Scout Report: Week ending September 2, 1994

September 2, 1994

The Scout Report is a weekly publication offered by InterNIC Information Services to the US. research and education community and others who will benefit from the listed resources. Included are selected new and newly-discovered online resources, network news, and bits of net culture. The Scout Report is accessible via gopher and World Wide Web, and is distributed in both ascii and html formats via electronic mailing lists.

To access past issues of the Report or to browse the current issue via gopher or WWW:

http://www.internic.net/infoguide.html
gopher is.internic.net choose Information Services/Scout Report

See the end of the report for additional information and detailed access and subscription instructions.

Highlights in this week's Report:

  • Several new education resources
  • The Peabody Museum gopher site expands content and functionality
  • InterNIC Directory Services expands the Directory of Directories
  • NII section overflowing
  • National Hockey League information on the 'Net

World Wide Web

  • The Center for Renewable Energy and Sustainable Technology, a 501(c)(3) organization in Washington, DC, announces Solstice, a file server with state-of-the-art information on renewable energy, energy efficiency, the environment, and sustainable community development.
  • The Chesley Bonestell Art Gallery was created so that people world wide could view the art work of the astronomical painter, Chesley Bonestell, who was known in the fields of architecture, motion picture illustration, and astronomical art. Bonestell worked on the Golden Gate Bridge, the Chrysler Tower, and films such as War of the Worlds. Digitized views of 26 original painting in a private collection are all inventoried, researched to the Bauder Catalog, and annotated with information collected from various sources.
  • The Consortium on Green Design and Manufacturing is an interdisciplinary research effort in the College of Engineering at U.C.Berkeley and an industry/university partnership focused on issues related to environmentally-conscious product design and manufacturing. The page contains information on current research, industry partners and general background on green manufacturing.
  • Coombs Computing Unit at the Australian National University, Canberra now administers CERN's Virtual Library page on Demography & Population Studies. The server has links to 105 sites worldwide which may be of interest to demography and population researchers and others. Listings are nicely organized by access method.
  • The HotList of K12 Internet School Sites: the latest in K12 Internet School Sites are linked from this home page, which includes 11 Elementary Schools, 4 Middle/Junior High Schools, 32 High Schools, 17 School Districts Sites, and 7 State/Regional Sites.
  • The Hub is an Internetworked resource for mathematics and science education whose goal is to transform the technological potential of recent developments in telecommunications into services of value to educational policy-makers, administrators, educators and students in the Northeast and the islands. The Hub provides services that can help to publish curricula, projects in progress, requests for proposals, and to share data. It is also an educational resource, making available newsletters, curriculum materials, and software in support of the greater educational community as well as provide references to valuable information from across the internet.
  • The Institute for the Learning Sciences at Northwestern University is now offering Engines for Education, a hyper-book discussing what's wrong with the education system, how to reform it, the role of educational technology in reform, and progress made at the Institute using computers to provide motivating learning environments that let students learn things by doing them. Engines is constructed as an ASK system, a form of structured hypermedia developed at ILS based on the metaphor of a question-answer conversation.
  • InterNIC Directory and Database Services has added 74 resources to the Directory of Directories this month.
  • National Wetlands Inventory's World Wide Web server includes a U.S. map indicating availability of both hardcopy and digital versions of wetlands maps. Or you can directly access their WAIS database to search their metadata index. Links to the Wetlands Inventory FTP files and ordering information for hardcopy versions is also available.
  • The Russian and East European Studies Home Pages, a comprehensive hypertext guide to the worldwide network-accessible resources available to scholars in the interdisciplinary study of Russia and Eastern Europe has been improved and expanded. Resources organized by discipline, type, and links to the homepages of 16 related countries.
  • The U.S. Department of Commerce's Economics and Statistics Administration's WWW servers for the National Trade Data Bank and the Economic Conversion Information Exchange are now available. These servers make use of the University of Massachusetts's Center for Intelligent Retrieval's natural language query software.

Gopher

Email/FTP

  • Division of Endangered Species of the US Fish & Wildlife Service has made available the following items on their Library Server: The List of Threatened and Endangered Species, The Plant Notice of Review, The Endangered Species Act of 1973, and Species Maps.

    email to: r9irmlib@mail.fws.gov
    in the subject line type: SEND HELP

  • The Internet Press -- A guide to electronic journals about the Internet. Provides some guidance on what's out there and what's good. Multiple access methods included where available. Some of the publications are free, some cost money. Email access, or check out the copy on the InterNIC InfoGuide which includes links to the referenced items.

    send email to: savetz@rahul.net
    in the Subject line type: send ipress

    to receive future updates automatically:
    in the subject line type: subscribe ipress

  • The US Environmental Protection Agency has established a new forum concerning the US/Mexico border. The purpose of the discussion group is to begin a dialogue among individuals and groups in the United States, Mexico, and elsewhere who are conducting research or work concerning the US/Mexico border environment. Government and non-government participation is welcome.

    send mail to: listserver@unixmail.rtpnc.epa.gov
    in the message body type: Subscribe us_mexborder <your name>

  • The wellnesslist list is founded for the purpose of discussing issues concerning Health/ Nutrition/Wellness/Life Expectancy/Physical Fitness, and the books, experiences, and solutions recommended by the participants. This can and should include announcement of and reviews of books that include solutions, nutrition related position papers, requests for information, recommendations of participants, healthy recipes, nutrition and fitness related product announcements, and general discussion of related issues.

    email to: majordomo@wellnessmart.com
    in the body of the message type: subscribe wellnesslist

National Information Infrastructure

  • Released at the end of July and now available via gopher and WWW: The Computer Science and Telecommunications Board of the National Research Council has published: Realizing the Information Future, The Internet and Beyond by: The Nrenaissance Committee. It is a "new study (which) revisit(s) the issues addressed by the CSTB in a 1988 report "Toward a National Research Network" The report views the internet as a "distributed information and communications system." The committee supports a vision of the NII as "the full integration of communications and information infrastructures" supported by an "Open Data Network (ODN)". It rejects the either or notion of the future being either a pure extention of the Internet or purely a commercial extention of the entertainment industry.
  • Electronic versions of _Public Libraries and the Internet: Study Results, Policy Issues, and Recommendations_ funded by the National Commission on Libraries and Information Science are now available online.
  • "Cable TV Resources on the Net" is a collection of Internet resources useful to cable professionals and others who track telecomm developments. Included are separate listings for mailing lists, publications, FTP - gopher - WWW sites, newsgroups, FAQs, and a section specific to Canada.
  • The House has forwarded to the Senate the first major telecommunications policy reform legislation since the 1934 Communications Act. The Final Bills (H.R. 3626 and 3636) as Reported by the House as passed on 6/24/94, are available. Also posted are the Senate versions, S. 1822 and S. 2111 in full text and summary versions, other relevant documents, and a pointer to the WAIS database of U.S. House Legislation for the current session of Congress.
  • The Alliance for Public Technology, providing a consumer voice for equitable and affordable access to telecommunications technology, is pleased to announce its WWW site. APT's vision paper, membership information, and other items of interest are available.
  • The Federal Communications Law Journal Volume 46, Number 3 for June, 1994 is now available. Of particular interest to the Internet community is an article entitled "The National Information Infrastructure Initiative and the Emergence of the Electronic Superhighway".

NetBytes

  • New versions of the Pine Message System are now available - Pine and PC-Pine 3.90. This release represents a notable step forward in functionality.
  • The Network Training Materials Gopher now holds a revised version of Unit 1 of the Network Training Pack, which includes presentation, handout, workshop, and exercise materials. This unit is an introductory overview of networking, covering in a general way the sort of information which is available via networks, and some of the tools available to access it. It assumes some computer-literacy, but no previous network familiarity. The revised material reflects the increasing importance of tools such as WWW and gopher, and the diminishing role of straight ftp and telnet, though these latter are still included.
  • webNews contains announcements of new Web pages as well as notices relating to other useful Web information, with new articles added regularly and conveniently "hypertext-ified" to aid your access to the referenced Web resources. If you missed it on the WWW USENET News groups, you may find it in webNews.

Weekend Scouting

  • Extensive National Hockey League information is summarized on a new homepage, including the latest NHL scores, the present league standings, team records against each other, the 1994 Stanley Cup Playoff matchups broken down game-by-game, and the leading scorers. Current information is for the 1993-94 season. Plans are to keep the HTML files updated automatically with the use of two FORTRAN programs that take as their input game scores and the names of players who have registered goals or assists. In addition, you can also get the history of matchups in the Stanley Cup finals, and NHL awards like the Rookie of the Year Award or the Most Valuable Player Award.
  • The Froggy Page -- a fun page containing links to everything froggy, including images, sounds, stories, and songs.
  • A comprehensive journal of music news, reviews, information and opinion Delivered via internet e-mail, published monthly. Topics such as: The Electronic Carnival of Lollapoloza '94, The release of Boyz 2 Men's _II_, Copyright issues on the net, and Kaleidospace. To subscribe to iMpulse

    send email to: iMpulse@dsigroup.com
    in the Subject line type: SUBSCRIBE IMPULSE

About the Scout Report

The Scout Report is a weekly publication offered by InterNIC Information Services to the Internet community as a fast, convenient way to stay informed about network activities. Its purpose is to combine in one place the highlights of new (and newly-discovered) online resources and other announcements seen on the Internet during the preceding week.

A wide range of topics are included in the Report with an emphasis on resources thought to be of interest to the InterNIC's primary audience, the research and education community. Each resource has been verified for substantial content and accessibility within a day of the release of the Report.

The Scout Report is provided in multiple formats -- electronic mail, gopher, World Wide Web, and now HTML. The gopher and World Wide Web versions of the Report include links to all listed resources. The Report is released every weekend.

NOTE: In addition to the ascii version, the Scout Report is distributed in HTML format via a separate mailing list. This allows sites to easily add the Scout Report to their local WorldWideWeb servers each week, providing fast access for local users. Subscription information for the scout-report-html mailing list is included below. Note that permission statements appear on both versions of the Scout Report, and we ask that these be included in any re-posting or re-distributing of the report. Thank you.
Comments and contributions to the Scout Report are encouraged and can be sent to scout@cs.wisc.edu.

-- InterNIC Info Scout (SM)

Scout Report Access Methods

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Copyright 1994 General Atomics.
Permission is granted to make and distribute verbatim copies of the Scout Report provided the copyright notice, this permission notice, and the two paragraphs below are preserved on all copies.

The InterNIC provides information about the Internet and the resources on the Internet to the US research and education community under the National Science Foundation Cooperative Agreement No. NCR-9218749. The Government has certain rights in this material.

Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this publication are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation, General Atomics, AT&T, or Network Solutions, Inc.

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