The Scout Report - May 28, 1999

Watch for Our New Interface
http://scout.cs.wisc.edu/
Here at the Scout Project, we're wrapping up our anniversary celebration -- five years of the Scout Report and six years of Net-Happenings! In culmination, we will unveil our new interface next week. We hope that you like our new look and find the scout site easier to navigate. Let us know what you think.
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Scout Report for Science & Engineering and KIDS Report
Scout Report for Science & Engineering
http://scout.cs.wisc.edu/scout/report/sci-engr/1999/se-990526.html
KIDS Report
http://scout.cs.wisc.edu/scout/KIDS/archive/KIDS-990525.html
Volume 2, Number 18 of the Scout Report for Science & Engineering is available. The In the News section annotates eight resources on the endangerment of sea cucumbers and other marine life near the Galapagos Islands. The May 25 issue of the KIDS Report, written by and for K-12 students, comes to us from Ms. Sachter's elementary school class at Nederland Elementary School in Nederland, Colorado. This issue features Internet resources on inventions and inventors. [AO]
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Final Report of the Select Committee on US National Security and Military/ Commercial Concerns with the People's Republic of China (Redacted Version) -- US House of Representatives [.pdf]
http://www.house.gov/coxreport/
US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) Scoops Cox Report
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/news/19990527/index.html
This report, released publicly by Congress on Tuesday, investigates and chronicles 20 years of Chinese espionage in the US. The three-volume, 700-page document concludes that the People's Republic of China has acquired US intelligence both legally and illegally over the last two decades. The report, written by a special House panel chaired by Rep. Christopher Cox (R-CA), claims that the PRC stole nuclear secrets from US weapons labs and obtained valuable military technology through the commercial procurement of supercomputers and satellite equipment. The Cox report also outlines 36 recommendations in response to the investigation, such as suggestions to tighten security at weapons centers and to increase restrictions on technology exports to China. Declassified versions of the report's eleven chapters and appendices are available in discrete sections at the US House of Representatives site in both HTML and .pdf format. In light of the Cox Report, the National Security Archive (NSA), located at George Washington University, has released a Defense Estimative Brief published by the US Defense Intelligence Agency in April 1984. The four-page brief, obtained by the NSA through a Freedom of Information Act request, details Chinese efforts to enhace its nuclear capability through "overt contact with US scientists and technology, and the covert acquisition of US technology." [AO]
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EXTOXNET [Frames]
http://ace.orst.edu/info/extoxnet/
A cooperative effort of University of California-Davis, Oregon State University, Michigan State University, Cornell University, and the University of Idaho, EXTOXNET (the Extension Toxicology Network) is an online resource providing "objective, science-based information about pesticides" and other toxic chemicals. First-time viewers will find useful information in the FAQ section, which covers health effects and risks, diet and cancer, food safety, drinking water, garden chemicals, and other topics. Also available at the site is the University of California at Davis's Environmental Toxicology Newsletter. The heart of the site, however, is the searchable database, which provides extensive profiles of pesticides, toxicology information briefs, toxicology issues of concern, and fact sheets. Although still under construction, the database of pesticide profiles includes trade name(s), regulatory status, chemical class, formulation, toxicological effects, ecological effects (on birds, aquatic organisms, etc.), environmental fate, physical properties, exposure guidelines, basic manufacturer, and references. For toxicology students, researchers, or the general public, this is a well-written and useful resource. [LXP]
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National Guideline Clearinghouse (NGC)
http://www.guideline.gov/
Frames: http://www.guideline.gov/index.asp
Non-Frames: http://www.guideline.gov/body_home_nf.asp?view=home
Operated by the US Department of Health and Human Services, the Agency for Health Care Policy and Research (AHCPR), the American Medical Association (AMA) and the American Association of Health Plans (AAHP), The National Guideline Clearinghouse provides information about hundreds of "evidence-based clinical practice guidelines" for health care professionals. Guidelines from over 100 different medical organizations can be searched or browsed by disease or condition; treatment or intervention method; or issuing organization. Each record includes the date of release and current status of the guideline, major recommendations for interventions and practices, organization(s) and committee members responsible for the guideline, and methods used to collect evidence and rate the quality of evidence. A link to the full text of the guideline is provided if available. When more than one guideline has been released on a topic, users can compare selected guidelines in chart format. A News section tells developers how to submit guidelines to the Clearinghouse. [GW]
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New Cultures and Economies [.zip, Word97]
http://homepages.gold.ac.uk/slater/
Don Slater, Department of Sociology, University of London, shares interdisciplinary research in economic sociology at the New Cultures and Economies site. Readers may download extensive bibliographies on consumer culture and market society topics in Word97 or .zip formats or browse course pages online, and the Sociology of the Internet section, now in progress, aims to create dialogues among scholars of electronic media. [MW]
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UNESCO Observatory on the Information Society
http://www.unesco.org/webworld/observatory/index.html
US Mirror:
http://mirror-us.unesco.org/webworld/observatory/index.html
The Observatory on the Information Society, an extensive Website developed by UNESCO, aims "to raise awareness on the ethical, legal, and societal challenges brought about by new [information and communication] technologies." The site collects and disseminates current information for UNESCO's 186 Member States, focusing on four themes: Privacy and Confidentiality, Content Regulation, Multilingualism, and Access to Public Domain Information. The Privacy and Confidentiality section encompasses issues such as the protection of personal data, cryptography, and digital signatures. The Content Regulation section covers topics including the freedom of expression, violence in cyberspace, and child protection. The Multilingualism section offers resources on linguistic rights, diversity promotion, and language technologies. The Access to Public Domain Information section contains documents related to the public information policies adopted by various nations. The site also includes Action Plans, Strategies and Policies, a section that provides resources on the information infrastructures of international organizations and countries worldwide. [AO]
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Drugs & Crime Facts -- BJS
http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/dcf/contents.htm
This new section of the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) Website collocates US data on violations related to illegal drugs and their effect on crime rates, law enforcement, courts, and corrections. Gathered by the BJS and other agencies, the data available at the site "updates the information published in the popular [BJS] report, Drugs and Crime Facts, 1994." [AO]
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IA-64 Instruction Set Architecture [.pdf]
http://developer.intel.com/design/ia64/architecture.htm
For those eagerly waiting for the IA-64 Instruction Set Architecture to be revealed by Intel Corporation and Hewlett-Packard Company, the details have at last been released. From compiler-directed instruction level parallelism to backward compatibility with x86 code, the IA-64 architecture has it all. For anyone involved in computer architecture or compiler design, the IA-64 ISA manual is a must-read. This processor may or may not take the world by storm, but it certainly is interesting. [CL]
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GEO-Data Explorer (GEODE) -- USGS [Java]
http://dss1.er.usgs.gov/
Provided by the US Geological Survey, the new GEO-Data Explorer (GEODE) organizes database information spatially. Replacing the Digital Earth Explorer, the site currently includes a comprehensive geological data set on the Powder River Basin in Wyoming and Montana as well as limited data on the energy resources along the North Slope of Alaska. In the future, GEODE plans to include data sets from all of the Geologic Division's programs. Note: this Java-driven site is still in beta-testing, and users are advised to consult the checklist of minimum requirements to obtain hardware and browser specifications. [JJS]
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Health Concerns Across a Woman's Lifespan: The Commonwealth Fund 1998 Survey of Women's Health
http://www.cmwf.org/programs/women/ksc_whsurvey99_332.asp
.pdf version of report: [140K, 65 p.]
http://www.cmwf.org/programs/women/ksc_whsurvey_332.pdf
.pdf version of charts [65K, 16 p.]
http://www.cmwf.org/programs/women/ksc_whsurvey_charts.pdf
The Commonwealth Fund has recently published a new report based on the research findings of a recent survey on women's health. The report highlights key findings derived from survey questions that examined "access to care, health knowledge, health-related behaviors, violence, depression, use of hormone replacement therapy, and informal caregiving roles." The report includes 32 charts and 19 data tables. [AO]
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Spy Letters of the American Revolution
http://www.si.umich.edu/spies/
This new digital exhibition displays and contextualizes a collection of letters written by spies during the American Revolution. The letters, held by the University of Michigan's Clements Library, offer historical insight into the military intelligence of both the American and British armies. The site presents large images of the original letters beside typewritten transcriptions. The value of the letters as primary documents is enhanced by the historical background provided by the site creators, four students in the U-M's School of Information. The rich background information at the site includes historical narratives related to espionage, explanations of the era's epistolary spying techniques, detailed maps tracing the spy letters' routes, biographies of important persons, and a timeline chronicling major events in the American Revolutionary War. [AO]
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Curriculum Development Timeline
http://www2.bc.edu/~youmansm/ed711cover.html
Developed by fourteen doctoral students at Boston College's Lynch School of Education for Dr. Sara Freedman's course, The Historical and Political Contexts of Curriculum, this site chronicles the development of curricula in US schools from 1780 to 1999. The timeline provides nine topical sections that examine curricular issues from different eras, such as Spelling as Social Construction, 1780-1830: The Role of Culture in the Social Construction of Learning; From Expression to Attention: The Shift from Oral Reading to Silent Reading in American Schools, 1910-1935; and, Home Ec or High Tech? Vocational Education, 1900-1980. The site also includes a glossary of terms, a collection of quotations on education, bibliographies, links to related sites, and suggestions on how to use the site for teaching and learning. [AO]
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Aperture Gallery
http://www.aperture-photo.com/index.html
The Aperture Gallery of London has created this Website to present fine arts photography to a wider audience than its traditional gallery could ever hope to attract. The Gallery's main aims are to assist photographers by promoting their work and to sell photography to collectors. The Website includes an online reserve form for buyers, and price and framing information for each photograph. But the looking is free, and there is a lot to look at. Users can enter the Website from a museum-like map of its rooms to view the latest exhibitions, and photographs grouped by a variety of subjects, such as landscapes, celebrities, portraits, and animals. Parents be warned, there are some nudes. This month's current exhibits include truly disturbing images created by Andreas Horvath that suggest the horrors of war using melted plastic soldiers, Antonella Bari's color-drenched closeups of vegetables, Gregory Stringfield's abstract camera paintings, and Penny Taylor's black and white photographs of architectural details. [DS]
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LawGuru.com
http://www.lawguru.com/
LawGuru.com is an exhaustive resource for free legal information. The site provides access to more than 430 legal search engines and databases, including a feature that allows parallel searching of multiple databases. The site also maintains the LawGuru.com BBS, a searchable database of legal questions posted by users accompanied by responses from one of the more than 320 practicing attorneys in the LawGuru.com network. Currently the BBS database contains over 4,000 legal questions divided into more than 25 categories. In addition, LawGuru.com provides a collection of fifteen FAQs written on various legal issues, links to over 500 legal Internet resources, and information on over 600 associated electronic mailing lists. Recently, LawGuru.com began hosting the Internet Law Library (see the May 3, 1996 Scout Report), a comprehensive resource formerly maintained by the US House of Representatives. LawGuru.com is operated by The Law Offices of Eslamboly & Barlavi (California). [AO]
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Women of the West Museum
http://www.wowmuseum.org/
Current Feature Story:
http://www.wowmuseum.org/gallery/sod/index.html
The Women of the West Museum is an online museum based in Boulder, Colorado that seeks to celebrate the accomplishments of everyday women who lived in the West. Contemporary women are honored in the Woman of the Week section. The Museum features Programs, a Gallery, an Educational Resource Center, a Story Quilt that solicits contributions, and additional information on books and Websites related to the topic of women in the Western territories. The exceptional Feature Story, There Are No Renters Here: Women's Lives on the Sod House Frontier, profiles the Oblinger family, sod house homesteaders in Nebraska in the 1870s, through descriptive, heart-felt letters and archived photographs. [JR]
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Wall Street Journal Interactivo
http://interactivo.wsj.com/
Dow Jones & Company created the Spanish-language business news resource Wall Street Journal Interactivo "to serve the needs of Latin American businesspeople." This comprehensive site draws on content from the Spanish news agency EFE, Reuters NewMedia Inc., and The Wall Street Journal Americas, among other sources, to provide continuous online financial news as well as Diarios de la Region -- links to current headlines from top Latin American dailies by country. [MW]
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Political Information.com
http://www.politicalinformation.com/
Part of the DC Orbit Network, a group providing Web-based information tailored to the needs of the Washington DC political community, Political Information.com is a targeted search engine covering over 2,000 political and policy sites. Help is provided at the site on how to structure your search to retrieve exactly the items you want. I tried a general search on Wisconsin which retrieved over 4,000 items, but a structured search including Tammy Baldwin (Rep.) and excluding Thompson (Gov.) got a more manageable six. Although Political Information.com touts the sites it indexes as the best sources of political information, a list of what's covered is not provided. My first few searches primarily returned material from the e-zine Salon, but subsequent searches found other sources. [DS]
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The CGI Resource Index
http://www.cgi-resources.com/
Although numerous directories of CGI resources exist, The CGI Resource Index, a product of Matt's Script Archive, Inc., is one of the more useful and informed. Each of the 2,187 links to CGI resources is briefly described, categorized for browsing, and searchable. The resources annotated in this collection range from ready-made, free CGI programs in a variety of languages to tutorials on CGI programming. The most interesting feature this index provides is the ability to rate each of the resources on a scale of one to ten and, for registered users, the ability to comment on the resources. These ratings are available while browsing the resources and can be helpful in choosing a resource to use. While more comprehensive search capabilities would make this site even more useful, it is nonetheless one for Web programmers to bookmark. [CL]
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HushMail
https://www.hushmail.com/
Hush Communications recently unveiled HushMail, the Web's first free email client with 1,024-bit encryption. This email service uses a Java applet to encrypt and decrypt messages sent between users with HushMail accounts. The developers of HushMail call this process a "public key cryptosystem with roaming user capability." HushMail offers the ease of use of Web-based email while providing the security and privacy not available with other free email services. HushMail even allows users to create secure, anonymous accounts. [AO]
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Milosevic and Others Indicted for War Crimes
United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia: Milosevic & Others Case
http://www.un.org/icty/special/index.html
Documents Relevant to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia -- University of Minnesota Human Rights Library
http://www1.umn.edu/humanrts/icty/icty.html
US Information Agency: Kosovo
http://www.usia.gov/kosovo/
Federal Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia
http://www.smip.sv.gov.yu/
Yesterday, the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) indicted and issued international arrest warrants for Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic and four other senior Yugoslav and Serb officials, including Serb President Milan Milutinovic. Each of the five has been accused with three counts of crimes against humanity and one count of violating the laws or customs of war. Specifically they are charged with committing atrocities in Kosovo against ethnic Albanians, including murder, deportation, and persecution on political, racial, or religious grounds. Authorities in Belgrade stated that Yugoslavia will not recognize the jurisdiction of the ICTY. US State Department officials fear that the 41-page indictment could complicate negotiations for a peaceful settlement in Kosovo. And some diplomats claim that the charges only bolster NATO's reasoning for continued bombing campaigns over the former Yugoslavia. Milosevic is the first acting head of state indicted for war crimes. If apprehended and convicted, the five accused could be imprisoned for life, the maximum sentence. However, since its inception in 1993, only six of the 84 suspects publicly indicted by the UN court have been convicted and sentenced.

The UN ICTY provides an official page on the Milosevic & Others case (IT-99-37), containing a press release on the indictments, a statement by the prosecutor, and the full text of the charges. University of Minnesota Human Rights Library maintains a collection of documents and Internet resources related to the ICTY. The USIA's special section on Kosovo posts salient press statements, fact sheets, and maps issued by the US State Department about the crisis and the ICTY. The English-language site of the Federal Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia includes daily news bulletins, press statements, and information on Yugoslav foreign policy and consular affairs as well as official analyses of recent events related to the Kosovo situation. Additional resources can be found in the Scout Report Signpost, the Scout Report's database. These include the US State Department report Erasing History: Ethnic Cleansing in Kosovo, International Crisis Group (ICG) South Balkans Reports Index, and our recent In the News story Refugee Crisis in the Balkans. [AO]
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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, or the National Science Foundation.

Susan Calcari Rachael E. Bower Michael de Nie Travis Koplow Aimee D. Glassel Todd Hanson Sheilah Harrington Christopher Lukas Dave Mayer Sujani Nannapaneni Andrew Osmond Laura X. Payne Jeannine Ramsey Mike Roszkowski Debra Shapiro Jennifer J. Schultz Geraldine Wanserski Megan Waters Amy Tracy Wells Paul M Schwartz

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