Where I work, checking these sites is increasingly common- a friend recently had a scare where a student posted a violent rant on his page, pictures of grenades included. Should schools rely on students to carry reports of potentially worrying situations, or do they take advantage of very public information and be warned of potential problems early?
There's also been cases where students have created (public) groups ranting about school issues that they might never bring up directly; knowing about it means a chance to address concerns before they fester.
And worst case, sure, I've seen students pulled aside and quietly reminded that whatever they post online is there for all to see. When you're young, you may not think about it much... up until the day that you're paying some private investigator megabucks to bury your history from potential employers.
Insofar as what gets posted doesn't affect them during the schoolday, not much would be done, but when it comes down to "I hate teacher X and I have a grenade", it's awfully nice to have warning.
Reminds me of Optimoz or Sensiva; both are mouse gesture programs that have been around for years. (Optimoz being a browser extension for firefox) Fun stuff, though not actually very new.
You left out a big problem with other peptides that demonstrate a broad spectrum of antimicrobial activity with decent selectivity:
Cost.
If you want to market it seriously, it better not run a few thousand dollars per treatment.
Uh. I beg your pardon? I have a windows machine at home. I can install software, change registry settings, and generally mess around, and it's fine.
I have a Linux machine at work (Fedora). And if I wanted to change the appearance of the mouse pointer or the time on the clock, I would need to walk down the hall and get the network admin to log in to my machine with the root password. Root- to adjust the time on the clock.
Which philosophy gives the greater appearance that computers are fragile? Linux treats so many everyday tasks as privileged that users are often allocated almost no powers by default (and please don't tell me that the color of my mouse pointer is an invitation to have my computer broken into. I'll ignore you).
With windows, I at least can experiment and mess it up if I want to, and reinstalling isn't a total nightmare. I'm not an MS fan, but credit where credit is due.
In all fairness, the backend of Firefox is based heavily on Mozilla- which, as I recall, began development circa 1998. So the codebase is a good deal older than you're estimating.
That said, I've been working with Mozilla browsers since ~M-18- and as quirky as that was, I've not been tempted to go back to IE in a long time....Just so I don't get dismissed as an apologist.
Don't laugh- there used to be an email hoax going around that told people they could fix a "major virus problem" by deleting files with certain names for their hard drive.
It turns out, of course, that those files were actually windows components...
...I suppose that this might explain the phishing email I found in my inbox yesterday, which tried to point me towards a "Paypal verification" page under "clueless.net"...
And here I just thought that phishers were getting lazy.
I can't help you on the cookies (except to point out that they can be easily deleted through the Firefox cookie manager), but I can point out that if you're worried about privacy, the open-source Googlebar project has provided a Google toolbar for Firefox for some time that's 100% open source and focuses on search, meaning that Google doesn't get a log of every URL you visit. It's linked to on the same page from which you can download Google's toolbar.
The main difference is that the Googlebar focuses much more heavily on easy access to major search capabilities, and lacks the spellcheck/autofill/autocomplete type functions of the official Google Inc. toolbar- though on the other hand, it has a much wider selection of searches by default.:)
If you're curious about a chemistry angle, I believe I've seen some ongoing work from other groups in the past- while it's not mentioned in the article, I seem to remember that the Kopelman group is one such group (also at UM, and possibly a collaborator). It's handy to know names if you're looking for papers with technical details... the article is pretty basic.
From what I've read previously in this vein, there's currently work being done to create similar systems that bind to a particular receptor specific to a given type of cancer cell, rather than this more general approach that attaches something that might get into normal cells as well (In other words, picking a narrower target). Not sure how far some of these are from clinical trials, though.
First, I admit, I like Google's scholar. It's fast, I can access it from anywhere, and it can come up with some pretty interesting stuff; major articles in my field searched for by topic come up pretty quickly.
However, it has some major drawbacks. The best advice holds true even here: consider the source, but not to the exclusion of all else. In this case, actually try a few things listed; the author is telling the truth. So what if he works for Gale Group? Google's Scholar left itself wide open this time- the simplest testing would have caught a few of these issues.
My personal gripes:
1. Searching by date range is every bit as bad as advertised, and you don't even have to be esoteric. Want something simple? Search full text from 1400-2005 for the word "a". 1,350,000 hits. Now search again from 1900-2005: 1,400,000 hits. And remember, every word counts now- those are real search results for that word. Not only do they claim that only a small fraction of articles in their database use a fundamental unit of the English language, but there are more of them when you shave 500 years off your search.
2. You can't search within results very effectively. And with the number of papers about proteins (my field), that's an unholy nightmare.
3. Searching by journal title? Not very reliable, and it doesn't deal well at all with abbreviations. Mind you, my field is big, and sometimes the article I want to find may be in a pretty obscure journal- it's not always so easy to figure out that a reference to J. Bav. Ck. Rec. Occ. Sci means "Journal of Bavarian cookie recipes and occasional science". And no, the complete name doesn't always work either.
Speaking in general terms, chemical composition isn't the only danger... For example, one of the things that makes asbestos so dangerous isn't that it's chemically deadly, but rather that the molecules take the form of long, thin fibers that can be inhaled into the lungs.
As another example, I've actually looked at the "before" and "after" pictures of cell membranes attacked by small molecules such as dendrimers, and it's rather ugly. Again, this has been seen so far for several different types of dendrimer materials- supposedly not toxic (they were being looked at for transporting pharmaceuticals in the body!), yet size and structure mean they can do some real damage.
Another problem with creating such a formula: I would expect that the success of a sitcom depends on the culture in which it airs. British humor seems to be a little more self-deprecating, while Americans are... not. Hence including how deluded the characters are, and how often they fail, could make great humor in one country, but be a flop in another.
...Oh, sure, we could get into the question of how popular television shows serve as a way to transmit cultural values and norms, but... still.
What flies in one market wouldn't necessarily hold well with a different audience. So besides being almost impossible to scientifically quantify the variables, the formula itself contains certain inherent assumptions about the people who will be watching the show.
I'm not sure how it would fly in a public school system, but I do know that for what I do, OpenOffice just doesn't suffice... among other things, I very frequently need to work with scientific papers and presentations, and the MS Office equation editor is vastly more usable than the OOorg 1.1 editor.
For another matter, load times are better- the strategy of bundling OO into a single mamoth application makes loading it almost physically painful on an older machine.
And then there's the matter of the presentation program. I mean, have you ever used the presentation maker in OO? Sad but true, Powerpoint does give more options and more flexibility, and I've found that it's often more trouble than it's worth to transfer presentations btwn OO and MS Powerpoint, since many things break and need to be reworked.
For a school, I'd think that the three big catches are slow speed (they tend to have obsolete hardware), powerpoint pains (annoying the teachers), and the fact that the native file format isn't read by Office at all, which could make bringing your work home that much more tedious until students catch on about saving it as another format. Especially since the format picker in OO lists EVERYTHING, and it's a hassle to go down the whole list every time.
I've used SciFinder too- several versions over the years, in fact... It's got a lot of issues that, sadly, have yet to be resolved.
In particular, I've often found that searching for a named chemical reaction by reactants and products (or only one) gives very different results than searching for the rxn name...
Likewise, the "subject" search can't find the same references for a molecule name as the "molecule" search can (...and that finds different results depending on the variant of the name or CAS identifier used....!!!), and for even MORE different results, just input the structure of the molecule you want. You need four separate approaches to find the same thing!!
Further, most schools only have the right to use a couple copies of the program at a time- my undergrad institution of >30k students and 30 chem faculty students had 5 licenses, and every semester, a major OChem assignment using SciFinder came due... the same week as several grant proposals!
On the OTHER hand, though... Google scholar can't yet refine by articles available online, it can't figure out which journals your institution has access to (and thus recommend the best way to get the article linked to), and can't search within results (the only refinement I've yet found is the "author:" keyword- not even searching by date or language!). It's got a lot of potential, and while I hope one day to see SciFinder either killed by something better or fixed so as to be unrecognizable, Google sadly has a long way to go to catch up. In particular, I imagine that making it really useful to all the people in each specific field would be a real challenge, since fields like chemistry have a pretty wide range of specialized needs.
Speaking of Google, the highlighting feature has already been available in both IE and Mozilla for some time, via the Google toolbar or the workalike Googlebar, respectively. Just type in your keywords, hit the "highlight all terms" button, and this highlighting comes up instantly. The toolbar takes up some space, but at least the feature is available as an extension.
Nah- they just got backlogged on the submission queue. Anyway, though, there are some nice notes tracing the mathematical development of quantum mechanics (from a chemistry standpoint) on MIT's OpenCourseWare site: http://ocw.mit.edu/5/5.61/f01/index.html (and don't link- finals are coming up, and this site is too useful to me to be slashdotted!!)
And now to nitpick: Actually, the correct expression for the heisenberg uncertainty principle is Delta(E)*Delta(t)>= h-bar/2, meaning that the product of the uncertainties ("delta") in energy and time cannot be less than the quantity planck's constant "h", divided by 4*pi (not 2*pi, as stated in previous post). That is, if you know one quantity with miniscule uncertainty (time), the other must have a huge uncertainty because the two quantities cannot both be known with a high level of precision (see the MIT site above for a looooooooong explanation). The product of the two must be at least some minimum value (hence the joke in above post, for non-physics people. Kind of kills it, though).
Definitely: for one thing, Google sets is still tripped up by the strangest things. Case in point: curious to know what you call someone with black hair, I typed in the other possibilites (blonde, redhead, brunette...) into Google sets- and got back "fetish", "underwear", "amateur", "movies", "babes".... need I go on? This is one thing whose accuracy could actually benefit from a "safe mode" filter!
Ah, but the Googlebar also adds a few other special searches, like Linux/BSD/Mac restricted searches, a site search button, and find-term in page buttons. Especially if you check the latest (and highly buggy) experimental version that we link to from our translations page. Feedback is always appreciated, or help fixing bugs.
-AndyB
Whoa, whoa, whoa. The Googlebar is making your system crash? As one of the developers behind it, I've kept an eye on the mailing list and user notes pages, as well as trying to test every release myself, and never had or heard of any problem of the sort. If you'd care to explain the problem as much as possible, we can try and fix it, or at least track down the real culprit. Yes, there are bugs, but...
Um, how about Mozilla with Google Toolbar? It's a multi-platform browser with tabbed browsing, the links (site navigation) toolbar, good privacy control, and hopefully no "Ooka ookas" (As it's spelled on United Virtualities' page). Works for me...
A friend of the family works for a fairly large company, and has mentioned in the past that he can get some very steep discounts on handhelds and such- ie, he was able to buy a palm m505 for $50 or so, sold to him at cost. If the census bureau buys that many handhelds, and considering the decrease in prices over time, why should there be any problem meeting the $100 price?
For mozilla news, I generally read Mozillazine, the major mozilla news site, as well as Mozillanews, a somewhat more community-driven site. For downloads, try XULPlanet, which has a good collection of themes and a good tutorial, and Mozdev (I usually follow projects like Optimoz- gestures- and Googlebar, a mozilla Google Toolbar. Most community development projects wind up here.) Mozillaquest is reserved for cheap laughs, though they have a few article templates to choose from....
I don't use the search bar to search- there are several search-related projects for mozilla on mozdev, such as easysearch, a general search-engine toolbar, and Googlebar (not made by google, but has much of the same functionality as the Google Toolbar for IE does). Both are toolbars that you can expand or collapse at will and work quite well for convenient searching, without sending any extra information out.
Although I would love to see an honors system that worked, I'm currently in college, and that makes me deeply cynical about the prospects for its success. I do well on assignments- on my own- but unfortunately this leads to an incessant stream of questions such as "can I copy your hw?", "I need 'help' writing a paper", and the ever-popular "Can I sit next to you on the test?" from my fellow students. The fact of the matter is that many of the students at high schools and colleges are, to say the least, lazy- even in the honors program at my high school (ranked in the top 200 public high schools in the country, last time I checked), people routinely tried to buy and sell papers (including the valedictorian, who was caught selling them). Rather than do work, many of these students cheat and hope that they're not caught, using either websites with freely available term papers, or simply cutting and pasting much of their work. So, even if it means running my papers through something along with everything else (which doesn't bother me, since my papers are original anyway and a quick perusal of copyright law ensures that they'll remain that way or else), I'd rather see the cheaters caught than trust in an honors system that encourages people to cheat and not be caught Come to think of it, the Washington Post ran an article last year which slashdot covered, about a professor at a college with such a system who ran a check and found several hundred plagiarized papers- it's become easier than ever for students to cheat, and they do. This detracts not only from my own education, in that cheaters can receive higher grades for a weekend of partying than I do for a week of work, but also from the overall atmosphere (as I attempt to discourage people from trying to copy my work).
Good design doesn't necessarily mean using only the newest browsers and proprietary technologies. Far from it, I have a friend who develops the page for a local college, and the page is a fairly clean, tight layout that quickly connects the user to the main areas of the site (the one problem is the menu, which was designed by a committee, but last I hear he was fighting to trim it to a reasonable size). All that, and it's not ugly. No scrolling, and the info is right there. The interesting thing in all of this, however, is that he claims that the page works at least decently even with "beta versions of lynx", as he puts it- in short, it was designed with other browsers in mind. (I've been trying to find a browser where the page doesn't work, but so far no success. Any ideas?). Cross-browser compatibility doesn't require multiple versions of the same page, or a stripped down ugly site- just a little thought.
Slashdot Mirror
Where I work, checking these sites is increasingly common- a friend recently had a scare where a student posted a violent rant on his page, pictures of grenades included. Should schools rely on students to carry reports of potentially worrying situations, or do they take advantage of very public information and be warned of potential problems early?
There's also been cases where students have created (public) groups ranting about school issues that they might never bring up directly; knowing about it means a chance to address concerns before they fester.
And worst case, sure, I've seen students pulled aside and quietly reminded that whatever they post online is there for all to see. When you're young, you may not think about it much... up until the day that you're paying some private investigator megabucks to bury your history from potential employers.
Insofar as what gets posted doesn't affect them during the schoolday, not much would be done, but when it comes down to "I hate teacher X and I have a grenade", it's awfully nice to have warning.
Reminds me of Optimoz or Sensiva; both are mouse gesture programs that have been around for years. (Optimoz being a browser extension for firefox) Fun stuff, though not actually very new.
You left out a big problem with other peptides that demonstrate a broad spectrum of antimicrobial activity with decent selectivity: Cost. If you want to market it seriously, it better not run a few thousand dollars per treatment.
Uh. I beg your pardon? I have a windows machine at home. I can install software, change registry settings, and generally mess around, and it's fine. I have a Linux machine at work (Fedora). And if I wanted to change the appearance of the mouse pointer or the time on the clock, I would need to walk down the hall and get the network admin to log in to my machine with the root password. Root- to adjust the time on the clock. Which philosophy gives the greater appearance that computers are fragile? Linux treats so many everyday tasks as privileged that users are often allocated almost no powers by default (and please don't tell me that the color of my mouse pointer is an invitation to have my computer broken into. I'll ignore you). With windows, I at least can experiment and mess it up if I want to, and reinstalling isn't a total nightmare. I'm not an MS fan, but credit where credit is due.
In all fairness, the backend of Firefox is based heavily on Mozilla- which, as I recall, began development circa 1998. So the codebase is a good deal older than you're estimating.
...Just so I don't get dismissed as an apologist.
That said, I've been working with Mozilla browsers since ~M-18- and as quirky as that was, I've not been tempted to go back to IE in a long time.
Don't laugh- there used to be an email hoax going around that told people they could fix a "major virus problem" by deleting files with certain names for their hard drive. It turns out, of course, that those files were actually windows components...
...I suppose that this might explain the phishing email I found in my inbox yesterday, which tried to point me towards a "Paypal verification" page under "clueless.net"... And here I just thought that phishers were getting lazy.
I can't help you on the cookies (except to point out that they can be easily deleted through the Firefox cookie manager), but I can point out that if you're worried about privacy, the open-source Googlebar project has provided a Google toolbar for Firefox for some time that's 100% open source and focuses on search, meaning that Google doesn't get a log of every URL you visit. It's linked to on the same page from which you can download Google's toolbar. The main difference is that the Googlebar focuses much more heavily on easy access to major search capabilities, and lacks the spellcheck/autofill/autocomplete type functions of the official Google Inc. toolbar- though on the other hand, it has a much wider selection of searches by default. :)
From what I've read previously in this vein, there's currently work being done to create similar systems that bind to a particular receptor specific to a given type of cancer cell, rather than this more general approach that attaches something that might get into normal cells as well (In other words, picking a narrower target). Not sure how far some of these are from clinical trials, though.
However, it has some major drawbacks. The best advice holds true even here: consider the source, but not to the exclusion of all else. In this case, actually try a few things listed; the author is telling the truth. So what if he works for Gale Group? Google's Scholar left itself wide open this time- the simplest testing would have caught a few of these issues.
My personal gripes:
1. Searching by date range is every bit as bad as advertised, and you don't even have to be esoteric. Want something simple? Search full text from 1400-2005 for the word "a". 1,350,000 hits. Now search again from 1900-2005: 1,400,000 hits. And remember, every word counts now- those are real search results for that word. Not only do they claim that only a small fraction of articles in their database use a fundamental unit of the English language, but there are more of them when you shave 500 years off your search.
2. You can't search within results very effectively. And with the number of papers about proteins (my field), that's an unholy nightmare.
3. Searching by journal title? Not very reliable, and it doesn't deal well at all with abbreviations. Mind you, my field is big, and sometimes the article I want to find may be in a pretty obscure journal- it's not always so easy to figure out that a reference to J. Bav. Ck. Rec. Occ. Sci means "Journal of Bavarian cookie recipes and occasional science". And no, the complete name doesn't always work either.
Speaking in general terms, chemical composition isn't the only danger... For example, one of the things that makes asbestos so dangerous isn't that it's chemically deadly, but rather that the molecules take the form of long, thin fibers that can be inhaled into the lungs. As another example, I've actually looked at the "before" and "after" pictures of cell membranes attacked by small molecules such as dendrimers, and it's rather ugly. Again, this has been seen so far for several different types of dendrimer materials- supposedly not toxic (they were being looked at for transporting pharmaceuticals in the body!), yet size and structure mean they can do some real damage.
What flies in one market wouldn't necessarily hold well with a different audience. So besides being almost impossible to scientifically quantify the variables, the formula itself contains certain inherent assumptions about the people who will be watching the show.
I'm not sure how it would fly in a public school system, but I do know that for what I do, OpenOffice just doesn't suffice... among other things, I very frequently need to work with scientific papers and presentations, and the MS Office equation editor is vastly more usable than the OOorg 1.1 editor.
For another matter, load times are better- the strategy of bundling OO into a single mamoth application makes loading it almost physically painful on an older machine.
And then there's the matter of the presentation program. I mean, have you ever used the presentation maker in OO? Sad but true, Powerpoint does give more options and more flexibility, and I've found that it's often more trouble than it's worth to transfer presentations btwn OO and MS Powerpoint, since many things break and need to be reworked.
For a school, I'd think that the three big catches are slow speed (they tend to have obsolete hardware), powerpoint pains (annoying the teachers), and the fact that the native file format isn't read by Office at all, which could make bringing your work home that much more tedious until students catch on about saving it as another format. Especially since the format picker in OO lists EVERYTHING, and it's a hassle to go down the whole list every time.
I've used SciFinder too- several versions over the years, in fact... It's got a lot of issues that, sadly, have yet to be resolved.
In particular, I've often found that searching for a named chemical reaction by reactants and products (or only one) gives very different results than searching for the rxn name...
Likewise, the "subject" search can't find the same references for a molecule name as the "molecule" search can (...and that finds different results depending on the variant of the name or CAS identifier used....!!!), and for even MORE different results, just input the structure of the molecule you want. You need four separate approaches to find the same thing!!
Further, most schools only have the right to use a couple copies of the program at a time- my undergrad institution of >30k students and 30 chem faculty students had 5 licenses, and every semester, a major OChem assignment using SciFinder came due... the same week as several grant proposals!
On the OTHER hand, though... Google scholar can't yet refine by articles available online, it can't figure out which journals your institution has access to (and thus recommend the best way to get the article linked to), and can't search within results (the only refinement I've yet found is the "author:" keyword- not even searching by date or language!). It's got a lot of potential, and while I hope one day to see SciFinder either killed by something better or fixed so as to be unrecognizable, Google sadly has a long way to go to catch up. In particular, I imagine that making it really useful to all the people in each specific field would be a real challenge, since fields like chemistry have a pretty wide range of specialized needs.
Speaking of Google, the highlighting feature has already been available in both IE and Mozilla for some time, via the Google toolbar or the workalike Googlebar, respectively. Just type in your keywords, hit the "highlight all terms" button, and this highlighting comes up instantly. The toolbar takes up some space, but at least the feature is available as an extension.
And now to nitpick: Actually, the correct expression for the heisenberg uncertainty principle is Delta(E)*Delta(t)>= h-bar/2, meaning that the product of the uncertainties ("delta") in energy and time cannot be less than the quantity planck's constant "h", divided by 4*pi (not 2*pi, as stated in previous post). That is, if you know one quantity with miniscule uncertainty (time), the other must have a huge uncertainty because the two quantities cannot both be known with a high level of precision (see the MIT site above for a looooooooong explanation). The product of the two must be at least some minimum value (hence the joke in above post, for non-physics people. Kind of kills it, though).
Definitely: for one thing, Google sets is still tripped up by the strangest things. Case in point: curious to know what you call someone with black hair, I typed in the other possibilites (blonde, redhead, brunette...) into Google sets- and got back "fetish", "underwear", "amateur", "movies", "babes".... need I go on? This is one thing whose accuracy could actually benefit from a "safe mode" filter!
Ah, but the Googlebar also adds a few other special searches, like Linux/BSD/Mac restricted searches, a site search button, and find-term in page buttons. Especially if you check the latest (and highly buggy) experimental version that we link to from our translations page. Feedback is always appreciated, or help fixing bugs.
-AndyB
Whoa, whoa, whoa. The Googlebar is making your system crash? As one of the developers behind it, I've kept an eye on the mailing list and user notes pages, as well as trying to test every release myself, and never had or heard of any problem of the sort. If you'd care to explain the problem as much as possible, we can try and fix it, or at least track down the real culprit. Yes, there are bugs, but...
Um, how about Mozilla with Google Toolbar? It's a multi-platform browser with tabbed browsing, the links (site navigation) toolbar, good privacy control, and hopefully no "Ooka ookas" (As it's spelled on United Virtualities' page). Works for me...
A friend of the family works for a fairly large company, and has mentioned in the past that he can get some very steep discounts on handhelds and such- ie, he was able to buy a palm m505 for $50 or so, sold to him at cost. If the census bureau buys that many handhelds, and considering the decrease in prices over time, why should there be any problem meeting the $100 price?
For mozilla news, I generally read Mozillazine, the major mozilla news site, as well as Mozillanews, a somewhat more community-driven site. For downloads, try XULPlanet, which has a good collection of themes and a good tutorial, and Mozdev (I usually follow projects like Optimoz- gestures- and Googlebar, a mozilla Google Toolbar. Most community development projects wind up here.) Mozillaquest is reserved for cheap laughs, though they have a few article templates to choose from....
I don't use the search bar to search- there are several search-related projects for mozilla on mozdev, such as easysearch, a general search-engine toolbar, and Googlebar (not made by google, but has much of the same functionality as the Google Toolbar for IE does). Both are toolbars that you can expand or collapse at will and work quite well for convenient searching, without sending any extra information out.
Although I would love to see an honors system that worked, I'm currently in college, and that makes me deeply cynical about the prospects for its success. I do well on assignments- on my own- but unfortunately this leads to an incessant stream of questions such as "can I copy your hw?", "I need 'help' writing a paper", and the ever-popular "Can I sit next to you on the test?" from my fellow students. The fact of the matter is that many of the students at high schools and colleges are, to say the least, lazy- even in the honors program at my high school (ranked in the top 200 public high schools in the country, last time I checked), people routinely tried to buy and sell papers (including the valedictorian, who was caught selling them). Rather than do work, many of these students cheat and hope that they're not caught, using either websites with freely available term papers, or simply cutting and pasting much of their work. So, even if it means running my papers through something along with everything else (which doesn't bother me, since my papers are original anyway and a quick perusal of copyright law ensures that they'll remain that way or else), I'd rather see the cheaters caught than trust in an honors system that encourages people to cheat and not be caught Come to think of it, the Washington Post ran an article last year which slashdot covered, about a professor at a college with such a system who ran a check and found several hundred plagiarized papers- it's become easier than ever for students to cheat, and they do. This detracts not only from my own education, in that cheaters can receive higher grades for a weekend of partying than I do for a week of work, but also from the overall atmosphere (as I attempt to discourage people from trying to copy my work).
Good design doesn't necessarily mean using only the newest browsers and proprietary technologies. Far from it, I have a friend who develops the page for a local college, and the page is a fairly clean, tight layout that quickly connects the user to the main areas of the site (the one problem is the menu, which was designed by a committee, but last I hear he was fighting to trim it to a reasonable size). All that, and it's not ugly. No scrolling, and the info is right there. The interesting thing in all of this, however, is that he claims that the page works at least decently even with "beta versions of lynx", as he puts it- in short, it was designed with other browsers in mind. (I've been trying to find a browser where the page doesn't work, but so far no success. Any ideas?). Cross-browser compatibility doesn't require multiple versions of the same page, or a stripped down ugly site- just a little thought.