Food for Thought - October 2000
Webgrammar Stew
Keystroke Tips
BuzzWhack
Origin of -30-
Zooba
Did You Know
Recommendations
WINDOWS KEYSTROKES:
Use Alt+Tab to move between open programs. A box pops up showing all open programs, and by tapping the Tab key (while holding down Alt), you can move back and forth between the programs of your choice.
BUZZWHACK is the creation of John Walston with help from some of his friends. A veteran editor, he was an assistant managing editor at USA Today and also served as Executive Editor of the Wilmington (DE) News Journal, where he founded both the Wilmington Writers' Workshop and The National Writers' Workshop (sponsored by the Poynter Institute).
The BuzzWhack Premise: Business and government have always felt the only way they could communicate was to use big words. And when there wasn't a word big enough to convey their thoughts, they just created new ones.
Then someone let the geeks out of their cubbyholes, put them in charge of business and Buzzword Mania has compounded like a 401K retirement plan.
BuzzWhack believes the only way to combat this word-generating absurdity is to laugh. BuzzWhack is not elitist. It understands that in some circles buzzwords are a great shorthand that can communicate volumes. But when those buzzwords slip outside their words, they tend to be used to belittle "ordinary" folks who don't know their meaning. And the fun begins...
http://www.buzzwhack.com/
Morse Code and the origin of -30-
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/tech/DailyNews/KWMorse980716.html
ZOOBA.COM Zooba.com delivers interesting and easy-to-read information on the 46 topics by sending one e-mail per week on the subject of your choice, including Great Minds; Food & Cuisine; Destinations; Thinkers & Thought; Military History; and World Music, and receive informative emails that contain relevant product recommendations. For example, an email about Vincent van Gogh might recommend a book about the artist, a video based on his life, and a reproduction of one of his works.
Each 300-word email is written in a concise, storytelling, and easy-to-read format. For further exploration, Zooba members can often subscribe to Series, four to six additional emails on the specific person/subject of interest. Zooba’s editorial team works with a network of more than 500 contributing writers and experts to develop its original content. You can choose either text or HTML e-mail.
http://www.zooba.com/
DID YOU KNOW that many common words may be written either as one solid word or as two separate words, depending on the meaning.
Maybe - May be
Maybe is an adverb. (Maybe we should leave.)
May be is a verb. (The team may be flying to Phoenix.)
Nobody - No body
There was nobody (no person) at the information desk.
No body (group) of teachers is better than yours.
NOTE: spell no body as two words when it's followed by "of."
On - Upon - Up on
His articles were based on (or upon) experimental data. (On and upon are interchangeable)
Please follow up on the inquiry. (Up is part of the verb phrase "follow up," while "on" is a preposition.)
With help from The Gregg Reference Manual, Seventh Edition, Sabin, ISBN 0-02-819933-2
RECOMMENDATIONS
ALA $25,000 RESEARCH GRANT The American Library Association (ALA) announces the initiation of the $25,000 ALA Research Grant to support problem-based research for the profession. Research proposals should address one of the following questions recommended by the ALA Committee on Research and Statistics.
- In what ways do the services of libraries have a positive impact on the lives of users?
- What is/should be the role of librarians in adding value to electronic information?
Proposals focusing on a specific type of library or a specific type of library service are encouraged, as long as they relate to one of these broad questions.
http://www.ala.org/alaorg/ors/research_grant.html
CARBOHYDRATE CHARTS, from Natural Living Resources.
http://www.ncenter.com/carbcharts/carbohydrate_chart.shtml
THE COMPLETE HISTORY
OF THE DISCOVERY OF CINEMATOGRAPHY Paul Burns, film historian, researcher, author and former journalist and photographer, offers An Illustrated Chronological History Of The Development Of Motion Pictures Covering 2,500 Years Leading To Cinematography In The 1800's. An exceptionally fine site.
http://www.precinemahistory.net/index.html
Columbia Journalism Review Resource Guide This excellent section includes: Covering Criminal Justice Vol II; Covering Money & Politics; Covering Criminal Justice; Covering Managed Care; Covering Mental Health Issues; Reporting on Tobacco (1996)
Covering AIDS; Media Ownership - Who Owns What; and Dollar Adjuster - a calculator that automatically adjusts dollars from different years for inflation.
http://www.cjr.org/resources/
DAILY GRAMMAR Daily e-mail lessons from an experienced, effective English teacher.
http://www.dailygrammar.com
EVERYRULE.COM This site develops, maintains, and provides simple access to the largest database of rules in the world. It claims to be the first in-depth, informative online Rules weekly. It provides serious coverage, found nowhere else, of constant changes, interpretations, and violations of Rules in sports and other activities. It also offers interviews and quizzes to keep you informed and on top of your game.
Games: board, card, casino, computer, kids, sports. Also wedding etiquette, writing rules, 11 Rules of Writing (Guide to grammar, punctuation, and writing style rules)... Collisions at Sea - International Regulations for Preventing ... Dice, drinking, tiddlywinks, whirly ball games ... even NFL - Instant Replay Rules.
http://www.everyrule.com/index.htm
INFIND, a search tool that calls out in parallel all the best search engines on the Internet, merges the results, removes redundancies, and clusters the results into neat understandable groupings.
Each of these search engines is automatically called in parallel, and retrieves the maximum number of results each engine will allow. Some engines will return 250 documents, some as few as 10. InFind searches each engine with the absolute maximum each engine will allow. This is far greater than the default that most users search with.
After retrieving this huge list results, InFind clusters the search results. Clustering is basically a process of putting similar items together. While other search engines sort their results by how well they match the query, InFind gets all the best results, and then groups the related items together. This makes the large results returned very understandable. You can quickly see which documents are relevant and which are irrelevant.
http://www.infind.com/
AN INTRODUCTION TO SOUND BASICS Ever wonder about street noise: for example, if there's a formula for the relationship between sound and distance? Noise Pollution Clearinghouse Online Library includes noise related articles from journals and books, and links to other noise resources. See Noise News for summaries of noise related articles appearing in major newspapers. Check out the Law Library, which includes proposed noise legislation and existing noise laws from federal, state, and municipal sources.
http://www.nonoise.org/library/sndbasic/sndbasic.htm (Sound Basics)
http://www.nonoise.org/library.htm (Library)
LEARN MORSE CODE
http://www.arrl.org/ead/learncw/
LISNEWS: LIBRARY AND INFORMATION SCIENCE NEWS This is an excellent place to check up on the news that relates to library and information science.
http://www.lisnews.com/
Morse Code Tidbits
http://www.ac6v.com/pagemorse.html
NATIONAL ALLIANCE FOR THE MENTALLY ILL Mission: to eradicate mental illness and improve the quality of life of those affected by these diseases. Goal: That the general public will understand that mental illnesses are no-fault, biologically based, treatable, and may eventually be curable.
http://www.nami.org/
THE
PEW INTERNET & AMERICAN LIFE PROJECT On February 29, 2000, The Pew Charitable Trusts announced that a $5.9 million grant has been made to create a research center that will explore the impact of the Internet on American society. Now fully functioning, The Pew Internet & American Life Project creates and funds original, academic-quality research that explores the impact of the Internet on children, families, communities, the work place, schools, health care and civic/political life.
The Project aims to be an authoritative source for timely information on the Internet's growth and societal impact, through research that is scrupulously impartial. The basic work-product of the center will be phone and online surveys; data-gathering efforts that will often involve classic shoe-leather reporting from government agencies, academics, and other experts; fly-on-the-wall observations of what people do when they are online; and other efforts that try to examine individual and group behavior. The Project intends to release 15-20 pieces of research a year, varying in size, scope, and ambition.
http://www.pewinternet.org/index.asp
THE PRE-RAPHAELITE BROTHERHOOD (or PRB) was a 19th century group of rebellious young artists who, disillusioned with the artistic climate of their day, sought to rediscover the purity of art by creating an entirely new artistic style that drew upon the middle ages, the bible, classical mythology and nature for inspiration, emulating the work of the great Italian artists before Raphael.
Although the PRB only lasted for five or so years, it served to inspire many other painters such as Lawrence Alma-Tadema and John William Waterhouse throughout the rest of the 19th century and into the early 20th century. This site aims to present an overview of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, from its inception in 1848, to its revival in the 1880s and its conclusion in the early 1920s.
http://www.pre-raphaelites.com/prcoll/
PRINTMAKERS To welcome Georgetown's students and faculty back to campus for the 2000-2001 academic year, and to greet our many friends who enjoy coming to see our exhibitions, the Special Collections Division of the Lauinger Library presents this exhibition entitled "Printmakers A to Z: Selections from Georgetown's Collections."
The page takes rather a long time to download, since there are modified thumbnail graphics of all the prints. Clicking on a print takes the viewer to a magnified version.
The exhibition's title was chosen to accommodate our intent to present a brief survey of some of the famous, and some of the not-so-famous prints in the University's fine print collections, without recourse to some unifying theme, letting the alphabet impose the only loose constraint needed.
http://www.library.georgetown.edu/dept/speccoll/prints/printsA2Z.htm
PROFESSOR CHARLES DARLING'S GRAMMAR SITE
http://webster.commnet.edu/grammar/index.htm
SUPREME COURT ANTITRUST DEBATES (SCADs), a collection of excerpts from 72 of the Court's antitrust opinions from 1895 through 1993: John Bowen, Ripon College.
http://www.ripon.edu/Faculty/bowenj/antitrust/intro.htm
Webgrammar's Food for Thought: Library of Congress, Washington DC
ISSN: 1530-034X
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