POS would reject a stolen credit card. The clerk then would give the customer an 800 number to The Return Exchange, which would then investigate the case.

Gardiner Harris of The New York Times notes that the FDA has made poor use of HMO databases on patients:

"Many drug-safety experts say that the dangers of marketed drugs could be uncovered relatively quickly if the F.D.A. routinely mined the huge databases of patient information that large health maintenance organizations like Kaiser Permanente have constructed in recent years.
The F.D.A. has never had the money to do so, however, in part because of a 1992 funding formula that forces it to rely increasingly on fees from drug makers. Drug makers did not want their fees to pay for large drug-safety efforts, and funding from Congress was not enough to do so."

Send to is a useful Firefox extension that lets you send text selected in the browser to a file. It also adds a date, time stamp and delimiter. New entries are appended to the same file.

The MusicWeb Encyclopaedia of Popular Music has nearly 4,000 entries on performers, songwriters, producers and record labels.

Font lovers (and who isn't, really?) will want to check out the Encyclopaedia of Typography and Electronic Communication.

WorldAtlas.com offers lots of maps as well as many geographical facts and figures. Here's Kentucky's page and here's Indiana's.

"The Plain Language Action & Information Network is a government-wide group of volunteers working to improve communications from the federal government to the public." It offers "resources to help writers achieve the goal of clear communication." My first reaction when reading about this site was, "Huh?"

LOJIC, the official mapping agency that is part of MSD, is selling a new street atlas for $20. Besides streets for Jefferson, Southwest Oldham and Bullitt, LOJIC says it includes:

"New Metro Police Beats, Districts and Stations
Urban and County Fire Districts and Stations
Suburban City Boundaries, Metro Parks and Other Areas of Interest
Southwest Oldham County and Bullitt County Streets
Countywide maps of Metro Council
ZIP Codes and Municipalities in Street Index.
Easier to Read Page References in Indexes.
And much more!!!!"

You can order it with this form: http://www.lojic.org/products/pdfs/atlasform.pdf

Researcher Mary Ellen Bates offers good advice on how to tell whether a Web site is reliable. Make sure you check out the RYT Hospital Web site for an example of one that, as she says, "at first glance, looks reliable."

Google has a new page where, as you type, it suggests other search words to use.

Judicial Watch has put the financial disclosure reports for all U.S. Supreme Court and Court of Appeals judges online.

This page offers more than 200 different techniques for boosting your creativity. Not that you're necessarily creative enough to actually use them...

Here are tips on how to cope with "data smog." That's where "The sheer volume of information which many of us are exposed to every day may actually impair our performance and add stress to our lives."

The FDA posts all recalls, market withdrawals and safety alerts for the last 60 days online. You can get an RSS feed on that page.

Governments now see electronic records as a profit center - and are looking for ways to make you pay again for what your taxes paid for the first time. In Florida a judge ruled against a property appraiser who tried to make a private vendor pay royalties to obtain his agency's electronic maps.

This article answers the questions: "What can a web address, or URL (Uniform Resource Locator), reveal about an information source? How can the URL help when surfing the web or finding information on a company's website?" The second part is here.

The U.S. Patent office offers data on "the number of U.S. patents distributed by state and country of origin. The origin of a patent is determined by the residence of the first-named inventor."

EEVL, The Internet Guide to Engineering, Mathematics, and Computing, offers databases on all three subjects.

AllYouCanRead.com claims to be " the largest database of magazines and newspapers on the Internet, with listings for about 26,500 magazines and newspapers from all over the world. AllYouCanRead.com is a complete guide to world media sources where readers find stories quickly -- whether it's news from Time Magazine or a small regional weekly newspaper in Asia."

"DressForSuccess.nl is the exclusive fashion & beauty specific search engine and link database from the Netherlands, that helps you to find what you're looking for in the field of fashion, style, beauty, lifestyle, trends and design."

Plant panic: "Weeds Gone Wild: Alien Plant Invaders of Natural Areas" is a Web site dedicating to spreading information about "the serious threat and impacts of invasive alien (exotic, non-native) plants to the native flora, fauna, and natural ecosystems of the United States." I'm not sure, though, if I wanted to emphasize the seriousness of the threat that I'd name my site after a raunchy spring break video...

FRASER, the Federal Reserve Archival System for Economic Research, scans old economic statistical publications, releases, and documents and makes them available online for researchers as PDF files.

At No Train, No Gain "Newspaper training editors present their ideas, handouts and exercises to improve and expand newsroom training."

Excel isn't just for work: A gamer has created an Excel spreadsheet to analyze Halo 2 games. Halo 2, for those of you who still think TV, music, books and movies are the most significant forms of entertainment, is an Xbox video game that has sold more than 5 million copies since its release in early September. The Entertainment Software Association, by the way, released a survey claiming the average age of video gamers is now 29.

Google Guide offers explanations on how to use Google's advanced search features.

The Kentucky Legislative Research Commission has posted two large PDFs with information about the membership of the General Assembly for every year from 1900 to 2000. The information includes codes that each member's occupation, year of birth, party, sex, race and county. The report also includes a list of the longest-serving members and has maps of old legislative district boundaries. The direct link for the 1900-1949 volume is http://lrc.ky.gov/lrcpubs/IB175a.pdf and the 1950-2000 is http://lrc.ky.gov/lrcpubs/IB175b.pdf. Right click on these links and choose "Save Target As..." to download them to your computer.

The Kentucky State Police offer files containing all Kentucky crimes and their codes, in multiple formats including Word and Excel. These files also tell you whether a particular crime is a violation, misdemeanor or felony.
http://www.kentuckystatepolice.org/data.htm#kyucr

Webgripesites.com collects links to Web sites people set up to gripe about particular companies and their products. It was founded by a man who set up a gripe site about a car dealer and was sued in federal court, a phenomena the National Law Journal discussed in this article on companies using trademark law to shut up complaining customers.

You can find detailed information about which states and institutions are getting National Science Foundation grants in the agency's "Budget Internet Information System."

The Acronym Finder offers definitions of more than 373,000 "acronyms, abbreviations and initialisms."

The Marriage Database collects links to places online where you can find marriage records. Here are the pages for Kentucky and Indiana. Don't get your hopes up too much though - what's available is spotty at best. Kinda like being single.

You can get PDFs of Statistical Abstracts, the best single source of statistics on the U.S., back to 1878 on the Census Web site.

Slashdot asks, "Are Blogs the Future of Journalism?" Surprisingly, the answer from most of the geeks who hang out there is, No, they're not. The discussion was provoked by an article in Foreign Policy magazine about how "What began as a hobby is evolving into a new medium that is changing the landscape for journalists and policymakers alike."

Speaking of which, Greg Johnson points out there's a new demonstration site, Wikinews, whose mission will be "to create an environment where citizen journalists can independently report the news on a wide variety of current events. " In other words, get your resumes out because you're soon to be as relevant as the composing room...