Scout Report for Social Sciences and Business & Economics
Scout Report for Social Sciences
http://scout.cs.wisc.edu/report/socsci/2000/ss-000321.html
Scout Report for Business & Economics
http://scout.cs.wisc.edu/report/bus-econ/2000/be-000323.html
The thirteenth issues of the third volumes of the Scout Reports for Social Sciences and Business & Economics are available. The In the News section of the Social Sciences Report annotates eight resources on last week's elections in Taiwan. The Business & Economics Report's In the News section offers eight resources on the recent interest rate hike. [MD]
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Bartleby.com Relaunches With Five Major Reference Works
http://www.bartleby.com/141/
On March 20 Bartleby.com, a premiere source for free online literature, verse, and reference books, relaunched their Website and added five major reference works. Users can now access complete electronic versions of the Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition;The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Third Edition;Roget's II: The New Thesaurus, Third Edition;Simpson's Contemporary Quotations; and The American Heritage Book of English Usage. Each of these works may be browsed by the table of contents or index or searched by keyword. Unlike most of Bartleby's offerings, which are classic texts now out of copyright, these additions are all recent editions, the oldest dating to 1988. The new Bartleby homepage is attractive and easily navigated, offering pull-down menu access to its content in four categories: Reference, Verse, Nonfiction, and Literature. Users can also conduct keyword searches across all or selected areas of the site from the main page. [MD]
[Back to Contents]British and Irish Legal Information Institute (BAILII)
http://www.bailii.org/
Australasian Legal Information Institute
http://www.austlii.edu.au/
Launched last week, this pilot service from AustLII (Australian Legal Information Institute) offers free access to British and Irish legal materials, currently containing over 75,000 searchable documents with about 2 million hypertext links. At present, the site hosts fourteen databases from five jurisdictions, which may be searched individually or jointly. These include UK House of Lords Decisions, England and Wales High Court and Court of Appeal Decisions, Scottish High Court Decisions, Northern Ireland High Court and Court of Appeal Decisions, and Irish High Court and Court of Appeal Decisions, among others. Users may search the databases by keyword (supports Boolean searches), or browse cases and legislation by country and court/ legislative body. Links to additional legal materials via the AustLII site are also provided. Planned additions in the next month include UK Legislation, UK Statutory Instruments, Scottish Legislation, Scottish Statutory Instruments, and Irish Statutory Instruments. [MD]
[Back to Contents]Archives of Maryland Online [QuickTime]
http://www.mdarchives.state.md.us/msa/homepage/html/homepage.html
"The Maryland State Archives, through a grant from the Information Technology Fund of the state of Maryland, is working to provide on-line access to over one million historical documents that form the constitutional, legal, legislative, and administrative basis of Maryland government." Included here are documents from the following sources: legislative records, state council, judicial records, executive records, council of safety, land records, laws, codes, compilations, military records, constitutional conventions, public officials, and early state records. Recent editions to the electronic archive include the Proceedings and Acts of the 1796 General Assembly and Proceedings and Debates of the 1850, 1864, and 1967 State Constitutional Conventions. The archives are searchable as a whole or by selected section with a number of different parameter options available. Scholars doing research into the state of Maryland or the history of the early American Republic's governance will want to avail themselves of this site. [DC]
[Back to Contents]The Korean War - Project Whistlestop
http://www.whistlestop.org/study_collections/korea/large/index.htm
Provided by Project Whistlestop, the Harry S. Truman online digital archive (reviewed in the July 17, 1998 Scout Report), this site hosts an excellent collection of primary resources for teaching or researching the Korean War. Most of these are offered in the ongoing Week by Week section, which contains a chronology, accounts, letters, presidential calendars, telegrams, memorandums, and other digitized documents that trace developments in the war on a daily and weekly basis. At present, only the first few weeks of the war, June 24-July 21, 1950, are complete. Other resources include photographs, teaching materials, and related links. [MD]
[Back to Contents]FT.com Global Archive
http://www.globalarchive.ft.com/search-components/index.jsp?requestPage=stdsearch.jsp
Behind this rather ugly URL, users will find Financial Times's Global Archive, where they can search and read over 6 million articles from 3,000 periodicals worldwide, most of them for free. Keyword searches may be modified in a number of ways, and users can select to search one, several, or all of the publication groups indexed. Registered users may also save their searches for later reference. Although quite slow to load at times, the site is a powerful tool for anyone searching for current business-related news and writing. [MD]
[Back to Contents]University of Pennsylvania Digital Library Project [.pdf]
http://digital.library.upenn.edu/oup-public/
Launched in January, this collaborative project of the University of Pennsylvania and Oxford University Press (OUP) will "study digital book use and its impact on teaching, learning, and book sales." While the full collection of texts (300-400 titles in history over the next five years) will only be available to the Penn community, the project does offer a preview site for the general public. At this site, users can read the full text of three recently published (1999 and 2000) OUP books: Louise Newman's White Women's Rights The Racial Origins of Feminism in the United States, Walter Laqueur's The New Terrorism: Fanaticism and the Arms of Mass Destruction, and Joseph Rothschild's Return To Diversity: A Political History of East Central Europe Since World War II. Users interested in developing similar projects at their institutions will also want to read the project overview and press release, as well as browse the collection list by title or author. [MD]
[Back to Contents]Museums and the Web 2000: Speakers' Papers
http://www.archimuse.com/mw2000/speakers/index.html
Museums and the Web 2000 homepage
http://www.archimuse.com/mw2000/
Past Conference Papers
http://www.archimuse.com/conferences/mw.html
Now in its fourth year, Museums and the Web 2000 will be held April 16-19 in Minneapolis, where international attendees will discuss and explore a number of themes related to exhibits and programming on the Web. Those unable to attend the conference can still benefit from the 60+ presentations and demonstration papers now available on the Web. Some describe individual projects, while others answer how-to questions for museums just venturing into the digital realm. Examples of paper topics include "Integration of Primary Resource Materials into Elementary School Curricula," "Protecting a museum's digital stock through watermarks," "How to get more than 500,000 museum-visitors within 6 months," and "Universal Access: Designing Web Pages for the Hearing- and Visually-Impaired." Abstracts are available for those papers that are not available online in full-text. Papers and abstracts from the previous three conferences are also available at the above URL. [MD]
[Back to Contents]A Thousand Years of Work and Money
http://www.csmonitor.com/atcsmonitor/specials/athousandyears/workmoney/work1.html
This special collection of articles from the Christian Science Monitor examines the evolution of work. "Infinite Quest" considers workers's needs to have a safe and secure place to work, comparing today's workers with their counterparts in 1000 AD. "Events That Shook the World of Work" provides short synopses of the 20 most important "inventions and developments, and how they changed the way jobs get done" from the rise of guilds in the eleventh century to the World Wide Web in 1993. The improvements in wages and quality of living over time are outlined in "More Power to More People," while "The Search for Personal Wealth" deals with the finances of workers throughout the past 1000 years focusing especially on the changes wrought by investing. Finally, "Rooted in Religion, Charities Branch Out" explores the development of not-for-profit agencies. These thoughtful, well-written articles are accompanied by a timeline that charts the evolution of currency. [EM]
[Back to Contents]Women in Politics: Bibliographic Database
http://www.ipu.org/bdf-e/BDfsearch.asp
This bibliographic database currently holds 650 titles of recent works concerned with women in politics. A new addition to the Inter-Parliamentary Union's "Democracy through Partnership between Men and Women in Politics" site, "it provides bibliographic references to books, reports and journal articles on all aspects of women's participation in political life worldwide." The search mechanism allows users to specify type of document, geographic region, publishing organization, subject matter, author, title of periodical, and year of publication. Alternatively, there is also a subject keyword search. For more information about the Inter-Parliamentary Union Website, see the December 12, 1997 Scout Report. [DC]
[Back to Contents]forced-migration-history
http://www.mailbase.ac.uk/lists/forced-migration-history/
This new, UK-based, moderated mailing list serves as a forum for discussions on population displacements in 20th-century European history, "and to explore the inter-relationship of forced migration/resettlement/repatriation with nationalism, state formation and the construction of social identities." While the moderators believe that most of the subscribers will be involved in migration studies, history, geography, demography, and anthropology or sociology, scholars from other fields and different geographical and historical time periods are most welcome. Users will find archived messages and subscription information at the site. [MD]
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Supreme Court Rules on Tobacco Regulation and Student Fees
Food and Drug Administration et al. v. Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corp. et al. [.pdf]
http://supct.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/98-1152.ZS.html
Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System v. Southworth et al.
http://supct.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/98-1189.ZS.html
In a major victory for cigarette manufacturers and a setback for the Clinton Administration, the nation's highest court ruled Tuesday that the government does not have the authority to regulate tobacco as an addictive drug. The case, on appeal from the US Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, concerns the sweeping new regulations introduced by the Food and Drug Administration in 1996 with the president's strong support. In her opinion for the 5-4 majority, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor concluded that Congress had not granted the FDA the authority it sought to exercise over tobacco products. On Wednesday, the Court issued a ruling that had very large consequences for public colleges and universities, deciding unanimously that these institutions can use money from mandatory student-activities fees to finance campus groups to which some students object. The case stemmed from a lawsuit filed by three "conservative Christian" law students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who wished to withhold their student fees from 18 of the 125 student groups subsidized by the university. This ruling does not apply to private universities, as the First Amendment only protects speech from government restrictions. Users can read the full text of the Syllabi (head notes), Opinions, and Dissent/ Concurrence for both cases in HTML and .pdf format at the Cornell University Legal Information Institute Supreme Court Collection site. [MD]
[Back to Contents]Budget 2000 Prudent for A Purpose: Working for a Stronger and Fairer Britain
http://www.official-documents.co.uk/document/hmt/budget2000/hc346.htm
BBC News Budget 2000 In-Depth
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/in_depth/uk/2000/budget2000/default.stm
This week, Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown unveiled the UK government's new budget. In crafting the budget, the chancellor had to walk a delicate political tightrope by avoiding the so-called "tax and spend" policies which characterized "Old Labour" administrations and still appealing to the core Labour voters. Using surpluses instead of new taxes, the budget calls for significant new spending (2 billion pounds) on health and education, two areas where the government has been criticized for not living up to its promises. Users can read the full text of the budget, which includes six chapters, several appendices, charts, and tables, at the Stationary Office homepage. For a wealth of analysis, commentary, and related materials on the budget, visit the special in-depth site from BBC News. [MD]
[Back to Contents]The Nazi Olympics: 1936 Berlin
http://www.ushmm.org/olympics/
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum presents this Web version of an exhibition depicting the 1936 Olympics as a two-week anomaly during which Germany attempted to conceal the racist and militaristic character of the newly powerful Nazi regime and appear a tolerant host for the international games. In spite of this, some individual athletes and countries elected to boycott the 1936 Olympics. Using a variety of graphic materials such as photographs, posters, and newspaper clippings, accompanied by explanatory texts, the exhibition lays out this history in ordered sections from the rise of Nazism in Germany to concluding sections on World War II and the Holocaust. In between are sections like the Boycott and the Olympics. The former includes an account by Milton Green, the Jewish captain of the Harvard track team who took first place in pre-Olympic trials, then decided to boycott the Nazi Olympics. The latter features Nazi propaganda promoting the games, as well as images of African-Americans who participated. The concluding image of the show is a table of photographs of Olympic athletes who died in the Holocaust. [DS]
[Back to Contents]Annual Defense Report 2000 [.pdf, 2200K]
http://www.dtic.mil/execsec/adr2000/
Annual Defense Report -- DOD
http://www.dtic.mil/execsec/adr_intro.html
Forwarded to the President and Congress annually, the Secretary of Defense's Annual Defense Report serves as "a basic reference document for those interested in national defense issues and programs." The 350-page 2000 edition is available in HTML and .pdf formats. It covers topics such as defense strategy, the current state of the armed forces, plans for transforming the armed forces and the Department of Defense, statutory reports from the individual secretaries, and a number of appendices. The Department of Defense (DOD) Annual Defense Report page contains previous reports to 1995 and an internal search engine. [MD]
[Back to Contents]Opinion-Pages
http://www.opinion-pages.org/
Created and operated by Montgomery Kersell, this excellent resource allows users to access very recent opinion and editorial pieces from approximately 600 different English-language international sources. Indexed daily, the database can be searched by keyword with numerous modifiers. Returns include a link to the piece and a brief abstract. A sample search for "presidential campaign" produced 40 hits, while one for "Kashmir" returned 11 hits. In both cases, the pieces linked to were very current, many from that day. Users can also keyword search topical collections of columnists's pages, including Political & General, Business & Finance, Technology, Arts & Leisure, Health, and Sports. Those looking for the opinion page or letter to the editor columns for specific newspapers can browse a geographic listing. Additional resources include a pair of opinion columns (Think Ahead and Think Sideways) penned by Kersell himself. [MD]
[Back to Contents]Report of the Panel of Experts on Violations of Security Council Sanctions Against UNITA
http://www.un.org/News/dh/latest/angolareport_eng.htm
Released by the United Nations on March 15, this study alleges that a number of European and African states have violated the UN's arms and financial embargoes against the Angola rebel army UNITA. Bulgaria, according to the report, is one of the chief offenders, serving as the primary source of arms purchased by UNITA. Burkina Faso and Togo, two West African nations, have acted as important transit points for the shipment of weapons and fuel, which have been paid for in part by diamonds, many of which are reportedly sold at the world's largest diamond market in Antwerp, Belgium. Users can read the full text of the report, which includes a table of contents, at the UN site. [MD]
[Back to Contents]Railway Women in Wartime
http://business.virgin.net/artemis.agency/railway/
Compiled by Helena Wojtczak, the first woman to be employed as a guard by British Rail and an authority on the history of railwaywomen, this collection of annotated photos documents the experiences of women working on the British railways during the two World Wars. More than 200,000 women worked on the rails during the wars, performing all manner of duties, such as porters, guards, repair crew, workshop staff, and signal women. Users can browse the collection by period and job type or tour the entire site via a link at the bottom of each page. Each section offers a few well-chosen quotes (many from the photo subjects themselves), and the quality of the featured photos is on the whole quite good. While certainly not as large as some online photo exhibits, Railway Women in Wartime provides an interesting and entertaining glimpse into an understudied aspect of British women's history. [MD]
[Back to Contents]Inc. 500
http://www.inc.com/500/
The Inc. 500, from Inc. Magazine, features the annual list of the 500 fastest growing private companies. Along with announcing the winners for 1999, Inc. has created a database of winners from 1982 to 1999, searchable by year, company name, keyword, state, and sector. While a large percentage of the 1999 winners are technology-based companies, Roth Staffing, an Orange County staffing service, came in first place. The Inc. 500 also contains short articles about each of the companies along with at-a-glance company overviews, a hall of fame, and additional articles and stories. The site includes an online application form for those interested in nominating a company for the Inc. 500 2000. [EM]
[Back to Contents]FinalFour.net [Flash, RealPlayer]
http://www.finalfour.net/
Die-hard college hoops fans, especially those whose team is still in the running, have no doubt reached a state of frenzy and froth, as the sweet sixteen, after tonight, becomes the elite eight. Even the mildly curious, however, will find numerous items of interest at the official site of the NCAA men and women's tournaments. There visitors will find live coverage, game summaries and breaking news, analysis of the impending matchups, statistics, an animated playbook, photos, and much more. Whatever your level of interest in the tournaments, this is the site. [MD]
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Google Web Directory
http://directory.google.com/
In a rather brilliant move, Google has licensed the data compiled by the Open Directory Project (ODP) (reviewed in the November 20, 1998 Scout Report--http://scout.cs.wisc.edu/report/sr/1998/.html#20}), used by a number of major search sites, and applied its own powerful searching technology, adding further value to what many believe are the Web's top search site and directory. As with Yahoo and the original ODP, users can browse for sites by picking a major category (there are more than 230,000 hierarchical categories in total) and drilling down. However, unlike other users of ODP data, the Google Directory employs its PageRank technology so that sites are listed from most to least relevant or important, rather than alphabetically, helping users find the best sites quickly and easily. This new feature is also integrated with all of the Google search interfaces, allowing single-click access to the relevant directory categories from all search returns. Already widely recognized for its speed, accuracy, and uncluttered design, with the addition of the ODP's data, Google may very well supplant the other major players and become the most popular Internet search site. [MD]
[Back to Contents]The Spire Project
http://spireproject.com
UK Mirror
http://spireproject.co.uk/
Australia Mirror
http://cn.net.au
Created and maintained by David Novak, the Spire Project has been expanded and refined since its original review in the January 14, 1999 Scout Report for Social Sciences. Offered as both a research guide and search-engine alternative, the site offers a number of searching tutorials on specific topics which feature numerous links and search forms. While each tutorial is different, most contain a mix of official or governmental sites, databases, libraries, and commercial resources. The Government Resources section, for instance, covers general sources for government information and a number of specific ones for the US, UK, and Canada. Other tutorials include Finding Articles, Searching Patents, Company Information, Country Profiles, and Finding a Library, among others. Most offer some final thoughts in a conclusion as well as search strategies. While the site will certainly prove a considerable help to newer users, more experienced internauts may also want to poke around a bit to find some new resources or brush up on their searching strategies. [MD]
[Back to Contents]LinkBox 2.5 [Mac OS 8]
http://www.mediavillage.org/linkbox/
LinkBox is a compact and basic utility for storing URLs found in emails, newsgroup messages, or any text message. While most current email browsers and word processors handle URLs quite adequately and interface with Web browsers, LinkBox is helpful for those situations where the URL is not clickable or for saving lists of URLs (note: only five URLs can be saved on the shareware version). LinkBox features drag and drop capability which makes it much more useful than other basic URL utilities, but it offers no way to sort or arrange URLs. The shareware version is $10. [AF]
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Russian Presidential Election
Russia's Vote for President -- BBC News
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/static/in_depth/europe/2000/russian_elections/default.stm
Election 2000 -- Moscow Times
http://www.themoscowtimes.com/indexes/61.html
CNN - In-Depth: Russia Election
http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2000/russia/
Resources on the Russian Presidential Elections
http://www.ceip.org/programs/ruseuras/Elections/elections.htm
Russia Votes
http://www.russiavotes.org/
"Russian Presidential Election Rules" -- Russia Today
http://www.russiatoday.com/features.php3?id=145750
"Putin Reflects Russia's Perplexed, Lost Society" -- St. Petersburg Times
http://www.times.spb.ru/current/opinion/powerplay.htm
"A Russian voter's confusion over Putin" -- Christian Science Monitor
http://www.csmonitor.com/durable/2000/03/23/p11s1.htm
"As Russian election nears, little is known of the top candidate" -- Philadelphia Inquirer
http://www.phillynews.com/inquirer/2000/Mar/22/opinion/RUBIN22.htm
Voice of Russia
http://www.vor.ru/index_eng.html
The Government of the Russian Federation
http://www.government.gov.ru/english/
It appears that Vladimir Putin's biggest challenge in Sunday's election comes not from one of the ten other candidates vying for the Russian Presidency, but rather from voter apathy. The election of the acting President is regarded as such a foregone conclusion that some even fear that not enough Russians will go to the polls (50 percent) to make the election valid. A low turnout could also deny Putin the 50 percent of the vote cast he needs to win outright and avoid a run-off, probably with the Communist candidate, Gennady Zyuganov. Putin appeared recently on television and issued an appeal to the voters, reminding them that the election does indeed matter, as the President is the chief of the armed forces in a country with a nuclear arsenal. A relative unknown when he was named prime minister in August, the former KGB official has won broad support for the campaign in Chechnya. Beyond that, however, he remains an enigma to many, even in the Russian press. His refusal to discuss even basic policy questions leaves many wondering about Russia's future under the imminent Putin presidency. Only after his election, it appears, will Putin reveal where he intends to lead Russia.
Readers can begin their search for more information on the election with the ever-dependable BBC. Their special on the election includes breaking news, analysis, archived articles, a clickable guide to the various power bases in Russia, a slideshow, profiles, and related links. The Moscow Times has also created an election special, featuring a number of articles and candidate profiles, as has CNN, whose site offers issue briefs, recent news, a map and timeline, analysis, and candidate profiles. Additional special reports and related resources, including polling data, can be found at the Resources on the Russian Presidential Elections page from the Russian and Eurasian Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and at Russia Votes, a joint project of the Centre for the Study of Public Policy, University of Strathclyde, and the Russian Center for Public Opinion and Market Research (VCIOM). A concise summary of the election rules is posted on the Russia Today site, while editorial pieces on the election are offered by the St. Petersburg Times,Christian Science Monitor, and the Philadelphia Inquirer. Additional information is available from the Voice of Russia radio service and the official site of the Government of the Russian Federation. [MD]
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