CDC Introduces New Website to Help Employers Combat Obesity and Reduce Health-Related Costs

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) today unveiled LEANWorks!, a Website designed to help businesses address obesity. LEAN stands for Leading Employees to Activity and Nutrition. The new Website was announced at a National Business Group on Health meeting in Washington, D.C.

“CDC LEANWorks! was developed in direct response to organizations asking CDC for help in addressing the obesity epidemic. Specifically they wanted to know what interventions were effective in helping employees maintain a healthy weight,” said William Dietz, M.D., Ph.D., director of CDC’s Division of Nutrition, Physical Activity and Obesity. “CDC has identified science-based interventions that work to prevent and control obesity. CDC LEANWorks! provides the tools that employers need to take action.”

The free Website was developed particularly for small and mid-size companies, which typically have more limited resources to devote to obesity prevention efforts. However, the tools and resources available on CDC LEANWorks! can benefit companies of any size. CDC LEANWorks! can help employers calculate the cost of obesity for their organizations and develop tailored approaches to help control these costs through interventions such as fitness classes, lunchtime health education sessions, weight management programs, and more.

Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

Customizable Interactive Map Shows U.S. Alternative Fuel Data

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and the National Renewable Energy Lab (NREL) announced the launch of a comprehensive mapping tool to help industry and government planners implement alternative fuels and advanced vehicles. The new TransAtlas tool combines several different types of geographic data to identify areas with potential for developing advanced transportation projects. It is sponsored by DOE’s Clean Cities initiative, which aims to reduce petroleum consumption in the transportation sector by promoting advanced vehicle technologies and alternative fuels. This interactive mapping tool is available by visiting www.afdc.energy.gov and clicking on the TransAtlas icon.

Source: National Renewable Energy Lab (NREL)

From a News Post:

Collaborative technology developer WebNotes has released WebNotes Pro to the public. The hosted service is designed to help researchers and students share and annotate content and disseminate work through automatically generated reports.

WebNotes Pro, which has been in a private beta since December 2008, is an online research tool that allows users to highlight and annotate their work. It provides the ability to place sticky notes on documents and highlight text in various colors. Annotated content can then be shared with colleagues using e-mail or permanent links. The service can also generate reports automatically and output the reports as HTML and PDF documents.

Access to the basic WebNotes service is always free. The Pro Version costs $9.95/month.

Source: T.H.E. Journal

From the Article:

This week I tested a solution that might have made my quest for boots a little simpler. Snipi, which became available as a free download from Snipi.com on Monday, helps you organize your online-shopping results by gathering, or “snipping,” product information from Web pages and saving the information to lists.

These lists are stored on your personalized Snipi page, where you can access them later. Snipi also can save photos and videos to lists. And it has a coordinating iPhone app that shows up-to-date versions of the lists created on the computer, so you can have them with you on the go.

Source: D: All Things Digital (WSJ)

From a WorldCat Blog Post:

We now have a WorldCat list widget available - you can see it in action here on the right hand side of the WorldCat Blog. You can customize the widget to display items on your public WorldCat list - just copy the HTML code in to your website and include the ‘List ID’ for your list.

Source: WorldCat.org

A full batch of news and new resources from Roddy MacLeod and crew at the Heriot-Watt University Library.is

Direct to Newsletter

You can access the feed here to place into your RSS aggregator.

For many more Swine Flu resources from a number of sources, see this ResourceShelf post from Tuesday.

Source: WHO

From the Website:

Key documents from the life and times of Henry VIII, the pious yet bloodthirsty king whose reign forever changed the nature of England. With video extracts from David Starkey’s acclaimed Channel 4 series ‘Henry VIII: The Mind of a Tyrant’.

This new online gallery went live at about the same time a new exhibit about Henry VIII opened at the British Library in London.

Source: BL

From a UN Pulse Blog Post:

The World Food Programme (WFP) has posted its Food Aid Information System (FAIS) with its Policy Resources. The FAIS database contains comprehensive data on food aid flows and was developed to aid in the coordinated international response to food aid shortages.

Direct to Food Aid Information System

Source: World Food Programme (via UN Pulse)

From an Article:

DirectGov said it had launched Moneyspeak in the wake of the chancellor Alistair Darling’s Budget as an interactive tool aimed at putting economic terms into context. The tool can be shared via social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace.

It has two functions. The first is a search bar which can be used to enter a financial word or phrase. Money speak will then pick up relevant references from across the web.

The second is that Moneyspeak identifies information about the chosen search term by linking to the relevant Directgov pages. Searchable terms include quantitative easing and fiscal stimulus.

See Also: Direct to Moneyspeak

Source: Kable’s

New EU election predictor resource

Who will win seats in the next European parliament?

A new resource called Predict 09.EU has just been launched to help you do this. It provides free access to predictions of the outcome of the June 2009 European Parliament elections which are based on a statistical model of the performance of national parties in European Parliament elections, developed by three leading political scientists: Simon Hix (London School of Economics), Michael Marsh (Trinity College Dublin), and Nick Vivyan (London School of Economics). The website provides free access to background information on the methodology used as well as weekly updated predictions of voting trends and patterns. It includes graphs of predictions of the composition of the European Parliament as a whole and of results in individual member nations.

Source: Intute

+ NewsTrendz

Normalizes Google Trends, Twitter Trends, and Yahoo Buzz to find out why they are hot across Twitter, News, Blogs, and Web Search.

+ Guardian Trends

Produces graphs of how often things are mentioned on guardian.co.uk.

+ Maponics Neighborhood Boundaries

Shows US neighborhood boundaries and neighborhood names, pulling from Maponics Neighborhood Boundaries GIS mapping data.

Note: You can also find neighborhood maps (browse by neighborhood name) via MelissaData

+ Birds of the World

Browse through birds of the world, categorized by continent and country. When you click a bird link, photos are retrieved from Flickr, and Wikipedia integration appears.

Source: ProgrammableWeb

A few weeks ago we posted about a new and FREE question answering service named Aardvark (aka “Vark”). Via IM, it finds people (your friends and friends of friends) who might have the answer to your query whatever it may be. More here. It does not require any new software, you simply use the AOL (AIM), MSN Messenger, or Google Talk instant messaging service. It also works using e-mail.

Aardvark is a closed beta at the moment but we still have a few logins available courtesy of the Vark team. Just send along an email message with the word “Vark” in the subject and we will do our best to get you started with the service.

More about the company and its investors (some big names) here.

+ Lexipedia
Visualize words/sentences using Lexipedia.

Where words have meaning

+ CallGraph

Skype recording, transcription, collaboration

+ Twitter Job Search
Locate job openings via the Twitter database.

+ Myebook
Libraries might want to create e-brochures using this free service.

Source: MoMB

From an Article:

The free ATM Hunter application, developed by MasterCard, is now available through Apple’s iTunes Store. The app will allow iPhone users to enter in an address or airport location to locate the nearest machine, while iPhone 3G users can find their location automatically with the GPS on their device. The app can narrow down choices of ATMs, such as those that can accept deposits, those from the consumer’s own bank — which can reduce withdrawal fees — or ATMs at banks with drive-through or wheelchair-accessible features.

Direct to ATM Hunter

Source: Credit Card News