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... at Medical-Dictionaries.org. The dictionary is by Babylon.com "the world's leading provider of translation software," the site says. Today's term of the day is "inflammation":
[in-fla-MAY-shun] Redness, swelling, pain, and/or a feeling of heat in an area of the body. This is a protective reaction to injury, disease, or irritation of the tissues.
This, incidentally, is a common ailment in the news industry.
I just can't help but link to the National Hot Dog & Sausage Council's Glossary of Sausages and Prepared Meats, if only because it defines Goetta, which explains this blog's name:
Fully cooked sausage of German origin similar to scrapple; made with ground pork and/or beef, oats, herbs and spices; available in rolls and slab form.
Clearly being the descendant of a German-American butcher has done nothing to moor me in the culture.
Barnes & Noble runs the Web site Quamut:
A Quamut is a concise yet comprehensive guide to a particular subject, such as Buying a Home, Personal Finance, or Making Sushi. Every Quamut is professionally written, edited, and fact-checked, so you can trust the content.
Their free online, but it costs you $2.95 to download one as a PDF and $5.95 if you want to buy one as a laminated card.
They also offer a daily free PDF download. Today's is on "aromatherapy," which doesn't speak well of B & N's "fact checking." Aromatherapy, B & N's Quamut says, "is the practice of enhancing health, mood, and appearance through the use of concentrated plant extracts called essential oils." The Quamut, for example, says coconut oil "supports healthy function of immune system."
There's no mention that many consider aromatherapy, in the words of a mostly uncritical Wikipedia article, "a pseudoscientific fraud." As the Skeptic's Dictionary says:
Besides personal experience, the only kind of research aromatherapists seem interested in is in reading what other aromatherapists have said or believed about plants or oils. The practitioners and salespersons of aromatherapeutic products seem singularly uninterested in scientific testing of their claims, many of which are empirical and could be easily tested. Of course, there are many aromatherapists who make non-testable claims, such as claims regarding how certain oils will affect their "subtle body," bring balance to their chakra, restore harmony to their energy flow, return one to their center, or contribute to spiritual growth. Aromatherapy is said to restore or enhance mental, emotional, physical or spiritual health. Such claims are essentially non-testable. They are part of New Age mythology and can't really engender any meaningful discussion or debate.
Quamut also has a wiki where it solicits contributions from anyone. Let's hope they're not all as bogus as this one.
If you have a Web site or blog you can now get free access to Britannica.com, which previously cost $70 per year. TechCrunch says:
Encyclopedia Britannica often is used in case studies as a definitive example of how new technology can disrupt a business. Everything was great for the nearly 250 year old privately held company until the Internet came around and a Category Five hurricaned on their parade.
The program is called Britannica WebShare, and the site says it's "for web publishers, including bloggers, webmasters, and anyone who writes for the Internet."
I submitted my site and was given access. Now I can link to any of Britannica's 120,000 articles, such as this one on the Kentucky Derby, and my readers can read it all too. But they still can't access the rest of the encyclopedia. You can also embed widgets on certain topics.
TechCrunch says it's the equivalent of being "half pregnant":
Britannica is doing a lot of things right - a relatively small staff of a hundred or so editors manages 4,000 unpaid (I believe) contributors who are recognized experts in their field. But, like the music labels, they still somehow feel as though people should pay to consume their content. And that means search engines can’t index their content. And that means they don’t exist.
Instead of going free and opening up to all, they’re using the new program to simply price discriminate. Give people who may link to the site free access. Everyone else has to pay. So in effect they’re aiming to be half pregnant - they want the benefits of web linking but don’t want to give up the subscription fees from the fools who continue to pay them.
We'll see if TechCrunch is right that to survive they'll eventually be forced to make everything free for everyone.
Don't let the fact that two books I read recently were God is Not Great and The God Delusion dissuade you from viewing these "Dispensational Charts" by Clarence Larkin first published more than 75 years ago. They illustrate topics such as The Heavens, The Failure of Man and The Underworld.
The books and charts by Clarence Larkin have been extremely helpful to Christians since they were first published over 75 years ago. They have passed into the public domain and we are making some of the charts available here as an aid to Bible study. Larkin's charts are well thought out and Scriptually sound. Some of the more detailed are books in themselves. They reveal Larkin's vast knowledge of the Scriptures and phenomenal grasp of prophecy. Practically all of the prophecy teachers today got their basic prophecy knowledge directly or indirectly from Larkin and C. I. Scolfield. Larkin's works, as well as Scolfield's, are definitive, works that will endure until Christ's return. No other book since their publishing over 75 years ago has much improved on them.
information aesthetics notes that "while appearing sparse at first" they "seem to pack a lot of information into a concise format."
The Law Librarians' Society of Washington D.C. offers a detailed online Legislative Source Book.
Some of it is for members only, but free content includes:
.... is "Your daily source of online business, tech & text lingo." For those of you curious about the meaning of terms like P2U4URAQTP.
Zillman has updated his Online Research Tools (PDF), "a comprehensive listing of online research tools that offer various downloadable as well as web applications to allow you to do your research and searching on the Internet far more effective and productive."
"… is a free website that enables anyone to create collaborative lists, atlases, databases and more. Lists can be broad and ambitious (like a List of All Baseball Players Who Played in the Majors) or niche (Punk Bands from the Lower East Side, 1975-1980), or quirky or ridiculous. You can collaborate with other people to share, create, and make something that will benefit humanity."
An introductory video describes it as a "multimedia database." As of this writing, lists featured on the home page include T206 White Border Baseball Cards, a World Shark Attack Database, a compendium of Yoda quotes from Star Wars with video clips and the greatest divas of all time. There's also a blog for the site.
ResearchBuzz writes about a new visual medical dictionary:
... enter a drug, disease, or therapy name. I tried shingles. I got two potential results — one for a disease and one for a drug (a vaccine). When I held my mouse over each word, I got a definition and some additional information. But even cooler is what I got on the right side of the screen.
The right side of the screen gives you a visual tree of medical terms related to the word you specified. Some of these words are WAY too general to be useful (like “pain”) but some of them are very specific. Each of the new items will also give you a definition and will branch out into its own tree of definitions.
The dictionary is from CureHunter, a company that offers "precision medical data mining." I know nothing about the company itself, but what it sells -- at $490 a year for an individual -- is intriguing:
CureHunter is the only fully integrated scientific search, data retrieval and analysis engine on the web that can read the entire US National Library of Medicine Medline Archive and automatically extract and quantify the evidence for successful clinical outcomes of all known drugs for all known human diseases.
I'm put off, though, by its search box on the home page. It says, "To find Cure enter Disease name." Yeah, right. If only a cure to all diseases was as simple as a Google search. The company does explain limitations to its methods on its frequently asked questions page.
The first item I came across perusing the forums was a discussion of "to disappear up one's own arse":
Sad to say, that's a phrase I know all too well from personal experience.
BusinessDictionary.com says its more than 20,000 definitions cover "every aspect of the business world."
Visuwords is an "online graphical dictionary." It visually represents a word, showing what type of word it is, words it's similar to, its derivation and more.
I must be self-absorbed, because when I first saw this blog's name I read it as info-dads, when it should be info-doodads. "infodoodads is a blog that reviews and discusses existing and new tools, services, and technology for finding information on the internet. What kind of information? Any kind. The women behind infodoodads love to learn and find information, and every day new tools are being created and unveiled that help people find, sort, and interact with information." I learned about it from The Intelligent Agent blog, which likes it a lot.
The Online Books Page from the University of Pennsylvania library lists "over 25,000 free books on the Web "
The Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia, "the nation’s leading research institute for the study of the American presidency," offers a detailed online reference on American presidents. The site says its information is "reviewed by prominent scholars on each President and administration."
MetaGlossary.com promises "meaning, not just links." It promises to define more than 2 million terms, phrases and acronyms.
Having been a writer for a living, though, I can tell you that correctly defining a term will in no way give meaning to your life."Meta" means beyond, more comprehensive, or more highly organized, and with respect to other dictionaries and glossaries, MetaGlossary is all these things. MetaGlossary harvests definitions from the entire web, the world's largest, constantly-updated repository of information. Hence, it surpasses traditional dictionaries, which grow more out of date with each passing day. MetaGlossary is as dynamic as the web, offering the most current information out there on the most contemporary topics.
However, unlike other search engines, MetaGlossary is able to precisely extract the meanings of terms and phrases from the often frustratingly unmanageable mass of information on the web. It provides you with concise, direct explanations for terms and phrases, not just endless links to sift through in search of a comprehensive definition.
What's more, MetaGlossary organizes these meanings based on topic and usage, so you'll find the one you're looking for quickly and easily. Since MetaGlossary spans the expanse of the web, even your most field-specific requests for terms, phrases, acronyms, technical jargon, and slang, will be successfully met.
You can get large quantities of official military statistics on personnel, procurement and casualties courtesy of the Department of Defense's Statistical Information Analysis Division. It won't be easy to analyze, however, because the data is provided as unhelpful PDF files.
QAS offers a free address lookup tool that does "fuzzy matching" to verify addresses, including returning the full ZIP code, filling out partial addresses and correcting misspellings. You get ten free lookups a day and they sell a "pro" version you can add to your Web site.
