ORACLES: The Thread.

I use crimemapping.com, my newspaper's crime blotter, Alaska State Troopers warrants report, and good old human intel.

Keeping up with news is good. Often your areas government will post surprisingly useful info in an effort for open government.

What might be a good topic is Freedom of Information Act, and if people used have used that for RLSH research, if so in what capacity and how it went down.

I've done FOIA, it's very straight forward. There are numerous simple templates online to choose from. As a journalist, I have a greater ability to access some of the extensive material since the fee can be waived, so I've done a few (fruitless) FOIA requests.

I'm liking all the information that is flowing... Now I'm just an average schmo and you guys are mentioning things I've never heard of. Is it possible to get a breakdown of these different resources and what areas they cover?

It all depends on the information you want. I wrote an article on crime mapping tools as a reference:

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Spokeo is a personal information website. John Doe lives and 666 Main Street and he uses Verizon for his cell phone bill. Here's a breakdown of his likely ethnicity, income and job based on his neighborhood.

Radaris and LexisNexis can be helpful here too. Facebook, ditto, could give you very personal information.

Government sites can give you homeless data, wanted criminal posters, missing persons posters, crime breakdown, at risk neighborhood income, etc.

Several non profit advocacy groups can give you homeless data and missing persons information on par or exceeding the government sources.

Twitter and RSS Feeds can also be good to keep up with news, breaking or otherwise. You need to devour investigative journalism so you can put statistics and findings in a larger context.

For example, what criminals target airports? Conventional wisdom suggests something violent, like terrorists, but there are far more thieves targeting the infrastructure of airports to steal copper piping to sell, as the price of copper has exploded.

Just some off the cuff basic stuff. What do you all feel is your main target of research?

How about dealing with the Orcal of Seasons and the Orcal of Time?

Polarman wrote:

How about dealing with the Orcal of Seasons and the Orcal of Time?

No zelda references please.

Zelda, specifically, is not allowed?

Just trying to keep it on topic.

I am told that if you have cable tv, you can find information on local most wanted criminals. I don't have a tv, so I can't vouch for the usefulness of this resource. Anyone know anything about this?

Local wanted criminals would also be found on the local PD's website, if they are up to date on their stuff.

Oooh, now this does sound like something I can be useful with since I'm not ready, or in an area that really needs it, for patrolling. I'm working towards being a librarian, and currently have quite a bit of access to library resources, as well as access to a larger amount of information search engines than people without academic (or journalistic as Zimmer pointed out) resources.

I have access to 72 separate search engines, an expansive dissertation collection, and so many encyclopedias that I think they may be apparating into place from all over the world to my school's library. So I would be more than willing to offer Oracle help.

Krystalline, we definitely need to exchange resource lists and geek out like library nerds sometime.

Also, it's Friday night, everyone's out on patrol and I'm not Oracling for anyone. Very sad.

Hopefully, I'm not alone in thinking that half of my prep for RLSH-work doubled as oracle-training. There's a lot of tech and people to get to know before you can do this well. The history of the group can help as well.

Couple of tips:
This has been said in other threads, but significant others can make great oracles. Not only is it a way to introduce them to this, it's also a good way to keep in touch while you're out and about for multiple hours outside of work. Granted, not exactly what I'd call a great date night.

Since I've graduated, I've lost a lot of my sources for peer-review articles. If you're in school currently, you might consider getting an external hard-drive and downloading as many articles in your field as you can before you get cut off. I'm a bio-guy, so if I had been thinking I would have filled a terabite up with all sorts of nerdery, but colleges often have access to peer-reviewed articles on criminology, engineering, and social sciences.

Some homeless outreach groups have to be literally infiltrated in order to gain good info from them. A lot of tent-cities aren't legally existing and go to great means to hide their whereabouts and movement, but they often keep in touch with outreach groups. Volunteering with the NPO's is a great way to get access to the whereabouts of these people.

In addition to the shared-resources of the Oracle network (Perhaps you could share passwords to various resources and change them periodically, or just put in search requests to the people who have the access), the network would serve as a list of people available to oracle. That could be expanded upon, possibly set up a thread or an IRC channel that oracles can log into when they are free to "work".

Bridges, that is an excellent idea. I've wanted an external hard drive for a while, but now I know that I'll definitely get one and download as many articles as I can.

Take that.

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And that.

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And that.

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Niiice

That whole thing looks really useful/interesting. You started that... yesterday?

I've been the Technology and Information Officer for the NYI for 2 years and a technology and international journalist for 3. This is just stuff I had in other places, and it's great to get it all in one place, organized. But yes, the wiki is less than 24 hours old.

I always thought of an Orcal as a gigantic bluish green glowing head in a jar who is commanding the little robot dude to dance around saying AyAyAyAYAi every time something goes wrong

Polarman you always have such fantastic insights. What would we do without you?

Just cheer up

Polarman wrote:

I always thought of an Orcal as a gigantic bluish green glowing head in a jar who is commanding the little robot dude to dance around saying AyAyAyAYAi every time something goes wrong

zordon from power rangers.

but I gotta agree.

I Had Plans To Bring Oracle To Life Actually The Entire DC Comic Book History To Life We Need To Change The Attitude In This World So This Is When Im Good Ready & Rich Ill Create The WatchTower By Going To Nasa & Russia Russia Is Making A Virgin Galactic Space Hotel Look Its Real Than Ill Get Russia & Nasa Hopefully To Combine To 2 And Create The DC Universe Need To Work To Get The DC Universe Real Thats What Batman Did Now Im Doing Right After I Graduate From HighSchool Shit