BREAKING SURF
| Scam and Guilt in Eve Online |
| The Negativeland iPod |
| Pacific Crest Trail Adventure |
| BlogAfrica |
| Geological Tourism |
| The Bowling Road Trip |
| Travel and Post, or Just Read at TravelBlog |
| Et Tu, Kong? |
| E-Zine File's Fantastic Photography |
| The Lost Art of Whistling |
| The Everyday Happenings of Weebl and Sometimes His Friend Bob |
| Netsurfer Recommendations |
| The Hyphen Between Asian and American |
| Animation for All and All for Animation |
| Tracking Newspaper Corrections and Retractions |
| Index of Newspapers around the Globe |
| The Phylogenetic Tree of Life |
| The History and Development of Stop-Motion Photography |
| The Women in the White Coats |
| Safety and Analysis of Herbal Medicines |
| Awesome Amateur Astronomy Photos |
| Thunderbird 1.0 |
| Hacking iPod Graphics |
| Guide to Designing Apple's Dashboard Widgets, and a Contest |
| BOOK REVIEWS |
| LETTERS TO THE EDITOR |
| Contact and Subscription Information |
| Credits |
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BREAKING SURF
Credit Agencies Blocking Links to Credit Report Site
A recently enacted law requires US credit-reporting agencies to give you an annual free copy of your credit report. One of the provisions of the law led to the creation of the Annual Credit Report site, at the expense of the industry's three major companies, Equifax, Experian and Trans Union. But it looks like the credit agencies don't really want you to know about that Web site, because they are taking blatant steps to obscure its existence. They are blocking links from external sites and carefully avoiding phrases on the Web pages that would make the site rank highly in relevant search-engine searches. The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) lays out the sleazy behavior in some detail in its complaint letter to the Federal Trade Commission. Meanwhile, make sure that you are informed about the law and about the Web site, and about how large, sleazy companies seek to prevent you from knowing about either. Annual Credit Report: https://www.annualcreditreport.com/cra/index.jspEPIC: http://www.epic.org/privacy/fcra/freereportltr.html
Rebutting the Florida E-Vote Study
In NSD 10.46, we ran a story about University of California, Berkeley researchers who statistically analyzed 2004 Florida voting patterns and suggested that the use of electronic voting machines was correlated with disproportionate numbers of votes for President Bush. We warned that the study was not definite proof of tomfoolery but rather an opening salvo in a political/statistical debate. Ta-daah! This week, two other researchers released a paper that rebuts the claims of the Berkeley bunch, concluding that "the study is entirely without merit and the 'results' are meaningless." However, according to Wired, the Berkeley bunch is standing by their results, though not without acknowledging that factors other than voting machines could still be responsible for the excess votes. Wired also has links to the two opposing papers.NSD 10.46: http://www.netsurf.com/nsd/sub/v10/nsd.10.46.html#BS1
Wired: http://www.wired.com/news/evote/0,2645,65896,00.html
The US Intelligence and Commercial Space Launch Bills
Two important pieces of legislation passed through the US Congress this week. Intelligence reform bill S.2845 came out of the work of the 9/11 Commission and the persistent lobbying of victims' relatives. The bill itself is fairly straightforward, providing for a new layer of intelligence bureaucracy, the creation of an Intelligence czar, and other reorganizations of the intelligence establishment. S.2845 is a very big bill, but browsing at least the table of contents is worthwhile. The other major piece of legislation that Congress passed this week is the Commercial Space Launch Amendments Act of 2004. This basically encourages the evolution of a commercial-passenger space industry through the removal of certain legal barriers and the addition of some reasonably limited regulation. Look for H.R.5382 on Thomas. This bill heralds the formal birth of a totally new, private transportation industry and as such is of interest to space-travel fans everywhere.http://thomas.loc.gov/
Boing Boing is one of the most popular blogs on the Net and has the statistics to prove it. Why should you care about its Web stats? Precisely because Boing Boing is one of the most popular weblogs on the Net, which means its stats are a great model of what it takes to run a really popular Web site. The numbers also tell us who or what is out there accessing popular Web sites. Boing Boing's bandwidth grew to about 470 GB transferred during November, split among 1,182,402 unique visits. You can see which robots crawled the site most often, and no, Google was not number one; that honor belongs to Ask Jeeves. To fuel the operating system wars, the blog points out that visitor systems are 70% Windows, 15% Mac, 10% unknown, and, sorry Penguinheads, only 4% Linux. Internet Explorer wins the browser race with 37% of all accesses, but note that Boing Boing's audience is tres hip: Firefox is right there at 31% with Mozilla at another 5% or so. Clearly, Internet Exporer is on the run in this particular community. The publicly available stats are a wealth of data for anybody who aspires to run a popular Web site, or is interested in the real-world stats of Web access. Incidentally, it's all done with an open-source weblog analyzer called AWStats.
Boing Boing: http://boingboing.net/stats/
AWStats: http://awstats.sourceforge.net/
New Tool Searches Scanned Handwriting
Researchers at the University of Massachusetts (UMass) Amherst have come up with something truly amazing: a tool that can search through scanned handwritten documents. The tool takes the standard search-engine approach - type in keywords and the tool produces a ranked list of pages. That this system works on scans rather than manually transcribed documents is the cool feature: there are literally tons of handwritten documents out there, and transcription and indexing costs are prohibitive. A tool that can search scanned handwritten historical documents is therefore an incredibly powerful addition to the arsenal for researchers - and potentially for amateurs as well. Collaborater Toni Rath offers a tutorial and demo of the system. The university has a press release and offers a PDF of a research paper on the process.Rath: http://ciir.cs.umass.edu/~trath/prj/hw_retr/demo_intro.html
UMass Amherst: http://www.umass.edu/umhome/news/articles/7683.php
Paper: http://ciir.cs.umass.edu/pubfiles/mm-341.pdf
Argo Ocean-Monitoring Network Hits Halfway Milestone
Somewhere out in the vast reaches of the world's oceans, some 1,500 robotic floats drift underwater as part of an elaborate monitoring network called Argo. Descending as deep as a mile, the probes surface every ten days to report their findings on salinity, temperature, and position, then descend again. The transmitted data pass from the floats to two main data-assembly centers in Brest, France and Monterey, Calif. The projects make the data freely available over the Net, generally within 24 hours of transmission from the probes. The resulting evolving database is invaluable in developing climate models, predicting weather, and studying climate change. Argo began to deploy the ingenious robots four years ago and expects to complete an array of 3,000 of them by 2007. Each four-foot-long freely drifting device should last about four years. The probes ascend and descend by pumping hydraulic fluid into and out of a bladder. The program is a solid example of international scientific cooperation, of more than 50 agencies in 18 nations, although the US contribution alone accounts for half the floats. UCSD has a press release.Argo: http://www.argo.ucsd.edu/
UCSD: http://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/newsrel/science/ArgoGould1500.asp
NOAA Starts Release of Free Data
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has begun providing weather data in free XML format. Several advocates had been worried that Americans would have to pay twice for this data - first, they would pay taxes to acquire the data and then they would have to pay a private interpreter of the data, such as AccuWeather or the Weather Channel, to see the result. A Wired article brings all the issues to light, but if you want to use the NOAA data, you will have to provide your own XML reader.NOAA: http://www.nws.noaa.gov/forecasts/xml/
Wired: http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,65919,00.html
"The 12 Days of Christmas": an Economic Analysis
You don't need to read this PNC Bank analysis to know that Christmas is expensive, but price the items listed in "The 12 Days of Christmas" and just how expensive may blow your mind. For 20 years, PNC staffers have charted the cost of true love. Overall, what you'd have to pay for all 12 days' gifts has climbed a modest 1.6% annually since the company first started calculating how much those lords a-leaping would set you back in 1984. Within the overall stats, however, PNC details how some goods have declined in cost while others have soared. Outsourcing, that great boon to consumers, has helped keep some costs under control. Despite a recent uptick in gold prices, gold rings are a steal, having fallen badly out of favor. This year, the cost of all the gifts is a cool $17,296.91 - with all repetitions, that balloons to a staggering $66,344. Online buying's delivery charges up the cost substantially. The bargain item on the list is the partridge (PNC seems to have forgotten about the pear tree), although on a per unit basis the maids a-milking are a steal at barely over $5 each. Ladies and swans are a different story.http://www.pncbank.com/12days
Despite this age of the electronic game, there are still many fans of old-fashioned board games. The games you play on a cardboard surface with cards and/or counters and which require you to actually be in the same room within touching distance of your opponents still have their devotees. Modern board games range all over the map in theme and mechanics, and there are so many that it's tough to guess which are worth buying. Hence this gift guide from the Morning News, which gives you capsule summaries of the best and most innovative board games available this holiday season. The games include a cool railroad-building game, a war game that seems to resemble a small-scale Axis and Allies, an addictive one-rule card-and-chip game, and many, many more. By the way, apparently Germany is the center of the board-game universe, for sociological reasons.
http://www.themorningnews.org/archives/opinions/the_2004_good_gift_games_guide.php
Merriam-Webster Words of the Year
Based on online look-ups at their dictionary site, Merriam-Webster has pronounced the word of the year to be - wait for it - "blog", defined as "a Web site that contains an online personal journal with reflections, comments, and often hyperlinks provided by the writer." Merriam-Webster has a Web page with the other top-ten words of the year, most of them fairly banal. But what the heck is "defenestration" doing at number 10? We can only speculate that what people really wanted to look up was a word for throwing out Windows.http://m-w.com/info/04words.htm
eBay Offers Want Ads to Merchandise-Seekers
Until recently, hunting for bargains on eBay was just that, a hunt, made only slightly easier with e-mail alerts of search results. New eBay tools hope to help registered users connect with sellers in the reverse of the standard model. Users can place an anonymous 30-day want ad that describes just what they're looking for; sellers can search those ads and direct users to specific auctions that meet their needs. eBay slow-balled the rollout, which began Nov. 30, but the idea took off regardless, showing it clearly has legs for weary eBay hunters.CNet: http://news.com.com/Wanted+your+ad+on+eBay/2100-1024_3-5476543.html
Want it Now: http://pages.ebay.com/wantitnow/
What with speedy Wal-Mart ahead of it and Kmart, newly married to Sears, in its rearview mirror, Target must have been tempted to find something to differentiate itself from the competition. The retailing giant got a little more than it bargained for when it hired Amazon.com to help operate its Internet store. Not restricted to Target merchandise, customers who used the search function at Target's Web store got results that included items from Amazon.com's global cornucopia, including a lot of stuff that Target wouldn't want to sell for love or money. Among items that Target customers could find were books, CDs, and DVDs on drugs and sex, not things consumers normally associate with the mainstream retailer. The gaffe has prompted some chuckles and mirth in the blogging community and some red faces in paneled boardrooms. Amazon.com is said to be working closely with Target to suppress such results in the future. CNET has the story and Boing Boing broke the news.
CNET: http://news.com.com/2100-1038-5475376.html
Boing Boing: http://www.boingboing.net/2004/12/03/targetcom_no_blowjob.html
Iraq Prisoner Photos Found on the Web
Here's a cautionary tale that shows just how pervasive and information-rich the Internet is. An Associated Press reporter was researching Iraqi prison abuse. On a photo-sharing Web site, he came upon a series of photos of Iraqi prisoners being subdued during what appear to be raids on civilian homes. Without context, it's not clear that the photos show anything illegal along the lines of prisoner abuse, but it's the policy of the US military that photos of prisoners should only be taken for evidentiary or administrative purposes. These photos clearly do not belong in those categories. So how did they wind up on the Web? Apparently, the wife of a Navy SEAL found them on her husband's camera and posted them online. This is not the kind of publicity that the US military wants in the wake of the Abu Ghraib scandals, but the incident shows how difficult it is to control information in the modern connected environment. Yahoo has the AP story.http://tinyurl.com/5bfvg
As you type in your Google query, a pop-up on this experimental Web page suggests sites you may be looking for. It's quite elegant, and in some ways mimics similar technology in browsers, though of course you're searching the Web rather than just a list of URLs in your cache or bookmarks.
http://www.google.com/webhp?complete=1&hl=en
Pew Reports on Musicians' Views on File-Sharing
Given all the lawsuits the RIAA has filed over illegal file-sharing, the new Pew Foundation report on artists and file-sharing is a refreshing change of pace. The people whose work lies at the core of the issue have mixed opinions of the practice, but only 30% of 2,755 artists surveyed believe that peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing poses a major threat to their careers. In fact, the artists believed that P2P only hurts the purveyors of music, meaning the companies that distribute the music and belong to the RIAA. The Pew survey reveals that two-thirds of artists think that they should have complete copyright control of their own work. Given the conclusions of this report, one hopes that Congress and the media will begin to question companies when they sue users of P2P networks. One other striking feature of this report is the sheer number of Americans who believe themselves to be artists.http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/142/report_display.asp
HungryPod Service Rips Your CDs
Too busy, too lazy, or too phobic to transfer your music to the increasingly ubiquitous iPod? One plucky young lady has an answer - she'll pick up your CDs, rip them to MP3s, and transfer them to your iPod for a measly buck and a half per disc. For a few more dollars, Catherine Keane will recommend music you might like to add, based upon the tastes you've revealed to her. A whole set of industries is cropping up around the iPods, and Keane's HungryPod service is right on the cutting edge. On one hand, this is a cool idea that led to a cool entrepreneurial job. On the other, there's really a lot of thumb-twiddling involved. The New York Times has more.HungryPod: http://www.hungrypod.com/
Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/02/technology/circuits/02podd.html
"My Experiences as a Comic/Card Dealer"
Way back when NSD used to have a section called Thread Watch, we would point you to notable threads on Usenet. Well, we soon learned the futility of trying to keep up that particular effort, but every now and then we come across a good thread on some forum or other which we think our readers would like. This is such a thread, in which a poster known as "noun" tells the story of his experiences in the economically complex world of comic and card dealership. Comic struck kids may dream of growing up to own a comic-book store, but the reality is that it's a difficult business plagued by fad-driven economic cycles of boom and bust. Anybody who collects comics or cards, or is just a fan of the art forms, will enjoy noun's narrative and the appreciative comments of his knowledgeable audience.http://www.quartertothree.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=13386
Joel Spolsky's blog is popular with software engineers. He's also an author, and he's compiling a book to feature the best essays on software of 2004. He did the obvious thing and called online for essay nominations. His many fans did not disappoint, sending him a huge selection of candidates for inclusion in the book. The result is here in all its glory, a list of 160 of the best software related essays on the Net. This is a treasure trove of recent writing on the art of programming, much of it from popular and respected technical authors. The topics cover everything from grand philosophy to the minutia of C programming syntax. This is a first-rate collection of writing on software, and we don't envy Joel the job of cutting it down to book size. We recommended it highly for anybody interested in programming at any level.
http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?best04
Porn Spammers Retreat to ASCII Art
It's no chestnut that porn is the source of innovation online - more often than not, it really is. As spam filters have become more effective in routing out e-mail ambushes, porn spammers are retreating to that old standby, ASCII art. Remember ASCII art? The state of the spammers' art is not actually porn images in ASCII, but text strings that spell out larger words. Boing Boing has all the details. Look for it in your e-mail soon.http://www.boingboing.net/2004/12/02/pornospammers_eterna.html
ONLINE CULTURE
We're used to hearing about scams in the financial and political worlds, but what about real scams in worlds that don't even exist? This confessional is the tale of a dastardly deed carried out in the massively multiplayer Eve Online, a space game. Tired of gathering points in Eve Online's universe through the cautious and tedious means of mining and trading ore, a player who calls himself Nightfreeze decided to get a loan from another player and go trading with the big boys who had already paid their dues and amassed huge amounts of virtual cash. The idea was going well, until a pirate blew him straight back to the tyro mining planets. Brilliant inspiration led Nightfreeze to try to con a group of investor-players, including his previous benefactor, out of their points via some fake endorsements. It worked - he made his millions and evaded the real-world wrath of one victim. Strangely, or not, he never played Eve Online again. It's a great morality tale.http://static.circa1984.com/the-big-scam.html
It didn't take long for the recently released iPod U2 Special Edition to go from super-hip icon of modern culture to target of a super-hip post-modern culture-jamming. While Apple and U2 branded this iPod U2 with the band's logos and music, artist Francis Hwang put up for auction on eBay recently one that contained albums and artwork of the band Negativeland. Negativeland is famous for its legal battles in the early 1990s with U2 and music labels over fair use. Hwang, who modified the iPod himself, falls firmly in the counter-corporate-culture camp: "This unauthorized iPod modification is an artful mashup of the forces of corporate megarock and obscure experimental music, and a provocative symbol of the ongoing struggle between those who would confine culture and those who would free it." Apple complained to eBay and the auction was pulled, even though nobody can figure out any legal reason why. Hwang notes the auction closure in his weblog. Wired has the rest.
iPod U2 Special Edition: http://www.apple.com/ipod/u2/
Hwang: http://fhwang.net/blog/45.html
Negativeland vs. U2: http://www.deuceofclubs.com/write/negativl.htm
Wired: http://www.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,65959,00.html
ONLINE TRAVEL
On occasion uproariously funny and at times touching, this New Zealander's depiction of his trek from Mexico to Canada along the Pacific Crest Trail (PCT) is riddled with historical insights, photos, poorly-conceived approaches to tick removal, and typographical errors. The Kiwi in question, George Spearing, intended the account to become a book but no publishers picked it up and so he moved it out onto the Web. The publishers made a huge mistake, but you reap profit from their loss should you choose to visit. Even if you've never been on the PCT, you'll enjoy the narrative. Periodic PCT trekkers, like some of us, find even more nuggets. If you know the terrain, you might want to add to the account. There's no guarantee that Spearing will use it, but it seems plausible.http://www.angelfire.com/trek/nz_usa/index.html
The Berkman Center for Internet and Society, allAfrica.com, Geekcorps, and some other folks have collaborated to form the BlogAfrica project. The site offers a lot of material, ranging from scuba safaris to rugby to news from places like Ghana and Uganda. The site, as you'd expect by its name, also hosts blogs in many languages - and some are even in English. At last count, there were over 240 blogs to skim. In browsing those we could read, we learned that ignoring striking dreams is done at the peril of the dreamer, the Kenya High Court has ordered retired President Moi and others to testify before the Goldenberg Commission, and that some on the Dark Continent suspect France is simply biding time before acting on another genocide or regime change in Africa. Who knew?
http://allafrica.com/afdb/blogs/
There's nothing like a background in geology to help you truly appreciate a great view. Whether you're a geology teacher looking for a good field trip, a student who needs a certain type of terrain to complete a geology project, or you simply want to find a stunning place to do some camping, Travel in Geology, from Geotimes, has something for you. Start off with the Online Travel Reviews and you'll probably be drawn, as we were, to the breathtaking picture of Kauai. Yep, that sounds like a good place for a field trip! The sites featured here offer some of the world's most beautiful landscapes, and the single-page illustrated descriptions will help you find the unique geological formations of each, including links to local attractions and visitor information. Geotimes also archives articles on geological travel and reviews geological exhibits at various museums. There's a new review every month, so you'll want to check back and see what's new. Geology travel was never so easy.
http://www.geotimes.org/Travels.html
We're a little late on the uptake with the Bowling Road Trip. On the hypothesis that you can't ever wear enough bad shoes, Mike Walsh had this crazy idea to bowl in all 50 states. He completed his journey Apr. 26, 2003, but the story is still online and fun to read, especially for folks who get excited by ball returns. Frankly, we'd rather hear his story of his first job after college, "a cross-country tour driving Oscar Mayer's famed Wienermobile." "Frankly" - ho, ho, ho, we crack ourselves up.
http://www.bowlingroadtrip.com/
Travel and Post, or Just Read at TravelBlog
People who don't already have their own blogs but are going on a journey about which they'd like to keep their friends and family updated will appreciate TravelBlog. The site provides free hosting of stories and photos from around the world arranged geographically, by date, or by author. The site is allegedly supported by advertising, and there's no cost to set up a blog on the site. Just remember to keep it clean - your mom's reading this. Non-travelers will appreciate the vicarious tours of the far corners of the globe to be had here.http://www.travelblog.org/
ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT
If you're the sort of person to rush online to download the latest pre-release film trailer no matter how lame, do we have a treat for you. One other way a blockbuster can capture your heart and time is with a production blog. And what bigger, badder blog could there be than Kong Is King.net, the "King Kong 2005" production diary? Stuffed with goodies from the set and intimately connected with director Peter Jackson, the site approaches the movie set with a sense of humor. All you bandwidth-suckers will appreciate the copious video clips - may we recommend Day 46 for Jack Black fans? Other featured stars include Adrien Brody and the guy who played Gollum (Andy Serkis). This is big! Bigger than big! Watch the video clips! Chat it up! Eat your heart out, Jessica Lange! Kong is coming! Again!http://www.kongisking.net/kong2005/proddiary/
E-Zine File's Fantastic Photography
Photography transcends the mundane snapshot when it takes a new angle, sometimes quite literally. File e-zine supports that agenda with its deliberate policy of only showcasing photos that show everyday life in a new light. The quality of the images from both amateur and professional shutterbugs is outstanding and the site presents them with minimal fuss and explanation. Here, a picture is better than a thousand words, so it is simply allowed to speak. The site posts new content three times a week and readers can keep up to date using an RSS feed. We liked the black-and-white clarity of a skateboard shot like a jet on a runaway and entitled "Speed", the "Mystery Trash" collection, and the holiday joy of "Three Polaroids from Crete" but considering the eclectic taste of File's editors, there is probably at least one compelling photograph here for everybody.http://www.filemagazine.com/
Virtuoso whistling is something of a lost art. Back in the '30s and '40s many nightclub and lounge acts would feature a whistler, either as a novelty who could whistle bird songs or as part of the main musical act. Those days are gone, and whistling records are rare, so your best chance of reliving the Golden Age of whistling is at the marvelous Online Guide to Whistling Records. The site offers more than 100 MP3s as well as biographies of the giants like Muzzy Marcellino, whose work you may have heard in "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly", and Fred Lowery, considered by many to be the greatest whistler of all time. You may not want to rush to add some whistling to your music selection, but this site is an intriguing glimpse of a forgotten part of musical history. There's also some great fun to be had looking at the sleeves of old bird-training records; "How to Teach Your Parakeet to Talk" is a particular favorite of ours.
http://www.whistlingrecords.com/
The Everyday Happenings of Weebl and Sometimes His Friend Bob
The Everyday Happenings of Weebl is a series of poorly animated Flash cartoons whose heroes' voices are incomprehensible gibberish and which have practically no plot. They are also possibly the best and funniest Flash 'toons on the Net, something recognized by MTV UK, which licensed the Web content for broadcast and commissioned some new Weebl and Bob cartoons. Weebl is an egg with a face and Bob is, well, a slightly smaller egg with a face, and their adventures generally revolve around getting some pie. More than that is hard to say. You'll just have to check out their idiosyncratic adventures with the likes of Angry Paul, Mysterious Chicken, and Vibro Egg. And remember, there is no honor without pie.http://www.weebl.jolt.co.uk/
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/ |
Mind Hacks
McSweeney's Enchanted Chamber of Astonishing Stories
Behind the Seen: How Walter Murch Edited Cold Mountain Using Apple's Final Cut Pro and What This Means for Cinema
Yiddish with Dick and JaneThe Hyphen Between Asian and American
This online portal to the San Francisco-based Hyphen magazine brings news and culture with a distinctly Asian-American flair to throngs of netsurfers worldwide. Offering news, features, and commentary, this e-zine seeks to build bridges and raise awareness about one of the fastest growing ethnic populations in the US. Most of the content available at this site comes from past issues. For the latest edition, you'll have to subscribe and receive a paper copy via snail mail. The online Community Links page provides a plethora of sites of interest to the Asian-American community. You'll also find an Events page with up-to-date listings of happenings in the San Francisco area. Be sure to check out the Blog page, chock full of musings and rants about issues that affect the targeted audience.http://www.hyphenmagazine.com/
Animation for All and All for Animation
Animation brings in big bucks for Hollywood and the video-game industry. And any kid knows the importance of cartoons. If you're in the animation biz, you're probably familiar with Skwigly, an animation industry e-zine. If you're not, this site merits at least one visit. Most movie fans will find eyecatchers here, such as the current news item "Eleven Films to Compete for Animated Feature Oscar". A November article features Oscar triple-winner Randy Cook, creator of the Gollum character in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Another provides tips on how to make a TV series. Skwigly also reviews movies, books, and Web sites. It lists contests, festivals, and other events. The forum might even help you promote your own masterpiece of animation or land a job in the field. We aren't sure why the calendar is almost empty; maybe it's a new feature.http://www.biganimation.com/
Tracking Newspaper Corrections and Retractions
Newspapers don't always get the story right. Since they're well aware of their imperfection, they all have a mechanism to present corrections. Regret the Error is a nicely done blog that collects articles and studies about newspaper "corrections, retractions, clarifications, and trends regarding accuracy and honesty in the North American media." The site's subtitle is Mistakes Happen and the Regret the Error gleefully reports its own faux pas. A valuable list of links leads to the corrections sections of many major American papers. Reading this blog will help the dwindling band of newspaper readers find out what really happened.http://www.regrettheerror.com/
Index of Newspapers around the Globe
This comprehensive list of links to online newspapers around the world is a no-frills site with easy navigation. The purveyor of the site, journalist Hans Henrik Lichtenberg, provides a virtual gateway to most major national and daily newspapers. Begin by selecting your language preference from among English and three Scandinavian languages with more promised for 2005. Next, select a country from the main index and wait mere seconds for the page to generate a list of newspapers. While some of these online editions require user subscriptions, having worldwide media resources just a few clicks away is a boon for journalists, researchers, and anyone who wants to know all sides to the story.http://newspaperindex.com/
SURFING SCIENCE
A collaborative effort of dozens of distinguished biologists, the Tree of Life (ToL) Web Project has the noble goal of describing the interrelationships of all plant and animal life on the planet. Organized taxonomically, the clades and species occupy individual pages, each of which is loaded with information and features, such as illustrations, links, and special diagrams to help explain the phylogenetic context of the clade. The pages are peer-reviewed to guarantee the quality of the information, yet the approach is never stuffy or overly academic. If working your way through the 3,000-plus pages seems too much like hard work, try the special sections such as Popular Pages or the Random Page feature. Note that the ToL is a work in progress - indeed, it may not be possible to ever complete it - so much remains yet to be covered. Take your time to peruse the explanatory pages. Whether your interests are in evolution or biodiversity, or you merely want to know more about the organisms that live or have died out on Earth, this is definitely a site you'll bookmark and come back to again and again.http://tolweb.org/tree/phylogeny.html
The History and Development of Stop-Motion Photography
We seldom think of a movie as a series of still images, but that's what it is. Even computer-generated video can be thought of as a series of screenshots. Capturing and displaying a series of photographs to create the illusion of movement was a huge challenge in the 1870s and 1880s, when ingenious pioneers of the cinema experimented at length with equipment and techniques to advance the art of stop-motion photography. Chronophotographical Projections follows the development of that scientific art, and shows how it foreshadowed changes in concepts of time and motion. The site uses essays, photos, and photo sequences to isolate elements of early cinema. We aren't sure why Eadweard Muybridge preferred his models naked, given the prudishness of the times. Perhaps nudity lent credence to the concept of artistic endeavor. Muybridge likely generated more excitement than A.M. Worthington, who spent years photographing balls hitting pans of water and milk. Science teachers may find the Worthington work instructive; most visitors, though, are more likely to focus on the nudes. Ah, enlightenment!http://web.inter.nl.net/users/anima/index.htm
Whenever the subject of women in medicine came up in the 20th century, most people would think only of Florence Nightingale, Marie Curie, and "Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman". Today in North America, medical movers and shakers seem almost as likely to be women as men. Changing the Face of Medicine, a US National Library of Medicine (NLM) site, celebrates the lives and careers of women physicians. The Featured Physicians section lets you search for notable doctors, but you'll most likely start by clicking on a photo portrait to browse the accomplishments of one extraordinary woman after another. If some of the biographies seem dry, reality asserts itself in Question and Answer, which provides answers to three questions that would-be doctors often wonder about: What was my biggest obstacle? How do I make a difference? Who was my mentor? For many, the obstacle remains sexism. Many women in medicine still fight that battle. This site should inspire women to go into medicine or, if already in medical school, to gut it out. There are other good reasons to visit: career resources; educational Flash apps; and information about the NLM exhibit in Bethesda, Md. This is a fine example of how the Web can help to personalize history.
http://www.nlm.nih.gov/changingthefaceofmedicine/
Safety and Analysis of Herbal Medicines
Over-the-counter herbal remedies are popular nationwide. They're especially popular among the Hispanic population along the Texas-Mexico border. These remedies are bound by few government standards and regulations and thus vary widely in quality and effect. The Herbal Safety project at UTEP has gathered and, more importantly, made accessible a large and growing body of information about herbal remedies. Much of the information is in PDF format. The project offers numerous fact sheets, monographs, and other publications. In most cases, the information is not highly technical, but is set down in readily understandable English. Spanish versions of many documents are available; the goal is a totally bilingual site.http://www.herbalsafety.utep.edu/
Awesome Amateur Astronomy Photos
The photography at AstroMeeting is literally out of this world. These stellar photos are shot by amateur astrophotographer Stefan Seip. Divided among categories of heavenly bodies, these photos express the awe we experience when we can appreciate the ethereal beauty of the night sky. If something particularly twinkles in your eye, you can purchase a high-quality print for as little as $2. In addition to his amazing photography, Seip provides links to articles and other images available via the ol' World Wide Web. He also details the equipment he uses to shoot his cosmic images. If you're not interested in taking your own astral photos, a quick stop here will make you grateful that people like Seip take up this time-consuming and expensive hobby.http://www.photomeeting.de/astromeeting/_index.htm
SOFTWARE
This week, the Mozilla Foundation released the iconic version 1.0 of the Thunderbird e-mail client. The cross-platform software (Windows, Mac, Linux) has been in development for some time and is already used by many people as their primary e-mail client. Thunderbird's main claim to fame is the robust set of anti-virus and anti-spam features, but the program also has a built-in RSS newsfeed reader, advanced search and mail-organizing features, and the ability to automatically import your existing data from Outlook, Eudora, Netscape, and Palm PDAs. As the press release states, Thunderbird is the perfect companion to the Mozilla Firefox browser, which incidentally has been downloaded over 10 million times since it hit the magic 1.0 version number last month.Thunderbird: http://www.mozilla.org/thunderbird/
Press release: http://www.mozilla.org/press/mozilla-2004-12-7.html
When Apple designed the iPod, the company failed to release any utilities that would let you change the graphics and fonts that appear on the gadget's screen. Sure enough, it was only a matter of time before hackers managed to disassemble the iPod's software and figured out how to put Hello Kitty icons on the little screen. The hack involves an application called IpodWizard, which, oddly enough, runs on Windows. Endgadget tells how to alter the graphics on your own iPod. Read the comments for further instructions on how to do it without restoring your iPod to factory defaults. The site also links to pictures from people who applied the hack in various creative ways. Some people who were not careful apparently did mess up their iPod trying to do this, but probably not terminally.
IpodWizard: http://media.weblogsinc.com/common/videos/pt/ipodwizard.zip
Endgadget: http://www.engadget.com/entry/1234000610023097/
Guide to Designing Apple's Dashboard Widgets, and a Contest
One of the features of the next version of Mac OS X, due in the spring, is something called Dashboard. It's basically a technology framework with which programmers can create simple little widgets for the desktop - things like clocks, stock quote displays, silly games, and so on. It is based on HTML, CSS, and Javascript, which makes it easy for just about anybody who already knows Web design to create these widgets. Apple would like to jumpstart the Dashboard widget pool and accordingly the company has published a detailed guide to creating them. Apple is also running a widget contest, with the winner getting - you guessed it - an iPod. Do note that in order to play around with the Dashboard system you have to be part of the Apple Developer Connection program.http://developer.apple.com/macosx/tiger/dashboard.html