It's remarkable what you can find on the Web. One of our favorite sites -- OnlyBoth.com -- now rates hospitals, nursing homes, college finances and corporate income taxes by country.
Click "Benchmark a hospital" and type the name of a hospital. We learned that when CHI St. Vincent Infirmary -- listed on the site as "St. Vincent Infirmary Medical Center" -- is compared to the nation's nongovernment hospitals, it has the sixth-lowest rate of wounds that split open after surgery on the abdomen or pelvis. We then clicked on "What's best in class?" to compare it with similar hospitals, and we checked the box for those surgeries. The search showed us that Baptist Health Medical Center-Little Rock has an even higher success rate.
Back on OnlyBoth.com, click "Benchmark a nursing home." We searched for Sandalwood Healthcare in Little Rock. We clicked on "Where could it improve?" to discover that it had 87 substantiated complaints -- the third-highest of 15,665 nursing homes benchmarked. (The average nursing home has 3.5 complaints.)
Clicking on "Benchmark a country's tax system," we discovered that Bermuda is tied with eight other countries for the world's lowest corporate income tax rate. The rate is zero -- that's pretty low. The average is about 24 percent. In the U.S., it's 35 percent, or 39 percent if you count state taxes -- one of the highest rates in the world. But the amount of corporate taxes the U.S. actually collects as a percentage of its gross domestic product is among the lowest in the world.
As for college finances, Remington College's Little Rock campus has the fifth-highest return on net assets out of 1,831 private colleges. (We'd like to see their investment portfolio.)
College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass., ranked 34th in the U.S. News and World Report list of 919 liberal-arts colleges, but ranked third when the list is reduced to religiously affiliated liberal-arts colleges. On that list, the Jesuit institution was topped only by two Presbyterian colleges: Davidson College in North Carolina and Macalester College in St. Paul, Minn.
Parts and Labor
A reader writes that every time he's had his Yamaha stereo equipment fixed over the past 10 years, the price has been the same: $110.
The first time, the labor cost $30 and the transistor cost $80. Today, the labor is $90 and the transistor is $20. As the British say: "What you lose on the swings, you gain on the roundabouts."
Free Information
A reader wondered whatever happened to free 411 directory assistance. There's a free app for iPhones and an easy way to get that info from all other phones.
An app called 411 is available in Apple's App Store. We tried it on our iPad and it worked fine. You get the same results from WhitePages.com.
For users of Android, flip phones and landlines, dial (800) 373-3411 . You'll hear an ad at the beginning of the call and again when you get your number.
App Happy Trips
Google Trips is a free app for Android and iPhone. When you open it, you'll see trips you've already been on and trips you're planning. How do they know? Google culls them from your email; every place you've talked about is picked up. If you never mentioned it, it won't be there.
We found it to be a good reminder of where we've gone in the past six years. It's easy to forget -- and some of them were really forgettable. If you don't like this feature, you can turn it off.
We tapped on our trip to San Francisco and then tapped "things to do," "food and drink," and "getting around" for the next time we go. There's also a "need to know" category with info on hospitals, local currency and Wi-Fi hot spots.
Paint Shop
Corel's PaintShop Pro was one of the earliest photo editing programs we ever reviewed. We've looked at every version over the past 26 years. This program formerly cost hundreds of dollars, and we always felt it was for professional artists. But now it's only $60, and much more user-friendly. There's a free 30-day trial.
Tutorials and onscreen guides pop up when you start the program. They do a great job of explaining nearly everything. On the Corel website, there are even more tutorials for things like turning photos into coloring books. We like the basic "one-step photo adjust" command, which produced some of the best results we've ever seen. Some of the other adjustments are similar to controls found in Adobe's $120-a-year Photoshop.
Paintshop Pro comes with templates for making brochures, collages, greeting cards and social media posts. Our only complaint is many templates cost an extra $5. In the greeting cards area, for example, the only freebie was a one-page birthday card. If you're into making your own greeting cards, you can get thousands of templates, including photo cards, for around $30 on Amazon. Search for Nova Development's Greeting Card Factory, Hallmark, American Greetings and the great old Broderbund programs like Print Shop ($10 at Amazon).
In new features, PaintShop comes with its own screen capture program. It can capture sounds, images and website elements such as drop-down menus that only show up when you hover.
But the software tools that come with your computer are good enough for most of us. In Windows, type "Snipping Tool" into the search bar to find a good screen capture. On the Mac, hold down the Command and Shift keys and tap the number 4. Both operating systems do a good job of saving anything you see on your screen, and if you need to add text or arrows or underline things in your screenshot, you can bring the image into a free program like Windows Paint or Paintbrush on the Mac.
Bob and Joy Schwabach can be reached by email at bobschwa@gmail.com and joydee@oncomp.com.
SundayMonday Business on 10/03/2016