Stephen's Links to Useful and Official facts

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Links that don't fit anywhere else is a page of miscellaneous but useful web sites I really can't categorise.

UK Government information and statistics

UK Parliament for details of Bills (proposed law) and Hansard (debates). | OPSI for UK Acts (statute law)- and the thousands of Statutory Instruments now being used without review instead of primary legistlation. I like to read the little bits to be found in most modern laws which are often very interesting and rarely commented on. A more complete and updated set of current statutes can be found on UK Law Statute Database.

Revenue and Customs || Office of Fair Trading || UK DirectGov || UK Dept for Transport | | UK DCLG (odd new department)
Office of the Public Guardian re Powers of Attorney, mental capacity, and the Court of Protection.
UK Government News Network index of Government press releases for today only or sourceuk current and archived news of interest to and about the UK public sector.

If you want brief UK company info, go directly to the Company Search page of Companies House. Search for disqualified directors. For help with queries about what a Limited Company is and how it is supposed to work, they have lots of info in HTML and PDF format at Guidance booklets

The Official U K Statistics | Tim Berners Lee's gateway to UK Government data and apps is at data.gov.uk.
Available from this Office (free and online, as PDF files) are: the UK 2005 Yearbook - as well as previous years issues. Also, Living in Britain. Plus a very wide variety of Cost of Living indices.
There is also a fast UK cost of living index look up page. Series CZBH is the RPI inflation; Series CDKQ is RPIX inflation (all items excluding mortgage interest), series CBZX is RPIY (all items excluding mortgage interest and indirect taxes- sales tax, council tax and duties); series CZBI is inflation for all items excluding housing.

UK House Price Indices from the Government. || Recent sale prices, housing and neighborhood data from Mouseprice.com.

Personal Finance

For many people, rich and poor, young and old, banking and finance are something they know little about and find hard to discover. The British Bankers Association has a very readable site for everyone all the way up to big business, at Bankfacts.
The Financial Services Authority have a very clear and useful web site about all financial matters (redundancy, retirement, credit, saving, tax - lots!) under the banner of Money Made Clear with links to much more information held externally. Very useful. A few pages require javascript (eg savings tables) but most don't. Many documents are in PDF format.

Health

A lot of health information can be found at NHS Choices- However their web site is not entirely accessible- the Symptom Checker section uses images and CSS on-hover images navigation. If you need text navigation, amend your browser settings to ignore CSS (style sheets). The Initial Assessment section requires javascript. Much of the rest of the site is accessible. NHS Direct operate a UK telephone support line on 0845 4647.
More patient information is available from a commercial body that supplies leaflets for GP surgeries- Patient.co.uk.

SAD -UK website about Seasonal Affective Disorder- the Winter Blues.

The Legal system

Regretably many- especially young men- now face the wrong side of our criminal justice system. One way or another most folk will find themselves as witness, juror, victim or defendant. There is a super web site by CJS Online with lots of information for everyone. Also the Home Office have a web site on crime (their website is in the process of a rebuild). Community Legal Service is an official UK body which has info on common none-criminal legal problems including discrimination. Centre for Crime and Justice Studies has interesting comment and research articles.

Educational and informative web sites

The 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica is online - note this is mostly a raw OCR output and forgive the errors.
Many Unit conversions are possible- for UK Imperial liquid measure look to the top of the list for eg Br Pint, the default is US measure which differs. .
View or print a calendar - a month or year or any period. | | | UK History 1700-1950 (Spartacus)

A remarkable book by a talented decorator is "The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists" written way back in 1911 the subject material is ludicrously current. RTP is freely available on line - from Project Gutenberg as Text, HTML, Epub, Mobipocket and Plucker; and from Google books as page images of the Oxford print; also the Trades Union Congress, the owners of the manuscript, have the Gutenberg text alongside the page images of the handwritten MSS - with the text fully searchable.

Many lovely images of the solar system have now been taken, and on behalf of NASA, webarchive have created a web site that collects them together at NASA Images. If you do not wish to use javascript, the site remains accessible although obviously is very image oriented. Once you have selected your thumbnail and gone to its page, which without javascript will not show the chosen image, then without javascript you can download the image in zip form using the top right button, or to go to a more friendly page look at the bottom left for a link to "original url" and go there.

Mathematics can be fun. Martin Gardner, Clifford Pickover, David Singmaster- mathematicians that have kept me amused. On the internet, an excellent pot pourri of recreational maths can be found at Mathpuzzle.
Copyright? or Copyleft? An interesting article on intellectual property rights.

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