New PR Wiki

The New PR Wiki is a place for public relations people to share information about PR, how it's done and how it's changing.

BioDirectory

BioDirectory is a directory and search engine for information about life and medical sciences.

US Population Data 1969-2003

You can download US population data by county from 1969-2003 from the National Cancer Institute's SEER (Surveillance Epidemiology and End Results). This includes race and age breakdowns. You'll have to do some work to put it in usable form, though, so make sure you get the data dictionary.

Disability INFormation Resources

DINF -- Disability INFormation Resources -- is "an information resource for supporting the study of health and welfare topics for people with disabilities." This is the English version of the Japanese site, which collects information from Japanese and international sources. "There is a special emphasis on the role technologies can play in improving access to information for disabled persons," the site says. UPDATE 6/30 4 p.m.: Oops, linked to the Japanese version. It now links to the English one.

Artificial Intelligence TOPICS

AI TOPICS from the American Association for Artificial Intelligence is "for students, teachers, journalists, and everyone who would like to explore what artificial intelligence is, and what AI scientists do," the site says. "Our goal is to offer a limited number of exemplary, non-technical resources that we have organized and annotated to provide you with meaningful access to basic, understandable information about the AI universe. " I'll settle for artificial intelligence, given my lack of the genuine kind.

Open archive for library and information science

E-LIS "is an open access archive for scientific or technical documents, published or unpublished, on Librarianship, Information Science and Technology, and related areas. "

Eugene O'Neill archive

eOneill.com offers the complete plays of playwright Eugene O'Neill, as well as recordings of some of his works, reviews or recent and past performances, notices of upcoming O'Neill productions and biographical and scholarly material.

S.E.C. EDGAR Full Text Search

You can now search the full text of the last two years of SEC filings via EDGAR. "The full text of a filing includes all data in the filing as well as all attachments to the filing," the site says. Private companies selling access to SEC documents have been offering full-text search for some time, but at least this is free. I don't, however, see any valid reason for them to limit it to the last two years. They say they're still developing the feature and are seeking suggestions, so that's one I'll be making.

BBC interviews with writers

The BBC shares recorded interviews with some of the 20th centuries greatest -- or at least most famous -- writers.

"I will be heard!" - Abolitionism in America

... is an online exhibition offered by the Cornell University Library.

Project Wombat

Project Wombat is a mailing list for difficult research questions, of the kind you would direct to a reference librarian. Many of its members are librarians, and it is a successor to the now defunct Stumpers mailing list.

Education Atlas

The Education Atlas is a guide to what it says are the best education sites on the Web.

OpenCourseWare Finder

More universities are putting free course content online and the OpenCourseWare Finder makes it easier to find what interests you by searching multiple sites at once.

Campus Health and Safety

"CampusHealthandSafety.org is an online resource for higher education administrators, students, parents, and other professionals who are seeking information about creating healthier and safer living and learning environments for college and university students, both on campus and in the surrounding community." This includes information on alcohol, other drugs, violence and mental health.

BlackBookOnline.info

BlackBookOnline, the companion Web site for The Investigator's Little Black Book, has a new home online. It offers links to lots of Web sites of interest to private investigators -- and journalists.

SimpleR

R is free, highly sophisticated statistical software used by many statisticians. You can use it to do very basic statistical calculations or highly complex analyses, but to do so, you have to be comfortable with programming. Other statistical software, such as SPSS and SAS, have graphical front ends that make them easier to use because you don't have to write code to calculate a mean or produce a chart. There are graphical front ends for R, including Jgr and SciViews, but they're relatively crude compared to their commercial counterparts. Now there's another one: SimpleR, which was just released by its developer. In an email announcing it he said it was still in "very early development," but if you're interested in R, you may want to check it out anyway.

wikiCalc

Dan Bricklin, the creator of VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet, has created a new, free, still-in-beta program called wikiCalc that is a combined web authoring tool, spreadsheet and Wiki. "It is for creating and maintaining web pages that include data this is more than just unformatted prose, such as schedules, lists, and tables," he explains on his blog. "It combines some of the ease of authoring and multi-person edit ability of a wiki with the familiar formatting and data organizing metaphor of a spreadsheet." Here's a screencast by Bricklin demonstrating it.

Truth About False Confessions

Truth About False Confessions is a blog devoted to just that. "False confessions are a terrible tragedy that is largely preventable," says the site, by Alan Hirsch, a legal studies teacher at Williams College.

Orato: "True Stories from REAL People"

Orato touts itself as "the only news site on earth dedicated to eyewitness, First Person reporting and storytelling," according to an email I received this week announcing its debut. Here's how the site explains itself:

Orato comes from the Latin and it means "I speak." That is exactly what you will find in this pioneer news Web site: people. We put a human face on the news by showcasing vivid, first-person stories from individuals involved in current events. Whether it is politics, sports, entertainment, science, love or war, Orato is capturing news in its rawest form. We are a celebration of every person's right to be heard in their own words.

Orato will feature uncensored statements from the famous and infamous-and uses the power of the Internet to make readers part of every story. They will join discussions, share their own stories and take sides on issues through online polls and The Forum.

Book TV.org

A reader recently suggested I check out C-SPAN's Book TV, where you can watch interviews and speeches by writers that have been shown on the network.

Each weekend, Book TV features 48 hours of nonfiction books from 8am Saturday to 8am Monday. This web site will enhance information on those books, provide an opportunity to watch or listen to programs you might have missed, and provide additional information not available on the network.

That additional information will include bestseller lists from around the country, opportunities to chat with authors and other readers, information on programming up to four weeks in advance, and background information on authors and publishers.

One broadcast I can recommend highly because I watched it myself is the interview with New Yorker editor David Remnick on his new book, "Reporting."

Weegee speaks

I love the photographer Weegee. The Getty Museum is having an exhibition devoted to his work, and they've put some of his photographs online. They also have audio excerpts of a radio interview he gave in 1945, including Weegee on how he got his name and "On how Weegee beat everybody (even the cops) to the scene."

Virtual Data Center

The Virtual Data Center is an "open-source, digital library to enable the sharing of quantitative research data."

So maybe I have a future, after all

From the Washington Post earlier this week:

Some news organizations surely will die as the Internet disrupts and remakes the century-plus-old newspaper and half-century-old television industries. But overlooked in this massive transformation are some underlying insights that should give pause to those who would put a gravestone on the mainstream media.

News consumption has fractured and fragmented in the United States over the past 30 years, but the demand for news is strong. Network morning, evening and news magazine shows, cable news and public broadcasting audiences, combined with the explosion of growth in the digital media, are bathing consumers in more news and information than ever before.

While it's true that fewer newspapers roll off the presses than a generation ago, that only half as many people watch the nightly network news as did 25 years ago, and that news magazines do not carry the authority of the past, new sources of news abound. The Internet has largely replaced the immediacy of radio and television for breaking news. Blogs of every conceivable perspective offer free opinions and arm-chair analysis. Community listservs supplement neighborhood newsletters. Videologs and RSS feeds target specific interests. Talk radio, despite its all-too-common bombast and vitriol, fulfills a demand to discuss issues that affect a community -- one of the most basic definitions of news.

Thanks to Gary Swick for the pointer.

Ziggs People Search

Ziggs People Search claims to be "the most comprehensive listing of up-to-date professional profiles on the web," with "over 1,000,000 on line profiles indexed." Its "Featured Profile" today shows an account supervisor who is quoted as saying, "My Ziggs Profile helps me build rapport with journalists by emailing my profile before, during, or after a media phone call."

Background checks on record requesters

In Aiken County, South Carolina, if you ask for a police report or other public record from the Sheriff's Office, deputies will run a background check on you without your knowledge, the AP reports. The sheriff says he finds up to 40 people a month with outstanding warrants that way. The attorney for the South Carolina Press Association calls it "the most absurd thing I've ever heard of."

Brant Houston on "Saving the press"

The executive director of Investigative Reporters and Editors, Brant Houston, writes that "Now more than ever, the public needs investigative reporting":

... it's becoming increasingly clear that investigative reporting may be the beleaguered newspaper industry's best franchise for the future.

Investigative reporting distinguishes journalists from agenda-pushing bloggers, from advocacy talk shows that parade as fair and balanced, and from the shallow reporting that happens when Wall Street pressures newsrooms to cut staffs.

Public record rap sheets?

PIbuzz.com asks, "Will states make rap sheets a public record?":

Oddly, criminal records with the personal information of the offenders, is being posted by states at the same time that county courts are removing their criminal record indices from remote electronic access. Why don’t states just post rap sheets rather than creating a hierarchy of offensive acts in selective registries, which are more stigmatizing and of little or no greater advantage to protecting citizens?

Google government home page

You can now personalize your Google home page with U.S. government information - including, for example, Department of Defense news releases, NOAA Severe Thunderstorm and Tornado warnings, FDA recalls, Library of Medicine news and content from government-oriented media like Federal Computer Week and Federal News Radio.

How the media reports polls

PoliticalArithmetik looks at how the media has reported recent Bush-approval polls. The blog's author, a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin, said he was prompted "by what seemed to be a cacophony of conflicting headlines":

... the news organizations are handicapped by their sponsorship of polling. CNN wants to quote only CNN polls, and CBS acts as if NBC didn't do polling. There are obvious business reasons for doing so, but it limits the writing reporters can do. This is especially true because the reporters are, of course, quite aware of what other polls are showing. .. Yet they are constrained to write "what the new poll shows" without the benefit of putting it into the context of what other polling shows.

ToxSeek

ToxSeek from the National Library of Medicine is a "meta-search and clustering engine for environmental health and toxicology." It searches multiple Web databases using "natural language processing and artificial intelligence to retrieve, integrate, rank, and present search results as coherent and dynamic sets," the site says. "... ToxSeekÂ’s results 'clustering' feature helps users to more easily identify particular concepts. These 'clusters' are created from what is retrieved in the original query, and can be useful in uncovering a specific concept or focus for more in-depth searching."

Wildflower information

WildflowerInformation.org "is a resource for wildflower enthusiasts and gardeners," the site says. "With a growing interest in the environment and natural gardening, our objective is to offer comprehensive information that is easy to use, and accessible for those from the casually interested to the expert."

Spokesman-Review news meeting webcasts

The Spokane Spokesman-Review is now offering live webcasts of its morning and afternoon news meetings. Editor Steven A. Smith told E & P he hopes it will "produce a quality civil dialogue [about the] kind of journalism we do." Having sat through more than a few meetings like that myself, I can't get excited about it, but how about mounting webcams on reporters' shoulders and broadcasting live as they go about their business? Now, that would be entertainment.

Real estate search roundup

SearchEngineWatch.com offers a real estate vertical search roundup, with part 1 and part 2. Even though I have read a significant amount about Web searching, I didn't have a clue what "vertical search" meant (a search for buildings by height?) and the articles didn't tell me. So I had to Google it. GigaOM explains that it "is a specialized search engine that mines data for one narrow niche of the market place."

Personal financial disclosure reports for Congress

PoliticalMoneyLine has posted online the latest personal financial disclosure reports of all members of Congress.

Google Shakespeare

Google Book Search offers the complete plays of Shakespeare.

Tools of the information-sharing trade

Derek Willis of The Washington Post shares his list of free software tools (PDF) that can be used to share information in the newsroom or elsewhere. From a talk he gave at the Special Libraries Association annual conference.

FlightAware plane tracking

FlightAware is a free online service that lets you track commercial and private airplane flights. You can find flights not only by airline and flight number, but also using the unique tail number assigned each plane. You can also view graphs of overall airplane activity, activity along specific routes and at specific airports.

Plot a phone number on map

The NPA-NXX Geolocator plots U.S. and Canadian phone numbers on a map. The plot is based on the first six digits of the phone number, so it just gives you a general idea where the phone number is, not its exact location. The site warns that it "makes no guarantees about the accuracy of the information presented, please don't even think about using it for something mission-critical." (Via PIBuzz )

World Cup tournament predictor

This site offers an interactive World Cup tournament predictor. It uses Markov Chain Monte Carlo algorithms to predict the outcome. What are Markov Chain Monte Carlo algorithms, you ask? The site explains:

Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms work by repeatedly simulating a sequence of progressive events over and over, and accumulating statistics on final outcomes.

MCMC works by leveraging simple single-event probabilities, that you can easily estimate, into long-range predictions involving many interactions. There's no magic involved. It's basically a way of estimating the probabilities of complex multi-step outcomes through brute force simulation.

In the case of the World Cup, this amounts to simulating complete tournaments by playing each game from round one through the final, choosing winners based on simple pairwise expectations of how the teams pair up against each other.

Anyone can submit "expert ratings" to be used by the predictor. I gave it a try yesterday and the expert ratings I used predicted the U.S. team's chance of winning as 0 percent -- and this was before the embarrassing loss to the Czechs.

Everystockphoto.com

everystockphoto.com is a search engine for photos offered under the Creative Commons license. That's an increasingly popular licensing scheme that governs how intellectual property may be used. The creator may grant free use of the photos for any purpose, or allow free non-commercial use but ask for payment if used in a commercial context. "We aim to be a community for designers, developers, photographers and other media publishers who want better, easier access to license-specific media on the web," the site says. ResearchBuzz wrote about it.

Copy editors who blog

The American Journalism Review writes about copy editors who blog ("Style Wars in Cyberspace"). "After years of grousing among themselves over matters of grammar and punctuation, copy editors are waging their style wars before a wider audience – in the blogosphere," the story says. "From Washington to Dallas – we hope that's not a false range – style mavens are holding forth on hyphens, word usage (or is it use?) and the true meaning of Groundhog Day." Depth Reporting, which isn't edited, is an ongoing demonstration of the need for copy editors.

Locate a county by place name

At the U.S. Census site you can locate a county by entering a ZIP code or town. That's useful if you're trying to find where someone lives or locate records about them. The site will also take you to Census facts about the county, too.

Programmer-Journalists

Adrian Holovaty, a programmer-journalist at the Washington Post, tells the Online Journalism Review journalists should learn programming skills in j-school:

J-schools need to get way more technical. A graduate of a journalism school should be a master of collecting data -- whether the old-fashioned way (by talking to humans) or through automated means.

And he says newspapers are making poor use of the information they already collect:

Much of the information that journalists collect, day to day, is structured. Information such as crime reports, obituaries and event listings always follow a certain pattern, which can be richly exploited by databases.

The majority of newspapers takes the time to *collect* this information -- which is the hard part -- but they dramatically reduce its value by NOT storing it in structured formats. Instead, they distill it into big blobs of text for publication in their print editions, and then they shovel those big blobs of text onto their websites. At this point, all structure is lost: Crime reports can't be sorted or searched intelligently, and event listings can't be viewed in any sort of user-friendly way.

The very act of distilling information into a news story -- which is essentially a big blob of text -- removes any sort of structure. Information is exponentially more valuable if it's structured.

Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System

The Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System uses surveys "to collect data from all primary providers of postsecondary education." This includes data on enrollments, program completions, faculty, staff, and finances. It offers tools to walk you the process of comparing institutions. For example, I used the "Executive Peer Tool" to compare the University of Kentucky with Indiana University, the University of Tennessee and the University of North Carolina. The tool told me that in 2003-2004, the latest year available, UK has lower full-time enrollment, fewer black students, higher tuition and fees, slightly more students receiving federal grants, a lower full-time retention rate, a lower graduation rate and lower professor salaries than the group median for the other three schools. (As usual with numbers, don't be too quick to draw conclusions from this demonstration, because UK does better than some of those schools in individual categories, which is masked by the use of group medians.) You can cut and paste the data into a spreadsheet, get the data for the individual schools and generate graphs.

False forensic certainty

A forthcoming California Law Review article, "The New Forensics: Criminal Justice, False Certainty, and the Second Generation of Scientific Evidence," challenges the belief that new forensic techniques such as DNA typing and biometric scanning will improve the justice system:

In recent years, the legitimacy of evidentiary stalwarts like handwriting, voice exemplars, hair and fiber, bite and tool marks, and even fingerprints has been seriously called into question. Exoneration studies have demonstrated the shocking degree to which the criminal justice system has historically failed to prevent spurious sciences and faulty or fraudulent evidence from serving to convict innocent defendants. For example, one study found that defective scientific evidence contributed to over one-half of wrongfully obtained convictions. ...

But it stands to reason that a system that failed to stem the abuse of obviously faulty forms of forensic evidence might also be wholly ill-equipped to safeguard the use of more robust, complicated forms of such evidence, both in terms of assuring its integrity and of fostering healthy scientific development. In fact, as this Article argues, the very characteristics that make this new generation of forensic evidence so promising serve only to enhance the need for concern about the use of such evidence in the criminal justice system.

International Census data

IPUMS-International offers "the world's largest collection of publicly available individual-level census data. The data are samples from population censuses from around the world taken since 1960." The site currently has data from 47 censuses representing 13 countries and 143 million records. The quick reference gives the countries and years represented. They hope to add 100 more samples in the next four years.

Create a Graph

Create A Graph from the National Center for Education Statistics is an easy way to create simple bar, line area, XY and pie charts. It's intended for school kids, but the graphs are of good quality and you may find uses for them in places other than homework.

SwarmSketch

SwarmSketch offers "Collective sketching of the collective consciousness." In other words, site visitors help make the sketch:

SwarmSketch is an ongoing online canvas that explores the possibilities of distributed design by the masses. Each week it randomly chooses a popular search term which becomes the sketch subject for the week. In this way, the collective is sketching what the collective thought was important each week. ...

Each user can contribute a small amount of line per visit, then they are given the opportunity to vote on the opacity of lines submitted by other users. By voting, users moderate the input of other users, judging the quality of each line. The darkness of each line is the average of all its previous votes.

You can reply sketches and see how they developed and the countries that contributed to their making.

Knight Science Journalism Tracker

The Knight Science Journalism Tracker ("Peer Review Within Science Journalism") offers a daily roundup of important science news:

KSJ Tracker is a new service for science journalists, created and funded by the Knight Science Journalism Fellowship Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. We believe that if science reporters and editors have convenient and timely access to the work of peers across the country, they can better evaluate and improve their own performance.

Our goal is to provide a broad sampling of the past day'’s science news and, where possible, of news releases or other news tips related to publication of science news in the general circulation news media, mainly of the U.S. Our goal is to have a new batch of posts up each day by 1 pm Eastern time.

We also give science journalists the opportunity to suggest stories and to comment constructively on one-another'’s work. The volume of science-related news makes a genuinely comprehensive site almost impossible, but we get what we can.

Purplemath

Purplemath provides free online algebra lessons "written with the student in mind." "These lessons emphasize the practicalities rather than the technicalities, demonstrating dependable techniques, warning of likely 'trick' questions, and pointing out common mistakes," the site says. There are also links to other math sites, quizzes and worksheets, software and other useful sites and services. The site says it emphasizes sites that are "immediately useful (and free)." "You won't find math jokes, biographies, or recreational math sites here," it says. There also guidelines on how to do homework ("How to suck up to your teacher") and a self-survey to measure your study skills.

Spreadsheet errors

Speaking of spreadsheets, Slashdot had a discussion yesterday on spreadsheet errors. It included links to a collection of news stories about spreadsheet errors and an academic paper on "What We Know About Spreadsheet Errors."

Google spreadsheets

Google is now offering online spreadsheets. " ... its free, Web-based application can be shared with up to 10 users simultaneously, improving upon a key limitation of Microsoft's Excel, the dominant stand-alone spreadsheet," CNNMoney.com reports. You have to sign up and hope for an invitation during this testing phase, and I've yet to receive mine, so I can't report on how well it works. CNNMoney says Google's spreadsheet can import data from Excel or comma-delimited files and has 200 functions and formulas.

Alexaholic

Alexaholic makes it easy to compare Web site traffic by leveraging the Alexa, a Web monitor owned by Amazon. Here, for example, is a comparison of the CJ with the Lexington Herald-Leader. You "can compare and measure website statistics for up to five domains at once, switch traffic chart types and ranges without page loads, and generate report pages that are easily bookmarked and shared," the site says. This applies only to sites big enough to be included in the top 100,000, which doesn't include Depth Reporting, sad to say.

RadTown

RadTown USA from the Environmental Protection Agency uses the concept of a "virtual community" to show the "wide variety of radiation sources and uses as you may encounter them in everyday life." It discusses radiation issues, government's role, and provides links to more in-depth information.

Miles per gallon calculators

A reader recently asked me if I knew of any Web sites that would calculate your car's miles per gallon for you. I didn't offhand, but I found these on the Web:

• http://www.csgnetwork.com/gasmileage.html
• http://www.24hourshoppingonline.com/calculator/gasmileagecalculator.php
• http://www.mytravelguide.com/travel-tools/mileage-calculator.php
• http://www.webwinder.com/wwhtmbin/java_mpg.html

I can't vouch for their accuracy, however.

TechXtra

If you're interested in engineering, math or computing TechXtra will help you "Find articles, key websites, books, the latest industry news, job announcements, ejournals, eprints, technical reports, the latest research and more!"

This post is not for children or the easily offended

I came across this a while ago but didn't pass it on because it had no immediate relevance to news reporting. But since the Kentucky governor's spokesman has given me an opening, I now have a professional obligation to share it. An Ohio State University associate law professor has written a paper on the legal implications of the f-word. The abstract, slightly edited, gives the flavor:

This Article is as simple and provocative as its title suggests: it explores the legal implications of the word f***. The intersection of the word f*** and the law is examined in four major areas: First Amendment, broadcast regulation, sexual harassment, and education. The legal implications from the use of f*** vary greatly with the context. To fully understand the legal power of f***, the nonlegal sources of its power are tapped. Drawing upon the research of etymologists, linguists, lexicographers, psychoanalysts, and other social scientists, the visceral reaction to f*** can be explained by cultural taboo. f*** is a taboo word. The taboo is so strong that it compels many to engage in self-censorship. This process of silence then enables small segments of the population to manipulate our rights under the guise of reflecting a greater community. Taboo is then institutionalized through law, yet at the same time is in tension with other identifiable legal rights. Understanding this relationship between law and taboo ultimately yields f*** jurisprudence.

'Nuff said.

CNET: Newspapers woo bloggers with mixed results

The article says:

Blogs written by so-called citizen journalists are increasingly challenging newspapers for readers. According to a recent study by Forrester Research, blogs and newspaper Web sites now have the same audience share--about 17 percent--among Internet users between the ages of 18 and 24.

"Newspapers still have a larger overall audience," says Charlene Li, a Forrester analyst. "But blogs are catching up quickly."

Data to compare the price of common medical treatments

The federal Health and Human Services Department has posted four Excel files online that can "be used to help consumers compare price, and with other available tools, quality, of common medical treatments."

Medicare payment and volume information is now available for common elective procedures and other common admissions for all hospitals. Information includes the volume and typical ranges of Medicare payments, by county, for 30 diagnostic related groups (DRGs), including heart operations and implanting cardiac defibrillators, hip and knee replacements, kidney and urinary tract operations, gallbladder operations, back and neck operations, and common non-surgical admissions.

Government Health IT has an article about it. The data is for counties, states and the U.S. as a whole.

The Condition of Education 2006

The National Center for Education Statistics has released its latest report on the condition of education:

The Condition of Education 2006 summarizes important developments and trends in education using the latest available data. The report presents 50 indicators on the status and condition of education and a special analysis on international assessments. The indicators represent a consensus of professional judgment on the most significant national measures of the condition and progress of education for which accurate data are available.

Eigen's Political & Historical Quotations

Eigen's Political & Historical Quotations claims to be "the world's largest collection of memorable quotes about and by historians, politicians and other public figures":

The collection is designed for the use of students, journalists, teachers, historians, political scientists and the many other people who are interested in politics and political history. Use the quotation search to look for quotes by keyword, author, idea, or actual text.

Here's a review from Poynteronline's Web Tips column.

Business information industry news recommendation

Robert Berkman, author of the Intelligent Agent blog and the editor of the Information Advisor, says his favorite way of keeping up with the business information industry news is "John Blossom, the principal at Shore Communications Inc., who daily provides headlines and links to the most important breaking info industry news from top online newspapers and publications." Berkman says he espcially likes Blossoms "weekly summaries, which are easy to browse, and provide insightful commentary as well."

Ask.com offers blog search

Ask.com now offers blog search. You can preview blogs without leaving the search results, as well as subscribe to blogs or easily post about them to Bloglines, digg, del.icio.us and Newsvine.

EducationNews.Org

EducationNews.Org calls itself "America's #1 Leading Online Source for Education News."

FBI files on bacteriological warfare in U.S. posted online

The Memory Hole has begun posting heavily redacted FBI documents on bacteriological warfare in the United States. The documents, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by researcher Michael Ravnitzky, are from 1941 to 1950. More are promised.

State and Local Government Finances

The U.S. Census Bureau has released its latest State and Local Government Finances data online. The data, for 2003-2004, covers revenue, expenditure, debt and assets.