Weekend update: The weekly reference collection/research gleanings:
A long list this week, catching up. Things are looking a little better on the hurricane front, at least for South Florida. I'd be worrying more now if I lived in the coastal Carolinas/Georgia. But still, too soon to tell for sure. Definitely gets your edge up.

And, here's the last weekday front page before the Herald for the new century debuts on Monday. It'll be looking very different. More on the changes in Sunday's newspaper.

Polls and surveys. They're happening all the time. We get good leads on them, often thanks to Gary Price and Al Tompkins, who post links as soon as they find them to their Resouceshelf and Morning Meeting sites (links in left-hand column).
But what do you do with them? I post them immediately to our Intranet, and hope that reporters who might want to use the data find them. I know many of these get covered by the wires, so editors see them in the incoming feeds, but not all. There must be a more proactive way to publicize them: do you bring them to news meetings? Send out newsroom-wide or newsroom leader-wide emails? Just tell a specific assignment editor? Not a researcher's job? Who else in your newsroom is monitoring what's new on the Web? Here are a few that I noted this week:

Latest War on Terrorism poll reports at Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) site. "War on Terrorism Has Not Made Public Feel Safer".

Internet use by region from Pew Internet.

Identity Theft report from FTC.

ASCE Scorecard on America's infrastructure. Roads, dams, schools, etc. mostly get Ds. From American Soc. of Civil Engineers.

Global survey of conflict, 2003

Global E-mail threats charts and graphs from Messagelabs track viruses and worms worldwide.

There's news from Blogger, too, in case you haven't heard. Subscribers to Blogger Pro, who paid about $35 a year to get extra features like spellchecking, posting by email, and RSS feeds, were told this week the service will now be offered free to all users, now that Blogger belongs to Google and the extra income isn't a necessity. People who've already paid get a free sweatshirt. The rest of us get extra stuff, except RSS, which is not yet available.

The useful links....

Reference

Great links on nuclear weapons from Sree Sreenivasan.

Nutrition Data incredibly complete analysis of fast foods, common foods, or custom recipe analysis. Here's a plain Krispy Kreme cake doughnut. Tools section allows you to create

Hot Topics: Hispanic Heritage month lots of background material, links, from Evergreen College library.

A comprehensive glossary of weather terms for storm spotters from National Weather Service in Norman, OK.

Nazi-Era Provenance Internet Portal search for art works.

The Wayback Machine is now searchable! Find information from old Websites. Direct link to Recall page with info about the search.

FreeMedicalJournals.com free archived articles from several prominent journals.

Conflict Statistics from Middle East Policy Council. Has total killed, bimonthly stats back to Sept 2000.

EPA report on World Trade Center site in PDF.

TRAC Report on Homeland Security

CIA Factbook on Intelligence, updated.

Criminology Web Sites: A "Webliography" from Info Today.
News:

Seattle Times archives now available back to 1990 for free. Just need to register.

Al-Jazeera English version now, a permanent website.

Great news sites for kids nice list from Cyberjournalist.

Google News: Italia now Google offers news sites for Australia, Canada, France, Germany, India, Italy, New Zealand, the UK, and the US.
Tools:

Sunrise/Sunset tools from U.S. Naval Observatory: Complete Sun & Moon data for one day; Construct table for one year.

Argali White & Yellow: download this service which searches several online phone directories at once.

TV Eyes Searchable TV! Enter your keyword and TV Eyes will send you an email with link to transcript whenever your search term is spoken on a program with closed captioning.(or send it to your PDA via Avantgo.)

Cool Search tricks: nice list of Google and other search tricks from J.D. Lasica, reprinted from an earlier blog entry.
Journalism:

Media Info Center has news and statistics, like Top 20 newspapers. From NWU.

American Photojournalist: By journalists. For journalists.
Public Records:

Findlaw document archive index Findlaw has been keeping original court documents on major stories going back a few years. This is complete index.

Connecticut inmate information

New Mexico Inmate search

Illinois Public Domain Land Tract Sales database of over 500,000 land sales in the nineteenth century.
Governments, Politics:

World Trade Special Report lots of stories, facts and figures from Independent.

California gubernatorial recall candidates: list, bios and info from NY Times.

Foreign Relations of the U.S., 1900-1918: access to documentary volumes from library at U.Wisc.

Rule of Law and Cuba FSU site has dissidents' sentencing documents.
Statistics:

Foreign Born Population of the U.S. press release and charts from Census.
Business:

Company Information Guide: the Virtual Chase lists sites that offer SEC information. Note one company, EDGARIQ, has gone offline.

GasBuddy.com site tracks local links for gas price information.

NFL Team Valuations, 2003 from Forbes. Dolphins ranked 10th; Redskins 1st.
People:

Integrity in Science database search for scientists, find corporate ties. Or search by university or company.

People Search on 192.com now searches 2003 UK electoral roll.

Finding experts from Mary Ellen Bates' Tip of the Month. (via Journolist

Brother Outsider site devoted to Bayard Rustin.
Florida: No links this week.
Some Interesting stories/Weblogs:

PopJustice: interesting blog from UK on pop music and downloading/file sharing, more. I like this message to Cristina Aguilera about Brianna LaHara:
"Get your chequebook out and write the cheque, Christina. This is not about you condoning the illegal distribution of your work. Nor is it a signal that you will pay the fine of anyone the RIAA sue for taking your work. This is about showing solidarity with your fans. "

Blog hard news on your site Steve Outing says this is the best way to get news quickest to your readers. Sounds right to me.

PR Bop Tara Calashain's new MT blog on "weird and wonderful off the wires". Goofy stuff from PR newswires.

10,000 birds: a blog by a group trying to reach this number of species. Lots of good birding links here, including Avibase, a world bird database.

Side Salad blog from a Tampa Trib features editor.

Salam Pax on how he got into blogging from his newly published book. "I became the profane pervert Arab blogger".

The Blog Herald "More blog news, more often".
Fun/Entertaining:

Comics by RSS: get your daily comics in your news aggregator!

Catch 33 fun game: catch each number from 1-33.