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| The Very Tough Towboat |
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BREAKING SURF
Robert Mugabe held elections last week. He won, which surprised anybody who didn't expect the balloting to be rigged, meaning nobody. Sure enough, there was plenty of corruption in the elections and Zimbabwe is probably heading down the road to civil war. The Western powers are taking their time in responding - perhaps with some justification. The British Commonwealth has just slapped Mugabe's hand by suspending the country from the Commonwealth for a year, but there might be more diplomatic fallout in the near future. Watch the situation, it's likely going to be the next big African tragedy. The BBC has excellent focused coverage and Yahoo has the usual ton of relevant news links.BBC: http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/in_depth/africa/2002/zimbabwe/
Yahoo: http://dailynews.yahoo.com/fc/World/Zimbabwe/
Killing Statistics of the Kosovo War
A research team involved in the genocide trial of Slobodan Milosevic has prepared this impressive statistical paper analyzing the pattern of killing and refugee movement during the course of the Kosovo war. They conclude that "the statistical evidence is consistent with the hypothesis that Yugoslav forces conducted a systematic campaign of killings and expulsions." The findings are based on data from border-crossing records, interviews, and exhumations. The paper estimates that over 10,000 Kosovars were killed during the war. Wired's story on the report includes details about the presentation of the paper during the trial. It's an impressive example of forensic statistical analysis.Paper: http://hrdata.aaas.org/kosovo/icty_report.pdf
Wired: http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,51106,00.html
Increasingly, content owners, armed with the draconian Digital Millennium Copyright Act, frown on practices that ordinary folk think are perfectly fine, like copying music from one of their CDs onto a tape for private use. Aggressive legal action against companies such as Napster, ongoing efforts to force anti-copying technology into just about any hardware, and clumsy attempts to build online music commerce sites suggest that media companies would almost rather have no commerce than commerce that's not entirely on their own terms. Now, however, a new group is standing up for the little guy. DigitalConsumer strongly opposes theft of intellectual property, but believes media companies want to go too far to protect themselves. The consumer advocacy group is lobbying for a consumer technology bill of rights that includes the right to time shift, to copy material onto other machines or into other formats, to use the content on any platform they choose, and to make back-ups. We think it might be helpful to drop in and encourage them in this important fight. Walter Mossberg takes a sympathetic look.
DigitalConsumer: http://www.digitalconsumer.org/
Mossberg: http://ptech.wsj.com/archive/ptech-20020314.html
Details of New US Nuclear Posture
Sizable portions of the new US Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) signed by Donald Rumsfeld are now available online. Anyone tracking the evolution of US military thinking won't be too surprised by most of what's here, but the document still makes compelling and important reading. The Los Angeles Times provides a somewhat hysterical view of the report, while the New York Times offers more sober comment with interesting sidebars to connected stories. The NPR boils down to facing the post-Cold War and post-September 11 global military realities. Instead of mutually assured destruction with the Soviet Union, the US has placed an emphasis on a wide range of possible threats, unpredictability, and the "axis of evil". Still, the new plans rely less on nuclear weapons than did the old ones, and the number of warheads has dropped considerably, although it remains substantial. All of this may upset some, but contingency planning is a vital military activity, and history proves the danger of military thinking based in the past rather than the present. Would you really want a military that hasn't contemplated the unthinkable and laid plans for unpleasant what-ifs?NPR: http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/library/policy/dod/npr.htm
LA Times: http://latimes.com/news/opinion/la-op-arkinmar10.story
NY Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/10/international/10NUKE.html
The Watch That Kept an Empire Ticking
What's the most vexing technological problem of the day? Energy? Data overload? Population stress? From the 16th through the 18th century, the great technological problem was the question of determining longitude. If navigators could accurately determine their longitude while at sea, their sponsors would have achieved a valuable advantage over competitors, both commercial and political. No wonder that the English Crown offered a 20,000-pound reward for a solution; and that such intellectual notables as Isaac Newton, Robert Hooke, and Edmond Halley attempted to win the prize. The prize winner, a not-so-humble mechanic named John Harrison, crafted a magnificent timepiece he called the H4, a pocket watch that allowed those aboard a ship at sea to always know the Greenwich Mean Time (GMT). With a knowledge of local time and GMT, you could accurately determine your exact longitude. The H4 was the personal analogue assistant that made an empire possible; Captain Cook traveled the Pacific with a copy. Harrison's award-winning watch and three predecessors are currently on display at the Royal Observatory Museum in Greenwich. The BBC also has a feature.Museum: http://www.rog.nmm.ac.uk/museum/harrison/
BBC: http://news.bbc.co.uk/low/english/sci/tech/newsid_1864000/1864737.stm
The Top Ten Characters in Fiction since 1900
The ten characters at this site make up a teaser for the full list of 100 that will appear in the March/April issue of Book magazine. This list was compiled after polling "prizewinning authors, artists, book experts of all shapes and sizes". The not-so-surprising number one? Jay Gatsby. Not surprising - but only because the list of experts was heavily skewed towards serious authors and editors. The list skews so literary that we're willing to bet the average non-NSD-reading adult would not recognize more than three of the top ten choices. Never mind, the whole point of these kinds of lists is to instigate much spilling of electronic ink in the pursuit of some odd intellectual masochism. Enjoy.http://www.bookmagazine.com/issue21/100best.shtml
Merriam-Webster Creates Unabridged Dictionary Pay Site
The popular and free Merriam-Webster dictionary Web site has split off a new service that will provide access to "unabridged" content. You'll get definitions of 470,000 words, access to a (bigger) thesaurus and an atlas, word games, exciting etymological breaking news from the editors, and the ability to search for etymologies, rhymes, and puzzle answers. At $30 per year or $5 per month, it may be a hard sell to consumers, considering you can pick up a book or CD-ROM with similar content for less than half that - not to mention all the other free online dictionary sites. However, the company has had strong online interest in its free version and figures that at least certain researchers will pay for access to the larger edition. Incidentally, if you're really into dictionaries check out OneLook Dictionaries - 751 dictionaries containing 4,138,349 words. Very cool.Unabridged: http://www.merriam-websterunabridged.com/
Free Abridged: http://www.merriam-webster.com/
OneLook Dictionaries: http://www.onelook.com/
Checking for Plagiarism, Archiving Papers, and Copyright
By now, everybody's heard the Napster saga and how its file-sharing model became synonymous with theft of intellectual property. A new chapter in the file-sharing wars involves not Napster, nor even music; it involves high schools, colleges, and a company called Turnitin.com. Turnitin.com's idea is pretty straightforward: teachers submit student papers for analysis and the company parses out the text, searching for identifiable "digital fingerprints" and comparing them to those from a wide array of documents. When it finds a match, Turnitin.com highlights the excerpt as possible plagiarism, and sends the results back to the teacher. On the surface, it sounds like a great tool for catching cheaters, but there seems to be a nasty undercurrent: exactly who owns the intellectual property, i.e. the texts that are submitted? Turnitin.com retains copies of each submitted work and adds them to its database. The students who write the term papers believe, and rightly so in our opinion, that this violates their intellectual copyright. In general, you own the copyright to anything you write, unless you have sold it as part of a contract. Turnitin.com claims hundreds of institutional clients, and further claims that their approach promotes trust. The Economist has the gist of the story, while Slashdot has the debate. We think Turnitin.com should offer students $5 for permission to include a paper, but not publish it.Turnitin.com: http://www.turnitin.com/
Economist: http://www.economist.com/science/displayStory.cfm?story_id=1033832
Slashdot: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/03/04/2028207
Contrary to what you might guess, Iran has cartoonists. Of course, over here in North America, we don't see many of them. That's pretty understandable, when you consider that cartoons such as "Doonesbury" and "Callahan" have been at times decried when they appear in the North American press. For a time, newspapers consigned "Doonesbury" to the editorial pages in many publications, and most just plain won't run "Callahan". But these American cartoons are pretty tame compared to the often racist material presented daily in major Middle Eastern publications. Daryl Cagle has collected Iranian cartoons that react to President Bush's "axis of evil" speech. You need to check these Iranian cartoons out to have any hope of understanding the culture. Compare the Iranian cartoons with American counterparts found in an international collection of cartoons on the same topic. The American versions are all over the political map, while the Iranian counterparts pretty much all toe the party line.
Iranian: http://cagle.slate.msn.com/news/IranAxisEvil/main.asp
International: http://cagle.slate.msn.com/news/AxisofEVIL/main.asp
All the News That's Fit to Google
Not satisfied to rest on its laurels as the Web's number-one search engine, Google is now beta-testing its News Search engine that currently blasts through around 100 news sources per hour with the goal of providing the most up-to-date news available. Don't feel like browsing through the news? Not a problem - in true Google fashion, News Search provides a first-class keyword interface for tailoring searches for news you can use.http://news.google.com/
We're sure it has never crossed your mind that the entertaining prose in NSD might have been created by a robot. But if the wetware at Columbia University's Department of Computer Science has its way, Columbia's Newsblaster may have you wondering just that. Newsblaster is designed to spit out story abstracts after reviewing news stories from multiple sources. Reassuringly for those of us who toil away here mainly for the fun of it and the occasional crumb of praise from readers, Newsblaster is considered a tool for editors and journalists, not a replacement (HAL take note). The Newsblaster approach also has applications in other areas of information processing, including in medicine. Kathleen R. McKeown and her team have been cranking away at natural language processing of text for almost 20 years and while many challenges remain, her work is an important step toward the realization of the decades-old dreams of information visionaries. If you want to delve into some of the technical details check out the reports at the Columbia Natural Language Processing Group (CNLPG). The Online Journalism Review (OJR) has a story.
Newsblaster: http://www.cs.columbia.edu/nlp/newsblaster/
CNLPG: http://www.cs.columbia.edu/nlp/
OJR: http://ojr.usc.edu/content/story.cfm?id=690
ActiveBuddy Chatbot Can Be Your Buddy
This week brought news that eBay has deployed an interactive agent - basically, a chatbot - that communicates with users via AOL Instant Messenger (AIM). You can add it to your buddy list and it will answer basic questions about eBay, though the ultimate purpose of the bot is to drive users to the auction site. This strategy has apparently succeeded for teen site ELLEgirl, which has amassed nearly 300,000 users in the month since it launched a similar chatbot. The technology comes from a company called ActiveBuddy, which offers at least eight different buddies, including ones devoted to the Oscars, singer Lindsay Pagano, and baseball (see link). You can help beta test by messaging the buddies on AIM. For eBay, this is just a limited test, and the company has no plans to introduce similar agents for Yahoo, ICQ, and MSN messengers. If all buddies prove as successful as ELLEgirl's, we can expect to see more in short order. CNET has an article.eBay: http://aimtoday.aol.com/today/topics/botcentral/fg/sub_ebay.adp
ELLEgirl: http://www.ellegirl.com/activebuddy/index.html
ActiveBuddies: http://activebuddy.com/agents/try_an_agent.shtml
CNET: http://news.com.com/2100-1023-862634.html
The Mac Community Responds to OS X
Derrick Story, a long-time Mac maven and author, has tabulated e-mail from about 500 Mac users on the subject of switching to the Unix-based OS X. For the most part, he says, the Mac community has enthusiastically adopted the new OS, and the new OS is even making some small inroads in the hardcore Unix crowd, which likes the pretty interface coupled with the power of Unix under the hood. In this article, Derrick gives an overview of the e-mail feedback and provides some examples of how the devoted Mac community is responding. The nice piece is of interest to Mac users wondering what others think about the new OS and to people who are considering buying one of the new Macs. Much, much more discussion can be found in the comp.sys.mac.system newsgroup.http://oreillynet.com/pub/a/mac/2002/03/05/mac_community.html
Looking at CIA Servers from the Outside
Google pops up again in the news - this time, as a tool used to search for CIA points of presence on the Net. Searches at Google returned CIA material not readily available to the public (although still non-classified), along with e-mail addresses, names, and phone numbers for a number of CIA officials. CIA spokespooks claim it's no big deal. The network map assembled from the data is considered rudimentary, but it's impressive, nonetheless. Or at least it seems that way. Computerworld has a brief article about the discovery. Computerworld:http://www.computerworld.com/storyba/0,4125,NAV47_STO68961,00.html
ICANN Reform Caught between Pro and Anti-Democracy Factions
To oversimplify a complex story, ICANN is not working and several movements are jostling to change the nature of the international Net governing body. On the one hand, insiders, including ICANN president Stuart Lynn, are pushing to diminish the importance of voting processes in appointing representatives. The organization voted to suspend their at-large elections last week during its annual meeting. On the other hand, people like member-at-large Karl Auerbach are angling for more representative democracy and greater transparency. In fact, Karl has just sued the organization in order to obtain financial records - it appears that nobody outside ICANN really knows what happens to all those membership funds. It's easy to pretend that ICANN is not really relevant, but it does control the deeply flawed domain resolution process. If you're interested in Net governance, you'll want to read this summary of the situation in Salon.http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2002/03/19/auerbach/index.html
Your next machine might not solve problems with electrons and silicon, but with DNA. Researchers have managed to prove that a DNA computer can solve problems with over 20 variables, such as the infamous traveling salesman problem. The real question is which operating system did it run? PhysicsWeb has all the fine detail. Those wishing to delve more deeply into the topic at large should visit the DNA Computing Web Pages for more info and links.
PhysicsWeb: http://physicsweb.org/article/news/6/3/11
DNA Computing: http://www.liacs.nl/home/pier/webPagesDNA/
Some People Actually Fall for the Nigeria Scam
You've probably seen an e-mail that promises you a small fortune in return for temporarily providing a financial holding box for the cash transfer of a large fortune. In general, these schemes come from Nigeria, but we've seen variations from other sub-Saharan countries and from the Persian Gulf. You've probably properly recognized this as a scam and think that no one would respond to such a note. Apparently, some people do - up to one in a hundred fall victim to this scheme, claims an anonymous US Secret Service agent in this SF Gate article. Once sucked in, victims learn from the hucksters that they have to pay comparatively small fees and payments to expedite the process. Victims have paid up to a million dollars in cash, and 15 have even lost their lives after becoming personally involved. This article tells those, umm, naive and gullible enough to fall for the ploy what to watch for, and it gives all of us a Secret Service address to which we can send such scam e-mails. We should also again point you to our NSD 7.10 review of one site posted by two guys who decided to scam the scammers.SF Gate: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/gate/archive/2002/03/14/nigerscam.DTL
NSD 7.10: http://www.netsurf.com/nsd/sub/v07/nsd.07.10.html#SS4#SS4
Macromedia's new Web development software, Flash MX, was such a hit with Web professionals when it was released last Friday that traffic jams slowed the company's servers. Even consumers just wanting to download the latest free client, Flash Player 6, were affected for a short time. Macromedia touts its new software as suitable for the entire Web page development process, not only animation. Flash MX incorporates a video player and various built-in elements for creating Web pages, and includes full support for Mac OS X. CNET has the story, Macromedia the software.
Flash MX: http://www.macromedia.com/software/flash/
CNET: http://news.com.com/2100-1040-861286.html
AOL's rate of growth is slowing, but the devil's in the details. AOL offers new customers an initial period of free use. Just how many customers are dropping the service when the free trial ends? How many are simply using the time they receive as part of a package installed on a newly purchased computer then signing up with another ISP? AOL isn't really helping analysts - the numbers the company releases don't reveal much detail about its client accounting, a practice that may help lower the stock price. If AOL has entered a decline, its merger partners won't be pleased. AOL isn't Enron, but it isn't pretty, either. There's more at CNET.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-859849.html
ONLINE CULTURE
Burn, Baby, Burn! Weblogger CD Swap
The idea is simple. Sign up for the swap and burn a CD of your favorite tunes. On Mar. 31, you'll get a list of five other people to whom you need to send a copy of your CD. In return, you'll get CDs from five other participants. To participate, you need to be over 18, a US citizen, and you must have a current Web site or blog. You can choose any music you want but you are requested to try to select something to do with a summer theme. (We wonder how many people will receive Katrina and the Waves' "Walking on Sunshine".) Is this piracy? Umm, err, uhh - we're not lawyers so we can't render a legal opinion. Yeah, that's the ticket. Regardless, we think this is worthwhile news, at least as a good example of yet another way in which the Net facilitates the trading of information - this time in actual physical form.http://www.encorswish.com/burnbabyburn.htm
One of the great things about the Net is that it allows art that would never see the light of day in the corporate-controlled media market to flourish. Take, for example, the arcane art of porn music. It's an underappreciated genre - surprising, considering its suggestively rhythmic beats. You'd figure horny teens would be all over it. This Wired article tells the story of John Dial, a.k.a. DJ Vanyanovich, who started with an idea and wound up with his own porn music online radio station, Fluffertrax. Now there's an American wet dream fulfilled. DJ Vanyanovich spins his songs via the Live365.com network, which lets anybody be their own radio star. This online success story combines kicking dirt in the face of corporate indifference, a quirky artform, and some surprisingly good beats emerging out of your MP3 player. Definitely a must-play at your next orgy.
Wired: http://www.wired.com/news/mp3/0,1285,50918,00.html
Fluffertrax: http://www.fluffertrax.com/fluffertrax/
Live365.com: http://live365.com/
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Our Votes, Our Guns: Robert Mugabe and the Tragedy of Zimbabwe
Mike Nelson's Mind over Matters
The Dressing Station: A Surgeon's Chronicle of War and Medicine
The ThunderthiefSURFING SITES
Towboat is an American misnomer. Towboats push, not tow (or even tug), and they're very powerful. This Web page chronicles an adventure of a very tough but, on the day in question, not quite powerful enough little towboat (it's small by modern standards). The picture series is amazing in two respects: mostly for what it shows, but also for the fact that someone had the presence of mind to keep snapping pictures. These 19 photos also show some of the amazing toughness of the diesel engine, the true Energizer Bunny of internal combustion engines. The page is only missing comments from the towboat crew. But then again, they'd not likely be printable. One day, while working on a sloop, our reviewer watched a New York Harbor tug chase a loose and wayward garbage scow that couldn't decide which way to go through the bizarre current at Hell Gate on the East River. The radio language was pungent and the Coast Guardies who control the radio channels kept telling the crew to cool it and cut the profanity while audibly cracking up in laughter. They knew the tug guys would eventually catch the barge. This web site brought back many memories.http://koti.mbnet.fi/~soldier/towboat.htm
If you like to make fun of Dubya, the First Lady, the GOP, Christians, or the USA in general and Big Tobacco in particular, you're going to find yourself in hog heaven when you visit this site. The place is full to the brim with humor, and all of it is geared toward lambasting one or more of the targets we mentioned. This site's White House Virtual Tour, for example, is provided because walking tours of the White House are suspended due to the war against negative approval ratings. A Department of Faith section features such titles as "St. Patrick's Day - Does America Really Need Another Excuse for Catholics to Get Drunk?", among other uplifting titles. Unquestionably, some misguided souls will view the content as offensive in nature, while the more enlightened will see it as the best thing to come along since Hormel presented Gorbachev with that huge tin of Spam.
http://www.whitehouse.org/index.asp
Once upon a time, there were computer gurus. As the Net grew, some gurus became known as gods. Some of these gods demanded of their minions chatty technical tips from Hollywood stars such as Gillian Anderson, who is purported to have said, "I'll never forget the day that I was hired to play Agent Scully on the X-Files, the first thing I did was go out and buy a brand new Catalyst 2924 XL. What a wonderful, wonderful switch." What better way to appease Cisco router gods than to post fetching photos of celebs such as Denise Richards, also an expert on the PIX firewall? If you get tired of the tongue-in-cheek "interview" between Richards and Cisco reporter Yuriy Kumanov, there she is to admire in a two-piece on a beach or reclining in a slit skirt on leather upholstery. ("Believe it or not, that skirt retails for $1200!") Of course, there's also a picture of the actual box, but Cisco knows what the gods really want. The goddesses subset will appreciate the interviews with several male celebrities, including Paul Hogan ("Well mate, the routers in an HSRP group send and receive keep alives using the multicast address of 224.0.0.2 and UDP port 1985.") and Fabio. It's not all flowing hair, however - you can also get tips from Gary Coleman and Mister Rogers, among others.
http://routergod.com/
No translation engine is perfect and it pays to visit more than one, especially if that one is the occasionally disappointing Babel Fish. FreeTranslation translates among eight European languages. It's fast. Results will vary, though, depending on the type of material. (A reasonable and often funny test is to translate a paragraph from English to another language, then translate the results back to English and compare the machine-generated English version with your original.) Like Babel Fish, this site offers to translate Web pages, in part to showcase its technology for prospective customers. Links on portal pages seem to translate fairly well, but expect only draft quality for pages with lots of text. You'll get the gist. Ectaco Online Dictionaries focuses on precision. It translates one word at a time, in either language direction. It failed to translate "hype" from English to Dutch, but a search for "heart" produced 14 Dutch nouns. This word-by-word approach did render a technical sentence comprehensible, though. It's also the only online place we know of that can translate Yiddish to Korean. It helps to have familiarity with your target language in order to interpret the results. Both sites are nice and helpful, but if you need to translate, say, a medical article or prenuptial agreement, we suggest you augment your search.
Babel Fish: http://babelfish.altavista.com/
FreeTranslation: http://www.freetranslation.com/
Ectaco: http://www.ectaco.com/online/
Outwitting the Logical Minotaur
Fans of role-playing games know all too well that a surprise can be waiting just around the next corner, regardless of the challenge. A fun Java puzzle called Theseus and the Minotaur quickly proves to the player that it is anything but simple or boring. You, Theseus, face a series of increasingly challenging mazes, 15 in all, in which a nasty Minotaur chases you. The catch: he moves two steps for each of yours. After your first bout of frustration, you can read the solution to the first maze to understand the reasoning behind it. There are colleges that assign programming homework of writing code that will solve such puzzles. You can just make lots of notes.http://www.logicmazes.com/theseus.html
You can never be too safe while boating. The Greek historian Thucydides said, very long ago, "A collision at sea can ruin your whole day." The MariSafe site is an e-store with an enormous amount of useful information for recreational boaters. The site contains technical material on all aspects of boating, weather information and links, gear list creators, navigation (chart and electronic) resources, and lots more. There's so much here that the boater with a laptop or onboard wireless Internet connections risks missing the scenery for the software. Full access to all features requires a paid membership in MariSafe's MariGuard program, but the free resources offer the most useful information.
http://www.marisafe.com/
ONLINE TRAVEL
To some, poking fun at linguistic ignorance is politically incorrect. Having thus forewarned the culturally sensitive, we acknowledge Japanese Engrish, a collection of linguistic flaws from signs, products, and T-shirts in Japan (mostly). You've got to wonder where the marketing experts behind these products studied, and who they hang around with. We laughed at Pocari Sweat Refreshment Water and we can't wait to get our hands on that Eric Crapton CD. We've never heard of Air Smash sugarless gum or downs Crack Up candy, but apparently both products have shelf lives overseas, if not at American airports. Our favorite section is "Japanese Engrish from YOU," a fairly large collection of items (without graphics or other evidence, alas) submitted by travelers and others with firsthand experience or fertile imaginations. This site is updated several times a month. You're invited to send submissions. Need a restroom? Go back toward your behind.http://www.engrish.com/
This is writing from the perspective of the Deep South, and it comes hickory-smoked and with a healthy heaping of grits on the side. To paraphrase humor writer Wes Wilson, it's writing for us folks what have always been broke and hog-tied to jobs. We loved the site's replacement astrological signs, which appear to be needed because the neighborhood ain't crawlin' with virgins, archers, and stuff like that. They've got a lot of things you'll find informative, here. They've got your humor, your travel tips, some recipes, and even lessons on grabbling and frog-gigging hereabouts. Set a spell. It ain't hardly a waste of time.
http://www.usadeepsouth.com/
FLOTSAM & JETSAM
Marvin, the Paranoid 404 Error
The future of Web serving? Too much traffic. Too little infrastructure? Too many variables? Javascript rules? Pages for 404 errors will never quite be the same. We're not so depressed.http://homepages.karoo.net/404.html
A fun applet for both kids and adults turns images of all sorts into virtual jigsaw puzzles to reconstruct. Players of different levels of skill and, perhaps more importantly, patience can do easy, intermediate, and advanced puzzles.
http://www.jigsawland.com/
Directory of 379 Linux Commands
As part of the online support for its "Linux in a Nutshell" book, O'Reilly has made available this directory of 379 Linux commands. It's basically an HTML version of the man pages, though often much more abbreviated. Harried Linux sysadmins should file this away as a great reference URL.http://www.oreillynet.com/linux/cmd/