Found this today

The Internet Speculative Fiction Database

The ISFDB is a community effort to catalog works of science fiction, fantasy, and horror. It links together various types of bibliographic data: author bibliographies, publication bibliographies, award listings, magazine content listings, anthology and collection content listings, and forthcoming books.

Via @pfanderson.

Hmmm...an interesting move

Amazon Starts Renting Out the Human Genome (via the Jedi Librarian)...

Forget books, MP3 players or vacuums. Amazon.com wants to offer you a copy of the human genome this holiday season.

Amazon Web Services, a subsidiary of Amazon.com, has started offering access to large collections of data. Business customers and scientists can take the information, which ranges from census databases to three-dimensional chemical structures and the genome, and use it as the basis for computing jobs. By gathering and storing the information, Amazon says that it can save businesses the step of assembling and managing data on their own.

That's a little disturbing

Britain is considering legislation to create a centralised database which will store details of all phone calls made, websites visited, and e-mails sent by UK citizens, ostensibly to fight crime and terrorism. Supposedly the content itself will not be stored. Still, opponents have labelled it as 'Orwellian' and a breach of the principles of a free society. I would like to think that the US, with its emphasis on civil liberties, would encounter great opposition in passing such legislation and could not get it through Congress, but then I had a lot more faith in the American government before the Bush Administration got a hold of things. Here's to the opponents in Britain prevailing.

Phone calls database considered
Warning over phone calls database
'No decision' on giant database
Giant database plan 'Orwellian'

A way to judge your hospital

Hospital death rates for key conditions unveiled

Hospital Compare allows you to find out death rates for individual hospitals by condition.

They also let you compare things like patient satisfaction and number of medicare patients treated for various conditions. Ours, being a tertiary-care facility, isn't in their database, but I checked other primary care facilities in Lexington. St Joseph (the main one) seems to have the highest patient satisfaction; Central Baptist seems to have a higher percentage of meeting standards of care. UK lags behind in both, but I'm not surprised. I'm not impressed by what I've seen of the university's health care system. I have a friend who works there. He never sees the same doctor twice. Their health insurance means they go through UK HealthCare, and there seem to be an inordinate amount of hoops to jump sometimes. I like the choices I have with my insurance better.