Resources, Reports, Tools, Lists, and Full-Text Documents (3 Items)
Economic Information–United States
Source: U.S. Census
Just Released, First 2002 Economic Census Report
Summary ||| Direct to Tables
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Language
George Mason University Speech Accent Archive
“The speech accent archive is established to uniformly exhibit a large set of speech accents from a variety of language backgrounds. Native and non-native speakers of English all read the same English paragraph and are carefully recorded. The archive is constructed as a teaching tool and as a research tool. It is meant to be used by linguists as well as other people who simply wish to listen to and compare the accents of different english speakers. It allows users to compare the demographic and linguistic backgrounds of the speakers in order to determine which variables are key predictors of each accent. The speech accent archive demonstrates that accents are systematic rather than merely mistaken speech.” 306 speech samples currently archived.
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Spyware
Source: University of Washington Computer Science & Engineering
Measurement and Analysis of Spyware in a University Environment
“We first discuss background material on spyware, including the various types of spyware programs, their methods of transmission, and their run-time behavior. By examining four widespread programs (Gator, Cydoor, SaveNow, and eZula), we present a detailed analysis of their behavior, from which we derive signatures that can be used to detect their presence on remote computers through passive network monitoring. Using these signatures, we quantify the spread of these programs among hosts within the University of Washington by analyzing a week-long trace of network activity.”
See Also: Full study (PDF; 187 KB)
See Also: Full study (HTML)

Briefly
xrefer Announces Online Reference Research Award

Search Technology
Education–Resources for Educators
A Faceted Approach to Searching: A New Demo Using Materials for Teachers
First, the content. “The Gateway to Educational Materials (GEM) project is a consortium effort to provide educators with quick and easy access to the substantial, but uncataloged, collections of educational materials found on various federal, state, university, non-profit, and commercial Internet sites.” Now with the description of GEM out of the way, let’s move to the technology. This “new and enhanced” version of GEM has been online for about six weeks. It’s powered with search technology from Siderean, a company based in LA that takes a “faceted approach” to searching. Those of you who took a cataloging class in library school can skip the next part. What are facets? “Faceted searching combines searching for specific words and phrases with browsing descriptions of resources – based on what are called facets.” The famous or infamous Dewey Decimal Classification is a faceted system. I’ve always thought that this approach (easy to understand/learn) would be very useful for certain types of collections. Learn more in this brochure and white paper from the company. More on Siderean Semark in the future. Happy testing!
See Also: Other Demos Using Siderean Technology
The recipe demo contains thousands of entries. Useful!

Public Libraries–Databases
Source: The Seattle Times
Countless Levels of Data on Libraries’ Web Sites
From the article, “Google, the No. 1 search engine, can’t offer all the information we might want from the Internet. In fact, we can’t get to some extremely useful information that’s on the Net simply by asking Google. I’m talking about those information-rich databases that are generally expensive and require membership for access. Public libraries, for example, subscribe to several of these databases and make them freely available to patrons.” Those of you who are affiliated with a university or community college also have access to these types of tools.
Note: Many other public libraries in the U.S., Canada, and elsewhere offer similar services. Check your library’s web site or just give them a call and ask. Most colleges and universities also offer remotely accessible databases for their students and faculty.

Professional Reading Shelf
Online Searching
Source: The Globe and Mail
George Boole: The Isaac Newton of Logic
“It was 150 years ago that George Boole published his literary classic The Laws of Thought, wherein he devised a mathematical language for dealing with mental machinations of logic. It was a symbolic language of thought — an algebra of logic (algebra is the branch of mathematics that uses letters and other general symbols to represent numbers and quantities in formulas and equations).”

Government Documents–United States
Government Printing Office–United States
Source: GCN
GPO signs on to using PKI
From the article, “The Government Printing Office by mid-summer will authenticate government documents using a public-key infrastructure and digital signatures. Judy Russell, the GPO’s superintendent of documents and managing director of information dissemination, yesterday said the office will apply the technology to all documents agencies submit to www.gpoaccess.gov. ‘We want to mark content as it comes in and to take the final product and digitally sign it so others can determine it is authentic,’ Russell said at the Federal Library and Information Center Committee Conference in Washington.”

The Internet Archive
The Internet Archive’s Live Music Archive Reaches A Milestone
The Internet Archive might be best known as the home of The Wayback Machine. However, it’s also home to many other collections. Last week the IA’s Live Music Archive (it’s been online for about 18 months) announced that it currently contains more than 10,000 live recordings. Here are some stats courtesey of Brewster Kahle.
+ More than 10,000 shows
+ 150,000 tracks, from almost 500 bands
+ Almost 1,000 people have uploaded recordings
+ A few more stats here
See Also: In Other IA News, Brewster Kahle Files Lawsuit (Kahle v. Ashcroft)
“Plaintiffs in this case � the Internet Archive and its Chairman, Brewster Kahle, and the Prelinger Film Archive (formally, Prelinger Associates, Inc.) and its President, Richard Prelinger � are filing suit seeking a declaratory judgment that the current system of unconditional copyright is unconstitutional.”

Web Search–Microsoft
Microsoft To Offer Weblog Search Engine
More from MS today.
+ More press for their news search service. Kudos to the reporter for mentioning that Newsbot has been online (for 10 countries and regions) since October at this url. Also, why is MS touting a 4000 source crawl? Rocket News, Yahoo News, and NewsNow offer thousands more. I would also bet that Topix will soon offer more sources.

+ From the article, “Microsoft is claiming a first with MSN Blogbot, a service that will let users search Web logs, or “blogs,” personal-journal type Web pages that have become increasingly popular. MSN Blogbot will aggregate content from hundreds of thousands of Web logs and index that content based on which Web logs are most popular and credible, Redetzki said. The service should go into beta soon, and Microsoft plans to introduce MSN Blogbot worldwide…”

Perhaps I should take the kudos I just gave to the reporter back. Microsoft might be claiming this is a first but the reporter should know and have mentioned that it’s NOT. Search tools like Feedster, Daypop, and Technorati, and Waypath have been available for several years and do an impressive job. A few comments from Scott Rafer, CEO of Feedster, in this post from the Seattle Times MS Weblog.

+ For your long range (very long range) radar. From the article, “Microsoft said it is working on a natural language search engine, dubbed MSN Answerbot. This service will take questions from users and find answers on the Internet, rivaling a similar service from Ask Jeeves. No release date for MSN Answerbot has been set, but [Karen] Redetzki, [a product manager for MSN] says it is about three years away.”
See Also: Want to See A Massive List of Weblog and RSS Search Tools? Check this Page from FaganFinder
See Also: “Web Question Answering: Is More Always Better?”
A 2002 paper by Microsoft researchers.
See Also: “An Analysis of the AskMSR Question-Answering System”
Another 2002 paper by Microsoft researchers.

Web Search–Eurekster
Source: Pandia & Search Engine Guide
A Conversation with Grant Ryan from Eurekster
Available via Pandia or Search Engine Guide
SEL’s Any Beal asks Eurekster’s CEO, Grant Ryan, a few questions. From the interview, “Eurekster makes use of its own SearchMemory technology which remembers the sites a user finds useful and presents them higher in the results the next time they search. Then, Eurekster lets a user and their friends share their searches and sites, so when they do a �hotel� search, for example, they’ll see the hotel sites their friends also found useful, moved up in the results and marked with an icon.”
See Also: A Recent Post About Social-Networking Software

Internet
Source: New Scientist
Spim: The New Spam
From the article, “The volume of so-called ’spim’ is set triple in 2004, according to a new report from the Radicati Group, a technology market research firm in Palo Alto, California. The company projects that 1.2 billion spims will be sent, 70 per cent of which are porn-related. This is a mere trickle compared to the 35 billion spams expected, but the researchers warn that spim is growing at about three times the rate of spam, as spammers adapt their toolkit to exploit a rapidly rising number of new instant messaging (IM) users.

Resources, Reports, Tools, Lists, and Full-Text Documents
Geospatial Information
Source: RAND Corporation
New Report, Publicly Available Federal Geospatial Information of Little Unique Use to Terrorists, RAND Study Finds
“Less than 1 percent of publicly available federal Web sites and databases contain geospatial information not readily available elsewhere that could help terrorists and other hostile forces mount attacks in the United States, according to a RAND Corporation study….”
See Also: Mapping the Risks: Assessing the Homeland Security Implications of Publicly Available Geospatial Information (Summary)
See Also: Full Text of Report (PDF; 1.7 MB)
Thanks to ResourceShelf’s SDK for the links.

Professional Reading Shelf
The Top Ten Things a new Sci/Tech Librarian Should Know: Developing Core Competencies
Source: Issues in Science and Technology Librarianship
A report from Sci/Tech Library Management Discussion Group ALA Annual Meeting in Toronto. Panel discussion incorporated supervisory viewpoint as well as new librarian viewpoint. Tips on how to get hired and what to do once you are hired.

Professional Reading Shelf (2 Items)
Information Architecture
Now Available: Presentations/Handouts from the Fifth Annual ASIS&T Information Architecture Summit
The summit took place at the end of February in Austin, Texas.
Presentations Include:
+ Taxonomies, Controlled Vocabularies, and Ontologies Panel
+ Fun with Faceted Browsing
+ When Ninety-one Years of Content goes Digital
+ Information Search Experience: Emotions in Information Seeking
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Scholarly Publishing
Open Access
Source: The Chronicle of Higher Education
“Scientific Societies’ Publishing Arms Unite Against Open-Access Movement”
From the article, “‘It feels good to say everything should be free,’ says Martin Frank, executive director of the American Physiological Society and one of the organizers of the new coalition, in an interview. ‘But we’d rather get there using a business model different than the one used by PLoS and the open-access advocates. It’s our contention that there’s nothing wrong with that, that it makes the literature available to the community of individuals who need it, in a timely manner.’”
See Also: Washington DC Principles for Science Home Page

Search Tools
Source: Technology Research News
Search Tool Aids Browsing
“Many research teams are working on the problem of how to make finding information on the Web faster and easier. Researchers from Carnegie Mellon University have devised a scheme that gives existing search engines some extra help. The software, dubbed ScentTrails, shows a user how strongly the links generated by a Web search correlate with the topics she is searching for. The software grades the links a search engine returns by increasing the font size of links that have more connections to relevant pages.”
See Also: complete paper as published in the ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction: ScentTrails: Integrating Browsing and Searching on the Web (PDF; 428 KB)

Web Search–AllTheWeb
Source: Search Engine Showdown
AllTheWeb Now Powered by Yahoo Database
Greg N. reports that the ATW site remains online but is now using the Yahoo database of web pages. This move was expected. The article also mentions that while some of ATW’s advanced search options remain available, others have been removed. ATW’s “Query Rewrite” option is also no longer available. Notess also mentions that ATW will only index the first 500kb of an html web page or pdf document. Google stops indexing web pages at the 101kb mark. In other Search Engine Showdown news, the wonderful Search Engine Features chart as well as several search engine reviews have been updated. Hooray!

News Alerts
Source: The Virtual Chase
RSS Search Engine Feedster Adds E-Mail Alert Service
Free e-mail-based keyword alerts from an RSS search tool. The TVC post also shares a caveat. Many sites only syndicate the headline or a snippet in their RSS feed. So, if your alert terms appear, let’s say in paragraph two and the site is only syndicating a headline, an alert will not be generated. Nevertheless. I still think the service will be of value especially for competitive intelligence and marketing types who want a simple way (and free) method for keeping track of product or company mentions in the blogosphere. Kudos are in order for Scott J., Scott R., and Francois, for continuing to add new features and services to Feedster.

Local Search
Mapquest Beta Tests Local Search Tool
Mapquest is also giving local search a try. The company (part of AOL) is beta testing a business search tool called MQ Search. A company spokesperson told me that that beta has been available for a few weeks but provided no info about future plans for the service.
+ Directory information is provided by InfoUsa.
+ Search interface located on MapQuest home page or this url.
+ Search by category or business name
+ Each entry is linked to a map
+ Sort results alphabetically or by distance (25 or 50 miles)
+ Ads on results pages provided by Google
+ Like other Mapquest products, maps can be downloaded to a pda
+ AOL Yellow Pages is Also Linked from Mapquest site

Shopping and Directory Search Tools
Two More Acquisitions in the Search Arena
1) Infospace Acquires Switchboard
Infospace pays $160 Million.
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2) Yahoo Acquires European Shopping Engine Kelkoo
Yahoo pays $575 Million.

Copyright
Source: UNESCO
New Resource, National Copyright and Related Rights Legislation of UNESCO Members
From the announcement, “Full texts of national copyright and related rights legislation of UNESCO Member States can now be accessed on the website of UNESCO’s Culture Sector. The collection currently comprises about 100 laws and is constantly being updated and completed.”
See Also: Direct to Collection of National Copyright Laws

Resources, Reports, Tools, Lists, and Full-Text Documents (4 Items)
Campaign Finance
Source: FEC
Just Released, Major Parties’ Fundraising Summarized
Several spreadsheets are included.
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Aviation Industry–United States
Source: FAA
Just Released, Full Text, FAA Aerospace Forecasts Fiscal Years 2004 – 2015
Fact Sheet ||| Full Text
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R&D–United States
Source: NSF
Just Updated, Master Government List of 36 Federally Funded Research and Development Centers Fiscal Year 2004
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Sports Business–United States
Revenues From Sport Venues
“We’re Revenues From Sports Venues and our business is providing that information to you.” While most of the information here is fee-based, the site offers free, current data on naming rights sales and prices, and the average high and low prices for luxury suites and club seats. There’s also a comprehensive listing of “major and minor sports venues, organized by state, city, venue and teams that play in the venues.” (PDF; 64 KB)