Thursday, February 26, 2004

Useful site for military information

(excerpted from Resource Shelf...)

Military Studies

Source: National Defense University (NDU)

Military Education & Research Library Network (MERLN)

MERLN, portal for the international military education library community, is a multilayered resource that is home to a wealth of unique digitized materials and a gateway to other libraries and research centers. Almost everything here is freely accessible to anyone, with the exception of certain proprietary databases that are restricted by license to participating institutions.

Wednesday, February 25, 2004

AN ABRUPT CLIMATE CHANGE SCENARIO AND ITS IMPLICATIONS FOR UNITED STATES NATIONAL SECURITY.

(excerpted from FY2004 EADSURLS No. 43)

Peter Schwartz and Doug Randall.

[United States Department of Defense. Office of Net Assessment]. October 2003, Web-posted February 2004.



Sunday’s edition of London’s Observer raised a furor with an article about this report, commissioned by the Pentagon last year and written by two futurologists. Subsequent media stories have described the report as a classified document that projects that Britain will soon have a Siberian-type climate, among other scenarios. The futurologists and Pentagon officials stress the report's scary-sounding projections are highly improbable and extremely unlikely. Rather, they stress, the report is typical of many “worst-case” studies, which specifically present low-possibility, high-impact scenarios for defense planners.



[Note: This report was discussed a few weeks in a Fortune magazine article. See: http://www.fortune.com/fortune/technology/articles/0,15114,582584,00.html ]



Handy eyedropper tool for working with webpages

-- Inetia.com --This Slovenian freeware tool is very useful for matching colors when editing webpages - very easy to install and use.

Zapmeta

Zapmeta is a metasearch engine with some nice features, including "QuickView" which enables you to preview search results without leaving the hitlist - eliminates a great deal of tedious to and fro!

Foreign Terrorist Organizations

Congressional Research Service

Foreign Terrorist Organizations

PDF; 111 pages

Thursday, February 19, 2004

Wednesday, February 18, 2004

Knight Ridder Election Blog

This is an election blog edited by Knight Ridder journalists covering the presidential campaign:

Knight Ridder Election 2004

Thursday, February 12, 2004

National Governors Association

(from ResearchBuzz #270, Feb.12, 2004)

The National Governors Association has announced a

new site providing information on the governors of

the United States. The site contains information on

both current and historical governors and is

available at http://www.nga.org/governors/1,1169,C_SEARCH_GO%20V,00.html

Monday, February 9, 2004

NYTimes on Google and librarians

An interesting article from the New York Times on Google and librarians:

"When Google doesn't work, most people don't have a plan B... Librarians have lots of plan B's. We know when to go to a book, when to call someone, even when to go to Google."

NYT on google and librarians.doc

Middle East Research and Information Project

(excerpted from Scout Report Volume 10, Number 5

February 6, 2004)

Middle East Research and Information Project

http://www.merip.org



Established 32 years ago, the Middle East Research and Information Project (MERIP) is a non-profit, non-governmental organization based in Washington, DC. The Project has been quite successful over the past few decades due to its commitment to providing a broad range of perspectives on the Middle East not generally found in some of the mainstream media and press coverage. While the organization's primary publication, the Middle East Report, is not available for free on the site (although some of its editorial pieces are), visitors will want to take a close look at the Middle East Report Online, which is available here. Recent features within the online report deal with the future of Middle East studies in American universities, ethnic unrest in Iraq, and the long-standing dispute over Western Sahara. For visitors interested in a particular subject, there is a subject index of articles, and a feature that allows interested parties to sign up to receive the online reports via email.

African-American History Month: Multimedia

(excerpt from EADSURLs, 38, 2004)African-American History Month: Multimedia

This is a nice site for facts and statistics about African American history. Under the “Radio” section heading, for example, there are links to text scripts and 60-second radio spots that are mini-biographies of some of the most inspiring African-Americans. There is one biography for each day in February. On February 12, the Census Bureau will make available on this site a video on the impact of the Brown v. Board of Education, 50 years after that historic Supreme Court decision.

Portal to European Union Law

(excerpted from the Feb.6 Scout Report )

EUR-Lex: The Portal to European Union Law [pdf]

http://europa.eu.int/eur-lex/en/index.html



"Given the enormous complexity of bringing together 12 of continental Europe's countries to form the European Union, it is not surprising that there is a vast body of legal material related to this process. As this is the case, the EUR-Lex website is in fact the "single entry point to the complete collections of EU legal texts in all the official languages." The homepage for the site contains several helpful thematic collections of documents (in a variety of file formats for convenience), such as case-law, parliamentary questions, treaties, and several other categories. Of course, the novice user will want to take a look through the About EU Law section which offers a broad outline of the legal process, a glossary, and an alphabetized section that will answer many questions. To say this site will be of interest to legal scholars and students of the EU legal process would be a vast understatement."