Scout Report for Science & Engineering
http://scout.cs.wisc.edu/report/sci-eng/1999/se-991013.html
Volume 3, Number 3 of the Scout Report for Science & Engineering is available. The In the News section annotates ten resources related to the world's population (which was estimated to reach six billion on October 12) and its environmental impacts. [MD]
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The Kosovo Conflict: Consequences for the Environment & Human Settlements [.pdf, 106p.]
http://www.grid.unep.ch:80/btf/final/index.html
UNEP Press Release on Four environmental hotspots found in Serbia
http://www.grid.unep.ch:80/btf/pressreleases/unep1410.html
The final report of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and UN Center for Human Settlements Balkans Task Force (BTF) on the environmental impact of NATO's bombing campaign in Yugoslavia was released yesterday. The report finds that the heaviest pollution is confined to industrial cities, four of which it identifies as "hot spots" in need of immediate attention. More on these "hot spots" can be found at the UNEP page. The BTF report itself is offered in .pdf format and contains an introduction, chronology of the Kosovo conflict, analysis of the state of the environment in Yugoslavia before and after the conflict, and recommendations. A number of maps and photos are included, which can also be accessed from the main page. [MD]
[Back to Contents]New Archival Evidence on Taiwanese "Nuclear Intentions", 1966-1976 - NSA
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB20/
This new electronic briefing book from the National Security Archive (last described in the April 4, 1999 Scout Report) features recently declassified documents which provide new details on efforts by the US and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to discourage Taiwan from acquiring critical technology for producing fissile materials in the late 1960s and mid-1970s. The site includes an introductory essay, some key findings, and 30 well-annotated documents. The image pages for the documents themselves are generally of high quality, which is not usually the case with declassified documents placed online. [MD]
[Back to Contents]Botany 301: Taxonomy of Flowering Plants
http://www.csdl.tamu.edu/FLORA/tfp/tfphome1.html
This spectacular learning resource is provided for Web viewers by botanist Dr. Hugh Wilson of Texas A&M University, also host of the Flowering Plants Gateway (reviewed in the September 25, 1998 Scout Report). Botany 301, currently underway at Texas A&M, is a Web-enhanced, mid-level introductory course on the taxonomy of flowering plants. Geared towards undergraduates, the heart of the site includes illustrated, hyperlinked Lecture Notes; illustrated Laboratory Notes (includes Basic Classification, Nomenclature, and Keys; and Family Studies from Magnoliopsida through Liliopsida), two Floras (The Navasota and Texas Endemics), and On-line Data (local and global). Educators and students of flowering plant taxonomy will find this learning site invaluable. [LXP]
[Back to Contents]USDA: Preparing for a New Millennium
http://www.usda.gov/news/pubs/98arp/content.htm
The USDA has recently placed online the full text of the Secretary of Agriculture's FY1998 report. Users can read the report in HTML format by chapter or display the report on a single page for printing. Contents include an overview of the agency's 1998 accomplishments and reports on family farm services, food and nutrition services, food safety, research and education, and rural economies, among others. The report includes a number of illustrations and charts and a list of USDA agencies and acronyms is also provided. [MD]
[Back to Contents]Cold Regions Bibliography
http://lcweb.loc.gov/rr/scitech/coldregions/welcome.html
A joint endeavor of the Federal Research Division of the Library of Congress and the US Army Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory (CRREL), this project disseminates information on Antarctica and cold regions science and technology "by maintaining and continually updating a database which is an accumulation of over 40 years of materials on the science and technology of the world's cold regions." This database currently contains over 208,000 records, with about 6,000 accessions annually. After entering a supplied user id and password, users can search the database by keyword, author, or year of publication. Search returns include title, source, and a link to more information, including pages, notes, series, and publisher information. A DOS version of the database is also available for limited periods to qualified researchers. More information is available at the site. [MD]
[Back to Contents]Taiwan Documents Project
http://www.taiwandocuments.org/
Developed and maintained by Y.C. Chi, this site hosts a large collection of full text documents relating to Taiwan's international relations, history, and legal status. These include treaties dating from 1662 to 1978, documents from World War II, Joint Communiques with Japan and the US, Taiwan-related US legislative activity, and UN documents, among others. The site also features two essays by the site author: an executive summary of international agreements affecting Taiwan's status and a discussion on sovereignty. A number of short pieces on non-legal considerations about the status of Taiwan are planned for the near future. While scholars and others involved on either side of the debate on Taiwan's status may not agree with the site author's views, the original full text documents speak for themselves. [MD]
[Back to Contents]Three History Resources
The History Guide
http://www.pagesz.net/~stevek/index.html
History Department Guidelines for Papers
http://www.Colorado.EDU/history/papguide.htm
History Department Guidelines for Referencing
http://www.Colorado.EDU/history/refdoc.htm
Created by Steven Kreis, Adjunct Assistant Professor of History at Meredith College, The History Guide is aimed at secondary and undergraduate students in History courses, studying for the A.P. test, or considering majoring in History. The core of the site is a collection of full text lectures from three university courses on Ancient and Medieval, Intellectual, and Twentieth Century European History. Also included are A Student's Guide to the Study of History, nine syllabi from courses Kreis has taught, a sizable collection of annotated links, and Kreis' own intellectual autobiography, which is presented for students considering graduate school in history. The remaining two resources are offered by the University of Colorado at Boulder History Department. Both guides offer essential advice for undergraduates writing papers for History courses. Both are clearly organized and provide numerous examples. University instructors will find these pages an excellent resource to link to from their online course pages or syllabi.
[Back to Contents]NCBI Coffee Break
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Coffeebreak/
The National Center for Biotechnology Information Coffee Break is a biweekly series of short reports on recent biomedical discoveries. "Each report is about 400 words, and is usually based on a discovery reported in one or more articles from the recently published peer-reviewed literature." Each report incorporates interactive tutorials, figures, and links to related sources for more information. Previous topics include: "The compound eye of flies divulges evolutionary secrets," "The neighborhood of Alzheimer's amyloid precursor protein," and "Ubiquitin links Parkinson's disease genes." Aimed at an academic and professional audience, the NCBI Coffee Break is a concise yet content rich current awareness tool. [MD]
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1999 Nobel Peace Prize
http://www.nobel.se/announcement-99/peace99.html
1999 Nobel Prizes
http://www.nobel.se/announcement-99/
Over the past week, the Nobel Foundation has announced the winners of its 1999 prizes, beginning with the Prize for Literature and culminating with the Peace Prize this morning. This year's Peace Prize was awarded to Doctors Without Borders (Medecins Sans Frontieres) "in recognition of the organization's pioneering humanitarian work on several continents." A list of the winners and summaries of their accomplishments in the fields of Physics, Chemistry, and Medicine are described in the October 13, 1999 Scout Report for Science and Engineering). Information on the winners of the prizes for Economics and Literature is available from the main site. [MD]
[Back to Contents]Images1: Online Images from The National Library of Australia's Pictorial Collection
http://www.nla.gov.au/images1/
At this site users can search and browse through 20,000 digital images selected from the roughly half million pictures in the Pictorial Collection of the National Library of Australia. Images1 includes portraits, photographs, paintings and prints related to the history of Australia. Three search methods are provided: Quick Search, a keyword search; Simple Search, to indicate where the search word should occur, such as Title, Subject, or Format; and Advanced Search for combining terms from several indexes. Those unfamiliar with Australian history can check the About page for information on the contents of Images1. Another very good way to approach the collection is to select the Browse Series Titles option, which produces a list of titles of the major groupings within the collection, and how many items each contains. For example, the Rex Nan Kivell collection is 3,000 pictures collected by Nan Kivell, a London art dealer, that document the early history and exploration of New Zealand and Australia. [DS]
[Back to Contents]Crisis in North Caucasus - CDI
http://www.cdi.org/issues/Europe/ncaucasus.html
This new online resource center from the Center for Defense Information (CDI) (reviewed in the July 18, 1997 Scout Report) will help busy but interested users learn about and follow the current conflict in Chechnya and Dagestan. Although modest in size, the site features quality resources in a concise and easy to use format. These include links to six news services covering the region (two in Russian), articles and fact sheets from CDI, a few maps, a number of related links, and day-by-day timelines of the conflict since August 7,1999. [MD]
[Back to Contents]Picturing Power: Posters of the Cultural Revolution [RealPlayer]
http://kaladarshan.arts.ohio-state.edu/exhib/poster/exhibintro.html
This fascinating site posted by the Huntington Archive at Ohio State University features materials from a recent conference sponsored by the University of Westminster's School of Fine Arts Gallery and Indiana University's East Asian Studies Center focusing on posters from the Cultural Revolution. The online gallery allows viewers to examine representative posters of the era and features accompanying notes of analysis and, in some cases, audio components featuring snippets of culturally relevant songs or chanting as well as extended audio recordings of some lectures and round table discussions from the conference. The site also links to The University of Westminster's Chinese Poster Collection, which features dozens of posters from their 500 item collection spanning the period between the late 1960s and the late 1980s. [DC]
[Back to Contents]E-Commerce Special Section - The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/99/09/biztech/technology/
This new special section from the NYT (free registration required) explores the world of online commerce. The fifteen features stories cover topics such as e-mail and spam, MP3 and the music industry, online scams, teens and online shopping, online advertising, starting an e-business, and online college courses, among others. Other content includes the favorite sites of "online industry leaders," and a number of additional articles, grouped by topic. The wide variety of subject matter and generally solid writing allows this site to appeal to many users inside and outside the world of online business. [MD]
[Back to Contents]The Drawings of Annibale Carracci - NGA
http://www.nga.gov/exhibitions/car_toc.htm
The National Gallery of Art has created this online feature to accompany its new exhibition of the drawings of Annibale Carracci (1560-1609). Prefaced by a lengthy introductory essay by Diane De Grazia, the exhibition catalogue contains ten sketches dating from 1582 to 1606. Each image page contains a thumbnail of the sketch, a few paragraphs of explanatory text, notes, provenance, bibliographic references, and in some cases, additional related images. A bibliography of some 300 related scholarly sources is also provided. [ATW]
[Back to Contents]AMA Health Insight [RealPlayer, .pdf]
http://www.ama-assn.org/consumer.htm
Provided by the American Medical Association (AMA), this site contains a very large collection of general yet authoritative health information aimed at the ordinary reader. The site is comprised of four main sections: Specific Conditions, General Health, family Focus, and Interactive Health. Each section features a variety of subtopics accessible via pull-down menus. Other content at the site includes a fairly comprehensive Atlas of the Body, breaking medical news, a What's New listing, and several items aimed at younger users. [MD]
[Back to Contents]WorldCat Top 100 Books in Libraries
http://www.oclc.org/oclc/press/19991005a.htm
The Online Computer Library Center (OCLC) recently surveyed WorldCat, its Online Union Catalog, to determine the most common books held in library collections. This year's winner, found in 3,971 libraries, was In Search of Excellence: Lessons from America's Best-run Companies, by Thomas J. Peters and Robert H. Waterman, Jr. Books one would expect to top the list, such as the Bible or Shakespeare's works, did not rank because there are so many editions, each of which is listed separately. Users can browse the list of 100 titles at the site. The books are listed by rank and include number of libraries holding them and OCLC number. [MD]
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CNET Help.com
http://www.help.com/
This new site from CNET offers a host of tips and answers to a wide variety of computing questions. The core of the site is a collection of hundreds of thousands of questions and answers culled from Usenet newsgroups and submitted by users around the world. These are organized under six large headings (Hardware, Software, Internet, Web Building, Consumer Electronic, and Games), with numerous subtopics. A collection of answers from top contributors is also provided and users can post their own question to the CNET Help.com user community. Additional resources include a large collection of tips and how-tos written by CNET editors, a link to CNET's Help Centers, and an internal search engine. [JB]
[Back to Contents]Cookie Pal
http://www.kburra.com/cpal.html
Cookie Pal is a Windows based utility that makes managing your cookies a snap. Cookies are controversial little pieces of data given to your browser by web servers. The cookie is sent back to the server whenever you request future pages at the same site. This enables a web site to deliver personalized content including targeted advertising bringing up a host of privacy concerns. Cookie Pal gives you much better control of your cookies than the heavy-handed approach provided by most popular browsers. One tab gives an enlightening view of all your cookies and who gave them to you. The most useful feature however, allows you to incrementally build accept and reject filters based on Internet domain. Cookie Pal works on Windows 95/98 and NT 4.0 with most of the popular browsers and at a mere 291 kb, downloading is easy. It comes with a 30-day evaluation period. The registration fee is $15. [JB]
[Back to Contents]Yahoo Messenger - Macintosh (Beta) [PowerPC, Mac OS 8.5 Stuffit Expander 5.1]
http://messenger.yahoo.com/messenger/download/beta/macbeta.html
Yahoo has released a Mac Beta version of its popular chat client. While short on pizazz, the Messenger still has all the basic features: a friends list, invisible mode, and an ignore list. It also offers quick and simple access to the Yahoo member directory. [MD]
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Military Takeover Complete in Pakistan
BBC News Coup in Pakistan: Special Report [RealPlayer]
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/south_asia/newsid_472000/472968.stm
Text of Proclamation of Emergency - Pakistan News Service
http://www.paknews.org/newsflash/messages/5511.html
Provisional Consitutional Order - Pakistan News Service
http://www.paknews.org/newsflash/messages/5515.html
Pakistan Link
http://www.pakistanlink.com/
"Army assurances" - The Nation
http://www.syberwurx.com/nation/editor1.htm
"Need for a right choice" - The Nation
http://www.syberwurx.com/nation/editor2.htm
"US should not press army to restore democracy soon" - Dawn
http://www.dawn.com/daily/19991015/nat1.htm
"Welcome Pak Army" - Pakistan Post
http://www.786news.com/events/army99/19991012.htm
Diary of a Coup
http://www.chowk.com/CivicCenter/bshah_oct1499.html
Pakistan: 'A Coup in Dangerous Territory' - USIA
http://www.usia.gov/admin/005/wwwh9o14.html
"Who is Pervez Musharraf?" - AsiaNow
http://www.cnn.com/ASIANOW/south/9910/13/musharraf.glance/index.html
Pakistan: A Country Study - LOC
http://lcweb2.loc.gov/frd/cs/pktoc.html
General Pervez Musharraf assumed the position of chief executive of Pakistan early this morning, completing a very quick and bloodless coup that began on Tuesday night. General Musharraf declared a state of emergency, suspending the constitution and the national and provincial assemblies, dismissing the provincial governments and governors, and banning the Supreme Court from challenging his authority. Reaction to the coup has been rather muted within Pakistan and abroad. Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, who is now in custody, was increasingly unpopular in Pakistan because of the country's dire economic situation, his handling of the conflict with India in Kashmir, and what some saw as his systematic efforts to undermine the authority of rival political parties and branches of government. Foreign officials and editorials have criticized the military and called for the restoration of civilian rule as soon as possible. However, many have also acknowledged Sharif's poor record and some have even called for a transitional "technocratic" government to revive the economy and fight corruption. While the crucial question of foreign aid and loans to Pakistan is still very much up in the air, it does appear that at least some nations, most notably arch-rival India, are prepared to do business with Pakistan's new leaders, at least for the short term.
A good place to begin learning about these events is the always reliable BBC, which has created a special online report on Pakistan with breaking news, archived articles, analysis, audio selections, and related links. Users can read the full text of General Musharraf's Proclamation of Emergency and the Provisional Constitutional Order declaring Martial Law at the Pakistan News Service site. The website of Pakistan Link, a Los Angeles-bases English-Urdu weekly, contains a large number of stories on the coup and international reaction. The Nation, a Lahore-based newspaper, has placed two editorials on the coup online, one regarding the army's decision to impose Martial Law, the other concerning who should be appointed to the newly vacated governmental and administrative posts. Dawn, Pakistan's most widely circulated English language newspaper, offers an interesting analysis of reactions to the coup in the US media. The Pakistan Post's very favorable coverage of the coup includes several articles and photos. Chowk, an interactive online magazine, features a piece by a diarist writing under the name Bina Shah, who was in in Karachi when the coup took place. The United States Information Agency (USIA) has compiled excerpts from 61 reports and editorials on the coup from newspapers in 24 countries. They are grouped by region and country. AsiaNow offers a brief biographical sketch of Pakistan's new executive and offers numerous links to related stories and sites. Finally, the Library of Congress (LOC) country study of Pakistan contains extensive details on the social, political, and economic structures of the country. Additional resources on Pakistan can be found in Signpost, the Scout Report's database. These include the H-Net Asia-Pacific Network, Asia Times Online, and INCORE-Internet Country Guides. [MD]
Signpost
http://www.signpost.org
H-Net Asia-Pacific Network
http://scout7.cs.wisc.edu/pages/00006669.html
Asia Times Online
http://scout7.cs.wisc.edu/pages/00011141.html
INCORE-Internet Country Guides
http://scout7.cs.wisc.edu/pages/00002694.html
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