The U.S. Department of Defense Manpower Data Center now has a site where you can confirm if someone is active duty military - if you have a SSN and birth year and month. The site doesn't work with Firefox but does with Internet Explorer.

Given the sudden firing of a Miami Herald columnist for tape recording a suicidal politician's phone call without the politician's consent, you may want to review the laws on taping summarized by the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.

A free guide to grammar and writing.

JockBio.com - its motto really is "Get a Life!" - offers biographies of athletes . For those who would rush to the bookstore to be first in line for a copy of "The Simeon Rice Story."

Time and Date.com will give you time zones for cities around the world, sunrise and sunset times, convert one time zone to another, calculate the number of days between any two dates, provide dialing codes, generate a calendar for any year, past and present and much more.

Commentary Today offers "Opinions from the country's greatest columnists updated daily ... "

The U.S. Department of Justice recently unveiled a National Sex Offender Public Registry that lets you search names submitted by 22 states. Information returned includes the sex offender's crimes, date of birth, address, physical description, date registered and when the information was last updated.

Stanford University's Highwire Press "hosts the largest repository of free full-text life science articles in the world, with more than 850,000 free, full-text articles online."

The private investigator site InvestigationTips.com offers tips on such things as how to investigate an accident, locate hidden assets or find bank accounts legally.

This from the blog Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science, is a more than fair point, I'd say:

"I was reading an article in the newspaper the other day (I think it was about Medicare fraud in New York state, but it doesn't really matter) that presented some sort of result obtained from a 'computer analysis.' A computer analysis? Regression analysis, even statistical or economic analysis, would give at least some vague notion of what was done, but the term computer analysis is about as uninformative as saying that the analysis was done inside an office building."

Information Aesthetics is a blog that highlights creative ways of visualizing information. Highly recommended.

MapDigger is a directory of free online maps.

At Wondir you can ask any question and someone, hopefully someone who know what he or she is talking about, will answer it.

Copyscape is a free service that lets you plug in the address of a Web page to see if anyone has plagiarized or copied from it.

"Law and Policy Institutions provides a well-organized point of access for legal and legislative information."

The Government Printing Office offers an RSS feed with its latest news and updates.

From LLRX.com, a primer on researching medical literature on the Internet.

Microsoft offers free Excel templates to do personal finance.

At Pokernomics.com, University of Chicago Economist Steven Levitt, the co-author of the bestselling Freakonomics, wants volunteers to send in their "hand histories" so he can do the "first large scale analysis of poker." "Our goal is to understand the factors that make players successful at poker," the site says. "Many people have written books on poker theory, but there has yet to be a systematic analysis using actual data on what works and what doesn't." Participants who send enough hands will get a free hand analysis, an autographed copy of his book or a t-shirt.

I've been meaning to highlight this story a week ago by the St. Paul Pioneer Press (free registration required), where the reporter, Paul Tosto, debunked a report that Minnesota has "has more young children taking care of themselves after school than any state in the country." Tosto did what reporters don't do often enough: questioned the numbers and traced them to their source.

The Journal of the American Medical Association reported this week that the results of nearly one third of the studies published in it and two other leading medical journals didn't hold up after further study, according to this AP report. The AP quoted the author of the report saying, "Contradicted and potentially exaggerated findings are not uncommon in the most visible and most influential original clinical research." The AP also noted that the author said scientists and editors shouldn't give selective attention to just "the most promising or exciting results" and should emphasize the limitations of science.

Penal Law: A Web, by a law professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo School of Law offers "A comprehensive on-line digest of American criminal law." Among the options are a Penal Code Comparer and a Penal Code Analyzer so you can look in depth at codes from different states.

CompleteRSS lets you "search for and subscribe to thousands of RSS feeds."

englishcompanion.com summarizes notetaking strategies. Intended for students, but reporters might pick up a useful idea or two for organizing their pathetic scrawls.

Yahoo! Mindset is an experiment that lets you view search results sorted according to "whether they are more commercial or more informational (i.e., from academic, non-commercial, or research-oriented sources)."

Here's a "Big List of Blog Search Engines."

Elegus calls itself "The FASTEST, EASIEST way to find government and legal information." It says it will "Instantly SEARCH the CONTENT of any US Federal or State government website!" It has a list of the federal and state government sites it searches.

AMEDEO, "The Medical Literature Guide," lets you select medical topics that interest you and each week it will email you bibliographic lists of new scientific literature on those topics and links to abstracts of the articles themselves.

A site devoted to exposing "weasel words." By the author of "Death Sentences: How Cliches, Weasel Words and Management-Speak are Strangling Our Public Language"

"The mission of Topic Hunter is to gather the most useful resources on the Internet into a single, easy to use search site. Topic Hunter is your site, so your comments, criticism and suggestions are needed to maximize its potential. There are many new concepts being implemented with Topic Hunter which have never been seen on the Internet and I am optimistic you will find this site extremely useful in your daily exploration of the unknown." So says the creator.

Microsoft offers 17 hours of ASP.NET training, "Developing Microsoft ASP.NET Web Applications with Visual Studio.NET," for free.

The GMaps Pedometer uses Google maps "to help record distances traveled during a running or walking workout." The creator explains why: "As a runner training for a marathon for the first time, I found myself wishing I had an easy way to know the exact distance a certain course is, without having to drag a GPS or pedometer around on my runs."

A Google Maps naysayer says Sportsim, which is free software, is better because it allows you to record movements with a GPS receiver , "save background maps to your tracks, analyze your achievements, compare with heart rate data, get cumulative statistics of your training and replay simultaneously activities from same route. Even better, Sportsim is a community where you can create your own race, compete in races, share your recommended activity and explore and discover new places to train."

The State Machine is an interactive graphic on campaign finance where you drag green plus signs representing special interests around the screen and watch as red and blue circles representing U.S. Senators scurry after them. The more money a senator has received from a particular PAC, the more that senator circle is attracted to that PACs green plus sign. Hover your mouse over a circle to get detailed information about that senator's contributions. The data comes from opensecrets, a campaign finance Web site. Personally, I found it confusing, but an interesting attempt nonetheless.

Google now has a Firefox toolbar.

The National Guideline Clearinghouse is "a comprehensive database of evidence-based clinical practice guidelines and related documents." The goal of the site, by the federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, is to offer "objective, detailed information" on the best treatment for diseases and mental disorders.

Go here to find the county a city is located in or the cities within a county. The site by the National Association of Counties also offers other information about all U.S. counties, including population, square miles, the year of founding, elected officials and phone numbers.

BankruptcyData.com calls itself "the premier business bankruptcy resource on the web. BankruptcyData.com provides instant access to information on thousands of business bankruptcy filings from federal bankruptcy districts. Currently there are over 270,000 business bankruptcies in the database." You can search for business bankruptcies back to 1986 for free, but you pay for the details.

Here's a cheat sheet summarizing the advanced search operators in Google.

The Palm Beach Post used a program called HTML ImageMapper to produce this U.S. map showing where the soldiers who died in Iraq came from. The Courier-Journal used the same software to produce an online homicide map.

Here's another interesting online graphic that shows day by day where each soldier in Iraq died. Click on the red dot to get it going.

Drexel University's "Dragonfire is a fully interactive online publication bringing together innovative audio, video and print content in previously unimagined, mutually-supporting formats. ... We distinguish ourselves by reporting on culture, law, science, medicine, politics and the arts and publish stories that are as important as they are interesting."

Abbreviations and Acronyms of the U.S. Government.

Read your Congressman's brain: Ted Bridis of the AP reports that there's a new Web site, http://www.opencrs.com/, where you can search more than 8,000 Congressional Research Service reports. These timely reports on everything from veterans' health care to gas prices once were available only to your esteemed representatives.

The Government Performance Project is "A non-partisan, independent program of research focused on state governments and the public's interest in improving their management capacity and performance. The Government Performance Project gives state governments information and data they can use to improve management and achieve goals."

Another Google Maps variation: The Seattle bus monster lets you enter a location and get the bus stops in that area. It also lets you view routes and links to traffic cams giving live views of current traffic. This week Google officially made public the software tools needed for Webmasters everywhere to embed Google maps like this on their own sites. I gotta think a newspaper or two will seize the opportunity.