Scout Report: Week ending October 14, 1994

October 14, 1994

The Scout Report is a weekly publication provided by InterNIC Information Services to assist InterNauts in their ongoing quest to know what's new on and about the Internet. It focuses on those resources thought to be of interest to the InterNIC's primary audience, researchers and educators, however everyone is welcome to subscribe and there are no associated fees.

The Scout Report is posted on the InterNIC InfoGuide's gopher and WorldWideWeb servers where you can easily follow links to resources of interest. Past issues are stored on the InfoGuide for quick reference, and you can search the InfoGuide contents to find the items reported in all previous issues. The Scout Report is also distributed in an HTML version for use on your own host, providing fast local access for yourself and other users at your site.

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

Comments and contributions to the Scout Report are encouraged and can be sent to scout@cs.wisc.edu.

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

Highlights In This Week's Report:

  • NIC Locator - network information center info online and searchable: enter a profile for your academic, government, or corporate NIC
  • Daily News Online- the newspapers, magazines offered at no cost
  • Pointer to details of the TIIAP grant announcements
  • Wine Enthusiasts Web Paget

World Wide Web

  • An Aviation Web server has been built as a collaborative effort of many administrators who have until now have each maintained there own versions. The common consolidated list of all the aviation servers on theWeb is now available at Harvard and will be supported through a group effort. Lists of aviation archives will also be maintained, as well as aviation picture archives and weather information links.
  • Thc Chicago Mercantile Exchange, the World's Largest Marketplace, trading approximately $200 trillion annually in underlying value of financial and agricultural futures and options, now has a Web page. Accessible from the CME Home Page are background and product information, volume and membership-price information and charts, and the CME Model for Federal Financial Regulation, a proposal for streamlining government oversight of financial institutions.
  • The Health Care Financing Administration (The Medicare and Medicaid Agency) has announced a Web page.
  • Erasmus now has an experimental page on the Web linking 9 European universities (Kingston, Paris VI, Montpellier II, Leipzig, Milano, Muenster, Espoo-Vantaa, South Bank, and Limerick) in Curriculum Development and Student Mobility programmes. Students from each of the participating universities will work in transnational groups, sharing distributed resources accessible via the Internet. The 'shop window' to the programme is at present through the WWW. Erasmus is being made publicly accessible on a temporary basis as an example of how new technologies can be used to add value to Erasmus and other transnational teaching schemes. There are links to some syllabi, to language and cultural resources, and to some university profiles. For copyright reasons, the teaching materials themselves (text files, HyperCard stacks, AI programs) are not available via the Web, though may be in the future.
  • Leeds university, School of Mathematics Web server includes activities of the three departments of the school, links to other mathematics servers, and preprints.
  • NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab and the Planetary Data System have announced an updated version of one of their most popular Home Pages, WELCOME TO THE PLANETS. This is a collection of over 200 of the best images from NASA's planetary exploration program. The collection has been extracted from the interactive program "Welcome to the Planets" which will be distributed on the Planetary Data System Educational CD-ROM in November1994. There are captioned images from the major planets, small bodies, and the space craft used for the images.
  • "The Science Behind Jurassic Park" is an html document describing how world renowned paleontologist Jack Horner is using computers and CAT scan machines to peer inside 30 million year old dinosaur fossils.
  • The Space Systems Laboratory (SSL) at the University of Maryland is investigating human and robotic performance in space. Among the many projects being conducted at the SSL are a telerobotic spacecraft servicer called Ranger--to be launched into Earth orbit via an expendable rocket in 1997, and a Space Shuttle flight experiment which will investigate human fatigue during extravehicular activities (spacewalks). The SSL Home Page presents the projects, personnel, and facilities of the lab.
  • Youth Affairs Research Network is up and running offering a variety of services catering to Youth Researchers, including a newsletter: YARNing
    gopher://yarn.insted.unimelb.edu.au/
    ftp://yarn.edfac.unimelb.edu.au/YARN/
    [Note: Gopher site may no longer be available.]

Gopher

National Information Infrastructure

  • NII Awards - Call For Entries: The National Information Infrastructure (NII) Awards will recognize individuals, organizations and businesses that have achieved concrete gains through use of the "information highway". The Awards are sponsored by more than 50 industry and community leaders in cooperation with the Clinton Administration's Information Infrastructure Task Force. The purpose of the Awards is to:
    • build awareness of people can use the NII to improve their lives, communities and businesses (i.e., it's more than "500 channels").
    • encourage broad and beneficial use of the NII.
    We're looking for the success stories and examples of electronic commerce, community and health networks, virtual libraries, distance learning, online information services, collaborative work and more. It The NII Awards will be given in six categories: arts & entertainment, business, community, education, government and health. Price Waterhouse will oversee and verify the judging process. Sponsors include the C. Everett Koop Institute, the National Education Assoc., the League of Women Voters, and the Corp. for Public Broadcasting. Winners will receive national recognition for their achievements at an awards ceremony in Washington in the spring of 1995 and will be featured in a national education program.
    Email: write info@niiawards.org
    in the body of your message type: subscribe
    Hard-copy Entry Kits are available by calling 313-453-9137.
  • New documents on the Department of Commerce National Telecommunications Information Administration (NTIA) gopher:
    • Commercial Security and the NII Announcement
    • Summary List of 1994 TIIAP Grant Awards
    • Secretary Brown's Statement on 1994 TIIAP Awards
    • 1994 TIIAP Grant Announcements Press Release
    • 1994 TIIAP Grant Awards
    • 1994 TIIAP Grant Awards by Category
    • TIIAP Grant Announcements, Revised Date

NetBytes

  • "New on the Net" states that the Sept. 15th snapshot of the commercial domains registered with InterNIC shows 20,242 unique domains compared with 18,403 as of Aug. 15, 1994. The net increase of 1,839 domains represents and 10.0% month to month gain. For a copy of the full report, produced by Internet Info, send mail to the address below. Examples of new commercial domain names:

    Bank of America (ALCATRAZ.COM)
    Arizona Association for the Discussion of Budweiser (BUDWEISER.COM)
    First Church of Christ, Scientist (SPIRITNET.COM)

    New_on_Net@internetinfo.com.

Weekend Scouting

  • Best-quality Audio Web Poems (B.A.W.P.) a collection of recordings, in the MPEG-2 audio format, of poetry readings and live spoken word performances. The selection changes every two weeks at present.
  • Wine enthusiastsWWW page includes an ever expanding archive of tasting notes; an interactive tasting note compiler allowing folks with browsers supporting the Forms option to leave tasting notes of their own for others to read; Washington Wine Tour: Growing resource on WA state wine producers including discussions of releases as well as tourist information (i.e. phone #'s addresses and maps); FAQ on wine and of course links to other wine related resources.

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.

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.

If you haven't yet subscribed or told your friends and colleagues, now is the time. Spread the news by word-of-net. Join thousands of your colleagues already using the Scout Report as a painless tool for tracking what's new on the 'Net!

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

** To receive the electronic mail version of the Scout Report each Friday, join the scout-report mailing list which is used only to distribute the Scout Report once a week. Send mail to:
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in the body of the message, type:
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to unsubscribe to the list, repeat this procedure substituting the word "unsubscribe" for subscribe.

** To receive the Scout Report in HTML format for local posting, subscribe to the scout-report-html mailing list, used exclusively to distribute the Scout Report in HTML format once a week. Send mail to:

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in the body of the message, type:
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** To access the hypertext version of the Report, point your WWW client to:
http://www.internic.net/infoguide.html
>> Gopher users can tunnel to:
is.internic.net
select: Information Services/Scout Report.

Resource Addressing Conventions

After each resource in the Scout Report one or more network addresses are listed. In all cases a convention is used for listing the network address of each resource. It is assumed that users recognize the type of address and know how to use it. However, for those users unfamiliar with the Internet we provide here the order in which addresses are listed (by network tool) and instructions for accessing additional information in the InterNIC InfoGuide about each network tool. A brief explanation of one tool, WWW is included below.

The four network tools referenced most often in the Scout Report are World Wide Web, gopher, email, and FTP. Occasionally WAIS and Telnet addresses are also listed.

After each resource at least one address is listed, and sometimes more. This is because some resources are available through multiple network tools. The network tool addresses are always listed in the same order after each resource:

  • World Wide Web (WWW)
  • Gopher
  • FTP
  • Email
  • Telnet
  • WAIS

A WWW address is called a URL (Uniform Resource Locator) and always begins with a string of characters followed by a colon and two right brackets. For example:

http://www.internic.net/
gopher://gibbs.oit.unc.edu:70/11/research.d/grants.d
ftp://ftp.digex.net/pub/access/hecker/internet/slip-ppp.txt

To access the resource through the WWW you will need a WWW client installed on your host computer. Clients are available for all major computer platforms, including Macintosh, PC, and UNIX. To use a WWW client on your computer, you will need a TCP/IP connection to the Internet, either through a dedicated line connection or a SLIP/PPP connection. See the InfoGuide for additional information about the World Wide Web and for sites which archive WWW clients. For more information about SLIP/PPP, which can be used over a dial-up connection, see the document listed in the NetBytes section above.

gopher://is.internic.net/11/infoguide/using-internet/basic-resources/email/

Gopher to: is.internic.net
** Choose: Information Services/Using the Internet/

Send email to: mailserv@is.internic.net
In the body of the message type:

send INDEX
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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