The South Carolina Office of Human Resources is offering a new feature, HR Podcasts. These are short 3-5 minute MP3 audio files updated weekly and “intended to provide our customers knowledge on current HR issues in the HR community” Topics featured so far include Electronic Data Storage, the new E-Recruitment system, and Onboarding. Listen to them while you work!

When that multi-syllable medical term pops up in your reading or your prime-time TV watching, no need to feel ignorant.  At MedlinePlus, you can search  in the Merriam-Webster medical dictionary and the A.D.A.M Medical Encyclopedia.

The A.D.A.M Medical Encyclopedia has over 4,000 physician-reviewed articles on diseases, tests, symptoms, injuries, and surgeries. It also contains an extensive library of medical photographs and illustrations.  It is also available in Spanish.

Now you can find out that libraries in the medical world can have a very different definition: “a collection of cloned DNA fragments that are maintained in a suitable cellular environment and that represent the genetic material of a particular organism or tissue <inserting segments from a library of human DNA into yeast cells — Science News>”

Census data can be confusing. Not everyone is born with a spreadsheet in their hand ready to take on large masses of numbers. That’s where Social Explorer comes in. This project from Queens College of the City University of New York uses interactive demographic maps to help you visualize just what those numbers mean. And a map is just more fun right?

Social Explorer has both free data to use and subscription-only data. Data available for the public to use includes US census data from 1940-2000, at the national, state, county, and sometimes tract level for mostly-general variables such as Employment or Race. Subscription-only data includes some block level, zip code and place level as well as more-specific variables such as Employment by Sex or Employment by Race.

Where this website really stands out is in the ease of use of the mapping interface and the amount of zooming in you can do. Looking at Columbia, you can see certain demographic trends very easily in a way that would be less meaningful in a non-map form. For example, the percentages of people in the educational profession go way up near the university. But family income is highest in Forest Acres and near Lake Murray.

In Social Explorer, you can also build tables for demographic information based on the 2000 Census. This is useful, but mostly the same interface as the detailed and custom tables you can make with American Fact Finder

Here is a map of Columbia by Median Family Income (2000 data).  Click on the map for the full image.