See the Vigdis Finnbogadóttir entry for more.
Iceland's long isolation and relatively small genetic pool (shrunk over years of isolation and especially during years of disease-reduced population) mean that family trees are very completely known, and significant deviations from the mean can be studied both genetically and clinically. In 1998 or so, after extensive and even acrimonious debate, a law was passed empowering one company to gather DNA samples from everyone on the island. There is a voluntary element in the study, but even those who opt out will not stay completely unsampled, genetically or otherwise, since everyone is related. Needless to say, there are worrisome bioethics issues.
Here's the Icelandic page of an X.500 directory.
- If you ask, ``Do you know what time it is?'' it'll reply with an answer more useful than ``yes'' or ``now?''
- If you ask, ``What's the name of that woman married the baseball player, Henry Miller, and was the first platinum blonde, and sang to the accompaniment of President Harry Truman's piano playing?'' it'll reply: ``You're either pulling my leg or you're totally culturally ignorant. Go waste the time of the IBM mainframe, I've got calculations to do.'' This is called queue management, part of efficient multitasking. You, on the other hand, were attempting to access fault-tolerant content-addressable memory.
You can't fall off the floor.
Usually.
``The on-going scientific activities of the ISA are decentralised in Research Committees, Working Groups and Thematic Groups, each dealing with a well recognized specialty in sociology. These groups bring together scholars who wish to pursue comparative research on a transnational basis and they constitute basic networks of scientific research, intellectual debate and professional exchange.'' This page lists the Research Committees, all 53 of them. Our glossary hosts some perfectly redundant information on RC33, but we'll be adding the all-important snide commentary as soon as time pressures permit.
The main difference between ISAM and VSAM has to do with how different data blocks are located on a physical storage device, and especially how blocks are extended physically when they are modified.
The system was introduced into the UK by J. Whitaker & Sons Ltd. in 1967, and into the US by the R. R. Bowker Company in 1968. ISO standard 2108 specifies that the items assigned ISBN numbers may include ``printed books and pamphlets (in various bindings), mixed media publications, other similar media including educational films/videos and transparencies, books on cassettes, microcomputer software, electronic publications, braille publications and maps. Serial publications and music sound recordings are specifically excluded, as they are covered by other identification systems.''
What about websites?
The numbers have three coded data fields and one checksum character. The first field is a single-digit ``group identifier.'' It gives some indication of the country, language or geographic area in which the book was published. Group identifiers 0 and 1 are used for the ``English-speaking countries,'' including the Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK, and the US.
The second field identifies the publisher or producer of the book, and the third field specifies a particular title (or revised edition) in that publisher's list. The first two fields together are the ISBN prefix.
The ISBN is all decimal digits, except for the checksum, which is either a decimal digit or the letter ex.
There are many tens of thousands of publishers in at least a couple of the regions. The US ISBN Agency alone had entered just about 100,000 publishers at the turn of the century. (Note that most of the organizations that publish at least one book or pamphlet, and thus need an ISBN, are not primarily publishers.) Some publishers have put out over a hundred thousand books. If the fields were of fixed length, they would require a total of at least thirteen digits, not counting the checksum. Most publishers, however, need only a few title identifiers, while the number of publishers that need very many title identifiers is also few. The ISBN is kept to ten digits by assigning short publisher identifiers to the few larger publishers, so they have more digits available for titles. Publishers that run out of numbers get an additional publisher number.
In the US, the separate fields in ISBN's are indicated by hyphen separation. However, certain patterns make it possible to recognize how long the publisher identifier will be, so in principle the hyphens aren't needed. In particular, the ISBN's beginning 00 and 01 are for two-digit identifiers of very large publishers, so they would hyphenate 0-pp-tttttt-c, where pp is in the range from 00 to 19 and tttttt is one of a million title numbers. ISBN's beginning in 02, 03, 04, 05, or 06 are for three-digit publisher numbers, 07 and 080 through 084 for four-digit publishers, and 085-089 for five-digit publishers and 09 so far for six-digit publishers. Other group identifiers use their own patterns (whereas 06 is for three-digit publishers, 16 is for five-digit publishers). There's a pretty obvious pecking order here.
Bowker offers more information. I just offer some examples from my personal library. This is a different pecking order. If a two-digit publisher hasn't managed to get a book into my library, there's a good chance that when you scrape the trash out of their list, they only publish as many worthwhile books as a three-digit publisher.
0-02 Macmillan (Free Press)
0-03 Harcourt Brace
0-06 HarperCollins (was Harper & Rowe;
now has various imprints HarperFoobar. Belongs to Murdock's News
Corp.; took a big hit on author advances and returns of unsold books
in 1996; summer 1997 rumors, denied, that division would be sold)
0-07 McGraw-Hill
0-08 Pergamon
0-12 Academic Press
0-13 Prentice Hall (Sunsoft)
0-19 Clarendon (Oxford University Press) (US site too)
0-201 Addison-Wesley
0-256 Irwin (Parent company Times-Mirror
was acquired by McGraw-Hill in 1996)
0-226 University of Chicago Press
0-262 MIT Press
0-304 Cassell
0-306 Plenum
0-312 St. Martin's
0-316 Little, Brown
0-385 Doubleday (part of BDD)
0-387 Springer-Verlag New York
0-393 W. W. Norton
0-395 Houghton-Mifflin
0-412 Butterworths (Borough Green, Sevenoaks, Kent TN15 8PH, England)
0-412 Chapman & Hall
0-415 Routledge
0-440 Dell (part of BDD)
0-442 Van Nostrand Reinhold
0-471 Wiley
0-486 Dover
0-521 Cambridge University Press (CUP)
0-536 Xerox
0-553 Bantam (part of BDD)
0-670 Penguin (Viking) (US site)
0-671 Simon and Schuster (Pocket Books; Washington Square Books)
0-672 Adobe Press (publ. by Prentice Hall)
0-674 Harvard University Press
0-679 Vintage and other Random House imprints
0-688 William Morrow
0-691 Princeton University Press (or here)
0-887 William Morrow & Co.
0-7139 Penguin, Ltd.
0-7503 Adam Hilger (UK IOP)
0-7645 IDG (``International Data Group'')
(The ``...For Dummies'' books)
0-7821 Sybex
0-8014 Cornell University Press
0-8018 Johns Hopkins University Press
0-8020 University of Toronto Press
0-8052 Schocken Books
0-8053 Benjamin/Cummings (for years now a part Addison-Wesley)
0-8093 Southern Illinois U.P. (Carbondale and Edwardsville)
0-8162 Holden-Day
0-8176 Birkhäuser Boston
0-8186 IEEE
0-8194 SPIE
0-8306 TAB Books
0-8493 CRC (Chemical Rubber Company)
0-85274 IOP as well
0-86516 Bolchazy-Carducci Publishers, Inc.
0-87819 CRC (Chemical Rubber Company) (older no.)
0-88029 Barnes and Noble
0-911014 NEO Press
0-912675 Ardsley House Publ., Inc.
0-937073 Center for the Study of Language and Information (Stanford U.)
1-56592 O'Reilly and Associates
(also a German-language version)
1-57444 St. Luice Press, now part of CRC Press LLC.
2-226 Albin-Michel Paris
3-540 Springer-Verlag Berlin
3-7643 Birkhäuser Basel
90-277 D. Reidel Pub. Co.
981-02 World Scientific
R. R. Bowker is the sole US agent for ISBN International. Bowker also handles SAN. Irritatingly, Bowker uses the isbn.org domain as the website for ISBN in the US, and has a few pages of ISBN International content in a subdirectory. Here's something apposite:
The fact remains that in current bourgeois cinema, attention to visual information is total. That the disruptive nature of typographical errors in sub-titles is not noticed and corrected is a sign that it is not felt.
This links it to a broad variety of other social phenomena, such as the method of speed-reading in which individual words recede and are replaced by a Gestalt comprehension of content, or the techniques developed for display advertising and product packaging (including mass market publishing) for the printing of information which, for any number of reasons (e.g., it is considered ``inessential'' such as the identification of the jacket designer, or possibly counterproductive to sales, such as a listing of chemical additives in canned foods), the producer does not wish the customer to read. In this sense the most revealing language in Noam Chomsky's Reflections on Language may well be the ISBN number on its rear cover, printed in a different direction and in a lighter color than the rest of that page's text.
Google the source for more serious nonsense.
![[column]](images/column.gif){kind=small}
ISDN uses pulse-code modulation (PCM) to digitize speech.
Every four years the EU doles out some 15 billion euros in research grants to over 30 member and associate states (the PA and Israel are member, mmm, states) through its Framework Program for Research and Technological Development, the world's largest R&D fund. Participating countries pay a serious membership fee, and in return they are entitled to submit an unlimited number of proposals in a broad range of fields.
During the fifth ``framework'' (1999-2002), Israel paid approximately US$160 million in dues and received a similar amount in awards. Israeli researchers submitted 2,900 proposals, of which 780 were accepted and funded. (Most of the funding went to physical sciences and engineering, particularly information technology.) You're probably wondering, ``why participate in this mass lottery?'' Why not cut out the middle-man? Just take the dues and distribute them directly in grants to Israeli researchers. The reasoning is that the process fosters useful contacts and partnerships with European firms and technology transfers from Europe. Marcel Shaton, director general of ISERD, is quoted in the 13 June 2002 Jerusalem Post as estimating that Israel's investment in the Framework program has yielded Israel's industries, including such bodies as the Israel Aircraft Industry, some billion and a half euros. It's not clear what period of time that covers, or how the number was estimated. It looks like one of those infamous estimates of ``spin-off'' benefits of research expenditures. And perhaps the head of ISERD is not a completely unbiased source for this information.
Another difference between American and British for usage involves time intervals. We and they both describe continuing or recurring positive conditions with for. E.g., ``I've been in therapy for four decades.'' I mean ``positive'' here in the sense that a thing is described as happening rather than not happening. In America, but not in Britain, persistent negative conditions are now usually described with in. E.g., ``I haven't been in therapy in four decades.'' (But still ``I have been out of therapy for four decades.'') This distinction has a certain utility, because it effects a disambiguation: it is still meaningful to use for, but that might negate only the contrary statement. That is, to an American, ``I haven't been in therapy for four decades'' might simply mean that you took a break from therapy in 1998.
Well, detailed linguistic analysis is very much a part of philosophy. The ISFP is a sister organization of the Philosophical Society of England (PSOE). Membership in ISFP is free. It seems that ISFP was created primarily to promote and market ``Pathways to Philosophy'' products (awards, programs and learning materials) originally distributed and run in the UK by the PSOE.
Run by some of the same people: Philsophical Pathways newsletter.
The society publishes Rhetorica, a quarterly.
We attract people who want the international experience but who aren't real adventuresome. Canada is a way to get international experience with the comfort level of English as the primary language as well as common foods and standards in accommodations.
Have I mentioned that in 2002, one of the few bright spots in McDonald's's generally stagnating sales performance was France, of all places?
The Canadian Embassy in Washington, DC, estimates that enrollment at major [not sure what that means] Canadian schools by U.S. citizens has skyrocketed; increasing by at least 86 percent between 1999 and 2002! It now totals about 5000 students! What the AP calls ``a small but fast-growing number.'' They could be more precise and point out that it's about one thirtieth of one percent of total US college enrollment.
About 1600 of those 5000 are at McGill. In 1977, when my friend Rob visited his Long Island cousin there, the word was ``Shhh! Don't tell anyone how cheap it is!''
So it seems that the financial incentives that have increased American student enrollment by over 86 percent in three years have been in place for 25 years. Extrapolating that 23% annual increase (compounded annually) backwards, we can estimate growth by a whopping factor of 176 since 1977, when there must have been about 28.4 US students in Canadian colleges. In 1961, there was only one US student enrolled at a Canadian college (probably McGill). All other things being equal, in 2041 the number of US students in Canadian colleges will exceed the current enrollment in US colleges. What will happen to Division I-A football!?!?
Contribution to a future study: since the late 1960's, out-of-state students have constituted about one third of undergraduate enrollments at the University of Michigan.
(Yeah, yeah -- Mark Twain did this kind of analysis on the Mississippi River. I'm not sure if any of his assumptions were correct, but his arithmetic was unimpeachable.)
Hmmm, well, there's some stuff that's sort of relevant at the PERL, Perl, perl entry.
For more herpetological humor (sorry, no pythons) read about what Ms. Creamer saw.
ISIS-Inc is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization committed to creating new and effective tools for reaching people with critical sexual health information. [They want to reach people with this critical information so they can get the info and bring it back to us?]
Based in San Francisco, California, we work locally, nationally and internationally. Our partners include governmental and non-governmental agencies, for-profit and non-profit corporations, and individuals.
Our highly acclaimed projects include inSPOT.org, an online STD partner notification system for gay and bisexual men, and STDTest.org, an online syphilis testing service for San Francisco residents. Read more about our current and upcoming projects here.''
The most interesting situation, however, is that of English. In Old English manuscripts, one encounters the word igland, where I have written g to represent the yogh. Yogh was a rune preserved when Irish missionaries introduced Roman script to Germanic England, and its pronunciation evolved in different ways, strongly influenced by assimilation and word stress, but basically it tended to disappear as a consonant. In initial position, ge- (also gi-) was a common prefix and a standard part of past participles, as it still is in German today. In English, however, the initial ge- (also gi-, ga-) was eroded to an initial vowel in words like afford, alike, among, enough (German genug) yesterday (German gestern). In final position it often evolved into a y (day and the suffix -y, cf. German Tag and -ig) or an h (bough, suffix -ly, cf. cognate German Bug, -lich). (Note that under the influence of Norman French, most post-vocalic h's came to be spelled gh. Note also that final g in German usually devoices, often into an aitch sound (actually /x/ or /ç/). I want to emphasize also that there was some attendant confusion. Once the ge- prefix had substantially disappeared as a marker of the past participle, infinitives were back-constructed that failed to remove the initial y- that remained. (Most famously, Spenser back-constructed ycleepe erroneously from yclept. Note, however, that just as in Modern German, ge- also occurred as a different sort of prefix, often with a meaning similar to Latin co- or com-, in some Old English verb stems.)
Anyway, coming back from that illustrative little divagation to the word igland, we realize that the natural development of that word in Middle English would have been into something like iland. That's what happened, in fact (yland is also found in Early Modern English). (In Dutch and East Frisian, eiland is still the standard form.) Come to think of it, that's how we pronoune it too. However, in this form it came to be associated with the word ile (also yle) from the Old French word ile, ille, spelled île in Modern French (remember?). Hence the occasional spelling ile-land. Along about the fifteenth century, in a Renaissance-inspired conniption of etymological spelling, the French started writing the word as isle. They recovered, but we didn't, hence the ess in isle and island (influenced by isle-land) despite the fact that there's no ess in the pronunciation. (Actually, the situation is a bit more complicated, because for a while there were Anglo-French forms with d, like idle.)
You should visit the webpage because the mosaic illustrated by the background image. It shows two women wearing ancient bikinis and discombobulated expressions.
The word existed in Old English as igland. It was a compound noun essentially meaning `water-land.' The first element in the compound ultimately is a cognate of Latin aqua, `water,' in the Germanic branch of Indo-European. The kw sound in Latin, represented by qu, corresponded to hw in Germanic (hence all those Latin qu- pronouns correspond to wh- pronouns in English and w- pronouns in German).
Well, that's enough for today. Tomorrow you can read the isla entry and see what happened afterwards.
The Institute for Study of the Liberal Arts (ISLA) was founded in 1993 primarily to sponsor the publication of a classical children's journal called Hereditas and to foster the study of the liberal arts. In May of 1995, the ISLA created two virtual academies: Scholars' Online Academy and Regina Coeli Academy, with full humanities and science curricula. Thus the corporation was reorganized and became the Institute for Study of the Liberal Arts and Sciences (ISLAS). The ISLAS works closely with Regina Coeli Elementary and Agnus Dei elementary online acadmies in developing distance-learning programs emulating the classical trivium-quadrivium model.''
Okay, here you go: it's the Thursday of National Library Week (didn't know we had one of those either, didja?). Yeah, I think I got the national/international stuff straight. National Library Week is promoted by the ALA. ISLD is promoted by SLA. Symbionese Liberation Army? Bad guess.
The organization publishes a journal called The Journal of Supply Chain Management. It confers certifications of Certified Purchasing Manager (C.P.M., since 1974) and an Accredited Purchasing Practitioner (A.P.P., a kind of junior C.P.M. instituted in 1996) on the basis of exams, experience, postsecondary education and continuing education (CE) hours completed.
Since it became clear that the stuff we can detect spectroscopically is a small fraction of the mass in most galaxies, that other stuff (whose presence is inferred mostly gravitationally -- from the fact that galaxies don't fly apart) has been called ``dark matter.'' The ordinary stuff we figure we understand (dust and gas) is what ISM currently refers to.
The expansions of both LSN and ISN translate to English as ``Nicaraguan
Sign Language'' -- in principle, the terms might be equivalent. (The L
of LSN is cognate with ``language'' and ``linguist'' and derives from the
Latin term for tongue, while the I of ISN is
cognate with ``idiom,'' ``idiot'' and
``idiolect,'' from a Greek root
meaning personal or individual.)
In French, the name is Organisation internationale de normalisation.
A file that lists them completely with proper names for the characters, but which doesn't happen to display the characters, is also available. Some characters have HTML-specific escape sequences (``entity references''). These fall in three categories:
- One small set consists of ordinary characters which appear on most
keyboards,
but which must be entered as escape sequences so that they appear literally,
instead of being interpreted as mark-up. These are
" entered as ``"'' & " " & < " " < > " " >
- The second, larger set consists of ordinary alphabetic characters,
typically with diacritical marks, that are not standard in English and
which do not always appear on keyboards. It is easy to remember the
diacritical-modified characters. These are all of the form ``&[]mark;''.
For example, ``Ä'' is the code for an upper-case letter A
with an umlaut: Ä. (The semicolon is necessary; the double quotes
are just used here to set off the escape sequence). For all of the marked
vowel characters, both upper- and lower-case forms are available (ä
for ä). The available diacritical marks are
` ``grave'' for grave accent (write ``ò'' for ò, etc.) on all vowel characters: ÀÈÌÒÙàèìòù ' acute for acute accent on all vowel characters and wye: ÁÉÍÓÚÝáéíóúý ^ circ for circumflex on all vowel characters: ÂÊÎÔÛâêîôû ~ tilde for tilde on a few characters: ÃÑÕãñõ " uml for diaeresis or umlaut on all vowels and lower case wye: ÄËÏÖÜäëïöüÿ
(Note that in the preceding, I have made approximate substitutions for the isolated diacritical marks. See below for more accurate but less readable representations.)In addition, there are some explicit ligatures and other special characters:
Å Å (Swedes type Aa) å å or aa if the diacritical is unavailable.) Æ Æ (Actually a rune called the ash.) æ æ Ç Ç (Original to Spanish, but no longer finding much use in that language;* as Dave Barry has explained, it is actually a parasite living off of French words in English. This demonstrates the need for tight import controls for perishable goods.) ç ç Ø Ø ø ø ð ð (It's a scandal that ISO Latin-1 has this character, which is used only in Icelandic and Quantum Field Theory, as well as µ, but not pi.) ß ß Þ Þ (Another rune called the thorn.) þ þ
Arithmetic: - 045 (minus sign; wider than a mere hyphen; the distinction is also expressed by the terminology en-dash and em-dash. Actually, this seems to be default for the dash key binding. If you want a hyphen it's 173) × 215 (times symbol, multiplication sign) ÷ 247 (division symbol; also used in some communities to designate a range: 2÷5 meaning 2,3,4, and 5) ± 177 (plus-minus) « 171 (much-less-than, or open/left/begins double brackets, or whatever) » 187 (much-greater-than, or whatever) ¼ 188 (one quarter) ½ 189 (one half) ¾ 190 (three quarters) High finance: ¥ 165 (Yen) £ 163 (Pound) Low finance: ¢ 162 (Cent) Glam finance: ¬ 172 (chip rake) Spanish: ¡ 161 (inverted exclamation mark indicates beginning of exclaimed phrase) ¿ 191 (inverted question mark indicates beginning of interrogatory phrase. An entry here gives an example of this punctuation mark's utility.) ª 170 (used to abbreviate ordinal numbers and a few other words. E.g., 1ª = ``primera'' [first; agrees with female noun]) º 186 (used to abbreviate ordinal numbers and a few other words. E.g., 1º = ``primero'' [first; agrees with male noun], Nº = ``Numero'' [number]) Small Latine, and lesse Greeke (Gk.): µ 181 (mu) [Yeah, that's it for Greek: it's pretty bad. You can use the ess-zet ligature for squat beta, and <I>v</I> (v) on many systems looks more like nu than italic vee. Really, the µ is here for the metric system.] Commercial: ® 174 (registered trademark) © 169 (copyright) Copyediting: § 167 (section mark) ¶ 182 (paragraph mark; ``pilcrow'') Base-four superscript numbering: ° 176 (degree symbol) ¹ 185 (one) ² 178 (two) ³ 179 (three) ¹°² There: footnote #102 base-four (decimal 18). See how well it works? No? Please, a civil tongue! Phytoplankton: ¸ 184 (discarded cedilla*) ´ 180 (forgotten acute accent) · 183 (dot floating in middle of line) ¯ 175 (macron; overweening hyphen floating at top of line) ¤ 164 (exploding pipe; viewed end on) (supposedly it's a ``general currency sign'') (incidentally, here's a currency converter) ¦ 166 (vertical line with cinched waist) Extremely miscellaneous: Ð 208 (Where is its lower-case kin?) Format control -- coulda, shoulda been useful: [] [8] (BS. If this were operational a lot of character-building options would open up) [ ] [9] (HT. If horizontal tab were heeded in all hypertext, not just in this preformatted section, things would be a lot easier.) [ ] [32] (SP. Hypertext browsers insert single spaces after full stops. How crass.)There's also...
Format control -- a sop to anal retentives: `` '' (equivalently `` '') for a nonbreaking space. This isn't universally implemented. As a demonstration, or as a test of your browser, I have a file full of nbsp's with a long line that can only be broken at two places, and a similar file full of 160's.
Here's something more official.
Hawthorn wrote about isolation in the middle of the nineteenth century, but this was too early to have any effect on microelectronics development. It does no good to be too far ahead of your time.
The same algebraic sum of the positive and negative charges in the nucleus, when the arithmetical sum is different, gives what I call `isotopes' or `isotopic elements', because they occupy the same place in the periodic table. They are chemically identical, and save only as regards the relatively few physical properties which depend upon atomic mass directly, physically identical also.
Soddy didn't have to point out that he had constructed his new word from iso- (`equal') and tópos (`place') because in those days everyone had studied Greek and Latin (and not enough of anything else) in high school.
Soddy referred to ``positive and negative charges'' because at the time, the nucleus was thought to consist of protons and electrons. Rutherford had only discovered the nucleus in 1911. (I.e., he inferred the existence of a compact positive charge at the center of the atom.) The neutron was only discovered by Chadwick in 1932. Since protons and neutrons consist of positively and negatively charged quarks, however, there's really no need to adjust Soddy's definition.
There are one or two piddling complications concerning the definition of isotope. Therefore, you should visit the nuclide entry, read what they are and forget them.
8859-1 Latin-1: Western Europe (vide supra) 8859-2 Latin-2: Eastern Europe 8859-3 SE Europe and misc. others: Esperanto (uses circumflex where Czech uses hacheks), Maltese (.mt), etc. 8859-4 Scandinavia/Baltic (mostly covered by 8859-1 also) 8859-5 Cyrillic 8859-6 Arabic 8859-7 Greek 8859-8 Hebrew 8859-9 Latin-5, same as 8859-1 except for Turkish instead of Icelandic 8859-10 Latin-6, for Lappish/Nordic/Eskimo languages
Roman Czyborra maintains a good page on ISO 8859. For more on font standards, visit this explanation. (It won't solve your problems, but it will help you understand what your problems are.)
``ISO 9000 comprises a series of internationally accepted [*] standards designed to assure customers of a quality management system resulting in the consistent delivery of a quality product. An entire company or any of its divisions, operations or product lines can be registered under these standards, which entail all aspects of the business as well as how the company manages and improves controls. Companies obtain ISO 9000 registration through an audit, which is performed by a registration body approved by an international certification organization.''
``My dream is to become the first person to have an ISO-9000 certified life. I am currently working feverishly to completely document all the procedures involved in living my life (42 megabytes so far). That documentation will be posted on this web site as soon as my lawyer verifies that it does not violate the Communications Decency Act [CDA].''
At a party in the Summer of 2002, I mentioned ISO 9000 to the publisher of a stock analysis newsletter, and was pleased that he didn't know what I was talking about.
If you need a presence provider for your business, you have the opportunity to pay big bucks for ISP evaluations. Here are some resources listing and/or evaluating ISP's, all offering some limited information free:
- Inverse Network Technology. Note, however, that there is an apparent conflict of interest in the case of Inversenet, which also sells the kind of service it rates. Inversenet tends to evaluate dial-up data.
- Keynote Systems tends to focus on latencies in the internet proper, and on backbones, rather than on the home user end of things.
- Boardwatch Magazine bills itself ``guide to internet access and the world wide web.'' They've collaborated with Keynote on some research. Their list will help you locate a server convenient to you, but won't give you much in the way of benchmarks. (Boardwatch used to be at its own domain name boardwatch.com, and internet.com used to have its own separate list of ISP's; looks like they merged during 1998. Oh yeah: ``Just as the Internet access markets are highly dynamic, so is the Internet publishing business. We have had numerous changes at Boardwatch Magazine over the past several months. In June 1998 Mecklermedia bought Boardwatch, ISPCON and the Directory, and in November Penton Media, Inc. bought Mecklermedia. In the interim our Web site was integrated into the old Mecklermedia Internet com site. We had a little bit of an outdated system for collecting information in the past, and we have been migrating and updating our method to the new integrated site. This has been a painful and difficult process. It has worked to an extent, but it will work better. What we will be doing is updating our information on the Web as soon as we can.'')
- ISPs.com has a somewhat smaller list of ISP's than does Boardwatch (4000 instead of 6000, December 1998), but the different set of search options may be useful. (And I don't know how much overlap there is.)
Viagra hasn't put them out of business?
A distinct code is assigned to each original recording of a piece, but different distribution formats -- CD and cassette, say -- of a single recording share the same code. In any case, a typical physical medium will carry recordings of multiple pieces, each with its own ISRC. An individual ISRC consists of twelve characters in four fields:
- A two-letter country code. This identifies the particular registrar (national agency), not the registrant's country. (Multinational registrants may register in the country where they record or where they have their headquarters.)
- A three-character registrant code. Usually the registrant is the producer, but it may be a subsequent owner of the recording is sold before being registered. National agencies are encouraged to distinguish music video recordings from sound recordings by assigning two registrant codes for a single registrant to use separately for the two types of recordings. Each character of the registrant code may be any digit or (upper-case English) letter, so each national registrar can assign up to 363 = 46656 unique codes. Is that really enough?
- A two-digit year. Under versions of the standard prior to 2001, this ``year of reference'' was the year the work was recorded, and although there was a recommendation that years prior to 1940 not be used, that recommendation was not always followed. So in the years approaching 2040, Y2K-type ambiguity would be an increasing problem, but a fix is promised for a future version of the evolving standard. FWIW, the year of reference is now to be the year that the ISRC is allocated.
- A five-digit ``designation code.'' A serial number, left-padded with zeroes to make five digits, if necessary.
IFPI is the ISO-appointed international registration authority for the ISRC system. See their online handbook.
Although this is not quite one of those webhomeless societies, its site is not frequently updated, so you may need to do a separate search for the annual meeting!
``Gear'' -- I like that word. It isn't used enough. Phylacteries and rosaries should be located in the ``Religious Gear'' section of the supermarket.
Typically described as ``a vital stepping stone for ambitious future missions to Mars and beyond'' in the sense that the Canary Islands were vital to the 1492 rediscovery of America by Columbus.
Perhaps accurately described as ``the most complex and expensive engineering project ever attempted.'' Still a few little unresolved problems, like making it quiet enough to live in -- but don't worry, NASA stopped trying to keep these problems secret after The New Scientist broke the story in 1999, less than two decades after the initial designs. Since then, NASA has publicly admitted that there are problems with noise, so we can trust them now.
I had a Ghanaian friend who once said that the only thing the Americans ever invented was the atom bomb. This was a deliberate provocation, of course, but sometimes one likes to focus on the negative -- someone else's negative. At first blush, ``European Idea'' may include many things: representative democracy, perhaps, and mechanized genocide, indoor plumbing, and rifling. There are a lot of ideas, so ISSEI has to narrow its focus. The 11th conference of ISSEI, held in Helsinki in 2008, focused on just the following five narrow areas:
- History, Geography, Science
- Economics, Politics, Law
- Education, Women's Studies, Sociology
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A nonprofit, nongovernmental scientific society founded on May 19, 1924. A member society of the ICSU since 1992.
The national affiliate of the ISSS for the US is the SSSA.
I remember one day when I was eating lunch in the cafeteria that used to be in Norton Hall (next to Knox). It was one of those rare days when the Stammtisch didn't convene, and I sat at an otherwise empty table. A bunch of students sat down around me, and I forget how we got into conversation, but at some point the student across from me exclaimed in surprise bordering on alarm ``I've never eaten with a professor before!'' I tried to get her to chill, saying something like ``it's cool, it's cool,'' and she exclaimed ``I've never had a professor say `cool' to me before!'' Some people are very excitable.
Oh yeah, so InSySySy has been held every year since, like, 1988.
Pakistan, on India's northwest shoulder, keeps GMT+5. Bangladesh (old East Pakistan) and Bhutan, to the northeast, keep GMT+6. Nepal used to keep the same time as India, but doesn't any more; see dueling time zones about that.
The term ``safe transit'' makes a probably unwanted allusion to safe-conduct.
Public Law 102-240, December 18, 1991. It includes the Intelligent Vehicle-Highway Systems (IVHS) Act of 1991.
ISTEA was superseded in 1998 by TEA-21 (q.v.).
ISU's roots go back to the Academy of Idaho at Pocatello, a state-funded boarding school at the secondary level established in 1902. Eighty percent of the students were from Pocatello, so maybe dormitory life was optional. In 1915, the academy became Idaho Technical Institute, and despite the name its orientation was shifted away from the vocational education that had originally been its main focus. It was empowered to offer ``instruction in such vocational, scientific, literary and technical subjects as will meet the educational needs of the students enrolled. Provided, that the course shall include two and not more than two years of college grade and such work below college grade as the conditions of the educational system of the State renders desirable.'' If that last grammatical-number disagreement is any indication, ``such'' was quite a bit. Pocatello representatives in the state legislature had to settle for this; they had pressed for a college, arguing that the University of Idaho at Moscow was too distant. In 1927, the institute became the Southern Branch of the University of Idaho; it became Idaho State College in 1947 and Idaho State University in 1963.
ISU has been in the midst of downsizing (it's called ``reprioritizing'') over the past few years. (See a brief article from February 2007 at Inside Higher Ed. According to a news item on ISU's homepage in April 2008: ``Criminology professor serves one year in Iraq.''
But seriously, the provost's office issued a report in January 2007 that called for eliminating the physics and philosophy majors. Karen Schmid, associate vice president for academic affairs, said that students could still pursue an interest in either field by majoring in liberal studies with a concentration in physics or philosophy. I can't speak for philosophy, but Schmid apparently knows something about ``science.'' She is an associate professor in the Department of Family and Consumer Sciences. Visit her webpage. You can learn a lot from a face. She has a Ph.D. in Family Social Science from the University of Minnesota.
So you see where the slippery slope leads. Once you concede that there is a thing that can legitimately be called a ``social science,'' it's just a short step or shimmy to ``family science'' and ``consumer science.'' (The FCS department has a program in ``Interior Design,'' but this is not yet directly called a ``science.'' For now it can only bask in the reflected glory of the department's absurd designation.)
By the time a report was submitted to the board of trustees (April 19, 2007), the recommendations had been scaled back: ``Plan under development with other departments to create Philosophical Studies program and reorganize academic unit'' and ``[c]reating Department of Chemistry and Physics, retaining, but restructuring Physics major....'' As of April 2008, neither of these pointless rearrangements had occurred.