Physorg.com

Physorg.com writes about science, physics, technology, outer space, the Earth and more.

Biomapping

As explained here:

Bio Mapping is a research project which explores new ways that we as individuals can make use of the information we can gather about our own bodies. Instead of security technologies that are designed to control our behaviour, this project envisages new tools that allows people to selectively share and interpret their own bio data.

The Bio Mapping tool allows the wearer to record their Galvanic Skin Response (GSR), which is a simple indicator of emotional arousal in conjunction with their geographical location. This can be used to plot a map that highlights point of high and low arousal. By sharing this data we can construct maps that visualise where we as a community feel stressed and excited.

How will our perceptions of our community and environment change when we become aware of our own and each others intimate body states?

dotSUB

dotSUB "provides free browser based tools that allow anyone to translate films from one language into countless other languages." Essentially, filmmakers contribute their films to the site, and volunteers subtitle them in the languages of their choice.

Google open sources OCR software

Google has revived and made free for all optical character recognition software that had been languishing on the shelf for years at Hewlett Packard. I think we're getting close to the day where OCR is built into document handling software as a matter of course - Microsoft's OneNote beta, for example, automatically converts imported document images to text.

The odds of dying

The National Safety Council gives the odds of dying by various causes. The lifetime odds of dying in "air and space transport accidents" are 1 in 5,051, it says.

Sex offender maps

At MapSexOffenders.com you can see what sex offenders may be living in your neighborhood. It includes their photographs and links to state registries, which offer more information about their crimes.

Death indexes

Deathindexes.com is a state-by-state directory of "death records, death certificate indexes, death notices & registers, obituaries, probate indexes, and cemetery & burial records."

Sewer History

This is what you call a labor of love: Sewer History is devoted to the 5500 year history of the sewer. "Its intent is to offer some insight into the history of sewers and the role its operators, engineers, and builders may have played in making our environment, homes and communities better and healthier places to live," the site says. The material was gathered by Jon Schladweiler, the Historian of the Arizona Water & Pollution Control Association. The site welcomes donations, the latest of which is a movie of an alligator inside a Mississippi manhole after Hurricane Katrina.

First Amendment podcasts

The First Amendment Center is now offering podcasts of "interviews, panel discussions and remarks by journalists, educators and others speaking about the First Amendment, a free press and freedom of information."

John Calvin and me

My father was a Calvin College dropout so when I can across the H. Henry Meeter Center for Calvin Studies and its Calvinism Resources Database I felt a special obligation to share it with Depth Reporting. As a bonus, plug "Schaver" into the Hekman Library Catalog on the same page and you'll find references to a few writings by my grandfather, J.L. Schaver, a Christian Reformed minister. I hadn't known about some of these until now. Ain't the Internet grand?

Computers writing news

From the Financial Times:

First it was the typewriter, then the teleprinter. Now a US news service has found a way to replace human beings in the newsroom and is instead using computers to write some of its stories.

Thomson Financial, the business information group, has been using computers to generate some stories since March and is so pleased with the results that it plans to expand the practice.

The computers work so fast that an earnings story can be released within 0.3 seconds of the company making results public.

Software writing news isn't new. eNarratives, for example, sells software that writes sports stories.

PLANTS database

The U.S. Department of Agriculture's PLANTS Database "provides standardized information about the vascular plants, mosses, liverworts, hornworts, and lichens of the U.S. and its territories." I don't know which is worse: warts on my liver or warts on my horns.

Louisville Metro Mapper

Metro Mapper maps crime, sex offenders, traffic, homes for sale, restaurants and historic sites in Louisville: "Metro Mapper provides interactive maps for the Louisville Metro area free of charge for residents and visitors," the site says. "Our desire is that residents and visitors will become more familiar with Louisville's neighborhoods, streets, and locations. Our vision is to build community and develop empathy in our relationships to one another." The creator's blog is here.

Good stuff from LLRX.com

• Criminal Justice Resources: Prisoners' Rights and Resources on the Web
• It’s Not Rocket Science: Making Sense of Scientific Evidence - "The purpose of this article is to review a search process using advanced search query features in Google, Yahoo, and other search tools to find publicly accessible Web-based information on toxic substances and the law and, more specifically, the reliability of scientific evidence about toxic substances."
• The Government Domain: Government Documents and the News
• FOIA Facts: Improving FOIA Operations

Doxpop: Indiana court records online

Doxpop "is a tool intended to help the public access court information easily and without having to make a trip to the courthouse." Here's the 31 counties it has records of and here is their fee schedule.

Govmine

"Govmine: The Alternative Search Engine" is a government-oriented search engine that ranks documents "based on relevance, not just popularity." Resourceshelf takes a look.

Farecast

Farecast's goal is to help you predict when is the cheapest time to buy an airline ticket. This page explains how it works. Louisville isn't one of the 55 cities included, but Cincinnati is.

Tufte on NPR

Edward Tufte is the guru of good information graphics. NPR did a piece on him this weekend and you can listen online. UPDATE: Slashdot discussed it here, which is my excuse for pointing to The Gettysburg Address in Powerpoint, which was mentioned in the discussion. Tufte is also a noted Powerpoint critic.

American Rhetoric

American Rhetoric is a Website devoted to speech ("Rationalize rhetoric and it speaks to your mind; personify her and she speaks to your soul"). It includes the Online Speech Bank, a "growing database of 5000+ full text, audio and video (streaming) versions of public speeches, sermons, legal proceedings, lectures, debates, interviews, other recorded media events, and a declaration or two." (via the Internet Legal Research Weekly)

National Transportation Atlas Database

These free files, in ESRI shapefile format, include national maps of highways, waterways, airports, train stations, military bases, hazardous material routes and more.

Easy School Search

Easy School Search uses Google maps to map more than 130,000 U.S. schools. Read ResearchBuzz's take.

A Guide to Free and Low Cost Textbooks

... is here.

Free Public Records Directory

A Depth Reporting visitor called my attention to their Free Public Records Directory, which "provides links to criminal records, civil court records, marriage records, divorce records, real and personal property records, recorded documents, jail and inmate records, sex offender records, wanted persons records, and many more free public records." You can search by ZIP code, city and state. There are also free database searches - including telephone area codes, aircraft registrations, ZIP codes, documented vessels and domain names - and a page devoted to public record news. "We are striving to develop the most comprehensive free directory of public records links in the country," the site says.

ForecastAdvisor

ForecastAdvisor not only gives you the weather forecast for any US ZIP code or city, but it also measures the accuracy of major weather forecasters such as Accuweather, Intellicast, MyForecast, The Weather Channel, and the National Weather Service.

MalaMata

You can search up to four search engines at once with MalaMata, which splits your screen into four windows so you can view all the results on a single page.

SciTechDaily

SciTechDaily links to articles from across the Web on science and technology.

Documents Pertinent to Middle Eastern Issues

You can find documents relevant to Middle Eastern issues – including a number of historically significant ones – via a page maintained by Mount Holyoke College’s International Relations Program.

Court docket research

The founder of Legal Dockets Online gives an overview.

Evaluating Websites

Southern Illinois University's law library offers guidance on "Evaluating Websites and Other Information Resources." They also have a collection of law-related "Research and How-to Guides." 

Bivings Report

 The Bivings Report is blog "of news, insight, research and analysis on the web-based communications industry." They recently released a report on "The Use of the Internet by America's Newspapers."

Lost in search space

SEOmoz.org ranks the "50 Top Blogs in the Search Space." Personally, I'd give a lower ranking to any blog that uses a term like "search space," but that's just me.

Free bookmark managers

... listed here.

Meet strangers online

I'm too anti-social and introverted to go trolling for strangers, but you may be interested in OthersOnline: "Others Online is a free toolbar that shows you people relevant to your Web browsing and other interests, on every page you visit," the site says. "We show you the interests you have in common, their Web pages (blog, MySpace profile, Web site, etc.) and online status, all on their terms. We'll even connect you by IM or email."

Numbers journalists should know

Tom Johnson of the Institute for Analytic Journalism solicited advice from various listservs on the "25 Numbers Journalists Should Know." He summarizes the answers here.

Radio-Locator

Radio-Locator is an Internet radio search engine with links to more than 10,000 radio stations. You can search by ZIP code, state, call letters, audio format and country.

Text mining the Congressional Record

ars technica reports that researchers used text mining software to analyze more than 70 million words found in the congressional Record to see what topics have been occupying legislators' attention. "The Congressional Record is a unique source of political information," ars technica says. "It contains verbatim transcripts of floor speeches made in both the House and the Senate and provides a view of political debate far more nuanced than the one provided by election returns, opinion polls, and vote counts. ... What's exciting about this project and others like it is that computers are at last capable of unsupervised, dynamic analysis, and they can produce meaningful results with little or no intervention." Slashdot discussed it here.

1 trillion words to go

Google is releasing a dataset of more than 1 trillion words harvested from Web pages for researchers to study. "We believe that the entire research community can benefit from access to such massive amounts of data," says the Google Research blog. "It will advance the state of the art, it will focus research in the promising direction of large-scale, data-driven approaches, and it will allow all research groups, no matter how large or small their computing resources, to play together."

What does your desk look like?

"Artists, illustrators, designers & creative folk share the stuff on their desks..." 

Birthdate database

BirthDatabase.com offers a free date of birth search. It says their database has more than 120 million names and birth dates. I'm not in there, but some people I know are. "Our birthday data is obtained from public records and available to anyone with a simple knowledge of public record access," the site says.

How Google indexes news sites

Google Blogoscoped explains how Google News indexes news sites. One tidbit: "Google News honors sites that break the news," the blog says. "When you’re the first article to be indexed for a given topic cluster, you will guarantee your site a permanent (or semi-permanent) stay on top of that cluster." And although Google just says it indexes more than 4,500 news sites, the blog has found 8,691 news sources it indexes -- and lists them too.