According to today's press release from NOAA, the National Archives (NARA) and NOAA are teaming up and joining the Old Weather Project hosted at Zoonivers.org to crowdsource the transcription of historic ships' logs in order to extract critical environmental data. The Old Weather Project began over 2 years ago with British Royal Navy log books -- 16,400 volunteers have transcribed 1.6 million weather observations so far! Transcribed data produced by Old Weather volunteers will be integrated into existing large-scale data sets, such as the International Comprehensive Ocean Atmosphere Data Set (ICOADS). Human volunteers are so important in this case because Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technologies cannot currently recognize hand-written text.

Before there were satellites, weather data transmitters, or computer databases, there were the ship’s logs of Arctic sea voyages, where sailors dutifully recording weather observations. Now, a new crowdsourcing effort could soon make of the weather data from these ship logs, some more than 150 years old, available to climate scientists worldwide.

NOAA, National Archives and Records Administration, Zooniverse — a citizen science web portal — and other partners are seeking volunteers to transcribe a newly digitized set of ship logs dating to 1850. The ship logs, preserved by NARA, are from U.S. Navy, Coast Guard and Revenue Cutter voyages in the Arctic between 1850 and the World War II era.

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Organizers hope to enlist thousands of volunteers to transcribe scanned copies of logbook pages via the Old Weather project with an eye to Information recorded in these logbooks will also appeal to a wide array of scientists from other fields – and professionals from other fields, including historians, genealogists, as well as current members and veterans of the U.S. Navy and Coast Guard.

[HT to Gary Price at InfoDocket for calling our attention to this project!]

Here's a post we just put up that offers a brief overview to a directory where you can listen live to first responders (police, fire, ems). The directory is free to use and the streams are free to access.

Of course, not every county or city has a feed but, for the most part the I-95 corridor is well represented.

Also, the directory is always online (not just a storm resource) and is national in scope. From the Juneau Police Dept. to the Pinellas County Fire and EMS and many other locations.

http://infodocket.com/2011/08/26/hurricane-irene-listen-live-online-to-first-responders-throughout-entire-storm-area/

A second post points out the fact that the FEMA National Situation Daily update is available online (can also be of use after the event) as well as a number of mobile tools from the National Hurricane Center including an option to be alerted to new updates via email or text.

http://infodocket.com/2011/08/25/reference-hurricane-irene-femas-nationa...

Transportation

You can always listen live to most major airport towers and centers in the U.S., Canada, and elsewhere.
http://liveatc.net

and finally, the AMTRAK Northeast Corridor Twitter Stream and Amtrak (National) on Facebook.

From the GPO:

The U.S. Government Printing Office (GPO) is providing permanent public access to the Coastal Zone Information Collection (CZIC) through the agency’s Federal Digital System(FDsys).

"GPO is delighted to partner with NOAA Coastal Services Center to provide permanent public access to the valuable digital Coastal Zone Information Collection,” said GPO’s Superintendent of Documents Mary Alice Baish. “GPO encourages Federal agencies to take advantage of FDsys’ preservation repository capabilities as a
way to ensure longevity and provide the public with permanent access to their Federal documents.”

Read the Complete Announcement

The Education Dept's ERIC Clearinghouse gave notice of this recent report on educational potential in Second Life:

ERIC #: ED493670
Title: Proceedings of the Second Life Education Workshop, Part of the Second Life Community Convention (1st, San Francisco, California, August 18-20, 2006)

As a volume of proceedings, this is a compilation of papers. My favorite paper based solely on title from these proceedings is "Down the Rabbit Hole ... or How the NMC Took the Red Pill and Got a Second Life (Larry Johnson)."

From a government information perspective though, people might be more interested in "Designing an Educational Island inside Second Life for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Earth System Research Laboratory (ESRL) (Eric J. Hackathorn)"

Both papers can be accessed at the link above.

It also appears that at least some of the content in the ERIC database is visible to Google, since I received this link in a Google Alert. It would be interesting for someone to research whether ALL of the ERIC content is accessible through Google since we've reported on significant amounts of government information are hidden from Google.