Dirt Diggers Digest No. 42
September 16, 2003
Editor: Philip Mattera
1. Database documents scientists' ties to industry
2. How to search 11 billion web pages
3. Valuable information source for electric utilities
4. Corporate campaigners conference set for October
5. The holes in EPA's ECHO database
6. Compendium of advertising industry data
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1. Database documents scientists' ties to industry
In Dirt Diggers Digest No. 40 we reported on a study by the Center
for Science in the Public Interest about the links between non-profit
organizations and the food and drug industries. CSPI has now
converted its research on the subject into an online resource called
the Integrity in Science Internet Database. Searchable by name, topic,
university or company, the database describes the ways in which
corporate interests fund (and presumably influence) scientific
research. The information comes from sources such as scientific
journals, press releases, websites, resumes and conference programs.
It can be found at http://www.cspinet.org/integrity/database.html.
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2. How to search 11 billion web pages
The Internet Archive <www.archive.org>, a 100-plus-terabyte archival
collection of webpages also known as the Wayback Machine, has
introduced keyword searching for the first time. The Recall feature
<http://www.archive.org/web/web.php> will initially search 11 billion
of the 30 billion pages contained in the Internet Archive. Search
results include a graph showing the distribution of hits over time.
The Internet Archive is now even more useful for things such as
showing changes in the content of a corporate website over time.
Speaking of search engines, the web research world has been abuzz
recently with the revelation that Google has a feature called a
Supplemental Index that is apparently searched only when the search
engine does not find adequate results. As Danny Sullivan, editor of
Search Engine Watch points out in a recent article
<http://searchenginewatch.com/searchday/article.php/3071371>,
the existence of this two-tier index raises questions about Google's
implicit claim on its home page that it searches more than 3.3 billion
pages.
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3. Valuable information source for electric utilities
As a result of the recent blackout, electric utilities are much in the news
these days. This gives somewhat more significance to the recent
announcement by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission that it
has upgraded its online archive of company filings and changed the
name of that archive from FERRIS to eLibrary. The archive -- which can
be accessed at http://www.ferc.gov/docs-filing/elibrary.asp -- contains
a variety of filings, but the most useful is probably the Form 1, the annual
report that must be submitted by major electric utilities. Form 1 contains
much of the same financial information that a publicly traded utility would
file in its 10-K, but it has much more extensive data on operations and
details on items such as tax payments and credits that do not appear
in 10-Ks.
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4. Corporate campaigners conference set for October
The Empowering Democracy conference for corporate campaigners,
originally scheduled for last June in Arkansas, will now take place
October 9-11 in Oakland, CA. The event brings together campaigners
from a variety of movements (environmental, labor, anti-globalization, etc.)
for networking, discussion and skills training (including a workshop on
corporate research). For more details and registration forms, see
http://www.empoweringdemocracy.org.
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5. The holes in EPA's ECHO database
Last December, in Dirt Diggers Digest No. 25, we reported that the
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency had finally put compliance
information online in a database called ECHO (Enforcement and
Compliance History On-Line). That was welcome news, but a feature
on the recently revamped website of the Working Group on Community
Right to Know <www.crtk.org> points out that ECHO has some holes.
CRTK says: "Because states are not required to report all enforcement
activities to EPA, ECHO is incomplete for many smaller facilities. For
example, ECHO does not include violations, enforcement actions, or
penalties for more than 130,000 'non-major' dischargers under the Clean
Water Act." CRTK provides a table showing the types of data missing from
ECHO: <http://www.crtk.org/detail.cfm?docID=671&cat=information%20reform>.
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6. Compendium of advertising industry data
Advertising Age, the bible of the consumer manipulation business, publishes
an annual compendium of data on the industry. The 100 Leading National
Advertisers is a directory of major corporations, outlining the extent of each
one's spending broken down by brand and by medium. The 2003 version of
this useful information can be found in a 73-page PDF file at:
http://www.adage.com/images/random/lna03.pdf
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Philip Mattera
Director of the Corporate Research Project
Good Jobs First