Scout Report: Week ending December 16, 1994

December 16, 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 servers for quick reference, and you can search the InfoGuide server 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/infogu ide.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:

Note

The Info Scout is going on vacation, and it's hard to believe, but she's not taking her laptop with her. (Can you imagine what those mailboxes are going to look like?? ;-). In any case, this means no Scout Reports until after the New Year. We assume you'll be busy in the real world, and won't miss us until then.

We're expecting life in cyberspace to be even more exciting in '95, so look for improvements in the Scout Report to keep pace with the times.

Until then, everyone here at the InterNIC wishes you all a happy and safe holiday season.

Best Regards,

Susan Calcari
Info Scout
InterNIC Information Services

World Wide Web

  • The Diabetes Knowledgebase is an effort of the U. of Wisconsin Children's Diabetes Center to provide diabetes-related information to the world community in an effort to enhance the lives of individuals with diabetes. http://islet.medsch.wisc.edu/
  • DNA TO DINOSAURS! A new interactive exhibit from The Field Museum of Natural History and the Biomedical Visualization Dept. at UIC is now online. Take a look at some of Earth's largest, most successful land animals. Animations, sound, 3-D and more! Take a tour through an exhibit 3.8 billion years in the making!
  • The Erasmus WWW Server, Faculty of Arts KUL, Leuven, Brabant, Belgium: Arts -- the final frontier. The Erasmus server's mission is to explore old worlds and new civilizations, to boldly go where no scientist has gone before.
  • The Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (IATH) at the University of Virginia would like to announce new publications and software, in addition to an on-going series of research reports. New software includes: an image viewer for X-windows that is faster than XV and provides a panner for large images; a sound driver for the IBM rs6000, that provides a control panel to record and play; a Perl script that helps a user add reference line numbers that relate one SGML-marked text to another. New general publications include: a museum installation developed from Edward Ayers' Civil war project under development at IATH; two essays by Jerome McGann about using hypertext in critical editing; two essays by John Unsworth about use of the Internet by humanities scholars. Also, visit the IATH-MOO - text-based virtual reality facility for real-time discussion of IATH projects.
  • The Univ of Nebraska Ag Econ Dept is now providing via WWW and Gopher a series of 32 papers on the 1995 Farm Bill. The papers are a product of the National Public Policy Education Committee. 74 extension economists from 36 universities and organizations across the United States have contributed this series of papers which broadly define the issues and provide a backdrop for knowledgeable discussion of this far reaching legislation. They will be of interest to the agricultural industry world wide.
  • Department of Computer Science, Queen's University Kingston, Canada: a new Server for the Computing and Information Science department, including faculty and student listings, assorted labs and reports, and the Queen's electronic phone book.
  • Neural Networks in High Energy Physics Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden. From the Dept. of Physics-Frescati comes this comprehensive list of references, recent developments in the field, upcoming conferences, etc. Of most general interest is the extensive list of commercial neural network hardware, including VLSI chips, PC accelerator cards, and neurocomputers.
  • Michael Moncur's Quotations Page: A collection of information and links regarding quotations, including a search function for quotes matching a keyword.
  • POW/MIA Database. Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.: This database assists researchers investigating the U.S. government documents pertaining to U.S. military personnel killed, missing, or imprisoned in Southeast Asia during or after the American involvement in the Vietnam Conflict. The database is searchable by last name, country name, service branch, or keywords, and copies of desired documents may be obtained from the Library of Congress.
  • The Deputy Director, Defense Research & Engineering, Laboratory Management announces the LABLINK WWW Home Page. LABLINK provides a single entry point to DoD laboratory activities, and presents reports on ongoing Laboratory Management projects. In addition, LABLINK connects to a wide spectrum of government, academic, non-profit and private industry information sources on science and technology, research and policy.
  • Padova Stellar Evolution Group announces that the large grid of theoretical isochrones of the Padova Stellar Evolution group is now available via the WWW server of the Astronomical Observatory of Padova.

Gopher

  • Bryn Mawr College
  • International Development Research Centre IDRC-CRDI-CIID (Canada)
  • Hong Kong Baptist University
  • The Media Literacy Project is an on-going research activity at the University of Oregon's College of Education. We are pleased to announce a new Gopher service dedicated to children and media literacy. The goal of this project is to make available information and resources of value to educators, students, parents, media producers, and others interested in electronic media and its influence on children. The following topics are available: A listing of associations, organizations, and centers which have an expressed interest in the study of media; A listing of conferences, workshops, and other events of interest to individuals working in media literacy; Programs of academic study or special course offerings related to media study at all levels of education; Resource listings including books, journals, newsletters, media resources, and related gopher sites.
    [Note: Originally reviewed as a gopher site; gopher site has been replaced by web site.]
  • New York METRO Gopher: The METRO Gopher is a UNIX-based gopher server designed to provide information about The New York Metropolitan Reference and Research Library Agency (METRO) to METRO member libraries and other interested parties. METRO promotes resource sharing among its 250 member libraries and library systems, and provides services such as Internet access, continuing education programs, and consulting services. The METRO Gopher was developed to provide METRO information to member libraries who either have direct access to the Internet through their own institutions, or who have Internet access through METRO's METgate system. It may also be used as a guide to other New York State 3R's councils online services or as a general guide to electronic resources located in the New York City Metropolitan area.
    [Note: Originally reviewed as a gopher site; gopher site has been replaced by web site.]
  • U.S. Dept. of Energy Headquarters: DOE information plus links to other DOE gophers.
    http://www.doe.gov/

Email

  • A new email forum, Comparative-Sci-L, has been established. The Australian National University provides a world-wide communications vehicle and a central electronic archive for anyone working on, or interested in the comparative study of sciences in society. The Forum was established on the 8 December 1994 on the joint initiative of the Coombs Computing Unit, Research Schools of Social Sciences & Pacific and Asian Studies, The Australian National University, and the 'Working Disparate Knowledge Systems Group', the Centre for the Study of Sciences in the Society, Deakin University, Geelong, Australia. Anyone, whether a registered member or not, can electronically view and retrieve the communications to the forum using a database 'ANU-Comparative-Sci-L' accessible through the standard WAIS software and through the WWW: gopher://cheops.anu.edu.au/7waissrc%3a/Coombs-db/ANU Comparative-Sci-L.src to subscribe to the list: send e-mail to: majordomo@coombs.anu.edu.au
    in the body of the message type:
    subscribe Comparative-Sci-L TYPE-YOUR-EMAIL-ADDRESS-HERE
    eg: subscribe Comparative-Sci-L xyz@abacus.abc.edu.au

Weekend Scouting

  • 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta.
  • CartooNet Illustration Agency. The European Cartoon Arts Network, Brighton, UK: The official server of the European Cartoon Arts Network, providing news and information about cartoon events and examples of work by organization members. Server space provided by Pavilion Internet.
    [Note: Site title has changed since the original Scout Report review. Site formerly referred to in the Scout Report as "The European Cartoon Arts Network, Brighton, UK."]

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 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 weekend, join the scout-report mailing list which is used only to distribute the Scout Report once a week

    Send mail to majordomo@is.internic.net in the body of the message, type:

    subscribe scout-report
    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 majordomo@is.in ternic.net in the body of the message, type:

      subscribe scout-report-html

      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 forward slashes. 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
      and 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.


      scout@is.internic.net
      guide@is.internic.net