U.S. Congress voting

The great researchers at the Washington Post created a database that tracks member voting from both House and Senate. You can browse every vote since 1991, and can search by House or Senate member, by state, vote missers, bills, most voted on, vote margins and more. Here is the list (with links) of North Carolina 109th Congressional members.

Poverty and Opportunity

The Brookings Institution recently released a 80 page report (PDF) titled, "From Poverty, Opportunity: Putting the Market to Work for Lower Income Families. From the executive summary:
"In general, lower income families tend to pay more or the exact same consumer products than families with higher incomes....At least 1.6 million lower income adults pay excessive fees for furniture, appliances, and electronics. And countless more pay high prices for other necessities such as basic financial services, groceries, and insurance....Reducing the costs of living for lower income families by just one percent could add up to over $6.5 billion in new spending power for these families."

Top 10 Medical Web Sites

The Medical Library Association lists their top 10, most useful medical web sites for health consumers.

35 ways to use RSS feeds

Marketing blogger, Steve Rubel has compiled a list of ways to use RSS feeds.

Southern Newspaper Publishers Association

This week’s SNPA eBulletin contains links to information on the SNPA First Amendment Summit - Sept 15. Paul Newby, associate justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court, will be the keynote speaker.

Also in this week’s eBulletin are:

How to save $200 per person at the SNPA Annual Convention
News about SNPA people
Links to stories you’ll want to read

NatureServe Explorer

NatureServe is a non-profit conservation organization that collects and manages detailed local information on plants, animals, and ecosystems and is an authoritative source for information on more than 65,000 plants, animals, and ecosystems of the United States and Canada, and they have more than 1,700 species images.

You can search the database for species or ecological communities & systems.

Education reporters

The National Center for Educational Statistics has recently released a report (with stats) showing the relationship between students' degree commitment and continued enrollment.