The Scout Report

December 19, 1997

A Publication of the Internet Scout Project
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). Subscription instructions are included at the end of each report.

NOTE: This will be the final Scout Report for 1997. See you on January 2, 1998. Happy Holidays to all!

Scout Reports for Social Sciences and Business & Economics
Scout Report for Social Sciences
http://scout.cs.wisc.edu/scout/report/socsci/
Scout Report for Business & Economics
http://scout.cs.wisc.edu/scout/report/bus-econ/
The seventh issues of the Scout Reports for Social Sciences and Business & Economics, each of which annotate over twenty new and newly discovered Internet resources, are available. The In the News section of the Social Science Report annotates eight resources related to the recent Organisation of the Islamic Conference Summit in Tehran, Iran. The Business & Economics Report's In the News section annotates six resources related to the South Korean financial crisis. [JS]
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Art Guide
http://www.artguide.org/uk/
Developed by Cognitive Applications Limited, Art Guide is a comprehensive guide to the art collections of Great Britain and Ireland. The site is divided into three main sections, allowing users to browse for exhibits by artist, museum, or geographic location. The Art Guide database currently contains over 1,900 artists, more than 650 museums, and over 4,500 individual listings. Each artist listing features a list of works on display and their location; each museum listing describes the highlights of its collection, and provides an address and phone number, a link to its website (where available) and links to other museums in that region. Additional site features include a separate listing of museums with web sites and kid-friendly destinations, a comprehensive exhibition listing, and a visitors discussion forum. [MD]
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Two From IMF
International Capital Markets: Developments, Prospects, and Key Policy Issues [.pdf, 265p.]
http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/icm/97icm/icmcon.htm
World Economic Outlook [.pdf, 223 pages]
http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/FT/Weo/WEO1097/WEOCON97.htm
These two publications have recently been made available by the International Monetary Fund. International Capital Markets: Developments, Prospects, and Key Policy Issues is part of an annual series that has been produced since 1980. It is "an integral element of the IMF's surveillance of developments in international financial markets." It contains sections on developments in mature markets, emerging markets, and international banking, among others. World Economic Outlook is a semi-annual report that provides "IMF staff economists' analyses of global economic developments during the near and medium term." It also surveys the creation of the European Monetary Union (EMU), exchange rate arrangements and economic performance in developing countries, and monetary policies in the transition economies. WEO contains a statistical appendix on various global macroeconomic variables. [JS,THN]
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The Sickle Cell Information Center
http://www.emory.edu/PEDS/SICKLE/
The Georgia N.I.H. Comprehensive Sickle Cell Center, the Sickle Cell Foundation of Georgia, and the Pediatrics and Hematology-Oncology Departments of the Emory University Medical School sponsor this site, an information-rich compendium on Sickle Cell Anemia that targets health care providers and patients alike. The highlights of the site, in the Health Care Providers section, are two full text publications, Problem Oriented Management of Sickle Cell Syndromes (an update of a 1991 text by James Eckman and Allan Platt), and the National Institutes of Health Publication Management and Therapy of Sickle Cell Disease. Also available are a professional summary of the disease, a list of conferences, newborn screening information, transfusion protocol information, and general information for patients and their families. [JS]
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Lakota Information Home Page
http://web.lemoyne.edu/~bucko/lakota.html
This site on the Lakota and Dakota peoples (sometimes referred to as Sioux or Siouan peoples) is a joint project by Martin Broken Leg at Augustana College, Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and Raymond Bucko, S.J. at Le Moyne College, Syracuse, New York. Users interested in Native American Studies, and the Lakota and Dakota peoples in particular, will find a large number of useful resources at this site. Features include an 820-item bibliography, language resources, electronic texts, full-text treaties and resources addressing current legal concerns, historical essays, and information on Lakota and Dakota educational institutions. The site also contains a collection of related (mostly non-academic) links. [MD]
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SPIEWeb Publications Abstracts
http://www.spie.org/web/abstracts/abstracts_home.html
Telnet access:
telnet://spie.org
telnet to: spie.org
Login: SPIE
The International Society for Optical Engineering provides this searchable and browsable database of over 90,000 abstracts from SPIE publications. Abstracts date primarily from proceedings volumes going back to 1991; selected journal article abstracts are also available. The collection may be browsed by year, proceedings volume, or technology. A telnet interface allows searching of proceedings volume citations back to 1963. Ordering information is available at the site. [JS]
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Roberto Ortiz de Zarate's Political Datasets
http://www.terra.es/personal2/monolith/
Roberto Ortiz de Zarate, a licentiate of Information Sciences, has created a site designed to supplement a number of different classrooms. It offers information on contemporary leaders from 185 countries and three international organizations, the office-holders longest in power, contemporary women leaders, European governments since 1990, the first post-colonial African rulers, heads of state killed in or out of office, and obituaries of prominent leaders who have died since 1990. The site also includes a collection of unannotated related links. [MD]
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International Humanitarian Law Database
http://www.icrc.org/ihl
Provided by the International Committee of the Red Cross, this site features the full text of 89 treaties, commentaries on the four Geneva Conventions and their Additional Protocols, a list of signatures, ratifications relating to IHL treaties, and the full text of reservations. Users can browse treaties, texts, and articles by keywords, or list states, parties, and signatories by country or treaty. Although the site can be slow to load at times, the amount of information available makes it well worth a visit. [MD]
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HyperStats Online [Java, JavaScript]
http://davidmlane.com/hyperstat/
This online statistics textbook, provided by David M. Lane, a Psychology and Statistics Professor at Rice University, caters to the introductory level college student. Its eighteen chapters discuss univariate and bivariate data, probability, distributions, prediction, and chi-square, among others. Instructional demonstrations and analysis tools, some created by the author, are also featured. In addition, there are pointers to several other introductory statistics information resources. Both the content of the site and its pointers provide an excellent, comprehensive introduction to the subject. [JS]
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The State of the World's Children 1998--UNICEF [QuickTime]
http://www.unicef.org/sowc98/
Gopher access:
gopher://gopher.unicef.org:70/11/.s498sowc
Gopher to: gopher.unicef.org
Select: UNICEF Public Information/1998 Publications & Information Items/1998
SOWC Archive:
gopher://gopher.unicef.org:70/11/.s2pubdocs
Gopher to: gopher.unicef.org
Select: UNICEF Public Information
This year's United Nations Children's Fund report on the world's children focuses on nutrition. The report contains a forward by UN Secretary-General Kofi A. Annan and sections addressing the scale of malnutrition, successful approaches to combatting child hunger, and scientific breakthroughs in nutrition. Additional features include statistical tables, special issue panels, spotlights, text figures, fact sheets, and several QuickTime video clips. [MD]
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US House Committee on Commerce Tobacco Documents [.pdf]
http://www.house.gov/commerce/TobaccoDocs/documents.html
US House of Representatives Committee on Commerce Chairman Tom Bliley has released over 800 tobacco related documents "which a Minnesota Judge has ruled are not protected by the attorney-client privilege..." The documents go back to 1954. They can be browsed (by date, size, or Bates Stamp). Full text searching is also available. The documents are scanned Adobe Acrobat (.pdf) files. Three privilege logs contain very useful document index information and a glossary of names to help in locating items of interest. [JS]
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Hubble Witnesses The Final Blaze Of Glory Of Sun-Like Stars--STSCI [QuickTime]
http://oposite.stsci.edu/pubinfo/pr/97/38.html
The Space Telescope Science Institute has released this stunning photograph from the Hubble Space Telescope, the "supersonic exhaust from [planetary] nebula M2-9." This is an example of a "bipolar planetary nebula" and is estimated to be ten times the diameter of Pluto's orbit. This picture, along with others, contributes to astronomers' understanding of the complex processes that can result from the death throes of Sun-like stars. The site contains the M2-9 photo in several resolutions and formats, an explanatory caption, a photo gallery of other planetary nebulas, a QuickTime movie illustrating the process, and other explanatory material. [JS]
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National Organic Program Proposed Rule Home Page--USDA
http://www.ams.usda.gov/nop/
Every year proposed US federal agency rules are published in the Federal Register so that interested members of the public may read and comment on the proposed rule before it goes into effect. Recently, the Internet has begun to show the potential to change and help democratize this process. The Department of Health and Human Services (HSS) Proposed Rule on the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families Program (TANF) (discussed in the November 28, 1997 Scout Report), was one example. The United States Department of Agriculture Agricultural Marketing Service's Organic Program Proposed Rule is another. Instead of searching through the cumbersome volumes of the FR, reading the rule, and then commenting on it, Internet users are now beginning to be able to go to the agency site, read the rule, broken up into its parts, and submit interactive comments on any of those parts. At the site other users can easily access those comments. In this way, the Internet can be used to help foster the democratic process--interested users can see this in action at these two sites. Note that the comment period on the National Organic Program Proposed Rule ends March 16, 1998, and that registration is necessary before commenting at the USDA site. [JS]
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Digital Images from the Radicalism Collection--MSU
http://www.lib.msu.edu/spc/digital/radicalism/
The Michigan State University Library Radicalism Collection contains a number of pamphlets published by political and social pressure groups in the US. This website contains the digitized full text of over 100 pamphlets by groups such as the Black Panthers, the Ku Klux Klan, the Industrial Workers of the World, and Students for a Democratic Society. Titles may be browsed by subject or alphabetical listing. [MD]
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Iowa State University Food Safety Project [RealPlayer, .pdf]
http://www.exnet.iastate.edu/Pages/families/fs/homepage.html
Food safety has been in the news lately, from E. coli outbreaks to the recent US Food and Drug Administration's irradiation ruling. The Iowa State University Extension provides this site, a clearinghouse for educational materials on the topic. The centerpiece of the site is a basic four-lesson food safety curriculum for consumers and K-12 students. Information on eleven food borne pathogens from Botulism to Cryptosporidium parvum to Salmonellosis is available. Consumers can consult the food safety tips (some in Adobe Acrobat [.pdf] format) and obtain information on other agencies that provide food safety resources. [JS]
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Bird Checklists of the United States--NPWRC
http://www.npwrc.usgs.gov/resource/othrdata/chekbird/chekbird.htm
The Northern Prairie Wildlife Research Center (discussed in the October 15, 1997 Scout Report for Science & Engineering), part of the Biological Resources Division of the US Geological Survey, provides 315 bird checklists for 48 states, the Virgin Islands, and Puerto Rico. These checklists are designed to help birdwatchers decide where to look for specific birds. They are compiled from various national wildlife refuges, national parks, and state bird checklists. With slight variations in format, these checklists usually contain seasonal information about the abundance of various species in a reported area. The simple designs allow for ease of printing. Note that checklist dates of publication range from 1982-1997. One of the main purposes of the site is to encourage the updating and maintenance of the resources here. [JS]
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The World Wide Web Consortium Issues HTML 4.0 as a W3C Recommendation
Press release:
http://www.w3.org/Press/HTML4-REC
HTML 4.0 specification:
http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has released the HyperText Markup Language 4.0 specification as "a W3C recommendation. A W3C Recommendation indicates that a specification is stable, contributes to web interoperability, and has been reviewed by all W3C members, who are in favor of supporting its adoption by the industry." More information about the features of the specification, which include improvements in forms, tables, and frames, as well as markup for multilingual documents and mechanisms allowing tables and forms to be translated into braille or speech, is available in a press release. The specification comtains complete indexes of elements and attributes. [JS]
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Cataloging Internet Resources: A Manual and Practical Guide
http://www.oclc.org/oclc/man/9256cat/toc.htm
The electronic version of Nancy B. Olson's 2nd edition guide to cataloging Internet resources is available on the web. The manual was originally developed to support participants in the Online Computer Library Center(OCLC)/US Department of Education-funded project, "Building a Catalog of Internet Resources." Similar to the first edition, the arrangement in this edition combines a discussion of Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules, 2nd ed.(AACR2), with the applicable US Machine Readable Cataloging (USMARC) tagging. This new edition includes updated examples and the newly adopted International Standard Bibliographic Description for Electronic Resources [ISBD(ER)] "expanded list of terms to be used in conjunction with the File Characteristics Area." The manual is meant to be used in concert with "AACR2, its amendments, and the Library of Congress Rule Interpretations (LCRIs)." [AG]
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Specular LogoMotion--3D Animation Tool
http://www.metacreations.com/products/logomotion/
LogoMotion provides an easy-to-use environment for creating 3D flying logos that are text based. A product of MetaCreations, it is available as a demo. LogoMotion features include camera moves that are automatic fly routes for the text to follow, lights, props or moving objects, and backdrops. The demo version of this commercial product comes with a simple, though limited, tutorial. End products can be saved out as QuickTime, PICT, compressed PICT, PICS, and TIFF files. [TB]
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Volume 1, Number 34: The Scout Report for December 16, 1994
http://scout.cs.wisc.edu/scout/report/archive/12-16-94.html
US Department of Energy
http://www.doe.gov/
Field Museum Dinosaur Exhibit
http://www.fmnh.org/exhibits/online_exhib.htm
When the US Department of Energy gopher site was announced, it contained a small amount of DOE information, along with relevant links. While the gopher site still exists, today the DOE web site is a large government information provider, highlighted by bibliographic and full text databases, connections to other DOE offices and labs, and access to the Department's declassified materials, as well as to over 12,000 research and development project summaries. The Dinosaur Exhibit, provided by the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, today appears tame in comparison to other museum exhibits that utilize state-of-the-art movie, image, sound, and virtual reality technology. When it was announced, however, its MPEG movies and interactive sound files were breathtaking. Its images are just as beautiful today as they were in 1994, and one can fondly remember when a 70K MPEG file was considered a huge download as well as a memory hog. [JS]
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Copyright Susan Calcari, 1994-1997. 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 (ISSN 1092-3861) is published weekly by Internet Scout

Susan Calcari
Jack Solock
Jeannine Ramsey
Teri Boomsma
Michael de Nie
David Flaspohler
Aimee D. Glassel
Kathryn Harris
Matthew Livesey
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Thiam Hee Ng
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The Scout Report - December 19, 1997

The Scout Report

December 19, 1997

New From Internet Scout

Research and Education

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