LLRXBuzz – April 23, 2001

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:

Martindale-Hubbell Launches ADR Directory

Physician Disciplinary Information Available Online

Law.com Relaunches Law.com/ny

Online Health Law Library

Information on Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolutions

AltaVista News

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Martindale-Hubbell Launches ADR Directory

Martindale-Hubbell has announced a directory of alternative dispute resolution professionals has been added to its Web site.

Available for free searching at http://www.adr.martindale.com, the site allows you to search by a variety of factors, including service role, expert area, languages spoken, and states. The search results provide a thumbnail of information, including the professional’s name, address and phone numbers, and expert areas. The name is hyperlinked.

Click the hyperlinked name and you’ll get a much-more detailed listing of information, including the year of bar admission for this professional, formal education, years of ADR experience, etc. Also featured are descriptions of ADR techniques most frequently used, and explanations of service roles often filled by ADR professionals.

Physician Disciplinary Information Available Online

The LA Times is Reporting <http://www.latimes.com/business/cutting/20010416/t000032214.html>
The Federation of State Medical Boards has launched the Federal Physician Data Center, which lists 117,000 state board charges against 35,000 doctors, is some cases dating back to the 1940s. (According to the story, the site is supposed to be at www.docinfo.org, but I wasn’t able to get it to come up on my browser.)

Even though the Federation of State Medical Boards is a not-for-profit group, the site charges $9.95 per doctor search to recover the cost of establishing the
database. Should no charges be filed against the doctor being searched, the charge still applies.

Law.com Relaunches Law.com/ny

Law.com has relaunched law.com/ny as a subscription-based service with daily news and case information updates.

Feature articles and news will be provided through a license agreement with the American Lawyer Media. Sources will include the New York Law Journal, The Deal and The Industry Standard. Subscribers will also receive daily Legal Alert e-mails with news and decision summaries of interest at New York state and Federal court levels.

Subscriptions for one-year are $170 per user, however free trial subscriptions are offered from the site. For more information, check out their press release at: http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/010417/2439.html.

Online Health Law Library

Pace University’s School of Law has an Online Health Law Library at
http://csmail.law.pace.edu/lawlib/Healthlaw/index.htm. Although the site is cited as being a source for health law attorneys and medical professionals, in addition to Pace Law students and faculty, it is actually a reference for anyone studying issues affecting health law on any level from local to Federal.

The site provides links to journals and newsletters that provide some form of full text through their sites. Current Awareness includes information from law firms, agencies and organizations, as well as medical news from media sources. Also on the page is a table listing resources for a variety of Research Topics including Antitrust, Bioethics, and Telemedicine in addition to the usual topics like Infectious Diseases and Emergency Treatment. Links to a diverse group of indexes and search engines are accessed from the Medical Research
table.

Information on Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolutions

Why can’t we all just get along? Beats me. One place folks sometimes really tussle is the Internet. There are plenty of conflicts over domain names. Check out UDRPlaw at http://www.udrplaw.net/. This site seems small at first, but has depth in unexpected places.

The front page of the site has weekly news related to domain name disputes (be sure to check the archives of these, there’s a lot of materials there) a “case of the week” related to domain name disputes, and, on the left side of the page, a short list of links related to domain name dispute resolution.

There are also a few links to “deeper material” that are more hidden on the front page, which is a shame. Don’t forget to check out the links on the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy and how they’ve affect athletic organizations and alcohol and beverage organizations, and appeals of UDRP decisions.

AltaVista News

This and that from the world of AltaVista… about a month ago AltaVista launched an effort to eliminate spam from being submitted to their index. If you submit a page to AltaVista now <http://add-url.altavista.com/cgi-bin/newurl?> you’ll have to enter the letters and numbers that appear in a randomly-generated image. AltaVista wouldn’t tell me how many URL submissions they get, but they did tell me that before they started using this
“puzzle” filtering method, 98% of the URLs being added were spam.

AltaVista is doing some cool stuff on their home page – but in the UK, not here! Check out http://www.altavista.co.uk/. Enter the query cats. You’ll see that the search results have thumbnail pictures to their right. AltaVista is considering adding the thumbnail feature to the main AltaVista page, but they’re still thinking about it. Kristi Kaspar of AltaVista told me, “We have to be 100% confident that it wouldn’t effect the speed or weight of the page – both are important to our user base.”

Finally, if you’re still on AltaVista.co.uk, look at the top of the page. Click on the MySearch button at the top of the screen. This feature allows you to track
your most recent 25 searches on AltaVista, and store up to 25 of your favorite searches. You can also save individual search results (that is to say, pages listed within search results) to a query search folder. You can even e-mail the search results from the MySearch screen.

Now this is seriously cool. This is an excellent management tool for the serious researcher. Does AltaVista has imminent plans to offer this on AltaVista.com ? No, darn it. Kristi Kaspar again: “Our number one priority right now is enhancing the relevancy and focusing on the vertical delivery.” But,
in regards to MySearch: “..as we watch its popularity grow on our International sites, we may consider the option to add the feature.”

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