Core Dump

MyFoodapedia is a site produced by the USDA Center for Nutrition and Policy Promotion that serves up nutritional information on common foods. For example, searching on potato brings up a list of common ways they're served. I selected baked with skin on and found that it's 157 calories. Adding sour cream adds another 50 calories. Deep fried french fries are really a bad way to eat pototos, it turns out. You can also compare two foods.

It's a useful site, although you can only browse generic foods and not brands.

Labels: health, reference

If you need help trying to figure out a way to graphically display some information, the Periodic Table for Visualization Methods is worth a look. It's set up like the standard periodic table of elements, but each cell is a different type of graphic. When you mouse over the cell, a popup window displays an example along with a brief explanation. Graphics are grouped by type of visualization: data, strategy, information, metaphor, concept, and compound.

It's a handy tool, although I do wish you could display the example graphics in a separate, larger browser tab.

Labels: reference, technical communication

Sometime early in the 1980s or thereabouts, Byte columnist Jerry Pournelle said that by the end of the century everyone would have access to all of the world's knowledge (or something to that effect - I don't remember the exact quote). With the development of the Internet and World Wide Web, his prediction was pretty well true by 2000. Now you can hold a large fraction of the world's accumulated knowledge in your hand in the form of the WikiReader, a small portable device that holds most of the Wikipedia.

My colleague, Scott Nesbitt, managed to score a review unit and has written a review of it. I had a look at it the other day and was quite taken by it - more by the idea of having that much information in my pocket than by the device itself, which is functional by not a knockout piece of design. But if I was a high school student, I think I'd be buying one -- even if my teachers wouldn't let me cite it as a source.

As my wife and I used the WikiReader, we considered who would best take advantage of it; besides the gadget addicts, that is.

Our conclusion? It would be a good fit in elementary and secondary school classrooms. The WikiReader probably wouldn't appeal to students at universities and colleges, where more rigorous standards for research apply. It's also great for parents who are traveling with kids and/or who are homeschooling their children.

For the average person, it's a useful and (fairly) up-to-date reference source that's more portable, and which has a much broader scope than a printed encyclopedia. And, as mentioned before, you don't need an Internet connection to use it.

Labels: reference, technology

The always useful ReasearchBuzz blog has some new posts about recent improvements to some of Google's search functions.

• The sandbox: Play around with Google's next-generation search infrastructure.

• Google News: Increases the size of its news archive.

• Google Images: Gets direct search options.

Labels: Internet, reference

Research Buzz points out a useful new language resource called WordNik. For any word you enter, it gives definitions, examples, related words, images, and usage statistics, and more - all on one neat page. This is going into my Links bar.

Labels: language, reference

Just in time for the summer barbecue season, here's a good article from the Wall Street Journal on how to barbecue a steak. (I wish I'd read it three hours ago). Along with the article, an interactive graphic on cheaper cuts that still grill well.

Labels: reference

Wolfram Alpha, the much hyped search engine by Wolfram Research, is now live. Calling it a search engine is a bit of a misnomer, because it's also a computational tool and a knowledge organizer. Too see what I mean, do a simple search, for example, "Canada" on Wolfram Alpha and Google and compare the results. You'll get a page of information, much like an almanac entry, with a collection of current statistics and links that let you drill deeper. You can also get the sources for the information.

It's still very much a tool under development - out of the four searches I tried, only one returned useful information, but when it works, it's truly useful.

Labels: Internet, reference

Here's a great mnemonic to help you remember the basics of trigonometry. I wish I'd known this when I was in high school.

For trig, all you need to remember is: "Two old angels / skipped over heaven / carrying a harp." Tangent = opposite / adjacent, Sine = opposite / hypotenuse, Cosine = adjacent / hypotenuse.

Thanks to John Russell for this one.

Labels: reference

It's been a long time since I read or studied the Bible. When I was in high school, we had a coupple of different versions and used several large, scholarly tomes in the school library for research. Now of course, it's much easier. For an example of how much easier, see The HTML Bible, a truly excellent resource published by John Hurt of Elmwood, Texas.

If you want to see an example of the empowering capabilities of hypertext and the Internet, you would be hard pressed to find a better example than this. For a start, you get the basic bible, King James Edition, online. Along with that, there are several Bible dictionaries and research books (Easton's Bible Dictionary, Henry's Bible Commentary, Nave's Bible Index are three of several) - all cross-linked back to the Bible. Or you can read the Bible with links to several of the reference books built in. Oh yeah, the Bible is searchable too.

But wait, there's more. For the Old Testament, you can read a parallel version that, for each verse, shows the original Hebrew, modern Hebrew, Latin vulgate, and several English translations. (For language buffs, this is fascinating - I could spend hours browsing this). As well, there are several spoken versions that you can listen to (although they didn't like Firefox 3 and wanted IE). And there's an extensive set of links to other Bible reference sites and software.

This is a remarkable resource, especially considering that it's free. They do produce downloadable and CD versions of the references for very reasonable prices. Mr. Hurt is to be commended both for the effort that obviously went into the site and for making it free.

Labels: books, reference

Here's a good dictionary of digital photography terms. Writers who work with graphics may find this helpful.

Labels: reference, technical communication

Academic Earth aggregates online lectures from several universities, including MIT, Yale, Princeton, and Harvard. It's pretty hard to beat a course on ancient Greece from Yale or an introduction to algorithms course from MIT. I do wish there were more history and English courses though.

Labels: reference

I don't use Adobe InDesign, but if I did, I'd be spending a lot of time at InDesign Secrets. As well as providing a lot of tips and resources, they also have a podcast and a videocast.

Labels: reference, software

I posted the other day about Sitepoint's beginner's guide to HTML. But they've got quite a bit more that's worth looking at. They've introduced a new reference site for HTML, CSS, and Javascript. The CSS reference will be especially useful for anyone using a modern help authoring tool, like RoboHelp 8, Flare, or WebWorks ePublisher.

To add to that, they've introduced a Firefox extension called Firescope that extends the capabilities of the popular Firebug developer's extension to give it even more power.

Based on what I've seen so far, the Sitepoint reference is among the very best out there and the Firescope extension makes it even more useful.

Now, if they'd just come out with an XML and XSLT reference ...

Labels: Internet, reference, software

I've been reading and enjoying Allen Wyatt's Word Tips newsletter for quite a while. Now he's branching out into a quite unexpected direction - cleaning tips. That's house cleaning, not registry cleaning. It's pretty good too. Of course, the main thing is to find the time to actually DO the cleaning ...

Labels: reference

The Perimeter Institute is a basic research think tank in Waterloo Ontario, founded by RIM CEO Mike Lazaridis. They specialize in seriously advanced physics and cosmology: quantum gravity, superstring theory, quantum information, particle physics and so on. They've set up a web page called What We Research with links to more resources, including an introduction to the subject, streaming lectures by Perimeter staff and visiting researchers, and links to external resources. They've also assembled learning packages for teachers and students; for example, The Mystery of Dark Matter.

This is a wonderful resource for anyone with a serious interest in science. And it's a good example of how the Internet can be used for the good of all of us. It makes me wish I was a science student again.

Labels: reference, science

Regular expressions are a powerful tool for manipulating text, but they can be difficult to understand. You can do some remarkable things with them in Microsoft Word, for example, but many Word users (probably most) don't know how they work. (A good explanation is is Jack Lyon's Microsoft Word for Publishing Professionals). Or you could go to Regular-Expressions.Info, which has comprehensive explanations of how to use regular expressions, tutorials, examples, and tools to help you with regular expressions. This is definitely a site you'll want to bookmark.

Labels: reference

I know a bit about Simplified English and I use Wikipedia quite a bit, but I didn't know that there is a Simple English Wikipedia. Even if you don't use the articles (and there aren't as many as on the main Wikipedia), this article on how to write in simple English may be useful.

Labels: language, reference

Abbie Hoffman's Steal This Book was one of the classic works of the 60s counterculture. It managed to be both politically outrageous and useful at the same time, especially if you were a cash-strapped university student. Now it's being updated in the form of a wiki, with a downloadable PDF version.

The first alpha release of Steal This Book Today has been released to the public and is available for download. This is an easy way to have an offline guidebook copy of the Steal This Book update for your computer or PDA, it is also what you need to print your own hard copy. It is split into four volumes and is over 500 pages of the most useful street and homeless survival combined with plenty of ways to fight oppression of all sorts. An alpha release is the first test release, some features are not complete or polished. Download it, print it, share it, edit it, steal it Today!

Labels: politics, reference

My son is taking trigonometry and algebra in high-school math right now, and it's not something that I can help him with without a big of a refresher. While I remember basic algebra pretty well, things like quadratics are kind of rusty, and I've forgotten most of the trig that I had to learn. I've been looking at math.com, which looks like it has a good set of both subject guides and refresher problems to work with (though no problems for trig).

Labels: reference

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy began in 1995 and now includes many hundreds of articles by well-known philosophers. There are many detailed biographical articles and quite a few on the more philosophical aspects of science, particularly some good articles on quantum mechanics.

Labels: reference, science

I'm not the most graphically oriented person around, as you can probably tell if you've looked at my web site. I work with a couple of software architects who create huge complex, multi-layered system diagrams that I could only dream of creating - my mind just doesn't work that way. So I am in awe of the people who created A Periodic Table of Visualization Methods. Not only is it a genuinely neat visualization in itself, but it's a truly useful resource for the graphically challenged looking for a way to reduce information to a diagram.

I hope in future versions, they can add the capability to expand the popup diagrams to a larger size, and possibly add links to resources or more information about the different types of diagrams and how to create and use them. However, other people are thinking along the same lines -- Chris Wallace has used an XQuery script to extract the diagrams and link them to Google searches of the diagram types, so you can see more examples. The Visual Literacy people who put the table together have also made it available as a PDF (although it lacks the popup samples) and provided a link to an academic paper explaining some of the concepts behind the diagram.

Thanks to the Content Wrangler for finding this one - it's a classic.

Labels: reference, technical communication

For some time, the Oxford University Press has been soliciting definitions and citations of words that have been coined in science fiction stories (robot and waldo are two that come to mind right off the top of my head). The fruits of this endeavour are now available in Brave New Words, The Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction. I'm somethhing of a dictionary junkie, and this is definitely going on my wantlist.

Citations are included for each definition, starting with the earliest usage that can be found. These citations are drawn not only from science fiction books and magazines, but also from mainstream publications, fanzines, screenplays, newspapers, comics, filk songs, and the Internet. In addition to illustrating the different ways each word has been used, citations also show when and where words have moved out of the science fiction lexicon and into that of other subcultures or mainstream English.

Brave New Words covers the shared language of science fiction, as well as the vocabulary of science fiction criticism and its fans--those terms that are used by many authors in multiple settings. Words coined in science fiction have become part of the vocabulary of any number of subcultures and endeavors, from comics, to neo-paganism, to aerospace, to computers, to environmentalism, to zine culture. This is the first book to document this vocabulary transfer. Not just a useful reference and an entertaining browse, this book also documents the enduring legacy of science fiction writers and fans.

Labels: books, reference, SF

Just as the Chicago Manual Style is the standard style guide for academic publishing, the AMA Manual of Style is the standard for medical and scientific publishing. The 10th edition has now been published.

The 10th edition has expanded its electronic guidelines, with the understanding that authors now routinely submit articles through online systems and often cite Web-only content. Ethical and legal issues receive increased attention, with detailed guidelines on authorship, conflicts of interest, scientific misconduct, intellectual property, and the protection of individuals' rights in scientific research and publication. The new edition examines research ethics and editorial independence and features new material on indexing and searching as well as medical nomenclature.

Labels: books, reference, technical communication

The Digital Library of India is an attempt to create a digital archive of all human knowledge, starting out with primarily Indian works. Currently, more than 36,000 books are online in English, with about 23,000 in other languages. Books are scanned, not converted to text format as in Project Gutenburg.

Labels: reference

Usable Help pointed me to an interesting project - WikiHow, which is a wiki with the goal of creating the world's largest how-to manual. So far, they're up to over 16,000 articles on a wide range of topics. And I do mean wide range - it's not limited to the usual computer hardware/software stuff you find on the 'net. For example, featured articles include "How to use a paint brush" and "Make blue cheese". Articles are divided into categories (Family Life, Hobbies and Crafts, Teenagers), and you can also search. I looked at several articles, and they were all reasonably well written. I'm going to bookmark this one - it looks useful.javascript:void(0)
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Labels: reference

MetaGlossary is a web site that offers over two million definitions for words, phrases, and acronyms by crawling other web sites. For words that have multiple meanings (I used "association" as a test), it groups the definitions by meaning (relationship, classes; organization, profit; community, together). This looks like another one worth bookmarking. ResearchBuzz has more about it.

Labels: language, reference