BREAKING SURF
| The Googlewashing of the Second Superpower |
| Big Download, Big Goof |
| Sacred Places |
| The Ultimate Seattle Pub Crawl |
| Deaths, Disturbances, Disasters, and Disorders in Chicago |
| Surfin' Minnesota |
| Minnesota's Mill City Museum |
| Guide to the States |
| Photos of Conflict |
| Five Steps to Drawing Yourself |
| Netsurfer Recommendations |
| Kid Lit of the Early Soviet Era |
| Modern Drunkard |
| Windows Annoyances, the Web Site |
| An Animated History of Books |
| Personal Web Site of Coolness +2, +4 vs. Kender |
| Sports Streaks: Myth and Science |
| The Cons of Refractive Surgery |
| Seven Signs of Bogus Science |
| Mozilla 1.4 Alpha Released, New Radical Development Roadmap Proposed |
| Sendmail 8.12.9 Fixes Security Bug |
| BOOK REVIEWS |
| LETTERS TO THE EDITOR |
| Contact and Subscription Information |
| Credits |
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BREAKING SURF
Superb Satellite Images of Baghdad
We've been impressed with Space Imaging and its private Ikonos satellite images for nearly four years, since NSD 5.33. Glenn Reynolds, the blogger behind InstaPundit.com, is also impressed with the company. He has posted links to seven Space Imaging photos in his blog. All focus on the Baghdad area, and all have been snapped within the last few days. The images are incredible, with one to four-meter resolution. What you see is amazing. Flaming, oil-filled trenches belching thick, black smoke. Blue-gray stains show where bombs have hit. The taxiways and runways of Saddam International airport are pocked with craters. These photos easily surpass anything you've seen on TV for coverage of the war's effect on Iraq's capital.NSD 5.33: http://www.netsurf.com/nsd/sub/v05/nsd.05.33.html#BS3
InstaPundit.com: http://www.instapundit.com/archives/008654.php
Daily Russian Military Intelligence Analysis of Gulf War II
A group of Russian journalists and military experts have created War in Iraq to provide news and analysis of the war from the Russian perspective. The site posts daily summaries of the military situation in Iraq in Russian and English, usually culled from other sources, and includes reports allegedly from the GRU, Russia's military intelligence service. It's always good to be cautious regarding the motive behind the release of any intelligence information. Although it's no secret that the Russians have a diplomatic agenda at odds with the military operation in Iraq, we may still reasonably ask how and why these reports find their way onto the Net. Nevertheless, the reports feel like the real thing. You can find the informative GRU reports at Venik's Aviation as well as through links on the daily pages at War in Iraq. It's a must-read, with open and skeptical eyes.Iraqwar.ru: http://www.iraqwar.ru/?userlang=en
Venik's Aviation: http://www.aeronautics.ru/
Iraq Discussions: War Blogs, Usenet, and Choking on Yahoo Groups
If you accept that Sept. 11 slapped the butt of blogging after its birth, then the current war in Iraq can be thought of as the first stirrings of adulthood in the fast-growing medium. Bloggers are tracking events, delivering news, keeping diaries in the field, and increasingly communicating with other bloggers and the vast online community. Cynthia Webb of the Washington Post has compiled what she calls "some of the more interesting war blogs on the Internet", divided roughly into "General War Blogs", "Blogs for Troops and with Military Themes", and "War Blogs from Reporters and Media Organizations". Meanwhile, one of our readers reminded us that blogs are not the only outlets for war discussion. Over on Usenet, the soc.culture.iraq has thousands of posts on the topic. We tried finding relevant Yahoo Groups groups, but were stymied when we got 1,150 hits and no way to sort the relevant from the dreck. Maybe you'll have better luck before being distracted by the "Regional > Countries > Iraq > Romance & Relationships > Adult" category.Post: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A42614-2003Mar28.html
Yahoo Groups: http://groups.yahoo.com/search?query=Iraq
soc.culture.iraq: soc.culture.iraq
The Demise of the Iraqi Internet
Bombing raids seem to have finally knocked out the Iraqi Internet infrastructure this week. Phone service in Baghdad is out, as are several satellite uplinks and the Cisco switch which provided connectivity for Iraqi citizens. Despite the outage, some Iraqi sites are still online by virtue of being hosted outside the country. One example, cited in this short Salon article which outlines the demise of the Iraqi Net, is Babil Online, the home page of an Iraqi newspaper reportedly run by Saddam Hussein's son Uday.Salon: http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2003/03/31/iraq_offline/index.html
Babil Online: http://www.babilonline.net/
At press time:
Bombs Dropped 22,800
Civilian Casualties: 725
W.M.D. Sites Uncovered: 0
Oil Wells Aflame: 2
Coalition Casualties: 88
Leaflets Dropped: 35,300,000
Iraqi Soldiers Surrendered: 5,300
(US) Cost Per Taxpayer: $258
http://www.iraqometer.com/
Watch the Iraq Satellite Channel
Here's how to watch Iraqi TV on your computer. The Iraq Satellite Channel is rebroadcast online by a Dutch company, DSL-TV, in both Real and Windows Media formats. The company tries to limit its service to computers in the Netherlands, so it takes a bit of work and a proxy server to bypass that impediment. This Slate article tells you how to go about it. Don't even bother trying this if you don't have broadband and be warned that it may not work if your ISP has a firewall. The other caveat - well, we're a short-cycle publication, but not that short-cycle, and there's no guarantee this thing will still be working by the time you read this. The US is trying to silence Iraqi TV and may well have succeeded by now.http://slate.msn.com/id/2080681/
Will the War Pull the US Economy out of the Doldrums?
War is good for business, right? Well, it depends. Although many credit World War II with ending the Great Depression, economists are somewhat divided over whether or not Gulf War II will end the current American economic doldrums. Virginia Postrel's article in the New York Times gives a balanced account of why the war may not stimulate the economy and blogger Jane Galt challenges some of the numbers critics of the war have thrown about. Among the most interesting pieces in this vein is an article by Steven Davis and his University of Chicago colleagues that weighs the costs of the war against the costs of containment (download the PDF titled "War in Iraq versus Containment, Weighing the Costs" at the Web site below). If you accept the article's assumptions, the war is a bargain compared to containment. Only Davis et al ask how the war may benefit the Iraqi people, and argue that the Iraqi standard of living will rise as much as 50% if the war is successful. Mind you, an improved standard of living only matters if you're alive to enjoy it.Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/27/business/27SCEN.html
Galt: http://www.janegalt.net/blog/archives/004056.html
Davis et al: http://gsbwww.uchicago.edu/fac/steven.davis/research/
Fiftieth Anniversary of the Discovery of DNA Structure
On Apr. 2, 1953, James Watson and Francis Crick sent a letter to the science journal Nature that stated: "We wish to suggest a structure for the salt of deoxyribose nucleic acid (D.N.A.). This structure has novel features which are of considerable biological interest." Fifty years later, the consequences of this paper continue to reshape the world we live in. You can read Watson and Crick's original letter to Nature, and if you feel you need to catch up on DNA, check out the first-rate site, DNA from the Beginning. Equally impressive is DNA Interactive, a work in progress that has three excellent learning modules about DNA and related technologies. It's a key resource for teachers and educational netsurfing for everybody else.Nature: http://www.nature.com/genomics/human/watson-crick/
DNA from the Beginning: http://www.dnaftb.org/dnaftb/
DNA Interactive: http://www.dnai.org/index.html
What's it like on the front lines of the war against spam? Salon answers that question with the story of Suresh Ramasubramanian, a sysadmin at Outblaze, a Hong Kong ISP that provides e-mail services to 30 million users. Ramasubramanian often must spend serious time contending with spammers who threaten the integrity of the service. Working the spam-abuse desk is like high-pressure triage that can't help leaving some unhappy with the outcome. Spammers don't like being thwarted, customers don't like spam, and other spam fighters sometimes take exception to his actions. The figures Ramasubramanian cites will end any doubts that spam is a serious problem. More than 80% of Outblaze's incoming e-mail traffic is immediately filtered as spam. Even after that initial cull, the remaining 15 million daily messages contain up to 15% spam. One growing concern is the use of hijacked PCs to spawn spam unbeknownst to their owners. Anti-spam work is an endless quest: no matter how well things go today, tomorrow the attack will be renewed. Some of the names Ramasubramanian has been called are amusing.
http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2003/03/27/spam_fighter/index.html
E-Mail Analysis Reveals Organizational Structure
Scientists at Hewlett-Packard-Compaq-Whatever have come up with a way to use e-mail to analyze the structure of an organization. The concept of traffic analysis is not new, but dates back to World War II. What is new is the use of e-mail, and the particular way in which these researchers teased out the social network that the flow of e-mail revealed. In addition to showing the structure of a company or group, the technique also can be used to identify leaders or other people of influence. Nature has the story while the research paper itself is available from the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL).Nature: http://www.nature.com/nsu/030317/030317-5.html
LANL: http://xxx.lanl.gov/pdf/cond-mat/0303264
The one-time senator and presidential candidate gets with the program and starts a blog. He doesn't have enough of a sense of humor to call it Monkey Business, however. Hart was a serious contender for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1988 until he was photographed supporting model Donna Rice on his lap on a yacht called Monkey Business. All indications are that Hart would have given then-vice-president George H. W. Bush a run for his money, but the Democrats went with Michael Dukakis. Since then, Hart has served on President Clinton's Commission on National Security, and he is currently on a speaking tour, discussing foreign policy and exploring a possible second run at the White House. His new blog is part of that effort, although being so new it is still rather light on content. Rice (now Donna Rice Hughes), meanwhile, is now an online child safety/anti-porn advocate.
Hart: http://www.garyhartnews.com/hart/blog/
Rice Hughes: http://www.protectkids.com/
To Correct or Not to Correct: Bloggers and Facts
Mainstream journalism leaves the wreckage of preliminary, erroneous, or just plain misleading stories behind, then moves on. Only rarely does it go back to provide corrections. How do blogs perform in this respect? Los Angeles programmer Andy Baio thought the recent discovery of what turned out not to be a possible chemical weapons plant in southern Iraq could serve as a test case for bloggers. Ironically, this is a story that the conventional press did correct, but most blogs didn't. Of 148 blogs that cited the original story, 112 didn't bother to revise the news when it became apparent that the place wasn't used to produce chemical weapons, at least not recently. Twenty-eight blogs issued corrections and eight only mentioned the new, negative findings. The comments Baio attracted from some of the bloggers show corrections to be a nuanced kind of thing. Why bloggers bothered or not to revise their story is the real meat of this tale, which makes it clear that truth and the news are different species. News is instant and unreflective. Truth, well, requires some assembly.http://www.waxy.org/archive/2003/03/27/bias_aff.shtml
Fantasy baseball, sure. Fantasy football, OK. But fantasy BlogShares? BlogShares models itself after a stock market, but the stocks are blogs. Who'd have figured you could gamble on blogs? A blog's valuation is set by links and the price per share that BlogSharers are willing to pay. You start with $500 in fantasy money and try to grow your stash, for no apparent reason. Blog owners can join and make an IPO, again for no apparent reason. To be brutally honest, we can't see anything that would entice us to play this game - it just seems so colossally pointless. But we understand that different folks have different tastes, and that this is at least, or at most, another data point on the growth curve of blog culture.
http://www.blogshares.com/
Beating Cheating in Online Gaming
Baseball players take steroids and professional cycling is plagued with doping. Is it any wonder that cheating is part and parcel of the world of online gaming and that game developers are eager to quash it? A New York Times article at CNET details the problems posed by online cheating and the various ways designers are fighting back. The techniques of cheating are important even if you don't play games, since they demonstrate the ways in which users often do unexpected things with software. Check out the vast array of cheats at TSO extreme; and one attempt to fight back at PunkBuster.CNET: http://news.com.com/2100-1040-994340.html
TSO Extreme: http://tsoextreme.com/
PunkBuster: http://www.punkbusters.com/index.php
Do computer games affect the real world we inhabit? You bet. You have to read this new blog on gaming culture. "Got Game?" is not a site with reviews of games or l33t gaming tricks; it's a site about games and the people who develop and play them. It's not gossip but anthropology, and it's fascinating. In particular, read the story about the Everquest players who transmuted their virtual assets into cash on eBay. We've covered that before, most recently in NSD 7.33.
Got Game?: http://www.corante.com/gotgame/
NSD 7.33: http://www.netsurf.com/nsd/sub/v07/nsd.07.33.html#OC3
It looks as though investors are snapping up eBay, Amazon, and Yahoo stocks, but nobody knows why. Sure, they've got the killer products out on the Net, but it's not as though the stock prices reflect reality. The recent rise in price means the big three are trading at roughly 70 to 90 times their actual earnings. Thinking of investing? Check Business 2.0 first.
http://www.business2.com/articles/web/0,1653,48297,00.html
ONLINE CULTURE
The Googlewashing of the Second Superpower
The term "second superpower" was coined on the front page of the New York Times on February 17. It referred to global anti-war protests as the emergence of "the second superpower". The meme spread fast as the term was taken up by anti-war activists around the globe, winding up on the lips of UN Secretary General Kofi Annan within a month. Up to about a week ago a Google search for the term would have turned up numerous and diverse sources. Then came a new blog and a political polemic written by James Moore. A small number of widely read bloggers linked to Moore's tract. Seemingly overnight the Google search for the term "second superpower" would return references to Moore's web site in all but two of the top thirty search results. Within 42 days the potent anti-war term has been googlewashed into a bland reference to a techno-utopian call for Net users to organize themselves into a superpower, all driven by a tiny number of influential bloggers. The Register has the story, spinning it as an Orwellian drama.http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/30087.html
An obscure but useful book, an enthusiastic author, and an even more enthusiastic set of downloaders have led to financial hilarity, or disaster, depending on your viewpoint. Glenn Fleishman is a co-author of "Real World Adobe GoLive 6", which has not sold well. Fleishman wanted to boost sales by offering the book as a free PDF download. He was following the advice of several tech pundits who argue that giving away content is a surefire cure for obscurity. Glenn posted the graphics-heavy 23-MB file online and sat back, waiting for the bucks to roll in. Some 10,000 downloads, 250 GB worth of bandwidth, and 36 hours later, he pulled the file. For a while there, Fleishman thought he might be on the hook for roughly $15,000 in excess bandwidth costs, but fortunately he was saved by the terms of his contract with his ISP and won't owe a cent. The book is still available for download, and Fleishman feels like he's dodged a bullet. The moral of the story? Don't do that, at least not without a little research first. Wired has the initial tale.
Wired: http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,58219,00.html
"Real World Adobe GoLive 6": http://www.realworldgolive.com/six/freepdf.html
ONLINE TRAVEL
Visit this site to discover "...how and why things become invested with sacredness and how the sacred is embodied or made manifest through art and architecture." Written and produced by Christopher Witcombe, a professor of art history at Sweet Briar College in Virginia, this site provides an inside glimpse into some of the world's most mysterious and miraculous (depending on who you're talking with) landmarks. Learn of the intrigue of Stonehenge in England, or the wonderment of the Giza Plateau in Egypt. Explore this site using the easily followed index sorted by natural manifestations such as mountains, trees, and caves. Each category details the revered subject with accompanying articles and images. A virtual spiritual odyssey is right at your fingertips. At the very least, you'll discover some interesting tales and beautiful photographs of these ancient and sanctified places.http://witcombe.sbc.edu/sacredplaces/sacredplacesintro.html
The Ultimate Seattle Pub Crawl
Apparently, the Emerald City (Seattle) has a paltry 570 bars. If true, it represents yet another of the many shortcomings of the place; a close second, perhaps, to the road system. Two intrepid explorers, Brandon and Jason, decided to brave both shortcomings as they set out to have a drink at each and every one of the establishments. The one caveat: to count, a bar must be allowed to serve hard liquor. In practice, this appears to mean that one or the other of the boys must drink hard liquor within the establishment. Actually, the drinking is secondary. Brandon and Jason spend most of their time chatting up barhelp and unlucky nearby clientele. This site is rather like looking at dueling bloggers. It's interesting enough on its own, but more so if you happen to be in the Puget Sound area.http://www.570bars.com/
Deaths, Disturbances, Disasters, and Disorders in Chicago
Trouble has plagued Chicago ever since it emerged from the swamps in the early 1800s. Cholera, typhoid, and a number of other epidemics besieged the city during the mid-19th and early 20th centuries. Part of the problem was that the city's raw sewage drained into the Chicago River and emptied into Lake Michigan - the source of the city's water. A decision was made to reverse the flow of the Chicago River, forcing it to drain not into the lake, but into the Mississippi River's watershed. It may not have been environmentally sound or all that considerate of the folks living along the Mississippi, but it helped solve Chicago's problems. Bone up on all manner of disasters large and small here; most have great links to other interesting material as well. The great freight tunnel flood of 1992 wasn't a huge disaster, but it leads to some fascinating material on small-scale rail materials transport.http://www.chipublib.org/004chicago/chidisaster.html
For anybody who thinks that you can only surf on the open sea, this site is an eye-opener. It documents the surfboard antics of the dedicated crew that crest the waves of Lake Superior in and around Duluth, Minn. For anybody wanting to try this for themselves, there's plenty of detailed information about when and where to find the best breakers. The surf forecast is spectacularly detailed with wave maps, text forecasts for different areas of the lake, webcams, and even news from specific buoys. The surfers in Duluth ride the waves and have the photographs to prove it. Their resident photographer has an artistic eye and any of the images would inspire a landlubber to don a wetsuit, grab a board, and try to think really hard of Hawaii during a few moments of surfing. If you're tempted, check out the information on this year's aptly titled ColdWaterSurfFest.
http://www.superior-surf.com/
The Mill City Museum is slated to open in just a few short months, but its Web site is already running. Get a preview of the museum's offerings here. This is not small beer, either - this comes straight from the Minnesota Historical Society. C'mon, you're no different from the rest of us, which means you know diddly squat about Minnesota other than that it's a surfing haven. For all you know, they all run around wearing Viking helmets. That being the case, you owe yourself a visit. You may think of places like Nebraska as America's breadbasket, but bread is made from flour, and the flour was ground in America's mill - Minneapolis, that is. Minneapolis was known as Mill City, and you can pick up some stuff you didn't know just by looking at the intro to the Web site. Gold Medal Flour and General Mills are two names you might never have associated with Minneapolis. Betty Crocker may have been fictitious, but she had her own radio show here.
http://www.millcitymuseum.org/
Planning a trip to Valentine, Neb. and wondering where to find a good bed-and-breakfast? Perhaps curious about hunting and fishing regulations in New Hampshire? Or maybe just dying to know the current population estimate for Yazoo City, Miss.? Surf around in circles no longer, Internet wanderer, all those questions and more will be answered at this site, which packs a ton of information on (almost) every city in every state in the union into one convenient location. Nearly every bit of minutia regarding US cities great and small can be found here, including TV guides, yellow pages, maps, driving directions, and local recreational activities. Though it's not the best looking site on the Web, as the creators themselves admit, navigation is thankfully plain and simple, with the sea of data contained here surprisingly easy to navigate. If it's US state/city related facts and information you're looking for, this should be your first stop.
http://www.stateguide.com/
ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT
Discover the tragic stories told through the touching images captured by photojournalist Raffaele Ciriello. After a start covering motorcycling racing in the early '90s, Ciriello embarked on a quest to tell the stories of war and conflict through photography. Several online galleries provide visitors an inside look at some of the most war-torn areas in the world. Articles written by Ciriello and several travel mates accompany the pics. Although translated to English, the articles remain poignant. Galleries include images of Sierra Leone and children at war, Afghanistan and the plight of women, Rwanda and the bitter Hutu-Tutsi conflict, and other areas devastated by war and conflict. Visitor beware, this site is not for the faint of heart. Some images are gruesome, and others heart-wrenching. At the end of your tour, you'll surely be thankful for the smaller things in life that are so often taken for granted.http://www.ciriello.com/
Five Steps to Drawing Yourself
Let your fingers do the talking as you draw yourself, if you dare, at the 5 Line Self Portrait. This bare-bones site calls itself a "design experiment that puts you on paper in as little structure as possible." The paper, of course, is metaphorical as this is the Web after all. Before you show the world the distance between your self-impression and your skill in depicting the same, we suggest you browse the site's large gallery of self-portraits, all drawn with only five lines. It's as likely to convince you that you need to be an artist to capture your essence as it is to guide your thoughts in how to move your mouse for maximum effect. The key is simplicity, although that's more easily conceived than done. As you might guess, with only five lines, you may well end up with an abstract, a hint of a personality, or a bare cartoon rather than the real essence of the person in your mirror. We're amazed by the range of impressions generated here. It's obvious artists have left their mark. So have others who should have thought twice.http://www.the5line.com/gallery01.htm
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.
For more selections, check out: Netsurfer Books: http://www.netsurf.com/nsb/ Netsurfer Library: http://www.netsurf.com/nsl/ |
Murder and Mayhem: A Doctor Answers Medical and Forensic 
The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently...and Why
Mac OS X Hacks
Five-Language Visual DictionaryKid Lit of the Early Soviet Era
McGill University has set up an online exhibition of children's books from the early Soviet era. One of the functions of children's literature of the period was to proselytize the new regime to the young, and many of the titles reinforce the memory of great moments in the revolutionary struggle, such as "The Battleship Aurora", published in 1931. The rapid, large-scale industrialization of the Soviet Union is also reflected in the children's literature - the construction of the ambitious Dnieprostroi dam in 1933 is celebrated in "The War with the River Dniepr" - and children were encouraged to learn about the skills and professions that had contributed to the strengthening of the Soviet industrial and economic base. Politics and propaganda aside, these books are things of beauty with stunning artwork and graphics.http://digital.library.mcgill.ca/russian/default.htm
Take that bottle of Scotch out of the bottom drawer of your desk, pour yourself a well-earned mid-morning large one, and browse through Modern Drunkard, the lifestyle magazine for the lush. There's a monthly round-up of alcohol-related current affairs in the Booze News section, a letters page, a page for poetry and fiction, and even a messageboard here. Don't be fooled by the theme - this magazine is no tottering one-trick pony and that's because the writing is first rate. Highlights (or lowlights) of this month's edition include a guide to the art of staggering ("Let the booze guide you, you are a ship, alcohol is your sail and the whole damn world is your sea") and a hilarious Dead Celebrity Fantasy Drink-Off between Richard "Double Bourbon" Burton and Charles "The Battlin' Barfly" Bukowski. Don't bother putting that bottle back in the drawer; pour yourself another and browse the archives.
http://moderndrunkardmagazine.com/
Windows Annoyances, the Web Site
We doubt there's a Windows user alive who hasn't been bugged by one Windows thing or another: glitches; crashes; fragmentation; faulty help; lack of help; in the case of Clippy, too much help; incompatible drivers; security holes; endless updates.... Users familiar with the glorious history of this operating system, as well as those puzzled by the Start button, will find something helpful at Annoyances.org, a task-oriented collection of tips and articles to help you enjoy - or, as some would say, survive - the world's most popular desktop operating system. The organization here is excellent. In our first minute on the site, we found a useful tip on how to restart Windows without restarting your computer in the Improving Performance section. Novices might do well to consult veterans of Microsoft wars before they try tips such as "Speed up system restart" ("Add BootDelay=0 to the [Options] section of C:\MSDOS.SYS") that might affect critical files or operations.http://www.annoyances.org/
For World Book Day, the BBC put together An Animated History of Books, a timeline of writing from 50,000 BCE to today. Some levity is brought to this potentially dry subject by Craig Charles, who played Lister in the British SF sitcom "Red Dwarf". Each time period has a Notes section with more documentation and a great list of places to visit specifically geared to the topics discussed in that era. Well, great if you're European. Slightly more expensive if you're not.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/books/historyofbooks/
Personal Web Site of Coolness +2, +4 vs. Kender
Tracy Hickman, who thought up Dragonlance and wrote the masterful original Ravenloft module for Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, has a Flash-intensive personal site. His biography proves that many younger generation gamers have never known a world not populated by his imagination. Although epileptics may occasionally find the site a bit too busy, the essays on the intersection of Christianity and roleplaying in his life are of particular interest, and the Christmas carols are not to be missed. Or maybe they are. Has anybody seen them? Tasslehoff?http://www.trhickman.com/
SURFING SCIENCE
Sports Streaks: Myth and Science
Fans love athletes when they're hot. So do TV commentators. Examples include streak hitters in baseball, streak shooters in basketball, and entire teams on fire that win and win and win. Hot Hand in Sports examines the phenomenon of streak performance with statistical analysis by Alan Reifman, assistant professor of human development and family studies at the University of Michigan. Like many, Reifman is fascinated by feats such as Los Angeles Laker star Kobe Bryant's record nine straight three-point shots during an NBA game in January. You don't have to be a mathematician to understand Reifman's academic approach, but it helps to have an aptitude for numbers. Fans might contest his dry conclusion about Kobe's bombs from downtown ("the nine consecutive hits from three-point range were not statistically noteworthy"), yet only a month later, New York Knicks hothead Latrell Sprewell also hit nine three-pointers in a row. The site is an objective look at a sports myth. Next up, momentum (we can only hope).http://www.hs.ttu.edu/hdfs3390/hothand.htm
The Cons of Refractive Surgery
If you watch infomercials and listen to radio commercials, you've no doubt heard both patients and doctors describe the joys of refractive surgery. We rarely hear criticism of these elective procedures. Lasik and Laser Eye Surgery Info, however, is a community site designed to tell both patients and medical professionals about risks, complications, and rehabilitation. Its Why We're Here page states, "We help identify current remedies and spur development of future technologies to help us overcome our surgically created visual difficulties." At first glance, you might guess the primary beneficiaries of this site would be personal-injury lawyers. There is a Legal Redress section, along with links for reporting a problem to the US Food and Drug Administration, but we found no ads for legal services. The seriousness of this advocacy site is reflected in its fine resources, including an Image Center (a collection of Flash demos that illustrate post-operative vision errors) and patient stories. As icky as it may make you feel, the site is a required destination for anybody wishing to give informed consent to a physician who's about to slice up their eyes.http://www.surgicaleyes.org/
The fact that modern technology is quickly becoming more complex, coupled with woeful scientific illiteracy, has made a lot of us suckers for the rapidly growing contingent of cranks and charlatans purporting to have done everything from cloning a human to inventing anti-gravity boots. Separating the good science from the bad in all this white noise has become increasingly vital, and to help in the endeavor, Robert Park has formulated these seven warning signs of bogus science, listing red flags to look for when evaluating the more suspicious of scientific claims. Among the list: A scientist who unveils his new invention directly to the media (real scientists don't normally pitch their amazing new discoveries to the National Enquirer, in other words) and a scientist who must propose new laws of nature in order to account for an observation (always a definite signal that something may be fishy). Keep this list handy and you'll never be blinded by bogus science, we hope.
http://chronicle.com/free/v49/i21/21b02001.htm
SOFTWARE
Mozilla 1.4 Alpha Released, New Radical Development Roadmap Proposed
As the latest alpha Mozilla browser hits the streets, the project has proposed a major change in its development strategy. Answering concerns that the monolithic Swiss army knife of Web browsing, e-mail reading, and newsgroup access has become too bloated, the Mozilla organization proposes to modularize the software. While the 1.4 branch will become the stable release, the rest of the Mozilla project will focus development on a stand-alone browser now known as Pheonix, a stand-alone e-mail/newsgroup client to be called Thunderbird, architectural changes to the Gecko layout engine and a new module ownership model. The Roadmap discusses these radical changes in great detail.Mozilla 1.4 Alpha: http://mozilla.org/releases/
Roadmap: http://mozilla.org/roadmap.html
Sendmail 8.12.9 Fixes Security Bug
While Sendmail is the most widely used e-mail transport agent on the Net, it also has a reputation for regularly revealing bad security bugs. The latest one is a buffer overflow attack that exploits a problem in how Sendmail parses an e-mail address. This one is pretty bad since it can be exploited to launch a denial-of-service attack, and may also allow a remote attacker to execute arbitrary code on your machine as root. Fortunately, a fix is available as Sendmail 8.12.9, and if you have not already done so, you should upgrade immediately. CERT has the security advisory.Sendmail 8.12.9: http://www.sendmail.org/8.12.9.html
CERT: http://www.cert.org/advisories/CA-2003-12.html