The Scout Report - September 29, 1995

A Service to the Internet Community
Provided by the Info Scout and 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 on the InterNIC server:
http://rs.intetnic.net/scout_report-index.html

Additional information and detailed access and subscription instructions are included at the end of each Scout Report.

Highlights In This Week's Report:

• RealAudio
• The CoVIS Project for K-12 learning in the Geosciences
• Nebraska Center for Writers
• Thesis discusses high-speed residential Internet access
• RockOnTV

World Wide Web:

• Elementary Science This Month is a free online Magazine for elementary aged students and the teachers who teach them. It features science activities with easily obtainable materials, profiles of eminent scientists and a featured animal of the month. Also a map and description of the months night sky. It is updated on the 25th of each month. ESTM for October is ready and online. It features a new, more streamlined format.
  http://www.lme.mankato.msus.edu/ci/elem.sci.html
  
• ENVIROFACTS contains the public information (FOIA information) from several EPA database systems including: FINDS, PCS, TRIS, CERCLIS, and RCRIS. The Web pages supply a description of each system, information on the data elements which are part of each system, and an HTML Form query page allowing the databases to be searched by City or Zipcode for a list of facilities. New, more flexible, query forms are planned for incorporation into the Web pages during October 1995. The database was initially released March 31, 1995 and the capabilities in the new forms have been based on the public feedback to date.
  http://www.epa.gov/enviro/html/ef_home.html
  
• Hoover's Online features an accurate and comprehensive database of company information free on the Web. Called Hoover's MasterList Plus, the database of more than 8,500 of the largest public and private U.S. companies provides company name, key personnel, address, sales, number of employees, ticker symbol and other information for companies meeting the user's designated search criteria. Hoover's Online also includes the week's top business news stories, a directory of more than 1,000 corporate Web sites, a synopsis of the 25 top-selling business books and links to other business information resources on the Web, including stock quotes and SEC filings. The new List of Lists has dozens of rankings indicating which companies are the largest, which CEOs made the most money, which companies are the best employers, and more. Almost all of Hoover's Online is free, including the content mentioned here.
  http://www.hoovers.com
  
• The Learning Through Collaborative Visualization Project (CoVis) is working to enhance science education by making it more like the collaborative, project-based environment of the scientific community. The CoVis community includes researchers at Northwestern University, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and the Exploratorium, along with teachers and students at more than 45 high schools throughout the United States. The CoVis Project has announced the debut of the CoVis Geosciences Web Server and the UIUC-CoVis Geosciences Web Server. The purpose of these servers is to provide K-12 teachers and students with online resources specially designed to support project-based inquiry in the Geological Sciences. To help support the special needs of different audiences, the CoVis Geosciences Server has been designed for CoVis classrooms and the general K-12 community, and the UIUC server is targeted more towards the needs of the atmospheric sciences and broader scientific communities. There is an almost complete cross-linkage and sharing of resources across these two servers, emphasizing the close relationship that CoVis believes should exist between the K-12 and scientific communities. Resources include a growing database of classroom projects and activities in the Geosciences; an extensive collection of annotated network-resources; a collection of multimedia instructional modules in the atmospheric sciences; and new web-based visualization environments to explore both the greenhouse effect and real-time weather data.
  http://www.covis.nwu.edu
  http://www.covis.nwu.edu/geosciences/
  
• The National Agricultural Library debuts its Directory of Agriculture-Related Databases, Datasets, and Information Systems, otherwise known as AgDB. AgDB presents a collection of metadata records that describe agriculture-related information systems available through various means, including: Internet, online services, CD-ROM, and even diskette and 9-track tape. The full-text of the metadata records is keyword searchable. For Internet-based systems, links to the actual resource are included within the metadata record. AgDB is a prototype project of the Agriculture Network Information Center (AgNIC) initiative.
  http://www.agnic.nal.usda.gov/agdb/
  
• The Nebraska Center for Writers is an on-line resource for poets and writers, including profiles of contemporary writers and information by and about writers and writing. Includes writers groups online, tools for writers, on-line literature, publishing opportunities, arts advocacy, links to university creative writing programs, literary agents, and more.
  http://mockingbird.creighton.edu/NCW/
  
• RealAudio provides audio-on-demand for the Internet. From their Web page you can download the player for the Mac or PC at no charge. Use it to listen to audio files from dozens of sites around the Internet. The news with RealAudio is that you can begin listening to the audio immediately, while it's downloading, rather than waiting until the entire file has been loaded to your hard disk. This feature provides a more pleasant experience for impatient Internauts. Listen to current news, information, or music files from sites such as ABC, NPR, Metaverse (ex-MTV VJ Adam Curry's music and entertainment site), CSPAN, ESPN, Fortune Magazine, Green Peace, Internet Multicasting Service or others from a wide selection of links on the RealAudio page.
  http://www.realaudio.com/
  
• The UK Index provides a searchable index of resources in or about the United Kingdom. The Quick Reference section offers links to News Resources in the UK such as the BBC, weather information, UK record charts, and UK related USENET newsgroups. The Foreign & Commonwealth Office provides good advice for travelers. The search engine allows the selection of categories such as arts or business to restrict the search to pages included in one category or a combination of categories.
  http://www.ukindex.co.uk/
  

Electronic Mailing Lists

• The new unmoderated listserver Tutor-L has two purposes: (1) To act as a common ground where students can announce that they are looking for expert tutoring in a subject, paid or free, and where professors, graduate students, or other experts in particular fields can announce that they are looking for students in their fields of expertise. (2) To act as a forum for discussion of tutorials, tutorial methods, and the possibility and merits of a voluntary, free network of individual tutors and students finding each other via the Internet for education outside the traditional university setting.

  send a message to: tutor-l-request@netcom.com
  in the body of the message type: subscribe
  

• BEATCALC: Mental Math Exercises. BEATCALC will wake up your brain on Monday morning with a mental math exercise that will stimulate those gray cells. Each Monday you will receive instructions for an exercise that will enable you to do math computations mentally faster than a friend can do them on a calculator. For example, how about learning to square 65 or 95 mentally in quick time? You can beat that calculator! These exercises are designed for : (1) Foggy heads at work on Monday morning who need a mental jump-start for the week. (2) People who say "I never could do math" and need some math confidence. (3) Calculator cripples. Kids (and big kids) who need a calculator to do 8 times 9. (4) Individuals who have refused to think about numbers since fifth grade. Was it long division that did it? (5) Braggarts who would like to show up a colleague by doing math mentally faster than he/she can do it using a calculator. (6) Seniors who want to keep mentally alert by routinely exercising the noggin. (7) And other hardy and adventurous souls who can use a little mental stimulation.

  http://forum.swarthmore.edu/k12/mathtips/beatcalc.html
  or send email to beatcalc@aol.com
  in the body of the message type: SUBSCRIBE BEATCALC yourfirstname yourlastname
  

NetBytes

• Sharon Eisner Gillett, a graduate student at the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science, has made available both Web and bound hardcopy versions of her thesis, "Connecting Homes to The Internet: An Engineering Cost Model of Cable vs. ISDN." The report describes the technology used to provide residential Internet connections via cable systems and ISDN networks, and discusses the results of a model to explore the cost of such systems. It concludes with a discussion of the technology, business and policy barriers to diffusion of high-speed residential Internet access. The hardcopy versions are now available from the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science publications service. Send email to pubs@lcs.mit.edu with your request for LCS Tech Report 654. The cost of the 197-page report is $21.00 plus postage.
  http://www.tns.lcs.mit.edu/publications/mitlcstr654.html
  
• If you're looking for a new Internet Service Provider, try The List for a geographic listing of 1,411 providers in the USA and around the world. Choose a country, or scroll to the bottom of the front page and click on ImageMap for a US/Canada listing by area code. Services offered and pricing included in most cases.
  http://www.thelist.com/
  

Weekend Scouting

• RockOnTV attempts to keep track of all television shows that may be of interest to fans of popular music. The particular focus is rock music and live performances, but they include other shows from time to time that are noteworthy. Music related shows are listed in a weekly schedule.
  http://www.musicstation.com/rockontv/
  
• A new mailing list is dedicated to exchanging Line Dance instructions, step definitions, addresses of magazines that publish Line Dance information, regional dance competition notices, names and addresses of good places to dance, and anything else related to Line Dancing and Country-Western Dancing. Subscribers are from across the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia.

  send mail to: MAISER@RMGATE.POP.INDIANA.EDU
  in the body of the message type: sub LINEDANCE-L
  

About the Scout Report

The Scout Report is a weekly publication offered by the InterNIC to the Internet community as a fast, convenient way to stay informed about network activities. Its purpose is to combine in one place selected new (and newly-discovered) Internet resources.

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 -- mailing lists for both a plain text and HTML version, and World Wide Web. The World Wide Web version of the Report includes links to all listed resources. The report is released every weekend.

In addition to the plain text version, the Scout Report is distributed in HTML format allowing sites to post the Scout Report on local WorldWideWeb servers each week. The result is faster access for local users. You are welcome and encouraged to re-post and re-distribute the report. Note that copyright statements appear on all versions of the Scout Report, and we ask that these be included when re-posting or re-distributing.

If you haven't yet subscribed or told your friends and colleagues, now is the time. Spread the news by word-of-net. Join 20,000 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

-- Susan Calcari
InterNIC Info Scout

Scout Report Access Methods

• To receive the electronic mail version of the Scout Report each Friday, join the scout-report mailing list. You will receive one message a week -- the Scout Report every weekend.

  send email to: majordomo@lists.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@lists.internic.net in the body of the message, type:
    

    subscribe scout-report-html

    • To access the hypertext version of the Report, point your WWW client to:
      http://scout.cs.wisc.edu/report/sr/

    Resource Addressing Conventions

    After each resource in the Scout Report one or more network addresses are listed. Every attempt is made to use the same convention in each listing for 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.) 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 using 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 can use a WWW browser installed on your desktop computer, or a "command-line" WWW client on your local Internet host computer. Web browsers are available for all major computer platforms, including Macintosh, PC, and UNIX. Check with your local support center or your Internet Service Provider for more information about Web browsers installed on the Internet host computer or your desktop computer.

    ---

    Copyright Susan Calcari, 1995.

    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 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 National Science Foundation, AT&T, or Network Solutions, Inc.