Scout Report: Week ending November 18, 1994

November 18, 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:

  • The Magellan Mission to Venus Home Page
  • The IRS and the CIA are now on the Web for your viewing pleasure
  • PAVNET Online, the Partnerships Against Violence Network
  • What's new with the "What's New" page?
  • Another feature movie site -- Buena Vista, a division of Disney

World Wide Web

  • The CIA has a server available which includes general information about the Agency and the Intelligence Community and the 1994 World Factbook and Factbook on Intelligence. Visit the CIA.
  • Clearinghouse for Subject-Oriented Internet Resource Guides now offers 11 new subject-oriented Internet resource created by student specialists at the University of Michigan's School of Information and Library Studies. Similar to last year, students have identified and evaluated Internet information resources, and organized them in topical guides in ASCII format. These ASCII guides are now available via the Clearinghouse for Subject-Oriented Internet Resource Guides. Unlike last year, these guides will also be published in HTML format for World Wide Web in December. Watch this space for details when they are announced.
  • ICE: Internet Connections for Engineering is a Web site sponsored by the Cornell University Engineering Library.
  • A Web page for feminists who are political activists has been established. Because great pages for women's studies and women in general already exist, this page concentrates on links to Internet resources of interest to activists, such as Communicating with other Feminists, Current Feminist Issues: News and Resources, Women's Organizations, Feminist Resources General Resources for Political Activists, TAKE ACTION: Suggestion for current feminist action.
  • The IRS has a Web server offering some tax forms, an FAQ (21 questions answered) where to file, and where to get help.
  • The Magellan Mission to Venus Home is now available at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab. The Magellan mission ended with a dramatic plunge into the atmosphere of Venus, the first time an operating spacecraft has ever been intentionally crashed into a planet. On October 11, 1994, Magellan's thrusters were fired in four sequences to lower its orbit into the atmosphere of Venus for its final experiment -- to gather data on Venus' high atmosphere. Within two days after these maneuvers, the spacecraft became caught in the atmosphere and plunged to the surface. Although most of Magellan will be vaporized during the fiery descent, some sections of the spacecraft will probably hit the planet's surface. The latest updates on Magellan's status -- as well as a comprehensive gallery of images and information from the five-year mission -- are available on the home page.
  • The Rockefeller University is pleased to announce the opening of its WWW server. Details about the University, one of the premier biological and medical research facility in the world, are available, as are the Archives of the Rockefeller Family.
  • The U. S. Department of Labor's Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) Web Page links to sources of safety and health information and organizations. OSHA is looking for suggestions on information the public would like to see in an OSHA Web page. Currently under consideration are topics such as press releases, Contact Information Standards On-Line, Inspection Data. If you have questions, please send E-Mail to webmaster@www.osha.gov.

Gopher

  • Biodiversity Gopher at University of Washington
  • BioMolecular Engineering Research Center
  • Brookhaven National Labs Protein Data Bank (PDB)
  • CIESIN: Center for International Earth Science Information Network: The Consortium for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN, pronounced "season") was established in 1989 as a private, nonprofit membership corporation with members from leading universities and non-government research organizations. The corporation was formed to respond to the creation of the CIESIN initiative by the United States Congress (P.L.J101-144), and is dedicated to furthering the interdisciplinary study of global environmental change. It is agency-neutral, specializing in the access and integration of physical, natural, and socioeconomic information across agency missions and scientific disciplines. gopher://gopher.ciesin.org [Note: Originally reviewed as a gopher site; gopher may no longer be current/available.]
    http://www.ciesin.org/
    [Note: Site title has changed since the original Scout Report review. Site formerly referred to in the Scout Report as "CIESIN Information Gateway."]
  • Institute for Child Health Policy, University of Florida
  • New York State Governor's Gopher
  • Ohio State University Atmospheric Science Program
  • PAVNET Online, the Partnerships Against Violence Network gopher, is a "virtual library" of information about violence and youth-at-risk, representing data from seven different federal agencies. It is a "one-stop" information resource to help reduce redundancy in information management and provide clear and comprehensive access to information for states and local communities. Pavnet is an interagency (USDA, Justice, Education, Labor, HHS, HUD, Defense) electronic resource on the internet created to provide information about effective violence prevention initiatives. 533 programs that deal with the issues of community, youth, and family violence, substance abuse, and victims rights are listed on PAVNET Online. Prevention, Enforcement and Treatment/Rehabilitation sub-categories hold program descriptions and contact sources. 126 files in the Foundation and Federal Funding Sources directory describe application guidelines and the purpose of these funding organizations. 332 files in the Technical Assistance and Curriculums directory include organizations that offer consultation or training, and curricula to use in existing or proposed programs. Gopher links to federal clearinghouse and private sector databases point to other resources for violence prevention information.
  • University of Texas Austin, Institute for Geophysics

Email

  • To subscribe to the Filmmakers mailing list, filmmakers@dhm.com, send email to: majordomo@dhm.com in the body of the message type: subscribe filmmakers
  • The Rural Health Care Email Discussion List, RURALNET-L, is sponsored by the Marshall University School of Medicine in Huntington, West Virginia. Students, faculty, practitioners and other interested persons in all heal Institute for Child Health Policy, th care fields are welcome to participate. This forum will focus on discussions of delivery, improvement, technology deployment, education and outcomes-based research in rural health care.

    To subscribe, send email to: listserv@musom01.mu.wvnet.edu in the body of the message type: SUB RURALNET-L your-name-here

    Additional rural health resources offered by the same institution are available on Marshall's gopher and WWW servers.

National Information Infrastructure

  • The IEEE Technical Committee on Gigabit Networks LISTSERV is being sponsored by the University of Pittsburgh following discussions at the 6/94 IEEE INFOCOM Conference in Toronto. This list is meant to facilitate technical discussions on gigabit networking. Questions/comments can be directed to giga-owner@tele.pitt.edu

    To subscribe, send email to: listserv@tele.pitt.edu in the body of the message type: SUBSCRIBE GIGA your-name-here

  • CPSR-GLOBAL is a moderated Listserv for uniting people all over the world who want to talk about:
    • decisions the USA will make on the information infrastructure, or NII, that will affect the rest of the world--we want the NII to be a positive force for a GII (global information infrastructure)
    • issues of national identity, "cultural pollution," and international communication and the GII
    • the new emerging GII world culture
    • international issues of security and privacy and computer law
    • international issues of computer development (keyboards, safety)
    • issues of design
    • language
    • And whatever other global issues you want to discuss
    Right now the list will be predominately in English, because it's the lingua franca of the Net. It is a MODERATED list. That means any posts which are not "on topic" or inflammatory will be filtered out.

    To subscribe send email to: listserv@cpsr.org in the body of the message type: SUBSCRIBE CPSR-GLOBAL yourfirstname yourlastname

NetBytes

  • What's new with the " What's New" page? O'Reilly & Associates, Inc. is now working in cooperation with NCSA, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, to support the NCSA What's New Page. It is now updated three times a week and has an improved format, which makes it easier read. Submission numbers have steadily increased, and currently run about 200 per week, so submitters are asked to be patient if your entry does not show up immediately. The time between when you submit an entry and when it is published is approximately ten days to two weeks. The What's New Page has a link to O'Reilly and to a new sponsoring organization each week.
    [Note: Resource may no longer be current. Archive information available at the above URL.]

Weekend Scouting

  • Buena Vista Pictures Marketing, a division of the Walt Disney Company, is proud to announce The Buena Vista Pictures Web--a source for information and previews of movies from Walt Disney Pictures, Touchstone Pictures and Hollywood Pictures. The Movie Plex is a very graphical environment providing movie trailers in QuickTIme format as well as a trivia game and movie gossip. The Press Room offers the same QuickTime clips and more, JPEG stills and the Press Kits for the movies. They also have a page for pointers to QuickTime Players for UNIX, Macintosh and Windows.
  • The Southland Ski Server, specializing in the Southern California ski resorts, plus Mammoth and June, now has interactive submit/browse functionality. You can stop by and submit your own ski reports plus follow links to resorts in other areas. The webmaster for this site says he is planning on making the underlying Perl code available via public-domain anonymous ftp to anybody who wishes to start a similar ski report server for their own local region.

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

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** To access the hypertext version of the Report, point your WWW client to:
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>> 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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