DailyMed

The National Library of Medicine's DailyMed "provides high quality information about marketed drugs." "This Web site provides health information providers and the public with a standard, comprehensive, up-to-date, look-up and download resource of medication content and labeling as found in medication package inserts," the site says.

Sources and Experts page

The Special Libraries Association maintains a page of links to sources and experts. "We have a preference for organizations that make it possible to search for experts by area of specialty, that provide contact information (phone and e-mail) and that show credentials," the page says. I will be adding this to the experts section of my Most Useful Web Sites for Reporters page.

Learn statistics with online videos

Learner.org offers a free (with registration) online video course on learning statistics called "Against All Odds: Inside Statistics":

With an emphasis on “doing” statistics, this series goes on location to help uncover statistical solutions to the puzzles of everyday life. Learn how data collection and manipulation — paired with intelligent judgement and common sense — can lead to more informed decision-making.

Mapping IP addresses

IP-address.com will plot the general location of a computer if you have its IP address. It plotted my home and work computers in Louisville, correctly, but fear not, it won't identify your exact address, only your city or the city of your Internet service provider. It grabs your computer's IP when you visit the home page and attempts to locate it automatically, but you can enter any IP address.

Online law sources not always most current

The Law Dawg Blog explains how online legal sources aren't always more current than print sources.

Hard-to-find digital resources search

The goal of OAIster ("...find the pearls"), a project of the University of Michigan Digital Library Production Service, is "to create a collection of previously difficult-to-access, academically-oriented digital resources ... that are easily searchable by anyone." The site says it has nearly 10 million records from 706 institutions. I searched on Kentucky horse racing and found 13 records, including a nice panoramic shot of the 1942 Kentucky Derby at Churchill Downs now in the Library of Congress that OIAster says is no longer under copyright.

Visual style search

The goal of like.com is to help you shop visually. To borrow an example from its home page: Say you like the boots Ashlee Simpson wore while performing in Sydney, Australia. You can use like.com to find online merchants that offer similar-looking boots. You have to use its pre-selected pictures, not just any old picture you dragged in from the Internet, which limits its usefulness. This site is also alpha, not even the ubiquitous beta, so don't expect too much.

Advanced Excel charting

ProcessTrends.com shows how to use advanced Excel charting techniques to visualize data.

Statistical Abstract in Excel

The Statistical Abstract of the United States is now more useful. Whereas before it was served as a series of hard-to-use PDF files, you can now browse each section on the main page and go directly to a link to download an Excel spreadsheet with the data you want. The PDF files, which are the same as the print edition, are still there if you want them.

SecondHandSongs

SecondHandSongs is a database to help you "Find out who performed the original version of a particular song, or who covered that song." "Unlike many related sites, we try to be as complete as possible (not just performer and song title, but also songwriters and original media) and order the data in a reusable and maintainable way," the site says.

ZIP code locator

ZipInfo, a ZIP Code database vendor, offers a free ZIP code lookup that will give you a ZIP's county, FIPS code, time zone, area code, latitude and longitude and its Primary Metropolitan Statistical Area.

Prisoners and electronic records

The FOIA blog reports that the federal Bureau of Prisons must release records to an inmate in electronic format, even if he lacks the means to read them electronically.

Scrubbing online reputations

A company wants to profit by scrubbing your online reputation, Wired reports:

The mistakes you make on the internet can live forever -- unless you hire somebody to clean up after you.

A new startup, ReputationDefender, will act on your behalf by contacting data hosting services and requesting the removal of any materials that threaten your good social standing. Any web citizen willing to pay ReputationDefender's modest service fees can ask the company to seek and destroy embarrassing office party photos, blog posts detailing casual drug use or saucy comments on social networking profiles.

The company produces monthly reports on its clients' online identities for a cost of $10 to $16 per month, depending on the length of the contract. The client can request the removal of any material on the report for a charge of $30 per instance.

The future of news graphics?

Imagine how much richer explanatory graphics will be when we can start making them like this:

Iraq Study Group Web site

The Iraq Study Group, whose work may form the foundation of a new policy in Iraq, has its own Web site. It includes a helpful fact sheet.

State Health Facts

State Health Facts from the Kaiser Family Foundation is "Your source for state health data," including data on Medicare prescription drug plans, a big issue in the news right now.

Is metadata a public record?

The San Francisco Bay Guardian explores how metadata has become a public records issue there:

Metadata entered the realm of public discussion in San Francisco after citizens started making requests of electronic documents with a specific plea for metadata. Activists Allen Grossman and Kimo Crossman wanted copies of, ironically enough, the city's Sunshine Ordinance, in its original Microsoft Word format. Grossman and Crossman wanted to use the advantages of technology to follow the evolving amendments the Sunshine Ordinance Task Force members were considering for the city's public records law. These "tracked changes" are a common function in Word, and are, technically, metadata.

State Blue Books

State Blue Books is a state-by-state list of manuals and Web sites describing how each state's government is organized.

Explaining FOIA to bloggers

The Electronic Frontier Foundation explains the Freedom of Information Act to bloggers, in the hope they will put it to good use.

Google Map Search Wizard

Google now offers a "Map Search Wizard" that lets you "Put a Searchable Map on Your Web Page":

Embed a searchable Google Map on your web page and let your users find places around you. Customize how the map should be displayed, and this wizard will write the code for you.

News Sniffer

The British site, News Sniffer, "aims to monitor corporate news organisations to uncover bias." It includes a tool called Revisionista which compares different version of stories posted online by BBC News, The Guardian and The Independent, with the goal of spotting bias in the way stories are edited over time.

The Scoop gets The Treatment

Derek Willis of TheScoop.org has given his site what he calls "The Treatment." He's converted it from a blog format into a browsable database of computer-assisted reporting stories. You can now browse selected stories back to 2000 by byline, source, topic, type of data used, date, state and more, as well as subscribe to specialized feeds, such as all new entries from a particular newspaper or reporter. He used the open source Web framework Django, which was created with the help of his friend and Washington Post colleague Adrian Holovaty, who is also co-authoring a book on how you can do it too.

Lack of ownership info = fraud

A GAO report looks at how little business ownership information is collected by states (PDF). From the highlights (PDF) :

Federal law enforcement officials are concerned that criminals are increasingly using U.S. "shell" companies—companies with generally no operations—to conceal their identities and illicit activities. Though the magnitude of the problem is hard to measure, officials said that such companies are increasingly involved in criminal investigations at home and abroad. The information states collect on companies has been helpful in some cases, as names on the documents can generate additional leads. But some officials said that available information was limited and that they had closed cases because the owners of a company under investigation could not be identified.

OhMy! No profits!

BusinessWeek writes about how Korea's citizen journalism site, last mentioned by this blog in 2004, is losing money and failing in its attempt to expand outside South Korea. A cautionary tale for newspapers hoping to be saved by user-contributed content.

Database quality

Dr. Dobb's Portal writes about how few organizations check their databases, and why they should.

Cyber-Museum of Scams & Frauds

That's how Quatloos.com describes itself:

Quatloos.com is a public educational website covering a wide variety of financial scams and frauds, including wacky “prime bank” frauds, exotic foreign currency scams, offshore investment frauds, tax scams, “Pure Trust” structures and more...

How to Read Email Headers

Explained by Pobox:

Headers contain a wealth of information about your email. They tell you which machines handled your message, and how long they took to send it to you. They can tell you who sent the message, and who it was destined for. However, headers can be misleading. It is fairly simple to write fake headers, which obscure information about the sender, recipient, and the machines that handled the mail.

Spammers frequently use fake headers to confuse the people they spam. And because so few people know how to read headers, it often works. A working knowledge of email headers can help you track spam to its source, which makes it easier to stop spammers in their tracks.

Court directory

Genealogy.com offers a directory of county courthouses in all 50 states.

Expanded SEC full-text search

The SEC has expanded its full-text search to include the last four years. "The newly searchable information includes registration statements, annual and quarterly reports, and other filings by companies and mutual funds filed during the past four years on the Commission's EDGAR database," the SEC says in a press release.

Online Education Database

The Online Education Database "contains reviews of 444 programs from 41 accredited schools":

Unlike other leading online education directories, our database only lists accredited online schools so that you can be sure that these degrees will be respected by potential employers. Our database allows you to sort reviews by programs, school, or degree level. Our library section will educate you on the basics of online universities.

Literature by e-mail

Daily Lit will email you the portion of a book each day. From the FAQ:

Why read books by email?

Because if you are like us, you spend hours each day reading email but don't find the time to read books. DailyLit brings books right into your inbox in convenient small messages that take less than 5 minutes to read. This works incredibly well not just on your computer but also on a Treo, Blackberry, Sidekick or whatever the PDA of your choice. In the words of Dr. Seuss: Try it, you might like it! (Oops -- it would appear that the actual quote from Green Eggs and Ham is "You do not like them. So you say. Try them! Try them! And you may.")

These are old classics, fiction and non-fiction, that have fallen into the public domain. "We hope to get lots of readers and eventually convince publishers that they should make copyrighted books available on DailyLit as well," the site says.

Pain.com

The mission of Pain.com, from the Dannemiller Memorial Educational Foundation, is "To be the premier educational and informational resource on the Internet for health care professionals and consumers who have an interest in pain and its management." Free, but registration required.

Where's the e-mail?

Government e-mail is often a public record and is sometimes useful for watchdogging public agencies. I just came across this useful article from Law Technology News last year summarizing all the places e-mail can hide.

"Where's the e-mail?" It's a simple question, but one answered too simply -- and erroneously -- by, "It's on the e-mail server" or "The last 60 days of mail is on the server and the rest is purged." Certainly, some e-mail will reside on the server, but most e-mail is elsewhere, and it's never all gone, notwithstanding retention policies. The true location and extent of e-mail depends on systems configuration, user habits, back-up procedures and other hardware, software and behavioral factors. This is true for mom-and-pop shops, for large enterprises and for everything in-between.

4-block world

You can often say more with a simple graphic than a complex one. The blog 4-block world shows the way.

Patterns of Global Terrorism

Berkshire Publishing publishes a $325 book compiling and making more reader-friendly the State Department's annual report on global terrorism. It has now put significant portions of that book online for free, although it would like you to sign up for its mailing list or make a small donation to support its work.

These important documents have a dramatic history themselves. In the aftermath of 9/11 and the U.S. government's efforts to understand and combat terrorism, the annual Patterns of Global Terrorism report became a political football. The statistical data on terrorist incidents around the world were incorrectly reported in the 2003 report, and then corrected.

In April 2005, the U.S. Department of State announced that it would no longer publish the reports. A blogger and security specialist Larry C. Johnson announced that the government was suppressing the report because it showed clearly that the war on terror wasn't working: significant incidents of terrorism in 2004 were the highest ever recorded, and loss of life in 2004 was the second highest in 35 years (2001 continues to be the highest).

Injecting science into the social

When I was a political science and economics major in the early 1980s, both fields typically constructed elaborate theories on sand -- whether it was Marxists spinning elaborate superstructures whose inner contradictions soon became only too apparent, or economists building economic models that always assumed away everything interesting and difficult about the world. It's heartening, therefore, to read that both fields are becoming more empirical, a trend driven by cheap computers and the vast quantities of data now being generated:

The quantitative social sciences are in the midst of a revolution in understanding the world and solving real problems. A dramatic increase in progress is now achievable because: 1) changes in technology enable us to collect and store unprecedented amounts of far more informative data about human populations and institutions; 2) new policies encourage the collection of data and its provision to researchers, including the computerization and automation of many government services, new data collection requirements, e.g., the No Child Left Behind Act, and the growing movement in science to make data publicly available; and 3) the development of novel methods of data collection and analysis that make it possible for scholars to extract information from new data, such as from the rise of social experiments that enable reliable causal inferences in major issues of public policy, natural language processing that enables scientists to extract information from millions of Web sites, newspapers, emails or other textual sources, and new informatics techniques that provide instant and reliably persistent, access to the world's data.

So says Gary King, the directory of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard, in an interview for the Data Mining Review. Some of that data and a tiny fraction of the techniques he discusses may one day be adopted by journalists, who are the protozoa of the fact-based universe. More than a few gut-trusting editors, incidentally, would just guffaw at this quote from King: "The central conclusion of research in hundreds of fields and most of the hundreds of thousands of applications is the same: Whenever a sufficiently important fraction of information can be quantified, statistical analysis beats qualitative human judgment. There is just no contest."

Improving democracy with technology

Jennifer Granick, executive director of the Stanford Law School Center for Internet and Society, wrote on Wired.com last month about how new Web technologies "can help citizens process and understand political donations, government contracts and programs, and performance metrics in all sorts of important and novel ways":

For example, tagging information about federal expenditures, unpaved highways or toxic waste sites with GeoRSS would let citizens easily cross-reference the data with other information, including campaign donations. Data feeds that use Ajax, JSON and OpenGIS Web Map Service can incorporate externally hosted geospatial capabilities into mashups that weave data together into a single, multifeatured map.

These capabilities would make publicly accessible information publicly comprehensible, for a multitude of uses and applications, incorporating a variety of data.

Upgrading to Blogger beta: We now have labels!

Blogger has always been evidence that Google is not the smoothly running machine its high stock price, bursting profits and slick new technologies would seem to imply. Clearly they've had some technology and management problems there. I've used it since 2003 and it has failed repeatedly, sometimes making it impossible to put up new posts. Only inertia and the dread of moving nearly 1,200 postings to a new system has kept me using it. Finally they've invited me to participate in their new Blogger beta, which is supposed to fix the many issues Blogger has had over the years, as well as add new features. I made the switch last night, and for you, the reader, this is probably important in only one way: Blogger now supports "labels," which will allow me to organize the postings here in a more useful way. I can now categorize the postings by subject, such as "investigative tools" or "mapping" or "demographics," so if you're interested in a particular subject, you can more easily find relevant postings. I don't think I'll ever be able to go back and add labels all 1,200 postings I've already made, but I will at least try to label some of them, as well as all future postings.

Mail drop search

Sometimes a fraudulent business will use an address that looks legitimate because it has a suite number and street name but in fact it's just a rented post office box at a UPS Store or other mail drop. This student financial aid site offers a search form you can use to see if an address matches a mail drop. As the site notes: "A mail drop address alone should not be considered confirmation of a scam, because legitimate firms sometimes use such mail boxes. But the fact of a mail drop address, together with other warning signs, can be a useful indicator of an operation's questionable legitimacy."

Trolling MySpace for gangs

San Bernardino, Calif., sheriff detectives search for gang members on MySpace.

Kids Health

Depth Reporting was sick as a dog last week so he Googled "cure for the common cold" just to see what came up. The top result was this page from the site, Kids Health, which he hadn't heard of before: "KidsHealth is the largest and most-visited site on the Web providing doctor-approved health information about children from before birth through adolescence," the site says. "Created by The Nemours Foundation's Center for Children's Health Media, the award-winning KidsHealth provides families with accurate, up-to-date, and jargon-free health information they can use."

Malcolm X Project

The Malcolm X Project at Columbia University is an in-depth look at the late activist and Muslim leader.

Bank rates

Bankrate.com provides free interest rate information on mortgages, credit cards, auto loans, money market accounts, certificates of deposit, checking accounts, home equity loans and other financial instruments.