The Cutting Edge: COMPUTING / TECHNOLOGY / INNOVATION : Some Interesting Places to Visit While Touring the World Wide Web

One of the best things about this job is that I get paid to cruise around cyberspace. You probably don’t, but you probably enjoy it anyway, so this week I’m just going to suggest some really neat stuff to check out on-line.

On the World Wide Web, readers are often the best sources of what’s new and interesting. Not long ago, for instance, I got e-mail from Henrik Javen, from an outfit called Homes & Open Houses, urging me to check out https://openhouses.com. Self-promotion puts me off, but it turns out that this really is a pretty cool site, and it will give you some insight into the future of house-hunting. It lets you browse homes for sale by location and price. You get descriptions and often even photos, and you can e-mail or telephone the real estate agent of any house that interests you. Eventually, I assume, you’ll be able to take a virtual tour, but meanwhile this will have to do.

Another reader, Alan Liu, sent e-mail to draw my attention to his “Voice of the Shuttle: Web Page for Humanities Research” at https://humanitas.ucsb.edu, which he describes as “a metapage (with some 20+ subpages) that is a research-oriented alternative to the Yahoo-style metapage intended for the general audience.”

Liu, a professor of English at UC Santa Barbara, has created a wonderful resource here, and not just for scholars. Any thinking person can use Liu’s humanities page as a gateway to all sorts of interesting stuff on the Web. I found a Russian language dictionary this way, for example. There’s also stuff on the technology of writing, gender studies, medieval literature, literary theory, music, etc.

For some really interesting food for thought, visit the RAND site at https://www.rand.org. This terrific resource offers a searchable archive of RAND abstracts on a variety of subjects. I searched “immigration,” for example, and got back a long list of RAND studies to choose from. Abstracts are available on the spot, and you can order publications on-line. Under “hot topics,” I read about RAND’s fascinating study “Student Performance and the Changing American Family.” There’s lots of other neat stuff at this well-organized site, which is a model of its kind.

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For a look at how the Web can be used to get support for a cause, point your browser at https://www.mcs.net/ ~bkmurph/girvies.htm, where you’ll find a page devoted to former Illinois death row inmate Girvies L. Davis, who maintained his innocence of the murder that brought him the death penalty. This somber site apparently resulted in more than 1,200 e-mail messages to the governor, and although Davis was executed, the site remains active as a kind of memorial. You can even hear the dead man make his own case via an audio file.

The musically minded will want to check out Johan Alkerstedt’s Beethoven site at https://www.ida.his.se/ida/ ~a94johal/beet.chtml, which offers a wealth of information about the great composer, though no sound that I could find. Visitors to https://www.seas.upenn.edu/ ~jimmosk/TOC.html will get access to lots of information about relatively unknown composers, including access to a page listing them complete with .wav files you can download and listen to (the files are sizable, though, so be patient).

If you’re longing for some way to quantify human personality, you can take the Meyers-Briggs Personality Test at https://sunsite.unc.edu/jembin/mb.pl. You’ll be asked a series of 70 dual-choice questions, and then the computer will calculate your personality type based on your answers. I’m ENTJ, evidently.

For those who need help more than assessment, there are a number of “agony aunt” types (as the British call advice columnists) on the Net, but few are as funny as the “Ask Joe” feature at https://fishwrap.mit.edu/News/AskJoe.html. Ask Joe “is written and inflicted on the Web three times a week by Joe Barco, a senior in chemistry at MIT.” One woman wrote in to ask Joe for help in deciding how, in general, one decides whether to cut off a suitor or continue dating. Joe suggested a series of useful benchmarks in this department.

“Restraining orders against him: punt. Magic player: punt. Inconsistent bathing habits: punt. Major hobby is netrek, doom, descent, or irc: punt. Tendency to act stupid when drunk (and frequently so): punt. Most everything else: continue.”

Despite Joe’s best efforts, the war between the sexes continues on the Internet, abetted by the proliferation of personal home pages. A source of great to-do lately on the Web is Babes on the Web, at https://www.tyrell.net/~robtoups/BABE.html. This site rates various women on the Internet based mainly on the pictures on their home pages, and offers links to those pages (the founder of Babes on the Web says it’s a satire, and even offers a link to the National Organization for Women home page).

Not to be outdone, someone else has started Babes of the Web II, which rates men based on their home pages; Babes II is at https://www.acofi.edu/~autopurr/hunk.html. Seekers of some latter-day Cary Grant may come away disappointed. Of one Swedish babe, we learn that “this computer nerd cutie has a thing for pi and women that love it.”

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Easily Digestible

One good way to learn about fun stuff on the World Wide Web is to subscribe to NetSurfer Digest, a weekly newsletter of what’s new and interesting on the Web. The digest is free, but the catch is that they also send you a NetSurfer Marketplace, which consists of paid advertising. You can ignore the latter, of course, and NetSurfer Digest is worth the inconvenience of the commercial edition.

To subscribe, send e-mail to nsdigest-request@netsurf.com. For the plain text version, the body of the message should say “subscribe nsdigest-text.” For a version that will work with your Web browser, send the command “subscribe nsdigest-html.”