The Scout Report - May 24, 1996

May 24, 1996

A Publication of Internet Scout
Computer Science Department, University of Wisconsin

A Project of the InterNIC

The Scout Report is a weekly publication offering a selection of new and newly discovered Internet resources of interest to researchers and educators, the InterNIC's primary audience. However, everyone is welcome to subscribe to one of the mailing lists (plain text or HTML) or visit the Web version of the Scout Report. Subscription instructions are included at the end of each report.
http://rs.internic.net/scout/report

Send comments and contributions to: scout@cs.wisc.edu

Speech, Text, Image, and Multimedia Advanced Technology Grant
The National Science Foundation (NSF), Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) plan to jointly support fundamental research devoted to understanding multimodal human communication and its application to computer technology. This initiative is focused on several areas of research: (1) automated processing of multimodal human communications; (2) discourse and dialogue phenomena for a wide variety of multimodal tasks; (3) new algorithm paradigms or representation schemes for processing within a modality; and (4) multimodal architectures that permit the separation of application functionality from modality of user interaction. Academic and other not-for-profit research institutions in the United States with computer and information science research capability are invited to submit proposals. Proposals may involve unfunded collaboration with industry or other agencies of the government, however an academic or research institution must be the prime research management organization submitting the proposal. Proposals are due September 1, 1996. For further information contact: Gary W. Strong, Program Director, Interactive Systems (703) 306-1928, gstrong@nsf.gov For more information, including examples for possible proposal topics on the solicitation:
http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/stis1996/nsf9685/nsf9685.txt
[Note: Gopher site may no longer be available.]
gopher://gopher.nsf.gov/
gopher to: gopher.nsf.gov
select: Search NSF Publications
search: NSF ADJ 96-85
select: NSF 96-85
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The Learning Web -- U.S. Geological Survey
The Learning Web, provided by the U.S. Geological Survey, is dedicated to K-12 education, exploration, and life-long learning. It is divided into two sections, Teaching in the Learning Web, and Living in the Learning Web. Teaching at present contains information about three main topics, Global Change, Working with Maps, and Earth Science. Each of these sections offers student activities, along with several images. Global Change and Working with Maps also offer teacher's guides that contain bibliographies and further information. Teaching also contains pointers to lists of USGS maintained pointers (not limited to K-12 sites) in subjects such as climate, earth science, hydrology, oceanography, and volcanology, among others. Living in the Learning Web presents information on topics such as household water supply, radon gas, preparing for volcanoes, and the affect of weather on streams. Each one of these sections connects to a pertinent USGS Web page, which in turn offers additional information and pointers.
http://www.usgs.gov/education/index.html
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Proceedings of Organic Mathematics Workshop -- Simon Fraser University
The Digital Proceedings of the Organic Mathematics Workshop, held at Simon Fraser University December 12-14 1995, are available on the Web. Papers are presented on such topics as Pfaff's Method, arithmetic properties of binomial coefficients, the Hirsch Conjecture, and differential equations, among others. However, what makes the site unique are the "mathactivations" that accompany the papers. Here the user can interactively enter variables to change outcomes using the mathematical computer program Maple. The result are papers that are "organic" in that they can change with user input, demonstrating interactively the concepts they explain. The site also provides spaces for readers to comment directly on the papers.
http://www.cecm.sfu.ca/organics/
Less graphical: http://www.cecm.sfu.ca/organics/contents.html
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Diversity Teaching Resources -- Fisher College of Business, Ohio State University
Fisher College of Business at the Ohio State University presents a page of Teaching Diversity Resources as part of its diversity pages. The college is committed to "recruiting and retaining the most talented students, faculty, and staff while promoting diversity in culture and perspective." The Teaching Diversity Resources page presents a bibliography of print diversity resources that address diversity issues as they relate to various aspects of business and employment. The resources are presented alphabetically by topic, including accounting, finance/banking, management, marketing, reference, and books. This resource is not meant to be exhaustive, and user input is actively solicited. At present there are over 200 citations, with strong sections in management and marketing. Fisher's central diversity page is a large set of pointers to general diversity resources in such topics as online magazines, business data, age, disabilities, gender, religion, sexual orientation, class, African-, Asian-, Hispanic- and European-American.
Teaching Diversity Resources:
http://www.cob.ohio-state.edu/~diversity/resource.htm
Fisher diversity pages:
http://www.cob.ohio-state.edu/~diversity
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Learning Aids for North American Indian Languages -- UC - Davis
The Native American Studies Department at the University of California - Davis has made available Learning Aids for North American Indian Languages, a resource offering "information on published and 'semi-published' teaching and general reference materials for North American Indian languages or groups of languages." It is a page of pointers to citations for dictionaries, descriptive grammars, pedagogic materials collections of bilingual narratives, and tapes, among others. This large resource is arranged alphabetically by language group, and also contains many cross references. Over 100 language groups are included, from Abenaki to Yukon languages. Citations contain bibliographic information and are thoroughly annotated. Learning Aids has been compiled from the "Society of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas Newsletter."
http://trc2.ucdavis.edu/ssila/learning.stm
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Society of Automotive Engineers
The highlight of the newly opened SAE (Society of Automotive Engineers) Web site, under the Products section, is the listing of a vast array of magazines, books, technical papers, standards, CD-ROMS, professional development tools, and software engineering tools produced by the organization. Thousands of items are available, and though there is a fee to obtain each one, the listings themselves make up a virtual library catalog of automotive engineering. The site also offers a large calendar of SAE events including meetings and expositions, collegiate design competitions, and professional development seminars, among others. The SAE site also offers Engineer Al, a weekly feature on the world of mobility.
http://www.sae.org/
Text only:http://www.sae.org/text.htm
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Info-Quality-L Discussion List
The Info-Quality-L mailing list was established in March 1996 by the Coombs Computing Unit, Research School of Social Sciences, ANU (Australian National University) to provide a world-wide communications vehicle and a central electronic archive for exchange of information dealing with the criteria, guidelines, standards and operational procedures for evaluation, development and management of high quality online, especially Web, information resources. The forum is an integral part of the Information Quality WWW Virtual Library.
To subscribe send email to: majordomo@coombs.anu.edu.au
In the body of the message type:
subscribe Info-Quality-L your-e-mail-address
Information Quality WWW Virtual Library:
http://www.ciolek.com/WWWVL-InfoQuality.html
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White House Economic and Social Statistics Briefing Rooms
The White House Web site has made access to current U.S. economic and social data much easier by establishing the Economic and Social Statistics Briefing Rooms. The power of these sites is that they not only offer brief statistics and charts, but that they also link to the agency that is responsible for the data, allowing interested users to obtain much more detailed data when available. The Economic Briefing Room contains current data on income, output, employment, unemployment and earnings, production and business activity, prices, money, credit and securities markets, transportation, and international statistics. The Social Briefing Room contains data on crime, demographics, education, and health. These two sites make the distinction between agencies that produce particular types of data invisible to the user.
Economic Statistics Briefing Room:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/fsbr/esbr.html
Social Statistics Briefing Room:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/fsbr/ssbr.html
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Two U.S. Supreme Court Rulings
The full text of two recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions that could have far reaching effects are available via the Internet. Docket 94-1039, Romer, Governor of Colorado, et al. v. Evans et al. struck down part of the Colorado State Constitution that prevented the passage of new anti- discrimination laws against homosexuals. Docket 94-896, BMW of North America, Inc. v. Gore set standards for determining when punitive damages are "grossly excessive." The Syllabus (headnotes), opinion, and dissent, are available in both cases.
http://supct.law.cornell.edu/supct/supct.may.1996.html
select the case(s) of interest
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The Guide to Museums and Cultural Resources -- worldwide
The Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County has recently opened the Guide to Museums and Cultural Resources on the Web. It is meant to be a comprehensive index for information about museums, aquaria, historical parks and other cultural institutions. It is provided not only to allow visitors to tour cyber exhibits when available, but to make information available for travelers who might want to visit the actual museums. Because of that, and in order to maintain a single list, this site is arranged geographically by continent. Under each continent there are country listings and, for the U.S., state listings as well. Each listing consists of a name, URL, and language, and can also contain an email contact and a description. Information about the resources is provided by each institution. The site is fully searchable. Search results provide the option to go to the museum or to the related geographic page, making it easy to find other museums in the same area. The Guide also includes a section on cybermuseums -- those that exist only on the Internet.
http://www.lam.mus.ca.us/webmuseums/
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Salon -- an e-zine about books, arts, and ideas
Salon is a weekly e-zine of "books, arts, and ideas." Articles cover news, books, movies, TV, media, politics, digital culture, and modern life. A browsable chronological archive is available, and articles can be read by subject as well. It also contains an interactive table talk section, as well as selected pointers to related sites.
http://www.salon.com/
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NETLiNkS Flavor of the Week -- an African American resource
The NetLiNkS Flavor of the Week site picks and annotates one African American Web site a week based on "content and contribution to the black community." Picks are eclectic in nature and have included music, film, history, business, books, and women. Each pick is fully annotated so that readers have a very good idea of what the site is about before they visit. This is one of the better sources of African American Web sites.
http://www.netlinks.net/netlinks/afro/flavour.html
[Note: Resource(s)/URL(s) mentioned above is no longer available.]
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Baseball at the Park and By the Numbers
Two new baseball sites on the Web allow you to follow the action in real time, and analyze statistics from the 1996 season on a day to day basis. The Instant Ballpark allows spectators (if they have Java enabled browsers) to actually view a Java applet graphic of the game. This harkens back to the days before radio, when fans by the thousands stood in front of "animated billboards" to follow the progress of World Series games. The Instant Ballpark provides tracer bullets to show the path of the ball, a scrolling scoreboard, and the ability to switch between games with the click of a mouse. And if you don't have Java capability, you can follow current text descriptions, play by play. The site contains a complete archive of all games played, standings, statistics, and schedule as well. Another site, the High Boskage House Baseball Pages, offers detailed, "normalized" statistical analysis, and attempts to account for the effect that such factors as the ball park and the "lively ball" have on player statistics. As such it takes actual player statistics and creates other statistics from them. The results are, of course, controversial, and this site is not for the feint of heart. But if you love statistics as much as the game, it is worth looking at.
Instant Ballpark:
http://www.InstantSports.com/baseball.html
[Note: When last checked by the Internet Scout team, this site URL was no longer available.]
High Boskage House Baseball Pages
http://www.highboskage.com/
More on statistical definitions at HBHBP:
http://www.highboskage.com/STATINFO.HTM
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JUDO-L Discussion List
The purpose of the JUDO-L mailing list is the public discussion of all aspects of Judo. Judo is an Olympic sport, a form of self-defense, a battlefield art, and a means of physical culture. Members of this list discuss techniques, practice methods, competition results, applications as a martial art, history, and traditions -- in short, the entire world of modern Judo.
To subscribe send email to: LISTSERV@UCONNVM.UCONN.EDU
In the body of the message type:
SUB JUDO-L yourfirstname yourlastname
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OCLC's NetFirst
NetFirst, provided by OCLC (Online Computer Library Center) is part of the FirstSearch suite of bibliographic tools. It is OCLC's first large scale attempt to create a bibliographic resource for searching Internet resources. Simple searching can be done on title or subject headings, and the search engine also supports complete Boolean AND/OR/NOT, proximity, and field searching. Word lists (inverted indexes of the database) are available in order to aid searching. Records contain bibliographic and access information, along with detailed summaries of the resource. NetFirst plans to incorporate all major Internet resource types in its database. Web pages and listservs are available now. NetFirst should not be confused with another OCLC service, InterCAT. NetFirst does not rely on volunteers to create its database as InterCAT does. NetFirst "uses a combination of automated collection and verification techniques and proven abstracting and indexing practices." NetFirst also does not create MARC (MAchine Readable Cataloging) records at this time. For these reasons, the NetFirst database is already much larger than InterCAT. NetFirst is freely available until July 31, at which time it will be sold to libraries as part of the FirstSearch suite.
http://www.oclc.org/oclc/netfirst/netfirst.htm
For more information on InterCAT see the Scout Toolkit:
http://scout.cs.wisc.edu/scout/toolkit/searching/subcatalogs.html
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HotBot
HotBot, a service of HotWired Ventures, uses the Inktomi search engine as the heart of its new Internet search service. It claims to index the full text contents of 50 million Web pages, as well as Usenet news and mailing lists. This would make it the largest search engine on the Internet. HotBot supports Boolean AND/OR/NOT, and phrase searching. It provides relevance feedback with retrieval. It also supports chronological, domain, and geographic searches, as well as media type searches such as Java, VRML, and Acrobat. HotBot is a public "beta" site and encourages feedback and bug reports.
http://www.hotbot.com
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Copyright Susan Calcari, 1996. Permission is granted to make and distribute verbatim copies of the Scout Report provided the copyright notice and this paragraph is preserved on all copies. The InterNIC provides information about the Internet to the US research and education community under a cooperative agreement with the National Science Foundation: NCR-9218742. 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 University of Wisconsin - Madison, the National Science Foundation, AT&T, or Network Solutions, Inc.

The Scout Report - May 24, 1996

May 24, 1996

Research and Education

General Interest

Network Tools

Scout Report and Scout Report HTML Subscription Instructions