SELECTED WEBSITES

BUSINESS

EDGARScan
http://edgarscan.pwcglobal.com/servlets/edgarscan
PricewaterhouseCoopers maintains this site which is an interface to the SEC’s EDGAR filings. As stated in its introduction, EDGARScan fulls filings from the SEC’s servers and parses them automatically to find key financial tables and normalize financials to a common format that is comparable across companies. Hyperlinks will take the user to specific sections of the filing, including the financial statements, footnotes, extracted financial data and computed ratios. Tables showing company comparisons can be downloaded as Excel charts and interactive graphical financial benchmarking can be performed.

EDUCATION

Education Report Card
www.uschamber.com/icw/reportcard/default
This is a state-by-state report card assessing education systems in the following categories: academic achievement, academic achievement of low-income and minority students, return on investment, rigor of standards, and post-secondary and workforce readiness. State comparisons are also available on those measures. Reports for each state and an overall report on educational effectiveness are given with the information drawn from the National Center for Education Statistics and think tanks.

HUMANITIES

Urban Dictionary
www.urbandictionary.com
This is an online slang dictionary for the MySpace generation. The words and definitions are added by users in Wikipedia style. Urban Dictionary was created in 1999 and has over 2 million definitions. Entries consist of slang words and phrases including profanity and names of notable personalities. In 2006 this site had 50 million visiters. For MySpace devotees.

NATURAL SCIENCES AND MATHEMATICS

Molecule of the Month
www.chm.bris.ac.uk/motm/motm.htm
Molecule of the Month is just that. Every month a new molecule is added and that new addition is highlighted. Chemical structures, historical background, biological relevance, toxity levels and physical and chemical properties are among the information presented. The contributors (who are identified) to the site are world-wide but mainly from the UK and US. The links will take the user to a university chemistry department or a commercial site. Propanethial S-oxide (the molecule that makes you cry when peeling onions) is September’s offering. The links at the end of the article include an excerpt from The Natural History by Pliny the Elder, the website of Onion World magazine and Scientific American. There is also a step-by-step guide to the proper way to slice an onion so as to minimize its cell damage thus causing less watering of the eyes. Links to more molecule collections are provided. The website has been available since 1996.

SOCIAL SCIENCES

Vinnie’s Home Page: Vincent Ferraro, Resources for the Study of International Relations and Foreign Policy
www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/feros-pg.htm
Professor Ferraro is the Ruth C. Lawson Professor of International Politics at Mt. Holyoke College. This fascinating site has ten major categories with hundreds of links relating to international politics back to the time of Herodotus. There are Government and Non-Government home pages, News Sources, Current Events Topics, Intergovernmental home pages and Documents. A search engine within the site can search across these categories. Typing “WTO” by keyword yielded 52 hits. This is a very user-friendly and intuitive site.