Google patent search

Google has unveiled an easy-to-use patent search. A search for "Louisville Kentucky" turned up three patents issued this year, including a "Method and apparatus for electronic collection, translation, grouping, and delivery of wage assignment information," "a Method and apparatus for bone fracture fixation," and a "Crankcase sealing apparatus."

Congressional Budget Office publications

The Congressional Budget Office places its publications, which relate to many issues in the news, from health to homeland security to taxes, on its Web site. You can sign up to notified daily of new reports.

Cartoon America

Cartoon America is an online exhibition of cartoons donated to the Library of Congress by editorial cartoonist J. Arthur Wood Jr.

Beyond Google Alerts basics

Digital Inspiration explains how to use Google Alerts in more sophisticated ways than just entering a few keywords. This includes limiting the alerts to items from specific Web sites, U.S. states, blog authors and more.

Swivel: data sharing made easy

Swivel wants to to be the YouTube or Flickr for data, whether it's ways of dying, poker stats, income by education level or diplomatic parking tickets, You can explore all kinds of data on the site, post graphs to your blog, email data links to friends, upload your own data or download data from others. TechCrunch reports that "Swivel will be automatically comparing your data to other data sets in the background, suggesting possible correlations to you that you may never have noticed." The site was founded by two former physics students, one from Russia and the other from the U.S., who worked at the same software company:

Like many business folks, we had spent a bunch of time editing spreadsheets, reading other people's spreadsheets and emailing spreadsheets back and forth. We had learned a bunch of macros, shortcuts and tricks for editing data. However, when it came time to share data with other people - so they could explore the data themselves - it was...less good. We, unfortunately, had to freeze the data in the form of a document or presentation because only other power users could really go nuts exploring the data.

At one point a few of us were listening to a NerdTV podcast with Dan Bricklin (he invented the spreadsheet). He was talking about the source of the spreadsheet idea back in the late 1970s. He said something like, I wanted to create a word processor for data. Wow, for us that sounded like a big insight. And in part led us to think, we need a Web site for data.

In 1979 software was the thing. Today, we have Web sites. In a Yogi Berra kind of way, we think of a Web site as half super-computer, half telephone and half surfboard. A Web site can process all kinds of data like a super-computer, it is excellent for getting people together to communicate like a telephone, and with a mouse in your hand you can surf a Web site until next week. The mission: apply all that good Web stuff to data.

The Statistical Modeling, Causual Inference and Social Science blog sees great promise in this:

It might not sound much, but having a database of data will remove the need for people to provide summaries of it. Anyone interested in the problem can perform the summaries for himself. This will make data analysis much more approachable than before. This can also become competition to existing spreadsheet and statistical software, and a platform for deploying recent research: it is often frustrating for a researcher in statistical methodology how difficult it is to actually enable users to benefit from the most recent advances in the research sphere.

Swivel offers an introductory tour.

Denied Persons List

The U.S. Department of Commerce's Denied Persons List lists people banned from receiving U.S. Exports.

A glossary of insurance terms

... offered by The Insurance Information Institute.

SciTechResources.gov

SciTechResources.gov is "A catalog of government science and technology web sites" for the "the scientist, engineer, and science aware citizen."

StateMaster

StateMaster is "a unique statistical database which allows you to research and compare a multitude of different data on US states":

We have compiled information from various primary sources such as the US Census Bureau, the FBI, and the National Center for Educational Statistics. More than just a mere collection of various data, StateMaster goes beyond the numbers to provide you with visualization technology like pie charts, maps, graphs and scatterplots. We also have thousands of map and flag images, state profiles, and correlations.

We have stats on everything from toothless residents to percentage of carpoolers.

StateMaster is from the creators of NationMaster, which does the same thing for the world and which Mary Ellen Bates writes about in her Tip of the Month.

Common Errors in English

... is the Web version of a book of the same name by Paul Brians. Please, whatever you do, don't begin pointing out all the errors from my own site. You should have better things to do with your time.

Spies Online

In spite of its name, Spies Online says its goal is not to encourage spying:

Spies Online has many investigative resources for private investigators and amateur sleuths that will assist in finding people or doing background checks. It is also concerned with the issues of computer security and privacy. There are many programs on the market that sell links that Spies Online provides here free.

Index card obsession

There is something artistic about this Japanese man's obsession with using index cards to organize his life. And if you're so inclined, you can adopt his methods. Via lifehack.org.

Shipwreck database

The Office of Coast Survey's Automated Wreck and Obstruction Information System (AWOIS) "contains information on over 10,000 submerged wrecks and obstructions in the coastal waters of the United States. Information includes latitude and longitude of each feature along with brief historic and descriptive details." You can download the data as an Access database or Adobe Acrobat PDF file.

Index to Military Periodicals

The Air University Library's Index to Military Periodicals "is a subject index to significant articles, news items, and editorials from English language military and aeronautical periodicals. The Index contains citations since 1988 and is updated continuously."

Banking Industry Analysis

The FDIC's Industry Analysis lets you "Access financial information on specific banks as well as analyses on the banking industry and economic trends."

Google Spreadsheets mashups?

I've never used Google Spreadsheets to do anything serious, so I can't comment on how well it works, but improvements rolled out this week are intriguing. One is that Google has made the spreadsheets programmable, so you can write software code that adds, deletes or manipulates data. And it has added its own "GoogleLookup function," which lets you pull data from a Google query directly into the spreadsheet. For example, here's a demo pulling data on newspaper company employment using the formula, =GoogleLookup("newspaper_co_name","employment"). As you can see, the queries don't always work, for whatever reason, but you have to think that this will get better over time. You can also update the spreadsheets continuously as news data is added. All of this could spawn some intriguing data mashups.

Secret CIA flight database

The author of a book about extraordinary rendition called "Ghost Plane: The True Story of The CIA Torture Program," has put a database of the once-secret flights by the spy agency online.

Database of News Sources and Subject Matter Experts

The Database of News Sources and Subject Matter Experts "by The Annapolis Group, a consortium of the nation’s leading liberal arts colleges, has been created especially for working journalists":

In this database you will find informed news sources and subject matter experts on topics related to the professional and academic disciplines of more than 950 well-informed professors, scientists, researchers, analysts, and other specialists at leading liberal arts colleges in the United States.

Whether your topic is planets outside the solar system, contemporary politics in the former Soviet republics of central Asia, historical perspectives on social security in the United States, recent developments in the field of biotechnology, or any of hundreds of other topics, the news sources and subject matter experts in this database will prove a valuable resource to your research and reporting.

This fully searchable database contains brief biographical sketches and contact information on every news source and subject matter expert listed as well as contact information for the public relations personnel at all Annapolis Group member colleges.