NetWorld! Tour: Part II To Part I
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CHAPTER FIVE: WIRED KNOWLEDGE

The Visible Human Project, which put online a digitized view of the body of Joseph Paul Jernigan, a 39-year-old Texas murderer killed by lethal injection. NetWorld! tells what he was like both as a man and a cadaver… Scientists cut him into four blocks, froze him in a blue gel, ground him down millimeter by millimeter, digitally photographed the 1,878 cross sections that emerged, scanned the sections into a computer, put them on magnetic tape, and sent them out into cyberspace. Jernigan, a body builder, was a near-ideal subject. Surgery had deprived him of a testicle and his appendix; otherwise he was virtually pristine. A digital woman, a 59-year-old heart attack victim, is now on Net as well. As reported recently by the Chicago Tribune, researchers expect to be able soon to "manipulate the anatomical data so that the woman's heart appears to beat, her kidneys to filter liquid, and her mouth to chew. 'Within five years, the Visible Man and Visible Woman will appear to walk around and simulate most aspects of life,' predicted Victor Spitzer, an associate professor of radiology at the University of Colorado where the cadavers were processed"…

Jernigan's beneficiaries… Helped will be medical education and research in areas ranging from cancer drugs to treatment of athletic injuries. Martha Pelster, bound for medical school, told me how medical students could benefit in the most direct way since Jernigan could be taken apart and put together again, endlessly. "You can see what happened before your lab partner went in there and messed up your cadaver. This cross-sectional anatomy is going to be the be-all and end-all." What's more, scientists can digitally simulate diseases and help determine the efficacy of possible cures… The Project has already led to an Interactive Knee Program and a 3D Virtual Colonoscopy… An affordable CD-ROM. It doesn't include the details many professionals would require, but could be of use to students and teachers… Another product, the Dissectable Human. You can click on a picture of a body part, such as a shoulder or hand, and see what's underneath…

Some of the Visible Human project's sponsors and participants… The project came from the National Library of Medicine, part of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. Michael Ackerman, the biomedical engineer who guided the project along at NIH, is at ackerman@hpcc.gov… Glaxo, the giant drug company took an interest in Ackerman's project. A Glaxo contractor once feared it might cost as much as $100 million to show the body by way of artistic recreations and virtual reality. Thanks to the project, the actual costs were a fraction of that… Some computing horsepower for the image processing came from the Scientific Computing Division at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the California Institute of Technology, mentioned in the "Wired Knowledge Chapter."

Other colleges and universities on the Net, via Yahoo… Harvard, Yale, Oxford, Cambridge, and the Sorbonne (if you are into Names)…

Stephan Harnad's papers on electronic publishing.

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Park View Educational Centre, in Bridgewater, Nova Scotia, where Net connections have benefited at-risk students, even reform-school alumni. They care more about their spelling and grammar and enjoy writing more when they have an audience by way of e-mail. Jeff Doran, the teacher in this chapter, is at JEFFD@pvec.bridgewater.ns.ca. Lorri Neilsen, the professor from Mount Saint Vincent University who organized the Learning Connections Project involved here, is at Lorri.Neilsen@MSVU.Ca…

The Net-aware Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology. At least 30 students--the listings aren't complete--have their own Web pages…

Alaska's North Slope Borough School District, the northernmost district in the United States. Take a look at the student essays about parents and ancestors. Sample from Mrs. Holmquist's third grade class: "My Aaka and Aapa are known to be a Captain's wife and Whaling Captain. Aapa was born on Tasiqpak Lake and when he was growing up he traveled around the North Slope. He went hunting for food and caribou"…

The Whole Frog Project, which lets students see fresh frog slices without killing off a frog. Suitably equipped viewers can even watch a Rotating, Transparent Frog Movie. People for the Ethical Treat of Animals ought to appreciate this site…

Homer's Odyssey and other classics from Project Bartleby at Columbia University…

American Civil War Resources on the Internet…

MendelWeb, built around the seminal work of Gregor Mendel, the 19th-century geneticist. The site brings together "elementary biology, discrete mathematics, and the history of science." For an overview of the project, click here. This isn't an electronic textbook. Rather it's a collection of resources for students and teachers to use. Hooray for the work of Roger B. Blumberg, creator and developer of MendelWeb…

National Aeronautics and Space Administration has taken a commendable interest in using the Net as an educational resource...

Children's Literature Web Guide. Among the contents are Lesson Plans from AskERIC, Recommended Books and Bestsellers, The Real Thing: Online Children's Stories, resources for parents, and teachers, and Movies and Television based on Children's Books. The site even includes Resources for Writers and Illustrators. A gem from David Brown (e-mail dkbrown@acs.ucalgary.ca) at the University of Calgary…

EdWeb, a first-class guide to education on the Net. Its creator is Andy Carvin (e-mail acarvin@k12.cnidr.org), an education and technology specialist with the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Be sure to check out The EdWeb Home Room. Andy Carvin also runs the World Wide Web in Education (WWWEDU), an excellent list for people seriously interested in educational uses of the Web. Subscribe by e-mailing listproc@kudzu.cnidr.org. Don't use a subject line. Write subscribe wwwedu Your Name. No period at the end. Use your actual name. Please note that the address of the list may change, so check out the WWWEDU page for the latest…

Web66: A K12 World Wide Web Project, including the International School Web Registry. Find out how your school can get on the Web!… HotList of K-12 Internet School Sites…

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EdNet. A high-volume list for teachers and others interested in the educational possibilities of the Internet. E-mail listproc@nic.umass.edu, and in the body write: subscribe ednet Your Name… EdNet Guide to Usenet Newsgroups…

Some other school-related resources, via Yahoo… Also check out the educational links at JumpCity… Education indices, via Yahoo… K-12 indices, via Yahoo… Scholarly electronic conferences… The Center for Networked Information Discovery and Retrieval, CNIDR, which, with the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, cosponsors EdWeb… The Consortium for School Networking, CoSN, one of the most Net-savvy groups in education… Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, ASCD… U.S. Department of Education…

Libraries, via Yahoo… Library of Congress links… Main Library of Congress Web area… Z39.50 Gateway, which simplifies "card" catalogue searches at the Library of Congress and some other libraries. Don't let the name scare you. Just follow the directions… Z39.50 search form… Libweb: Library Information Servers via the Web… Sailor library project for the state of Maryland…

Joseph Peightel (e-mail jpeigh1@umbc9.umbc.edu), the Bell Atlantic cable splicer mentioned on page 178, does far more than simply dial up electronic books. Nowadays he's even got his own Web area, a comfy virtual home with family snapshots and links based on his many interests. I love the motto that shows up at the bottom of messages from his account at the University of Maryland at Baltimore: "If you can't teach an old dog new tricks, well, just teach him some old tricks." It comes from Mark, his five-year-old. Meanwhile, Anne Peightel, 10, still benefits from Sailor, the Internet service that the state library system offers. She reads online books and has used the Yahoo search index to ferret out information on topics ranging from the Metric System to the U.S. Constitution. Joe Peightel says: "Anne's school has computer facilities but, alas, the school librarian seems painfully unaware of the Internet's possibilities. Oddly enough, the local branch of the Baltimore public library also does not have any public use terminals that can connect to the Sailor system." Those, of course, are some of the very issues that my Oracle Corporation's plans for a $400-$500, Net-ready machine, though I suspect it still won't be the TeleReader I envision--with the option of both a keyboard and a pen-style interface. Presumably, too, it'll lack the abilty to pull its weight offline as well as online. But, hey, TeleRead fans, we're getting there!

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CHAPTER SIX: GOVERNMENTS AND THE NET

Phil Zimmermann, PGP encryption software, and some related topics… Washington, which accused Zimmermann of illegally exporting encryption technology via computer nets, left him dangling. No prosecution. No abandonment of the case. And meanwhile the legal bills kept mounting. Then, on January 11, 1996, the prosecutors finally said they had dropped the case they had based on a 1991 Usenet posting of PGP. "The investigation," they wrote Zimmermann's attorney, Philip L. Dubois, "is closed." Finally! Click here for a victory statement from Phil Zimmermann to a cypherpunks list… The Persecution of Phil Zimmermann, American, written by Jim Warren. The government at one point wanted Warren to testify in the Zimmermann case, but changed its mind when prosecutors determined that his facts would be so harmful to their side… The Official PGP User's Guide and PGP Source Code and Internals by Zimmermann… Simpson Garfinkel's PGP: Pretty Good Privacy book… Where to get PGP… ViaCrypt, which offers a commercial version of PGP… RSA Data Security… SLED PGP services… Wired's report on Crypto Rebels… The Crypto Anarchistic Manifesto by Timothy May…

Anglican Father Bill Morton in the Canadian province of New Brunswick. Father Bill is the encryption-hip priest, members of whose virtual flock use PGP to safeguard their confessions. He's at wjmorton@nbnet.nb.ca. "One caveat: I don't sign keys--I have not posted my key to a key server. If people contact me I will forward my key to them." Click here to reach Father Bill's PGP Page.

Orwell's Revenge: The 1984 Palimpsest by Peter Huber.

Law-enforcement and intelligence agencies… The FBI Web site, including pages on the Ten Most Wanted Fugitives, the UNABOMer, Oklahoma City ("$2,000,000 Reward" for information leading to the conviction of the villains), the Arizona train wreck, computer crime, and counterintelligence and counterterrorism activities. That's the good news, the fact that the FBI is using the Net to help catch public menaces. The bad news is that the FBI is one of the main villains behind such measures as the Clipper chip, the scheme to make Americans more snoopable by promoting crippled encryption. The original Clipper ideas didn't fly, but the feds are coming up with variants of it, and meanwhile, via the "Digital Telephony" law, Washington is spending $500 million of your tax money to make phones more easy to tap. You can bet that the most dangerous criminals will circumvent the measures anyway by using full-strength encryption that's already available worldwide. The Electronic Privacy Information Center offers a good overview of privacy threats from the FBI and other agencies. … The CIA, which provides a World Factbook, a handy collection of basic facts on countries… The Intelligence Community, 13 U.S. agencies, including, of course, the top-secret National Security Agency (aka "No Such Agency"). You might check out the virtual version of NSA's National Cryptologic Museum, which includes an illustrated KGB exhibit...

The Alicia Patterson Foundation, whose director, Margaret Engel (e-mail apfengel@charm.net), was snooped on. A freelance writer applying for a grant from the foundation had done his job too well and had shown that the IRS was too soft on some big multinationals. Trying to find the source, the feds didn't just track his calls--they also monitored numbers of the calls that Peggy Engel made, including those to me.

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Net-oriented civil liberties groups… The Electronic Frontier Foundation… EFF's links to other organizations… Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility… CPSR's Cyber-Rights Campaign… Voters Telecommunications Watch… Center for Democracy and Technology… Electronic Privacy Information Center.

CRAK Software. Forgotten your password in some popular programs? CRAK offers ways to defeat the encryption. At the same time, isn't it disturbing that the cryptography is so weak? That's why ordinary people, not just bureaucrats, need industrial-strength encryption such as the kind offered by PGP.

Areas that Jim Exon might not enjoy… I'll limit the list to two covered for certain by SurfWatch child-protection software: Playboy and Penthouse. Brandy's Babes and Bianca's Smut Shack are almost surely on the list, too.

One of Brock Meeks's columns on Marty Rimm, the perp of the Carnegie-Mellon pornography survey that inspired the Time story about kiddie porn on the Net. The piece appeared in the July 13th issue of CyberWire Dispatch…

"A Detailed Analysis of the Conceptual, Logical, and Methodological Flaws in the Article: 'Marketing Pornography on the Information Superhighway.'" That's a demolition of the Rimm study. The authors, Donna Hoffman and Thomas Novak, are two Vanderbilt professors. Also see their work The Cyberporn Debate, which includes a link to Rimm's paper, "Marketing Pornograph on the Information Highway...

Cyberspace and the American Dream: A Magna Carta for the Information Age. Policy document from the Progress and Freedom Foundation, one of Newt Gingrich's favorite think tanks… Lisa Kimball's Analysis of a PFF conference…

Taxpayer Assets Project (TAP), Public Citizen, Public Interest Research Groups, Citizen's Clearinghouse for Hazardous Waste, and other public interest groups hooked up through Essential Information.

TAP's Jamie Love (love@tap.org). NetWorld! readers will learn of his campaign to protect the public against information gouges. We taxpayers paid for data to be gathered. Why should the feds let wealthy contractors make a killing off it?

The Securities and Exchange Commission, which has been the scene of many an info-related fight. Check out this link for some dismaying news. Meanwhile here's a direct link to the SEC Web Site, which, for the moment, is a rich source of information on companies regulated by the SEC. Write SEC Chairman Arthur Levitt (via a relay from sec@town.hall.org) if you don't the information industry to kill off the valuable EDGAR Database.

Government information links from TAP to the executive, legislative and judiciary branches. Create a bookmark to this page, or save it to your disk. Links take you to such categories as Supreme Court decisions, the U.S. Code, and blue book reports from the General Accounting Office…

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Policy Net, including Cap Web, a handy guide to Congress and a true service to the Net, even if it includes links to lobbyists.

Corporate lobbying online… My candor award goes to Podesta Associates, a lobbying firm named after Tony Podesta, a Clinton fund-raiser and former member of the transition team. Drop by the About the firm page and you'll see that one of the services is "Creation and management of issue-based coalitions and grassroots organizations." Oh, my, I'd always thought Washington was such a spontaneous place… Of course some of the Net activity by D.C.-based groups is just plain old image polishing. Take the Glass Packaging Institute. "Now's your chance," the institute tells us, "to learn a little more about the history, industry and people behind one of America's best-loved packaging materials: Glass." Who'd have thunk?…

Representative Sonny Bono, yes, Cher's ex--a California Republican who's been described as one of the dimmest bulbs on the Hill. Notice? No public e-mail address in the government listing to which I've linked. Who needs to mess with miserly Netfolks? Sonny's too busy pleasing potential campaign contributors. He's Point Man for the Congressional Entertainment Task Force. Jealous of the Democrats for collecting so much campaign loot from the copyright interests, some Republicans are trying to outpander them. As reported by the Washington Post of October 25, Bono "wants Hollywood's leaders to 'write your own legislation and bring it to us'" on certain key issues such as, gasp, copyright protection. The Post says "Bono isn't promising passage, just serious consideration." Such a relief. What's next, a Congressional School and Internet Task Force for those whom Hollywood-written copyright law might harm? Don't count on it. The campaign money just isn't there. We need good copyright legislation (as author of more than half a dozen books I'm hardly anti-copyright), but not a "highest-bidder" ethos…

The Coin Operated Congress, an area were you can track down your congress member's sugar daddies by industry. If you want to figure out why your Congress member voted a certain way, this area can turbocharge your analysis. Perhaps I'm missing something, but I couldn't find a way to track down individual donors for folks other than Newt Gingrich (actually the gifts are for the Gingrich-controlled GOPAC and benefit other politicians as well). I suspect that such a wrinkle will be along eventually. It would be great, too, to be able to key in the names of fat cats and see where they sprinkled their cash. And I'd like to see more current information; the main culprit here is Washington, which doesn't release the good stuff fast enough. Meanwhile, however, the Coin Operated Congress is a great start. A hearty thanks to Mother Jones Magazine for offering this public service. Thanks, as well, to the Center for Responsive Politics for gathering the data that Mother Jones presented superbly in graphical form; I myself benefited from CRP's help in writing my government chapter. For people who read the previous item, yes, I did see if Sonny Bono had begun raking in Hollywood cash in large quantities, and maybe he has, but it hasn't shown up yet in the Mother Jones area. Give it time. We'll be watching you, Sonny…

Vote Smart Web, perhaps the best single source of political information by way of the Net. Directly or indirectly you can follow links to politicians' voting records and lists of their campaign donations, and you can visit their Web sites…

Senate and House Web areas… Thomas: Legislative Information on the Internet. Yes, you can use it to read The Congressional Record and track bills, but the interface is much harder than it should be. Kudos to Newt Gingrich for starting and promoting Thomas. But he has a long way to go before he truly keeps his promise to bridge the information gap between the public and the D.C. elite. Tell us, Newt, when are you going to get committee transcripts and other goodies online for free for nonlobbyists?…

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Executive branch agencies and departments, via the Library of Congress listings…

The electronic White House, which functions partly as a campaign site in disguise. Click here to get to the White House Family Life page that includes meows from Socks the Cyber Cat…

Official Presidential campaign sites for Lamar Alexander, Pat Buchanan, Bob Dole, Steve Forbes, Phil Gramm, Alan Keyes, Richard Lugar, Arlen Specter, the Democratic National Committee, and the Republican National Committee.Vote Smart Web links to both official and unofficial sites for candidates. Just for fun, also check out the political parodies listed by Yahoo. The takeoff on Bob Dole ("often mixed up with the Dole fruit company") includes Links to Fruits and Vegetables.

A Supreme Court brief filed on the Net--augmenting a paper version. It's a friend-of-the-court brief in a securities case. Thanks to the links, judges can more easily follow citations than they could ordinary. The pioneer here was law Prof. Joseph A. Grundfest of Stanford University. Let's see more of this. Not only is the documentable easier to navigate in this format, everyone on the Web can get it.

My TeleRead plan, which would actually increase the amount of money devoted to books and other copyrighted works. My TeleRead chapter appears in Scholarly Publishing: The Electronic Frontier, from The MIT. Press.

U.S. Department of Commerce, the agency of Bruce Lehman, the intellectual property czar of Clinton Administration. A little issue has come up recently, courtesy the Republicans--should Commerce be abolished? Not to worry about Lehman. He's already been fighting for an intellectual property agency to inflict Lehmanesque copyright law on us…Nothing personal. I myself hope that Commerce makes it. It provides many useful services, and a reorganization might just end up costing the taxpayers more in the long run. One useful service is U.S. Census data. Want to find out the demographics of your town? Try the link I've just given.

The biography of Bruce Lehman, Public Enemy #1 of low-cost knowledge--the main perp behind the infamous White Paper, which, in effect, would diminish the role of public libraries in the information age… What if Clinton decided by "reform" the health care system by appointing, as chief "reformer," an insurance company lobbyist who'd fought aggressively for higher premiums? That's what we have here in the appointment of Lehman, a veteran string-puller for Hollywood and similar industries. To quote the official biography, "In more than nine years of private law practice, Mr. Lehman represented individuals, companies and trade associations in the area of intellectual property rights as it affects the motion picture, telecommunications, pharmaceutical, computer software and broadcasting industries." If Lehman had down more sensitivity to the needs of schools and libraries, his background would be irrelevant. But he acts as if he's still representing his former clients… Lehman is just part of the problem. Check out the composition of the National Information Infrastructure Advisory Council. Just one librarian and one K-12 educator ended up on the 37-member NIIAC. Could it just be that the Democrats worry less about school- and library- friendly policies in the copyright realm--and more about the goodwill of fatcat donors from Hollywood and other copyright-based industries? I myself am pro-copyright, but believe we need a good balance between the rights of copyright owners and the rest of society…

West Publishing and the Courts, the Pulitizer-caliber investigation that the Minneapolis Star Tribune did into West's favors for federal judges, including seven Supreme Court Justices. The beneficiaries helped select the federal judge who each year would receive a $15,000 justice award, and along the way, the contest judges themselves took trips to the Virgin Islands and other resort areas. The electronic version of the story on West includes the publisher's 6,000-word rebuttal. Stung by the series, West no longer administers the contest directly. And that's how it should have been in the first place--given the fact that judges' decisions in copyright and other areas could mean millions of dollars for West. Among lawyers, the company is known for its expensive databases of legal opinions. They're protected by a proprietary citation system, which U.S. court use, in effect making West a monopoly.

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CHAPTER SEVEN: THE ELECTRONIC MATCHMAKER

Lee Chen, comp-sci Ph.D. candidate at the University of Calgary, SMHG, author of the poem "Song of a Peripheral", and one of the nicest folks in the whole book. And, ladies, he's still looking. Click here to reach his Web area, which, at the time I was doing this page, featured Edgar Degas's "The Ballet Rehearsal." No mystery about Lee's aesthetic sensibility--check out his well-designed page. At some point this Tour may spotlight a woman, but for the moment I'll try to help an SMHG, given the laws of supply and demand. If you haven't figured out what an SHUG is, see page 313 of NetWorld! Lee's at lchen@cpsc.ucalgary.ca.

Dating services as listed by Yahoo… Match.Com… The Emily essay from the Seattle Times, by way of Prof. Brad Cox's provocative Electronic Frontier Project at George Mason University. "It's the year 2020, your daughter Emily is 9 years old, and she can't read or write. Is this your worst nightmare about our schools come true? Nope, Emily just doesn't need to read or write anymore." Readers of NetWorld! will understand what the Emily essay is doing here…

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