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| Update on VoteAuction.com |
| Interview with Brewster Kahle of Alexa |
| Long Live Rock... Art |
| Star Wars: Episode II |
| Foreign Films |
| An IMDb Approach to TV |
| Pictures by Numbers |
| Doctor Fun Comics |
| Netsurfer Recommendations |
| PC Sarcastizine |
| The Read, Learn, Apply, Repeat E-Zine |
| A Strange Collection of Opinions |
| Near Earth Objects and What We Can Do about Them |
| Modeling the Way of the Human Mind |
| Toledo Zoo |
| Spy on Howletts' Animals |
| MSNBC's Health Portal |
| 20/20 Sight Site |
| Browsing the Non-Profit World |
| Digital Paint |
| No Funds for You! |
| Last Minute URL |
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BREAKING SURF
Web Gets Gold, TV Bronze in Olympic Coverage
Day-old television coverage of the Sydney Olympics just doesn't cut it with Web savvy American viewers. Sports Web sites are racking up record visits and even broadcaster NBC's Web home, despite the online tape delays, is serving impressive traffic - while NBC's TV coverage is pulling in the fewest Olympic viewers in a long time. Note that NBC hired Quokka Sports, the current gods of online sports reporting, to produce its NBCOlympics site. The IOC's decision to ban all live Olympic content from the Web, including streaming video, seems to have had little effect on actual Web usage. Serves them right. Wired has more.NBCOlympics: http://www.nbcolympics.com/
Quokka: http://www.quokka.com/
Wired: http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,38849,00.html
By hiring anti-piracy firms to police the Web, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) has thwarted most end runs around NBC's lock on official online Olympic video and audio coverage. The IOC feels it must protect the substantial revenues it gains by selling exclusive rights to a relatively small number of broadcasters around the world. Violators discovered by the IOC's hired eyes first receive an e-mail warning, then a telephone call threatening legal action. So far, this has sufficed to shut down the 30 or so uncovered offenders - including the Web site of Moscow's TV6. Of course, this doesn't necessarily serve the public - it mostly ensures a leak-free copyright iron wall protecting the media companies that shell out the big bucks. The problem with NBC's Internet coverage is that it's a day old, to protect its TV franchise. Tune into Wired for official, non-pirated coverage of the story.
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,38960,00.html
An article in the Washington Post has some interesting background on the business and technology behind the Olympic Web sites. Don't expect too much technical detail, but the site does discuss the project management problems which IBM ran into in Atlanta and how the company revamped its operations for Sydney. It's a good overview both of the massive project and of the kind of business issues which go with running such a huge enterprise.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A15426-2000Sep25.html
You'd think genetic researchers at children's hospitals have enough to do without pondering the topology of Olympic symbols and how they really resemble chickens - and on top of that, building a Web page to prove it - but Dr. Jeff Craig of the Chromosome Research Group of the Murdoch Children's Research Institute at the Royal Children's Hospital in Parkville, Australia apparently does not.
http://www.geocities.com/neocentromere/Chooks.html
Phage: First Real Virus for Palm OS
Well, we all knew this was coming. F-Secure describes what looks like the first definitive virus designed specifically for the Palm OS. The code fits the classic definition of a virus by being able to independently spread itself from file to file. It does not pose much of a threat right now since it has not been seen in the wild - apparently, a copy was submitted anonymously to F-Secure for analysis. The virus affects applications but does not destroy any databases on the Palm. It demonstrates the viability of Palm viruses and inevitably many more will crop up in the near future.http://www.f-secure.com/v-descs/phage.htm
Business Friendly Red Hat Linux 7.0 Released
The latest release of Red Hat's popular Linux distribution has something for everybody. Consumers will appreciate improved support for USB, XFree 4.0.1, graphical boot screen, and numerous tool updates. Businesses will flock to the more commerce-centric distributions now available, including those optimized for the Oracle 8i server and designed for high availability. Simultaneously, Red Hat is launching a new feature which works much like Windows Update - it will download and install the latest updates automatically if you don't want to bother trying to keep up. The service is called the Red Hat Network, and is available as a free trial for the moment. Eventually, you'll have to pay $10 a month for this service.Linux 7.0: http://www.redhat.com/products/software/linux/
Enhancements: http://www.redhat.com/products/software/linux/rhl7_new_features.html
Network: http://www.redhat.com/network/main/login.html
Folding@Home: Donate PC Time to Find out How Proteins Fold
Another distributed computing effort is trying to solve the computationally intensive question of how proteins fold in space. If you recall your basic biology, proteins carry out all sorts of weird and wonderful roles in your body as one of the building blocks of life. Trouble is, nobody knows how the amino acids that make up proteins assume the shapes that they do - an important bit of knowledge because physical shape is the key to much of their function. Enter Folding@Home, an effort to recruit all those idle machine cycles on all those home computers in the name of big bioscience. If you'd like to help, read up on the project at the informative site and install the software, which features the obligatory cool screen saver. The software client runs on Windows and Linux.http://www.stanford.edu/group/pandegroup/Cosm/
Hackers Asked to Violate RIAA Copyright
The Secure Digital Music Initiative (SDMI) Public Challenge will pay hackers $10,000 to do something the music industry has been having fits over: illegally copy music files. The SDMI, which is offering the challenge, represents interests from a number of players in the entertainment industry, most notably the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), lead litigants in the case against the file sharing service Napster. The SDMI is trying out a number of different encryption schemes to prevent the copying of files and, to that end, has devised a contest that promises $10,000 to the hacker who successfully defeats its system. Opposition to the concept of hackers providing essentially free consulting to the SDMI - and, by default, the RIAA - has grown to include the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the editors of Linux Journal. The argument against the contest holds that the protection scheme violates fair use and would, for example, limit the consumer's ability to play files on different equipment. CNet has more details.SDMI Challenge: http://www.hacksdmi.org/
EFF: http://www.eff.org/pub/EFF/Newsletters/EFFector/current.html
Linux Journal: http://www2.linuxjournal.com/cgi-bin/frames.pl/articles/misc/0022.html
CNet: http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200-2730039.html
The latest Forbes annual tally of the richest 400 people in America is out (no prize for guessing who's on top). Studying this list won't necessarily help you join its ranks, but you can wallow in jealousy, or sneer at it, or whatever takes your fancy. If you aspire to join the 400, no mere millions will do. First off, most of these guys (and they are mostly guys) are billionaires, some 298 of them. Total net worth:, a dizzy $1.2 trillion. Heck, the average list member - average! - is worth a cool $3 billion. Forbes provides various ways of sorting the list, including alphabetically, to make it easier to find that long lost pal. Each name links to a short bio and picture. We get no details on the methodology, but no doubt it's hard, demanding work. After you digest this list, try others in the left frame, including world's richest, richest women, tech billionaires, and so forth. We'd settle for last place on any list, or even for just missing the cut.
http://www.forbes.com/tool/toolbox/rich400/2000/worth/1.htm
Electronic Cash, Banking, Gambling
The purpose of FinCEN, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, is to support a global crack down on financial crimes through the collection, analysis, and sharing of information about such activities, including money laundering. You'll want to read its strategic plan, if such things amuse you. But we mainly point you here because its survey of electronic cash, electronic banking, and Internet gambling - all 110 pages of it (although about half are appendices) in PDF format - makes fascinating reading if you are into it. By now, you know the drill: there is no way, given the clamoring horde of other reviews demanding space, that we can summarize the report here. Can't be done. We can say it is informative, and reasonably well written. Other than that, well you'll just have to hustle on over and read it yourself.FinCEN: http://www.treas.gov/fincen/
Survey: http://www.treas.gov/fincen/e-cash.pdf
We had a few letters left over after that huge Letters to the Editor undertaking of last issue, so let us direct you to this after-dinner mint of a page. Go ahead, try it. It's wafer-thin.
http://www.netsurf.com/nsd/letters/letter.06.33.html
ONLINE CULTURE
This article from Wired updates the saga of VoteAuction.com, the site that allows American voters to sell their franchise to the highest bidder. The site seems to have about 5,500 voters signed up at press time, quite a jump from when we last reported on it (NSD 6.29). Wired also quotes some statistics about the kind of people who are willing to sell their votes. Sellers are in their 20s, male, and generally college students, while buyers tend to be affluent Republicans in their 40s trying to boost their favorite candidates. That just strikes a chord, doesn't it? Only three unnamed relatively small companies have placed bids for votes. The vote bids seem to be converging at a value of around $20 per vote, which finally quantifies the worth of American voters. A good story getting better.http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,38931,00.html
Interview with Brewster Kahle of Alexa
Brewster Kahle made his name on the Net in the early years with a search engine technology called WAIS which he eventually sold. In 1996, he founded Alexa, a company that built up collaborative filtering technology used these days in all those "What's Related" browser features. Alexa is now part of the Amazon.com empire, but remains independent and based in San Francisco. In this interview, Brewster discusses his perspective on the Web, a viewpoint made all the more interesting coming from his privileged position on top of a mountain of search engine data. For example, his numbers show that the top 100 Web sites control 40% of the traffic on the Web, an astounding concentration of power. The interview touches on many deep issues intertwining the Net with the world's knowledge base.http://www.feedmag.com/re/re392_master.html
ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT
Put those old Roger Dean Yes album covers away, we're talking about an art form that's much older, by at least 40,000 years. The Centro Camuno di Studi Preistorici has taken on the task of presenting prehistoric cave drawings, rock engravings, and volcanic art in a way that's both academic (sometimes densely so) and fascinating. Articles about recent discoveries and research lay the background for dozens of images from around the world, and it's remarkable to see the similarities between the carvings. From pre-Roman carvings in Italy to petroglyphs in the upper Mississippi River valley to caves in Ethiopia, disparate ancient artists looked at the world in much the same way.http://www.rockart-ccsp.com/
George Lucas and crew have set up shop in Australia where they are busy filming "Star Wars: Episode II". The official Star Wars site is a bit more scrubbed up than unofficial fan sites and offers - well, official information, whereas those other sites offer mere rumor and gossip. You can browse behind-the-scenes tidbits like interviews with the modeling experts from Skywalker Ranch, quotes from the crew (operator Don Bies says, "R2D2 is having deja vu"), or online video clips. This should feed the hunger of any rabid fan who likes approved publicity. But there's always a place for gossip. Our Australian reviewer has heard of much drama on set and her Star Wars-obsessed friend - an artist who turned down "Titanic" but took a job with "Episode II" - was sent home after a few days work on the set due to a bureaucratic bungle (a legitimate excuse for road rage we think). Amid the secrecy surrounding the shoot, this official site may relieve your curiosity, but it's always more fun getting unofficial gossip from the eagle-eyed bicycle couriers who haven't had to sign confidentiality agreements.
http://www.starwars.com/episode-ii/
For you who long for late nights huddled around a bistro table with a band of witty lit-head Algonquin Round Table wannabes who don't even know what the Algonquin Round Table was, ForeignFilms.Com may be just your cup of absinthe, mes amis. Yes, you get a database and all the news about foreign film festivals, distribution and new titles, but the fun part comes reading the message boards and the reviews. "Run Lola, Run" was drivel, claims one, while another uses it to engage the style vs. substance debate. Insults consist of witticisms such as "You fruit fly!" (how drosophomoric!) but for the most part, an intelligent joie de vivre keeps this site a great routine stop for the well rounded film lover.
http://www.foreignfilms.com/
TV Tome harvests the enthusiasm of its fans. Attracting those who love television or have a favorite actor or program, TV Tome asks fans to contribute, either as an editor for specific areas of the site (i.e. programs new or old), or with information or advice. As a credited editor, you can turn your embarrassing Night Court addiction, for example, into social and professional glory. While TV Tome makes no promise of babes and cash, it's a great form of therapy and you can swap one screen for another as you become a glamorous TV Tome reporter. Oh, by the way, the IMDb is the Internet Movie Database.
TV Tome: http://www.tvtome.com/
IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/
Digital photography is taking off. It seems that everybody has a cam hooked into their systems. More to the point, they're going mobile. This site presents some solid tips for maximizing your digital photo experience. It should also help keep you from driving your friends nuts. When we visited, there was a nifty little tutorial on PhotoShop, along with tips for producing panoramic shots from multiple exposures, macro photography, and basic digital art. They also offer short courses in everything from choosing a digital camera to editing your masterpiece. Clearly not a site for the wealthy photographic genius; it's help for the rest of us.
http://bestfoto.com/
What Gary Larson's "The Far Side" did for animal awareness issues, this site seems to do for our basic doctor issues. These 'toons are well-drawn, and feature some great med humor. And other stuff, not that we get it all. Frankly, a lot of it seemed to worm its way right around our centers of consciousness. Still, there's enough material in this place that even dweebs like us could get a good laugh. We're sure we'll find more in there, after the de-worming takes effect.
http://www.ibiblio.org/Dave/drfun.html
BOOKS & E-ZINES
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Items our staff likes and you might too. Click on the image or title to order at a hefty discount from our affiliate Amazon.com, and send a few pennies our way as well.
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The Sims: Livin' Large
The Island of Lost Maps: A True Story of Cartographic Crime
Programming Perl (3rd Edition)http://www.pctyrant.com/
The Read, Learn, Apply, Repeat E-Zine
Saying that Friction Magazine is an edgy 'zine is redundant. Any good 'zine by definition should be edgy; edginess earns them the right to use fewer letters. Melissa and Allen are punk rock fans who advocate praxis (look it up, lazybones). Melissa's journalism professors claim her endeavors lack focus, but she's clearly got her laser sights set here. Everything in Friction focuses on first informing yourself then applying that new knowledge, whether you learn from an interview with a Kent State shooting survivor or from a piece about the life of a professional dominatrix. If reading online gives you a headache, first print out an Adobe Acrobat PDF version of the articles so that you can read them offline, then check the ergonomics of your workstation.http://frictionmagazine.com/
A Strange Collection of Opinions
Asymptote is a collection of brief, edgy articles which increases daily. Apparently, anything can be a legitimate topic, although violence, sex, and profanity are blessedly missing. Most pieces come from reader contributions and range from provocative to sophomoric. While there's precious little focus, picking the gems from the dross is pretty simple. We found two major problems. One, pop-up ads constantly block text; dismiss one and another pops up almost immediately. Intrusive and ugly doesn't begin to describe them. Two, the site owner explicitly claims copyright ownership of all submissions, whether used or not. You'd need to be an idiot to write to this site or contribute (as requested) to it as long as that policy stands. Thank heaven for idiots.http://www.asymptote.cjb.net/
SURFING SCIENCE
Near Earth Objects and What We Can Do about Them
By far the best produced and most dramatic PDF file to cross our desks in the last while has to be the "Report of the Task Force on Potentially Hazardous Near Earth Objects", by the UK government task force of that name. Championed by the British National Space Centre, the report details known near-earth objects, shows orbits and trajectories, compiles a list of risks and recommendations and, among the many impressive graphics, shows the Hale-Bopp comet blazing through the sky over Stonehenge. The report does an excellent job of presenting the material in a readable, visually interesting format. As you might expect, it takes a while to download unless you have broadband access. A word of caution before you go out and run up your credit cards in anticipation of a meteoric Armageddon: the next serious astronomical event that could harm the earth might be up to 6 million years off. As the report mentions, however, only 10% of objects that could cause serious consequences have been discovered.http://www.nearearthobjects.co.uk/downloads/full_report.pdf
Modeling the Way of the Human Mind
Although artificial intelligence has fallen off the front pages recently, work continues. The Mindpixel site is the home of a program called Generic Artificial Consciousness, whose goal is to model the way the human mind works. It uses the Mindpixel Corpus database as its "brain". The Mindpixel Corpus is a database of clear questions with unambiguous answers. Users add to the database by posing questions and answering or verifying questions posed by others. There's some material on why this project should work, but the primary purpose is to demonstrate what's been accomplished so far and allow users to extend the database. This is definitely a site worth contributing to and tracking.http://www.mindpixel.com/
"Lions and tigers and bears", it ain't. Well, okay - it does feature polar bears. It probably also has lions and tigers. It's a zoo, after all. We just didn't catch any large cats during our passes through. No, we admit freely that our attention was diverted by the cool underwater cams set up in the seal and hippo environments, and you know how cats hate water. One incredible video shows a hippo birth. This is really great - you don't have to let your cat breed just so the kids can witness the miracle of birth. Steer 'em here, and the most explaining you'll have to do will involve why hippos are born butt-first. Guess what? So are elephants. It's in a big animals' best interest to get the big parts out and done with quickly - which is what you'll want to do on this site: skip the Zoo Song. By the way, who knew that Toledo was once called Frogtown? The swamps that these little amphibians once called home have long been paved over; we'd never have pegged the place as a homeland for frogs. The site could stand some proof-reading, as it's a little repetitive in places. That aside, it makes a great visit.
http://www.toledozoo.com/
Animal lovers may want to check out the webcams at Howletts Online. It offers six of them, with streaming live video and controls that allow the visitor to move the cams around Howletts Wild Animal Park (near Canterbury, England) and zoom in on areas of interest. Currently, it features two cams for African elephants, three for gorillas, and one for tigers. The technology is interesting; the philosophy behind it is as well. It is apparent that liability laws in the UK differ vastly from those in the USA. In the privately owned Howletts and its sister zoo in Port Lympne, staff are encouraged to go into animal enclosures and interact with elephants, tigers, rhinos, primates, and many hoofstock. You can find many photos on the site of staff engaging in this sort of interaction, but you won't find any mention of the number of humans killed during the course of such interaction (and there have been several). If you believe that the duckies and the bunnies hold hands as they dance around the maypole, this is your place.
http://www.howletts.net/
"Men need beauty rest, too." "US sperm count holds steady." "Study: Food bug can cause arthritis." "Study doubts soy for hot flashes." "Doctors admit to lying for patients." If any of these recent headlines grabbed you, check out the source: MSNBC.com's comprehensive Health Library, a nice combination of background and news. At last count, the upfront scroll-down list on the home page offered 28 health topics. Each topic page has a "Fast facts" pop-up with a short summary of the topic, a "Timeline of events", and an "Interactive checkup" which, in the section on women's health, contains quizzes for risk assessment, knowledge, and articles on medical trends. True, a lot of the content comes from other sources such as the Associated Press or Reuters, but ease of navigation and variety of topics make this site a good browse. Two topics in particular, cloning and wired health, have a tech focus that may cause you to spend more time here than at other health sites on the Web.
http://www.msnbc.com/news/healthlibrary_front.asp
Once again, the ThinkQuest non-profit educational project has motivated a superb educational science Web site, this time devoted to arguably the most important of the senses, sight. Not just your basic rod and cone review, this site by high-school authors examines the complexities of perception, the scientific understanding of light, and the physiology of optics. Teachers may want to play some tricks on their students to illustrate the limits of human perception using the section on optical illusions.
http://library.thinkquest.org/C001464/
COMMUNITY SUPPORT
Some nonprofit organizations wield considerable power and influence - the Ford Foundation, United Way of America, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation come to mind - but many work behind the scenes. How do you find out about them? GuideStar, a searchable Web database, lists more than 640,000 nonprofits in the US and describes each in considerable detail. GuideStar reports are based on information from the organizations and the Internal Revenue Service and many contain images of the forms that public charities have filed with that agency. GuideStar doesn't rate the organizations in its database. Nonprofits can register in the Nonprofit and Grantmaker Centers here. The site also has feature articles by GuideStar staff, links to external news, classified ads, and links for donors and volunteers. Charity employees may discover interesting facts about their employers here, but if the occasional scandal surfaces, you're likely to hear about it elsewhere. GuideStar is for basic research.http://www.guidestar.org/
CORRECTIONS
Two years ago (NSD 4.26), we showcased a digital gallery of digital art by John Pangia and Judy Fioravanti. John wrote in to say the gallery now includes over 100 canvases as well as info on how the images are created. There's a new URL, too.http://members.home.net/pangia1/
Even further back (NSD 4.20), we spoke of naked-but-for-chocolate performance artist Karen Finley and her fight for funding, which went to the Supreme Court. Her site has moved, but do check out our original article, too.
NSD 4.20: http://www.netsurf.com/nsd/v04/nsd.04.20.html
Karen: http://www.geocities.com/womynlynks/finley.html
In our review of Last Minute Search last issue, we provided the URL to parent site Last Minute News instead, which wasn't so tragic since you can get to the former from the latter. Still, conscience (and Last Minute's webmaster) compels us to remedy the error.
http://www.lastminutesearch.com/