The Redbook (Guidelines for the Cleanup of Clandestine Drug Laboratories, 2005)

In 1990, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), in cooperation with the Environmental protection Agency (EPA) and the U.S. Coast Guard (collaborately known as the Joint Federal Task Force), published the Guidelines for the Cleanup of Clandestine Drug Laboratories, known by those in the industry as “The Redbook.” It was developed following the enactment of Section 2405 of the 1988 Anti-Drug Abuse Act. Now with more than a decade of experience, DEA, along with the assistance of the EPA, has updated the book to reflect the vast base of knowledge obtained since the first publication.

Summary ||| Direct to Full Text (PDF; 122 pages)

Source: Drug Enforcement Agency

Total Bankruptcy Cases Filed Fall to Lowest in Nearly Five Years

This news release includes several tables in XLS format.

Bankruptcy filings fell 9.3 percent during the 12-month period ending June 30, 2006. Bankruptcy cases filed in federal courts during that period totaled 1,484,570, down from the 1,637,254 bankruptcy cases filed for the 12-month period ending June 30, 2005. This is the lowest filings have fallen since the 12-month period ending September 2001. The drop in bankruptcy filings has occurred since the implementation of the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005.

Source: Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts

+ Google offers hosted communications apps (via News.com)
This is an extension of the Gmail for Your Domain service that was launched last month.
Notes:
1) Services provided include Gmail with 2 gigabytes of storage, Google Calendar, Google Talk and Page Creator
2) No word if the 2 gigabyte storage limit increases as the free Gmail storage limit increases.
3) You have to register for this beta and THEN will be notified when it becomes available. Google writes, “We’ll review the information you submit and contact you if we select your domain for this beta test. If selected…”
4) No timeline as to how long it will take to review is provided.
5) Google notes that customer service will be provided by email or an “online” help center but makes no mention of phone support.
6) From an email:organizations that sign up during the beta period will not ever have to pay for users accepted during that period (provided Google continues to offer the service).
7) From what we can guess, this is an English language service at the present time.
A premium version with support and additional storage will be provided by the end of the year. No more info about the service is available.

Don’t Forget Microsoft
These new services are once again another Google attack on Microsoft. For many months Microsoft has offered MS Office Live. Both free and fee based services. Office Live offers several services including:
1) Free, Office Live Basics (beta that will remain free after the beta)
++ Microsoft will register for you any domain you choose (assuming it’s available, at no charge to you) and then allows you to use different Office services
++ 5 personalized e-mail accounts (2 GB storage)
++ File transfer and storage
++ Web site traffic analysis
++ One-on-one e-mail support
2) Microsoft also offers (free during beta, $29.95 after beta) two other services.
++ This chart makes it easy to compare what all three services provide. For example, the fee-based services (after beta) offer more than 20 business apps and provide telephone support.

+ Yahoo! Temporarily Removes Blog Search for Retooling
(via SER)
Blog results are also gone from Yahoo News search results pages.

+ Flickr Adds GeoTagging

Reply.com

+ Database has been around for a few years, now with aerial imagery from GlobeXplorer.

+ Estimated home values, comparison prices, etc. You can also now make unsolicited offers on a property

+ Reply’s estimated price is called an R! valuation.

+ How an R! valuation confidence for each property is determined. We would like to know more than it being a “complex calculation.”

+ Other research info like neighborhood stats, recent home sales, property info is provided.
Note from Gary: Most but not all of the specific property info for my home was correct.

Btw, Reply.com “your decision engine” also offers automobile pricing information.

See Also: Zillow.com
Note from Gary: The Zillow estimate or Zestimate of my home was approx. $12,000 less than Reply.com. I think both are much higher (20-30K over what we would likely get for our home) when compared to recent sales in the neighborhood.

While mentioning Zillow.com, we need to point out that they now offer “Heat Maps” for several metro areas including:

+ Boston
+ Chicago
+ Cleveland
+ Denver
+ Houston
+ Los Angeles
+ Miami
+ NYC
+ San Francisco
+ Seattle
17 metros total. These maps allow you to compare neighborhood values (based on Zestimates per sq. foot).

See Also: HomePages.com
Homes for sale in over 30 markets plus aerial imagery and maps.

Internet Archive and Healthcare Advocates Settle Lawsuit

Healthcare Advocates, Inc and [the] Internet Archive, jointly announced today the settlement of the lawsuit brought by Healthcare Advocates stemming from allegations of computer hacking by a Pennsylvania law firm. The terms of the settlement are confidential.

In July 2005, Healthcare Advocates sued the Philadelphia-area firm Harding, Earley, Follmer & Frailey alleging copyright infringement and violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act based upon dozens of instances where the firm manipulated and abused the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, thereby gaining access to and copying historical Healthcare Advocates web site content stored on the Internet Archive web site without Healthcare Advocates’ permission. Internet Archive was included as a defendant in this lawsuit based on Internet Archive’s role in securing Healthcare Advocates’ archived web pages.

See Also: Internet Archive Sued Over Access To Pages
via Search Engine Watch Blog (July 13, 2005)

Source: Internet Archive

Chapter closes on a library tech pioneer
Betty Edison, the founder of Inmagic and a role model to many, passed away last month at the age of 78. She will be missed.

“She certainly was a very forward-looking person in library automation, and an innovator,” said Hope Tillman, director of libraries for Babson College… Inmagic co-founder Karen Brothers met Eddison at an MIT conference in the 1970s when Eddison was considering automatic typewriters to print catalogue cards. Brothers proposed a computer program to automate the process. Eddison took the idea and ran with it….”She was unstoppable,” Brothers said. “She wasn’t a technical person herself, but she would get information from others. She was at the forefront of building databases of textual content…Inmagic Chief Executive Phillip Green said Inmagic, which Brothers and Eddison founded without outside investors, now employs 50 workers and lists 5,000 customers.

A memorial service for Edison will be held September 9, 2006 in Lexington, MA. See this page for more about her life and a link to a guest book and how to make a donation in her name.

See Also: Inmagic News Release

NLM RSS Feeds and Podcasts
Six feeds and one podcast.

Source: NLM

+ Shop.emerald.com
[Emerald's] first online shop which offers an easy-to-use e-commerce platform for Emerald’s non-subscription products.

+ A century (and more) of physiology now online
Source: Physiology News
See Also: Wellcome Library Medical Journal Digitisation Project: New Journals Added

+ ScienceDirect Redesign Goes Live

More than a book a day challenged in U.S. schools, libraries

This year will mark the 25th anniversary of Banned Book Week.

From an ALA announcement:

More than a book a day faces expulsion from free and open public access in U.S. schools and libraries every year. There have been more than 8,700 attempts since the American Library Association (ALA) began electronically compiling and publishing information on book challenges in 1990.

Twenty-five years after the first observance of Banned Books Week, more than 1,000 people stayed past 1 a.m. debating a request to remove nine books – including “The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien and “Beloved” by Toni Morrison – from a Chicagoland school district. The books were ultimately retained.

“Forever” by Judy Blume was one of more than 70 titles a Fayetteville, Ark., mother requested be removed in 2005. Twenty-five years earlier, the book was restricted in the Park Hill (Mo.) South Junior High School library because the book promotes “the stranglehold of humanism on life in America.”

See Also: Materials for Banned Book Week

See Also: “It’s Perfectly Normal” tops ALA’s 2005 list of most challenged books

Federal Research Division Updates Country Profiles for China and Iraq

+ China
42 pages; PDF.

+ Iraq
26 pages; PDF.

Source: Library of Congress, Federal Research Division

Thanks to the newly married Phillip Lenssen* (congrats Phillip) for pointing to a new chart (upated daily) that lists the 100 most popular articles (in terms of hits) from the official English language site of Wikipedia. A pull-down menu (upper right) allows you to view rankings for other versions of the Wikipedia. It’s no real surprise to see sex related entries having lots of spots throughout the list (3 in the Top 10). For more Wikipedia stats, see this page. Item of note: The English language version of Wikipedia currently has about 1.3 million entries and received about 2100 new articles per day in June 2005. A year earlier (June 2004) Wikipedia (English) received 1256 new articles. The issue we wonder about is that with this type of growth can the checking, verification, etc., be effective? Will more people participate and those already participating devote more time to maintain (forget about the new content) what’s already available? Something worth watching over the next year or two.

See Also: Wikipedia founder seeks more quality (via AP)
Jimmy Wales talks about quality of an entry over quantity of entries.

We should continue to turn our attention away from growth and towards quality.

See Also: Kicking Wiki Out Of The Patent Office (via BusinessWeek)

On Aug. 15, the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office yanked Wikipedia from the digital toolbox its examiners use to help determine a patent application’s validity. But over the past several years, examiners used the online encyclopedia, which allows users to edit entries, to inform their decisions. Wikipedia has been cited in patent decisions on everything from car parts to chip designs.

“The problem with Wikipedia is that it’s constantly changing,” Patents Commissioner John Doll said. “We’ve taken Wikipedia off our list of accepted sources of information.” An agency spokesperson said inquiries from BusinessWeek about the use of Wikipedia led to the policy shift.

* Philipp is the editor of Google Blogoscoped and the creator and developer of the wonderful and amazing Games for the Brain site that we just posted about on Friday. When you need some fun and challenging mind stimulation, GFTB is a must. The new SpeedType game is very addictive.

Bibliography and Summary: Electronic Peer Review Management
“A variety of software tools are now available that enable the electronic management of peer review processes for scholarly journals. These tools promise to facilitate efficient and centralized control and/or supervision by journal staff of the submission, assignment, tracking and publication of articles though the web, as well as enabling a central archive of various tasks performed. Some programs keep all texts in on-line format throughout these processes, using multiple windows to allow reading, editing and on-line publication of articles, while others use automated ftp and email processes to exchange documents in standard formats. The specialized features available vary widely, but the more highly developed programs share many characteristics.”

Source: University of Michigan Library, Scholarly Publishing Office

New Report: Number of Jobs Held, Labor Market Activity, and Earnings Growth Among the Youngest Baby Boomers: Results From a Longitudinal Survey Summary

The average person born in the later years of the baby boom held 10.5 jobs from age 18 to age 40, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Department of Labor. Nearly three-fifths of these jobs were held from ages 18 to 25.

These findings are from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979, a survey of 9,964 men and women who were ages 14 to 22 when first interviewed in 1979 and ages 39 to 48 when interviewed most recently in 2004-05. These respondents were born in the years 1957 to 1964, the later years of the “baby boom” that occurred in the United States from 1946 to 1964. The survey spans a quarter century and provides information on work and nonwork experiences, training, schooling, income and assets, health
conditions, and other characteristics. The information provided by respondents, who were interviewed annually from 1979 to 1994 and biennially since 1994, can be considered representative of all men and women born in the late 1950s and early 1960s and living in the United States when the survey began in 1979.

Complete report also available as a 10 page PDF file.

Recently Released: Iran: Recognizing Iran as a Strategic Threat: An Intelligence Challenge for the United States
29 pages; PDF.

Source: Staff Report of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, Subcommittee on Intelligence Policy (via DoucuTicker.com)

SBA Introduces Podcasts for Business Owners (PDF; 94 KB)

The SBA podcasts provide an introduction to various small business topics, and will deliver business information and advice for new and established entrepreneurs on all aspects of starting, expanding and financing a small business, as well as business protection. The current list of podcasts includes the following subjects:
• Is Entrepreneurship for You?
• The SBA Small Business Training Network — Log On!
• Selecting a Business that Fits
• Disaster Preparedness for Business Owners
• Financing a Small Business

Download free from the SBA podcast library. New podcsts will be added monthly.

Source: U.S. Small Business Administration

Site24×7

This web-based service (FREE) service comes from AdventNet, the same company that also offers the Zoho “must see” web-based apps we posted about last week. It’s a tool of value to many including system librarians, webmasters, journalists, and others. I’ve been using it for a week and have zero complaints. Although many similar services exist, this one is very easy to use, offers lots of info, and is free.

What’s Available
+ Notification when a site goes offline and comes back online. Basically, Site24×7 will ping any url (http:// or https:// on most ports) up to once every five minutes. When a problem is detected the user is notified via email or SMS or both.

+ Site response times are also monitored and tracked. Data is available in chart form for the day, week, month.

+ Notification when a response time reaches a threshold you determine.

+ Notification when a specific portion of the page changes and/or specific words are added or removed. A way to monitor for possible defacements.
.
+ Ability to monitor web transactions.

Overall, this is one tool that should be considered by anyone looking to monitor the accessibility of any site or page

Here’s a weekly Site24×7 report for the url www.youtube.com.

* For monitoring URL’s for new pages, changes, new links, etc., we highly suggest a look at Web-Site Watcher. It’s an app that we depend on many times a day. Here’s an overview that Gary wrote for SEW last year. TrackEngine and Trackle are also noted.