Tara Calishain is the co-author of Official Netscape Guide to Internet Research, 2nd Edition, and author or co-author of four other books. She is the owner of CopperSky Writing & Research.
In This Issue:
Guide to Presidential Pardons Now Online
New York Times: Coming to a Computer Near You
Economist.com to Release Travel Information
Google Groups Watch — New Functionality
LLRXBuzz Archives: April 3, 2000 – Present
LLRXBu zz Research Tip Archives
The Latest on Legal Research
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Guide to Presidential Pardons Now Online
JURIST has put up an extensive guide to Presidential pardons at http://jurist.law.pitt.edu/pardons.htm.
The site has news on the Clinton pardons (as you might expect) but also discussions on the constitutional basis of pardon power, the history and development of pardons, pardon procedure, court cases, etc.
A box near the top of the screen notes new information added to this site. Plenty here; if you’re not burned out on pardon news, this is worth a look.
New York Times: Coming to a Computer Near You
The New York Times Company has partnered with NewsStand Inc. to announce the spring delivery of a print facsimile of the newspaper over the Internet. The online edition will feature all of the ads, pictures and graphics of the printed edition.
Like the printed edition, it will be available as single issue or subscription. If you don’t want to go that route, though, you can still get the newspaper’s stories through the NY Times site or Yahoo (at least some of them. See Yahoo’s NY Times page at http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/ts/nyt/?u.) You can
read the New York Times story on this at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/20/business/20TIME.html. Free registration is required.
Economist.com to Release Travel Information
Cities Guide has announced that Economist.com will soon feature “insider” information for the business traveler. Correspondents in metropolitan cities have reported information not found in a travel guide, like tips on lodging, restaurants, and different things to see and do. There will be additional suggesting about how to spend limited time.
There are ten cities to select from on the page at http://www.economist.com/cities/ : three in the U.S., four in Europe and three in Asia. There are etiquette articles, articles on good places to eat, and articles on items of personal interest. It seemed a little light in places but this is still good reading.
Yahoo News
If you haven’t read Yahoo News lately, please take the time. And if I may, I’d like to direct you toward some of the cooler stuff:
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/ — The front page. Get your
news fix right here.
http://news.yahoo.com/h/mt/?u — Most e-mailed content. Find out what people have been passing around for the last six hours. Some interesting things here — lots of current events, of course, but also some miscellaneous
weirdness you might not otherwise find.
http://news.yahoo.com/h/cl/us/dailynews/?u — This is the most popular content from the last hour. Usually lots of current-event stuff.
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/fc/US/FrontPages — The front pages from a small amount of top newspapers around the US. There isn’t a lot here, but it’s good to glance at just to get a feel for what’s going on.
New News Spot
Those ‘Spot people are at it again, this time creating HeadlineSpot at http://www.headlinespot.com/. The site, like most ‘Spots, is a concise guide to sources all over the Web. There are category listings for top news, science news, health news, etc. There are also brief articles written to answer questions like “Can I get headlines by e-mail?” and “What happened on this
day?” Worth a look.
Google Groups Watch — New Functionality
I was completely amazed at the response to Google’s purchase of Deja — a lot of folks are very angry that the search interface was as limited as it was at launch. I’m going to keep an eye on the interface and report on changes/upgrades every ten days or so.
In the Google advanced search (at http://groups.google.com/advanced_group_search) you may now search by message ID number and subject. If you’re like me and advanced search interfaces make you cringe, here are the special syntaxes that you can
use in the basic interface:
Group == group: (example group:rec.arts.*)
Message Subject == insubject: (example insubject:discworld)
Author == author: (example author:fred)
Message ID # == msgid: (example msgid:8675309)
You can add these syntaxes to a regular Google Groups
search. For example, this will work:
group:comp* “all your base are belong to us”
You can also force stopword searches like you can in
the regular Web search:
group:comp* “all your base +are belong +to us”
You can also mix syntaxes (though I haven’t tried every
combination):
group:comp* insubject:”all your base”
(NOTE: If these don’t work for you, try going back to groups.google.com and starting over. I noticed that a couple of times my searches stopped working in the basic search interface after several searches. I don’t know if it was me or Google Groups.)
Builder-Speak
If you don’t know the difference between a pivot hinge and a pin punch, you might want to check out http://www.homeglossary.com/. This site claims over
10,000 definitions of construction and real estate terminology.
Unfortunately it doesn’t have a search engine — a real misfortune with so many definitions. Instead you’re able to browse the site by first letter of the alphabet. Once you’ve selected a letter lists are broken down further (H breaks down into HA, HAR, HE, HED, HI, etc.) Pages are very graphic-light so they load quickly; definitions vary from a few words to a few lines. There was some cross- definitions but I wish there had been more. It’s very nice that a back rake is “Measurement of the angle at the top cutting edge of a lathe tool bit from the horizontal axis of the tool,” but why not go ahead and link to the lathe definition while you’re at it?
There’s a lot of good material here. A little extra effort would make it great.