STATS offers journalists help with data analysis

STATS at George Mason University, which regularly exposes the misuse of statistics in the news, is now offering help to journalists. "STATS isn't just committed to correcting mistakes with numbers and data — we want to prevent them in the first place," the site says. "Which is why we're here to help with data analysis. If you are a journalist faced with writing about a potentially controversial new study, or if you just want to discuss an issue or a story idea, feel free to contact us …" The contact information is here. The organization is also offering a $25 bounty every week for the worst use of numbers or statistics in the news.

PI Buzz: "10 Must Have Desert Island Web sites for Private Investigators"

PI Buzz gives its "10 Must Have Desert Island Web sites for Private Investigators." The author, Tamara Thompson, found so many sites she's created a Wiki for them: "60 sites in 60 minutes for private investigators."

CQ web search software

CQ web is free beta software that "finds and shows you information you would otherwise miss," its Web site promises. It uses standard search engines such as Google and MSN but instead of just rearranging their search results, it builds an index of words extracted from them. You then choose combinations of these words to find what you're looking for. "The search interface in CO web circumvents the 'hit or miss' nature and trial-and-error link clicking associated with traditional search engine results that are often limited to simple snippets when describing page content," explains a press release. I had been doing some research on Precision Journalism author Philip Meyer and gave CQ Web a try, and, as promised, it did find several interesting writings about Meyer that I hadn't found in earlier Web searches.

Scandoo, the Web nanny

Scandoo screens search engine results from Google, MSN, Yahoo!, or Ask.com and warns you about sites that may spread viruses, spyware or are offensive. You start your search at Scandoo, and it adds an icon to those search engines’ results telling you if sites are OK or dubious. "Our scanners inspect and classify all search results in real time before you click on the links so you can make informed decisions about the websites you visit and secure yourself against infection," the site explains. If you do a Google search on depth reporting, we're the number one result, but we get a question mark. I assume that’s because this is a small, little trafficked site, not a carrier of the plague. At least we're not Salon.com, where its section devoted to stories about sex earned the censorious red X. HBO’s Sex and the City, a Sex Pistols Web site, and Sex Addicts Anonymous, however, earn the green check of approval…

E&P: How to Get Ahead in the New Media Newsroom, Circa 2006

Steve Outing at E&P:

What seems to be becoming the norm in newsrooms these days is that a growing group of reporters, photographers and editors are now working in jobs where there's a wide variety of tasks to be done each day: feeding the newspaper's Web site; writing for blogs and interacting with blog readers; gathering audio for the website and/or radio partners; recording video clips; participating in online chats and discussion forums ... Oh, and writing for the newspaper's print edition.

To stand out from the rest of the crowd and climb the corporate ladder, I'd contend that you need to take on some of those responsibilities. The journalists -- young or old -- who stick to the old definition of what a newspaper reporter or editor is about are the ones who will get passed over.

National Vulnerability Database

The National Vulnerability Database from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security offers "official vulnerability information on all known computer vulnerabilities."

Muckraked

Muckraked is a blog devoted to investigative journalism. A recent post asks, "Where’s The Outrage on Barbaro?":

It’s interesting to note that amid all the poignant stories about brave Barbaro, the Kentucky-Derby-winning racehorse who broke several bones at the start of the Preakness, very few commentators are raising an essential question:

Is horseracing animal cruelty? ...

The post highlights a San Antonio Express-News story "which found that at the state’s five licensed tracks, 'veterinarians with the Texas Racing Commission have euthanized or documented the deaths of 300 horses in the past five years, usually after the animals broke ankles, legs or even spinal cords during races.'"

Medical condition guides

Condition Guides from MerckSource give you specific information about medical conditions, from AIDS to uterine cancer.

Global Legal Information Network

The Global Legal Information Network "is a public database of laws, regulations, judicial decisions, and other complementary legal sources contributed by governmental agencies and international organizations."

Web discussion search engine

Omgili searches only web-based discussion forums:

I decided to create Omgili in order to separate ordinary web pages from information rich discussion forums. The information contained in online forums is typically presented in a "question and answer" or debate style format. How is this significant?

Many times you will have a question that has already been answered. Using Omgili, you can avoid posting already asked questions and quickly find your answer. Unlike ordinary search engines that prioritize articles and edited web pages, Omgili only indexes discussion forums. Using Omgili's advanced search capabilities you can choose to independently search titles, topics or just the replies of a discussion.

LLRX.com: Business Filings Databases

LLRX.com maintains a state-by-state summary of business filings databases available online:

All 50 states make some level of corporate and business filings available online. In a few instances only limited information (such as name availability) is retrievable. The majority of the states, however, use their Web presence to disseminate a range of public business records -- and most of them offer access at no charge.

Export.gov

Export.gov is a U.S. government portal for information on exporting goods to other countries. It offers basic information about exporting, tariff rates, country information and more. There's also a Market Research Library where you can search for more than 100,000 market research reports on countries and industries.

Free college class broadcasts from UC Berkeley

The University of California at Berkeley has been putting audio and video recordings of class lectures online for anyone who wants to listen, whether students or not. Courses include biology, chemistry, computer science, ecology, physics, psychology, political science and more. There are also free event broadcasts from people who have given talks at Berkeley, and you can subscribe to RSS feeds to keep up with what's new.

Crypto-Gram

Crypto-Gram is a free monthly computer security e-mail newsletter from expert Bruce Schneier that claims more than 100,000 readers. "As head curmudgeon at the table, Schneier explains, debunks, and draws lessons from security stories that make the news," the site says. Here, for example, is his take on "Should Terrorism Be Reported in the News?"

Depth Reporting on vacation

I'll return next week. See you then.

Search engine of search engines

goshMe is a search engine of search engines:

Nowadays, the internet offers a great variety of specialized search engines, but this number is so gigantic that users feel sort of lost in front of so many possibilities. The problem of finding information on the Internet has been replaced by the problem of knowing where search engines are, what they are designed to retrieve, and how to use them.

GoshMe assists users in that. Once the user sends us his/her query, we will check all Search Engines possibilities for him/her, and present it in the most comprehensive way, providing a list of the best Search Engines and Databases to his/her query, ranked by relevance, divided by categories and sub-categories, and with a brief description about each Search Engine.

News Directory

NewsDirectory.com is a directory of thousands of English newspapers, magazines and TV stations around the world. You can search for publications by area code, browse by location or subject, or search for individual articles by topic or keyword.

Quick index to Wikipedia

WikiWax is "your quick index to Wikipedia." You start typing and each character you type narrows the list of matching Wikipedia entries until you find the one you want.

Roots of English software

"Roots of English is a free software package developed by Dr. Cotter at Seton Hall University. ... The software will help you find the Greek and Latin roots of thousands of words in the English language, and the hypertext links make it fast and easy to use. The Dictionary also contains background on the history  of English and details on the sources of individual words."

Speech Internet Dictionary

The Speech Internet Dictionary (SID) provides "concise definitions of technical terms used in phonetics, phonology, speech and hearing science and allied disciplines." This includes, in some cases, examples using illustrations and sound clips.

Deadly maps

Deadly Maps from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace illustrate the proliferation of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons around the world. This includes country maps that "show the major nuclear installations, both civilian and military, in each country."

Spotback: "A new breed of personalized news service"

Spotback calls itself "a new breed of personalized news service":

It is designed to quickly learn each user's fields of interest and style by analyzing how users rate and interact with news information. It then offers users the most interesting, relevant and hard to filter news information personally tailored to their taste. Spotback uses sophisticated algorithms that analyze social behavior. These algorithms are designed to harness the power of the entire community for the benefit of the individual user. The ideas and technologies behind Spotback are based on the understanding that every user has his own interest and tastes. The true challenge of a personalized information service lies in finding the information that will interest individual users the most rather than the information that most users think is interesting. This concept makes Spotback fundamentally different from the existing 'find the most popular content' or 'top stories' technologies.

Google does trends

Journalists love trends, especially bogus ones. Now Google offers a new trend tool where you can "See what the world is searching for." Google Blogoscoped writes about it here.

Investment adviser disclosure

Investment adviser firms must disclose detailed information to the Securities and Exchange Commission. You can search by firm name here. Information firms must disclose includes where their principal offices are located, the names of direct and indirect owners and officers, telephone numbers, states where they are doing business, how the firms are organized, the approximate number of employees and how many act as investment advisors, a rough estimate of the number of clients and the types of clients they serve, how the firms are compensated, the amount of assets under management, the types of services they provide, other business activities they perform, their participation or interest in transactions with their clients and their detailed disciplinary history, including whether the firm or an "advisory affiliate" has been convicted of a felony or violated other rules or statutes.

Solution Watch: Fifty Ways to Take Notes

Solution Watch offers Fifty Ways to Take Notes - a list of online note taking applications.

Seeking Alpha publishes conference call transcripts

Seeking Alpha is a network of stock market and financial blogs. It offers not only investment commentary and analysis but also publishes transcripts of conference calls between company officials and stock-market analysts. If you really want to understand the media business, you should read some of these transcripts, such as the most recent one for Gannett. One of the network’s blogs is devoted to media stocks. It offers lots of interesting information, such as this graphic showing quarterly gross profit margins for media companies.

Easy-to-understand economic information portal

Liber8 is an "economic information portal for librarians and students." Librarians for the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis created it, and it emphasizes non-technical, easy-to-understand information. "We hope this site will provide a single point of access to the economic information that the Federal Reserve System, other government agencies, and data providers have to offer," the site says.

Stock exchange for news

Trendio.com is a stock exchange for headline news. “ … you can bet on the popularity of politicians, sporting teams or events, ideas, stars, natural catastrophies, etc., in fact on any word that makes the headlines,” the site says. “The words are rated according to the number of times they appear in 3000 anglophone media web sites from around the world. Buy the words you believe in, sell the others!”

Printable maps from NationalAtlas.gov

NationalAtlas.gov offers a large collection of printable maps free for downloading. These are maps, in PDF or GIF format, formatted for easy printing. You can get maps of the U.S. and individual states, with capitals, rivers and lakes, selected cities and towns or counties included.

Information companies wiki

The goal of the free Alacra Wiki is "to help people find the world'’s best sources of business information," according to a press release (PDF) announcing the site's launch last year. "The Alacra Wiki provides descriptions and links to an array of in-depth business and financial databases ranging from archival news services to industry-specific directories." The site notes that "Anyone can contribute, but you must create an account in order to do so." Of particular interest is the databases page.

DetectiveForums.com

DetectiveForums.com offers "Free Bulletin Boards About Accessing Public Records." Robert Ambrogi says on his legal sites blog that it "could prove useful in helping to locate hard-to-find records. That, of course, will depend on how many users the site gets and how much information they have to share."

MyMoney.gov

MyMoney.gov "is the U.S. government's website dedicated to teaching all Americans the basics about financial education. Whether you are planning to buy a home, balancing your checkbook, or investing in your 401k, the resources on MyMoney.gov can help you do it better. " Two more narrowly focused versions will be unveiled soon: one for conservatives - GimmeMyMoney.gov - and one for liberals - TakeMyMoney.gov.

Death On the Job

The AFL-CIO has pulled together a large number of statistics on worker safety for its report Death On the Job: The Toll of Neglect. The report is a PDF, but at least some of it is available in more useful form here. (Note to anyone sharing data: NEVER make it available only as a PDF, because if you do, it is a NIGHTMARE to extract and make useful for analysis.)

Four Ways To Summarize Data in Excel

MrExcel.com explains Four Ways To Summarize Data in Excel. Personally, I'd use a pivot table, and never even would have considered subtoals, the SUMIF function, or consolidating the spreadsheet. But hey, that's just me.

Detecting stolen elections with statistics

The Social Science Statistics Blog discusses a paper (PDF) by Cornell University government professor Walter R. Mebane Jr. on how statistical methods could be used to detect election theft. The paper's first paragraph says:

The advent of electronic voting machines means that often now there are no paper ballots to be recounted. To steal an election it is no longer necessary to toss boxes of ballots in the river, stuff the boxes with thousands of phony ballots, or hire vagrants to cast repeated illicit votes. All that may be needed nowadays is access to an input port and a few lines of computer code. To detect such manipulations is a diffcult and urgent problem.

The Hotline's Blogometer

The Hotline's Blogometer "is a daily report from The Hotline taking the temperature of the political blogosphere." Uh, let me guess: The atmosphere is overheated...

Symbols.com

Symbols.com is an "Online Encyclopedia of Western Signs and Ideograms." The site has "more than 1,600 articles about 2,500 Western signs, arranged into 54 groups according to their graphic characteristics." I'm not sure what it says about us that there are eight family signs, but 19 fascist ones.

Free Trade Magazine Subscriptions

A long while ago I mentioned that trade magazines are a great resource for understanding how specific industries work, and mentioned that you can get free subscriptions to many of them through Tradepub.com. If you're interested, you'll also want to check out the Free Trade Magazine Source. They'll also email you when new magazines are added to the site.

Build your own maps with Wayfaring

Wayfaring leverages Google Maps to let you create and share your own online maps -- including letting you add your own markers, notes, routes and photos and videos. The "Best of Wayfaring" list includes a woman's favorite places in New York City, a guy describing places he's played golf, and a stadium guide for the 2006 FIFA World Cup in Germany.

The Kentucky Grand Ole Docket

Talking Points Memo, which has a page devoted to folks caught up in various national scandals, has a special section devoted just to Kentucky: "The Kentucky Grand Ole Docket." The page "is specially reserved for players in Kentucky's Merit System Investigation," the site says.

Questions about newspaper blogs

There are lots of reasons for me to get defensive reading these two articles:

• Robert Niles at the Online Journalism Review , asks "Can newspapers do blogs right?"
• A Web editor asks, "What are the most important questions for a newsroom to consider when creating a new blog?"

Deciphering email headers

The National Law Journal writes about "What you can learn from the data embedded in e-mail headers."

Fundamentals of Statistics

Fundamentals of Statistics is a free online textbook.

Public domain photos from an early news picture agency

The George Grantham Bain Collection at the Library of Congress "represents the photographic files of one of America's earliest news picture agencies":

The collection richly documents sports events, theater, celebrities, crime, strikes, disasters, political activities including the woman suffrage campaign, conventions and public celebrations. The photographs Bain produced and gathered for distribution through his news service were worldwide in their coverage, but there was a special emphasis on life in New York City. The bulk of the collection dates from the 1900s to the mid-1920s, but scattered images can be found as early as the 1860s and as late as the 1930s.

You are free to publish the photographs as you wish.

Thoughts of a press expert

danah boyd, a PhD student and social media researcher at Yahoo! Research Berkeley, blogs about being a press expert. boyd, whose work deals with social networking sites like Friendster and MySpace, summarizes some of her main points:

• Dealing with the press takes a LOT of time and is completely exhausting and often doesn't help you get your point across.
• There are many "experts" who have a lot to gain from being in the press all the time.
• American press competition does not produce better articles, but instead encourages scary articles that will entice readers to read more.
• "Fair and balanced" promotes experts who can keep scary or emotional stories flowing.

You may also be interested in her comments on the differences between local and national reporters:

At first, i felt really badly for those who were coming from non-national press. Most experts only want to talk with national press because you have more of an impact. Unfortunately, i've learned that there are other reasons. National press understand that your time is precious and rarely keep you for more than an hour. They get to the point ASAP - they are looking for a handful of quotes. They know their material better, having done the research (or used some poor sucker who was stoked to even get to talk to a press person). Talking with smaller papers can be very frustrating at times because they are not that savvy at dealing with experts, they are often looking to repeat a story that national news has already done, and when it comes to stuff like MySpace, they simply don't understand it.

Inauthentic Paper Detector

Submit text to the Inauthentic Paper Detector from the Indiana University School of Informatics and it will tell you the chance that it's "a human-written authentic scientific document." I submitted three texts to see how it did. The results:

• Albert Einstein's "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies": Authentic, with a 96.1 percent chance.
• The most recent posts on Depth Reporting: Inauthentic, with a 39 percent chance.
• Al Mohler's latest commentary: Inauthentic, with a 13.1 chance.

Organized Crime and Corruption Bibliographic Database

The Nathanson Centre for the Study of Organized Crime and Corruption offers the Organized Crime and Corruption Bibliographic Database. I searched on Kentucky and found one entry: A reference to a book on the mobster Meyer Lansky by Hank Messick, a former Courier-Journal and Miami Herald reporter. The summary of the book also mentioned Messick's first book, The Silent Syndicate from 1967, which was about crime and gambling in Kentucky and Ohio. If you're curious about Messick, here's an obituary, an online tribute to him and two other crime writers and a picture.

Country Reports on Terrorism

Every year the U.S. State Department must report to Congress the state of terrorism around the world. The Country Reports on Terrorism can make interesting reading. Consider, for example, this comment about our seemingly benign neighbors to the north:

... tensions over Iraq and U.S. actions against Canadian citizen terror suspects threatened to disrupt valuable information sharing between the two nations. Terrorists have capitalized on liberal Canadian immigration and asylum policies to enjoy safe haven, raise funds, arrange logistical support, and plan terrorist attacks.

Oh my. Of course, you have to consider that the Canadians are a little bit more concerned about such niceties as the "extraordinary rendition" and torture of an apparently innocent Canadian citizen than are Americans.

How to calculate the end of the month in Excel ...

...is explained by Excel Tips here.