LLRXBuzz – December 18, 2000

Tara Calishain is the co-author of Official Netscape Guide to Internet Research, 2nd Edition, and author or co-author of four other books. She is the owner of CopperSky Writing & Research.



In This Issue:

New Connecticut And New Jersey State Court Resource

How Closely Do You Check Your Medication?

Water Water Everywhere — And Amazingly Well Organized!

Trying to Find a Good Web Host?

State Health Facts

North Carolina Creates Child-Care Information Database

Science Search Engine Being Developed

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New Connecticut And New Jersey State Court Resource

CourtLink has launched a new version of CaseStream eAccess service that offers Web-based access to both federal and state court records and added two additional state courts, New Jersey and Connecticut.

With CaseStream eAccess users can search for cases and retrieve documents across federal district courts, bankruptcy courts, and the federal court of claims and access select state and county courts in major metropolitan markets. Users may also search by case name, across multiple state courts in differing states, and search by case number in all available state and federal courts. You can check out the press release at http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/001213/wa_courtli.html.

How Closely Do You Check Your Medication?

The US Pharmacopeia has released their 1999 report on hospital medication errors. It reports 6,224 medication error records from 56 facilities, including community, government, and teaching hospitals. These errors were reported to MedMARx, an Internet accessible database for hospitals to report and track medication errors anonymously.

You can access this report at http://www.usp.org/frameset.htm?http://www.usp.org/reporting /medmarx/index2.htm. You’ll have to register to get access to the 30-page PDF report. The registration is pretty extensive, asking you for affiliation, name, address, phone number, and e-mail address. The site’s privacy policy is available at http://www.usp.org/privacy.htm .

If you’re not interested in registering and you just want a summary of medication errors, you can get ’em from the press release at http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/001213/md_usp_2.html .

Water Water Everywhere — And Amazingly Well Organized!

If you need information on water, check out the Water Librarian’s Home Page at http://www.wco.com/~rteeter/waterlib.html .

You’ll find, among other things, links to water databases, regional issues, environmental science pages, publishers of water-related materials, and several library/librarian links. Favorite sites are marked with a star; new sites are marked with a new icon (you might want to take that with a grain of salt, though, as apparently this site has not been updated since late October.)

This site also has a lot of other material, including FDA news and information, several communities, and adverse drug reaction news. I was pleasantly surprised at how much material was available for free (not even requiring registration.) Worth a look.

Trying to Find a Good Web Host?

With dot-com companies dropping left and right, sometimes trying to find a Web host feels like a nightmare. Web Hosts Online ( http://www.webhostsonline.com/ ) offers a variety of information on virtual Web hosts and dedicated server hosts on several different platforms. For each of those categories they also have “special offer” sections as well.

While searching for a host, you can a dizzying array of options to choose from, including preferred platform, programming language, database, and “miscellaneous options” (which include things like raw access logs, shopping carts, and FTP access.) You can also specify preferred price range and bandwidth. Search results include hosting costs, bandwidth, setup fees, storage space, and descriptions. The descriptions look like they were written by the companies themselves, so be prepared for a bit of hype. Lots of information here; a good place to start if you just need to get a line on what’s available.

State Health Facts

Kaiser’s State Health Facts (http://www.kff.org/docs/state/). Either click on a state on the map (http://www.kff.org/docs/state/state.html) or choose a state name from the lis t provided below the map . You’ll get a list of health facts about that state, including total non-elderly population, total low-income population, and total M edicaid spending in 1997. If you scroll down the page you’ll get historic health demographics for that state and how they compare with the country in general.

This site also has overview pages on Medicaid, Medicare, minority health, the health of the uninsured, etc. There’s also a large section on health issues in South Africa. Worth a look.

North Carolina Creates Child-Care Information Database

The state of North Carolina has created a site for looking up information on licensed child care centers. The site, at http://www.ncchildcare.net/ , covers child care centers, family child care homes, and day camps.

There are several different ways you can do a search; by license number; name, city, county, zip code, facility type, permit type, age (from 0 to 12), and whether or not they accept subsidized child care. Search results will give you the name of the facility, address, and license type.

Clicking on the facility’s name will give you details on the facility, including name, address, e-mail address and Web address (if available) date of last inspection, inspection rating, and inspection score. If you don’t understand some of the terms, terms that have an asterisk beside them are clickable and will take you to a definition.

At the top of the page are several “tabs.” Clicking them will take you to additional information on the facility. The License Information tab will, among other things, give you information on capacity, license date, and age range. Special Facility Features shows information provided by the care center (in one case, an adult to child ratio for the center.) The state does not confirm the veracity of that information. The owner information gives — surprise surprise — information on the owner, including mailing address, fax, and Internet contacts (if available.) DCD Visits log visits by the Division of Child Development (and whether there were any violations found.) Actions Taken? shows any actions taken by the DCD against the care center.

Finally, Need More Information? gives you options for other places to contact for information on child care in general and this institution in particular.

Science Search Engine Being Developed

Elsevier Science announced on Tuesday that they’re developing a search engine designed for finding scientific information. The engine is called Scirus ( http://www.scirus.com ).

While the full site will not launch until March of next year, you can preview a version now at the Web site. It’s a standard search form (in fact, the technology is provided by FAST Search and Transfer, the folks behind AlltheWeb.com.) I tried search for all the words adrenal insulin uptake. I got over 1390 results. Interestingly, the search is divided into three tabs: all the results (the default), free access, and restricted access. This is an elegant way to divide out the free and paid materials without having to do a lot of flipping back and forth. The restricted materials I saw were, as far as I could tell, Elsevier properties (surprise surprise.) At the bottom of each page you have the option to save your results. There’s also a list of keywords at the bottom of the page that you can use to narrow down your search. Go take a look. This could be mighty interesting if they get a huge mass of content.

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