Mystery Pollster

Myster Pollster is a blog about polling.

A guided PACER tour

Groklaw offers a guided PACER tour. PACER is the federal court's computer system providing public access to case information.

Beyond Delay

Beyond Delay from the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington spotlights what it says are "The 20 most corrupt members of Congress (and five to watch)." Now former Congressman Mark Foley is not among them.

TRIP Database: Evidence-Based Medicine

Advocates of evidence-based medicine want medical decisions to be based on the best scientific evidence, not tradition, anectdote or untested belief. The TRIP Database, once a subscription service but now free, says it offers "the Internet's leading resources for Evidence-Based Medicine" and allows "users to easily and rapidly identify the highest quality evidence from a wide range of sources."

Intute

"Intute is a free online service providing you with access to the very best Web resources for education and research. The service is created by a network of UK universities and partners. Subject specialists select and evaluate the websites in our database and write high quality descriptions of the resources. The database contains 113417 records."

Data mining middle school

A Louisiana middle schools supervisor uses SPSS data mining software to analyze disciplinary reports, InformationWeek reports:

A search for the word "uniform," for example, might show if teachers or schools are being overly strict in enforcing dress codes, while a search on "tardy" could identify habitually late students. Bowman can search the records of a student, school, or the entire district.

Bowman combines those findings with demographic data to look for additional patterns. "I'm trying to look beyond the obvious and find out if there are hidden factors in why things happen," he says. Are kids from low-income homes, for example, disciplined for dress code violations?

The Science Inventory

The Science Inventory is a searchable database on what the EPA is up to scientifically. It provides "a snapshot of EPA science being conducted in its research laboratories and centers, program and regional offices, and through grants and other assistance agreements to universities and other institutions."

Point and click Google Maps

ShowMeWhere lets you create your own Google maps, with labeled points and lines, by pointing and clicking, not coding or geocoding. You can email the map, host it on your own Web site or open it in Google Earth, the site says. I gave it a quick try and found adding points as easy as advertised, but I couldn't get the draw line feature to work (There was no explanation I could find on how to do it, and although I managed to put a few lines on the map, they were barely visible). But hey, it's beta.

Trulia real estate search

Trulia shows properties for sale. You can search by city and state or ZIP code. When I looked, the Louisville page showed 824 properties for sale. Information offered includes number of rooms, square footage, year built and the number of days the property has been listed on Trulia. You can choose to get more details from the broker, compare a home to similar homes and view a city guide. Although there's a space set aside for prior sales history, none of the Louisville homes I looked at included that information. Make sure you check out the "heat maps," which are maps colored by average listing price, so you can see which areas of town are in your price range -- and which aren't.

Coal report

You can get data on U.S. coal production, exports, imports, receipts, prices, consumption and quality from the Energy Information Administration's Quarterly Coal Report.

Cooperative Research

Cooperative Research calls itself a "history commons":

The website is an experiment in open-content civic journalism. It allows people to investigate important issues by providing a space where people can collaborate on the documentation of past and current events, as well as the entities associated with those events. The website can be used to investigate topics at the local, regional, or global level. The data is displayed on the website in the form of dynamic timelines and entity profiles, and is exportable into XML so it can be shared with others for non-commercial purposes.

GAO Financial Restatement Database

At the Government Accountability Office's Web site you can download two tab-delimited files containing its Financial Restatement Database, which includes 1,786 announcements from July 1, 2002 to June 30, 2006 "identified as having been made because of financial reporting fraud and/or accounting errors." 

Ask.com on earthquake activity

Google Blogoscoped reports that you can type earthquake in the Ask.com search box and get back information on recent earthquakes, including date, time, location and magnitude. It also has an earthquake page that also maps them. If you live along the New Madrid fault, you may want to check this regularly. Or not.

RSS the Oprah Way

A blog called back in skinny jeans (explanation for that title here) explains  "RSS the Oprah way" :

The technical acronym for RSS is “Really Simple Syndication”, an XML format that was created to syndicate news, and be a means to share content on the web. Now, to geeks and techies that means something special, but to everyday folks like you and me, what comes to mind is, “Uh, I don’t get it?” 

So, to make RSS much easier to understand, in Oprah speak, RSS stands for: I’m “Ready for Some Stories”. It is a way online for you to get a quick list of the latest story headlines from all your favorite websites and blogs all in one place. How cool is that?

A century of British phone books

Reuters reports that BT, formerly British Telecom, is putting 100 years of telephone books online:

It is not just old relations that may turn up in the pages. In the days when ex-directory was less popular, Winston Churchill, Buckingham Palace, Alfred Hitchcock, Oswald Mosley, and John Profumo could all be found in the phonebook.

At one stage, BT allowed brief job descriptions. The author of Dracula, Bram Stoker, of Victoria 1436, was listed as a barrister, while Houdini could be found under "handcuff king".

What a resource that would be if someone did it in the U.S.A.

Krugman on sourcing

Unfortunately, you have to be TimesSelect subscriber to read it, but Paul Krugman of The New York Times, in a posting to readers explaining the advantages and disadvantages of various income inequality measures, promises to link to all his data sources in future columns:

On inequality, and in fact on many matters economic, it’s all too common to have numbers – some from unknown sources – flying in all directions. The issues are hard enough without clarity about where numbers come from. So from now on I’m going to post sources for the numbers in each column on TimesSelect, with links where possible (it usually is.) Basically, this is the same thing I do when filing my columns; I always provide sources and links to my copy editors. But now I guess my explanations will have to be grammatical! Anyway, I hope that other economic commentators will follow the same practice, which is easy in this Internet age, and will save all of us a lot of confusion.

LegiStorm: U.S. congressional staff salaries

LegiStorm calls itself "The Web's only source for congressional staff salaries." "Who is employed by Congress, and how much they are paid, is often a source of fascination for the politically aware," the site says. "Prior to this site's creation, members of the public needed to visit the document rooms of the House and the Senate in Washington, DC to discover who was being paid what. Now, all this information is available on the web - for residents of Alaska or Zanzibar - at the click of a mouse."

RecordsSiteReviews.com

RecordsSiteReviews.com promises to "provide balanced reviews of the top public records databases available online today," as well as articles on how to use public records. I'm not familiar enough with the site to judge whether the site's reviews are truly balanced, but here's how the the founder introduces himself and his site.

Bankruptcy records explainer

The Public Records & Investigation Blog explains bankruptcy records. (For some reason this post is blank in my version of Firefox, but displays fine in Internet Explorer)

Free image resizing

ResizR "allows you to resize an image from your local computer or the web":

Often you do not need more than just resizing an image on the fly. Before ResizR you required a desktop software to do this - heavy applications which can do much more than just resizing an image. ResizR changes the game - it's much easier. Select an image - choose the width - rotate optionally.

Mojeek

Mojeek lets you create your own personal search engine. I haven't tried it, but this is how the site describes its features:

• Create your own personal or topical search engine.
• Add and remove unlimited number of domains (Free Version up to 1000).
• Remove domains from the main Mojeek Search Results.
• Publishable links available to help share your engine and provide the service to your site's visitors (of course you can also keep it secret!).
• Your own Mojeek Personal Search home page (hidden or publicly available).
• Retrieve your personal search results in xml format.
• Add your personal search to the Firefox search bar with one easy click.

SearchMob

John Battelle, the author of The Search, created SearchMob, where visitors to his blog can submit search-related links and vote for the ones they like best. The most popular are the most visible, much like it's done at Digg, Newsvine, and Reddit. Battelle says SearchMob uses open source software called Pligg to make it work.

Majority Watch

Two polling firms created Majority Watch, which offers detailed information about the status of 30 key Congressional races, including Kentucky's 4th District and Indiana's 9th.

Creationist Probability

John Allen Paulos explains "What's Wrong with Creationist Probability."

YouWriteOn.com

YouWriteOn.com is a "free website to help new writers develop, and to help talented writers get noticed and published":

The YouWriteOn premise is simple: you review and rate another members opening chapters and then your opening chapters are sent randomly to another member to review and rate.

The highest rated chapters receive a free critique from our literary professionals, who include established authors and a literary agent.

Government Data Mining Programs

Newsinitiative.org explains interactively how the government gathers data about you and how the information is used.

The FTC explains pretexting

In the wake of the Hewlett-Packard boardroom scandal, the Federal Trade Commission explains how pretexting works and how to protect yourself from it.

Google co-opting information experts?

The Information World Review reports that "Google Co-op is inviting people with specialist knowledge to improve internet searches by providing a set of links to the most reliable web pages on their areas of expertise."

Amazing Wikipedia

Robert Berkman of the Intelligent Agent blog is amazed at how quickly the Wikipedia had a page devoted to the Montreal shooting. "Sure, I have a feeling that some details are going to be incorrect, but it's up to us as informed readers to get that second source or confirm data in some way before we rely on it, or use it in any important way," he writes. "Think of all the initial mainstream journalism accounts that have had some factual errors, especially early on in the reporting cycle." I should point out that the day of the Lexington air crash, the Wikipedia already had a page devoted to it and it is still being regularly updated.

Does user-generated content violate the principle of equal pay for equal work?

Publishing 2.0 raises the issue about a Super Bowl ad campaign Something to think about, given how many news sites, from the Cincinnati Enquirer to Newsvine, exploit free content contributed by readers.

Bad Guys Blog

An investigative reporter for U.S. News & World Report, David Kaplan, has started writing a "Bad Guys" blog, an "occasional column on evildoers around the globe, the unsung heroes who try to stop them, and the just plain folks caught in the middle."

Punch Clock Campaign

The Sunlight Network is "offering members of the public a 'goodwill bounty,' or fee, of $1,000 for each Member of Congress, and $250 for each candidate, that they persuade to sign the Punch Clock Agreement, an agreement to put their daily schedules on the Internet."

Government spending Web site on its way

The AP reports:

From US$500,000 for a teapot museum in North Carolina to US$450,000 for plants on the east side of the Capitol, the federal government spends hundreds of billions every year for grants, contracts, earmarks and loans.

With creation of a new federal Web site, citizens will at least be able to see where some of their tax money goes.

On Wednesday, the U.S. House of Representatives passed legislation to create a Web site that will give people ready access to information on the US$300 billion in grants issued to some 30,000 organizations annually, and the roughly 1 million contracts exceeding a US$25,000 threshold.

Does the Wikipedia link to you?

Micro Persuasion explains how to check for Wikipedia pages that link to you. At least 500 link to The Courier-Journal, but sadly, only one, and just a chat page at that, to Depth Reporting.

VPs of Search

SearchEngineWatch writes about "Your New Title: The VP of Search":

What do the New York Times/About.com, Citicards and Passages drug treatment center have in common? You guessed it, a Vice President of Search, the hottest new title in town. ...

Just a few years ago, the only person with in house search engine marketing knowledge was either a techie or an underling in the interactive marketing department. Needless to say, neither commanded the attention of the CMO, CTO or CEO.

As the quantifiable results from SEM gained attention, these early players became the "go-to" people for all matters search. Once the CMO took notice (and perhaps credit), search earned a firmly anchored line item in the annual marketing budget. Enter the VP of search.

Court research databases and data archives

The S. Sidney Ulmer Project at the University of Kentucky links to downloadable, scholar-ready databases on federal and state courts.

ClipBlast

ClipBlast lets you search for video from around the Web. "Unlike video web sites that scour their databases of user-generated videos, ClipBlast! Search gives you access to quality video from across the web and personal tools so you get the video you're looking for," the site says. ResearchBuzz reviewed it.

Six Tips to Protect Your Online Search Privacy

From the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Election Results Archive

The Election Results Archive "is a collection of electronic files containing data on election results from around the world":

While the growth of democracy around the world has led to increased demand for information on electoral results, accurate election-related data are not easily or widely available. This online database provides researchers, policy-makers, scholars, and others interested in elections with information on over 900 elections from around the world.

The archive has results for presidential and national legislative elections from 134 countries as far back to 1974. Search by country, year or type of election, and there's a free-text search.

Quick stats on religion

The Association of Religion Data Archives unveiled a new feature this week called QuickStats, which gives you quick access to some of the best information on religion. This includes surveys on religious affiliation, behavior, experiences and beliefs, including whether people believe in demons, UFOs and if God is angered by human sin.

The Net Democracy Guide

The goal of the Net Democracy Guide is to "make it easy for bloggers and other citizen activists to quickly understand the new campaign finance rules for the Internet, and to encourage all Americans to get politically active online":

The Internet is a powerful forum for citizen political participation. In the last few federal elections, ordinary citizens used the Internet to organize, raise money, report the news, and offer commentary, and they had a significant impact on the 2004 Presidential campaign. The 2006 election promises an even more influential role for Internet activists.

New federal campaign finance rules for the Internet have freed bloggers and almost all other citizen-initiated political advocacy on the Internet from any regulation. You can be a part of the online revolution in politics, help reinvent and reinvigorate our democracy, and transform political discourse. It's a good idea to have a basic understanding of the new rules.

National Historical Geographic Information System

The National Historical Geographic Information System (NHGIS) "is a project to create and freely disseminate a database incorporating all available aggregate census information for the United States between 1790 and 2000":

The great bulk of the United States summary census data exist in machine-readable form, but they are largely inaccessible. Approximately 670 gigabytes of data covering the period 1790 through 2000 exist or are in preparation, but they are scattered across dozens of archives and stored in incompatible formats on CD-ROM, magnetic tape, or paper.

Only a small fraction of these data are available on the Internet, and even those offer only primitive documentation an extraction tools. Moreover, census summary data cannot be effectively exploited without clear definitions of each geographic unit, but high-quality electronic boundary files exist only for the 1990 census year.

It's still in beta and incomplete, but here's a chart showing the data it will be making available.

Astronomy Picture of the Day

Space fans will appreciate NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day. "Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer."

Use Google text messaging instead of 411

A good tip from Alex Davis: "If you send a text message to 466453 (Google) with a command, for example 'sears in louisville ky' you'll get an instant response with the store's address, its proximity to the city center and phone number." He points out it's cheaper than 411 and also useful if you're in a meeting or can't talk on the phone for some other reason.

WikiWalki

"WikiWalki lets you search, draw, and share your favorite outdoor trails directly on a Google map." Listings for the U.S. are rather sparse - nothing for Kentucky or Indiana, for example - but maybe you'll want to contribute your own favorites.

Radio Scanner Guide

The Radio Scanner Guide is a comprehensive, free reference on scanners. It explains how they work, the differences between police, fire, airplane, auto racing and other scanners, and helps you choose which is the right model for you:

Hear Police, Sheriffs, Constables, state troopers, and other law enforcement investigate armed suspects, deal with hostile crowds, or bust routine criminals. Hear fire departments and paramedics revive accident victims. Sit back and relax with your radio scanner as you listen to commercial jetliners, private planes, and helicopters fly above you. Hear military aircraft fly on covert training missions or civil defense authorities do a monthly drill! Find out the inside scoop on your favorite race car drivers in the final laps. Other interesting services and businesses you will hear on your radio scanner include electric, gas and water utilities, marine activity, trains, taxis, tow-trucks, buses, road construction crews, factories, other businesses, the National Weather Service, CB radio, amateur radio operators, and virtually any other user of a 2-way radio system.

Download books from Google

Google Book Search now lets you download books that are in the public domain. Search Engine Watch explains how.

Campaign Network

C-SPAN and Congressional Quarterly have teamed up to create Campaign Network, which offers election news, analysis and videos. It includes a nifty election map forecasting House, Senate and gubernatorial races.

Kentucky Board of Nursing license check

You can confirm whether a nurse is licensed at the Kentucky Board of Nursing's Web site. You need a license number, Social Security number or permit number to use it, though.

Picture History

Picture History says it has "compiled a collection of thousands of the most important photographs of the last 150 years." " ... there are some stories that can only be told with pictures. This site is dedicated to those stories, and those pictures."

Business information sources

The Library of Congress maintains a page of indexes, bibliographies and guides on researching business. It ranges from specific topics, such as the auto industry and the wedding industry, to general ones such as doing business on the Internet and market segmentation.