NIST is soliciting comments on "Strengthening the Commerce Department's Advanced Technology Program: An Action Plan," which proposes increased emphasis on industry/university consortia, small/mid-sized firms, and state technology initiatives. There would also be more coordination with venture capitalists, to screen out projects of interest to private funding. ("News"); ; or fax a request to (301) 926-1630. [NIST Update, 21Jul97.]

NSF's Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) is seeking division directors for Information, Robotics and Intelligent Systems (IRIS) and for Computer and Computation Research (CCR). Program managers are also needed, in the Office of Cross-Disciplinary Activities (CDA). Appointments are to be made for one to two years, with the possibility of extension, and may be at the Federal salary rate or current salary and benefits under provisions of the Intergovernmental Personnel Act (IPA). See or contact Dr. Jerome Daen , CISE, 4201 Wilson Boulevard, Suite 1105, Arlington, VA 22230; 703-306-1900. [John C. Cherniavsky , 25Jul97.] (John tells me that Y.T. Chien, the IRIS director, is planning a one-year sabbatical.)

Honda Motor Co. has been getting good press the week with a demonstration of its P-2 walking robot (TCC 7.02, 09Jan97). The 462-pound autonomous android can climb stairs or find a work site, push a cart to it, and tighten a loose bolt. No commercial release is planned. [AP. SJM, 29Jul97, 1C.]

"The Nine Planets" site at is "one of those wonderful sites that redeem the value of the Web," according to Doug Fraser. He also likes the NASA Pathfinder sites and . [, 09Jul97.]

InScight is a daily science news publication, from SCIENCE magazine and Academic Press. . [12Nov96.]

Plasma-wave chips transmit signals via electric field waves rather than electron packets. This could permit gigahertz microprocessors, or sensors able to respond to the molecular vibrations of specific substances. [BW, 07Jul97.]

BBN Systems and Technologies has developed a "QuietChip" anti-noise system for automobiles. "Your first reaction is that the car in the next lane suddenly got louder." It will be marketed to car makers next year. . [Discover, Jul97. NewtNews.]

Numonics Corp. has developed an Interactive FlipChart electronic pen that captures drawings and text made on ordinary easel pads. The bitmap file can be edited and distributed via email, paper, or fax. [CIO, Jul97. NewtNews, 15Jul97. Bill Park.]

Malaysia is using the "FaceIt" face-recognition software developed by Visionics (NJ). When airline passengers buy tickets, their local facial features are encoded in a "smart card" boarding pass. At boarding time, a second scan is matched to the first. [TechWire, 26Jun97. NewtNews.] (Visionics' CEO is also head of the Rockefeller U. Computational Neuroscience Lab.)

Jack Berlin of Pegasus Imaging Corp. reports that most modern compression methods now beat fractal compression. Well done JPEG implementations are particularly good. Wavelet techniques are showing a bit of promise, with interesting commercial possibilities coming out of USouth Carolina (Summus) and Yale (FMA&H, plus the FBI fingerprint wavelets). Yale and Pegasus offer beta wavelet compressors for commercial trials, with a-coding and speed tricks built in; see . See for wavelet resources. Other good pointers are the SPIDT page, , and the Compression Pointers page at . [, comp.compression, 26Jun97.]

For LaTeX fans: Scientific Word Ltd. has a new website for their Scientific Word product, a WYSIWYG LaTeX for MS Windows and Power Mac; Scientific WorkPlace, a WYSIWYG Maple with link to Mathematica; and Scientific Notebook, a LaTeX-based Web browser. . [Christopher Mabb , sci.math.symbolic, 18Jul97.]

Remember when solving integrals was AI research? Mathematica from Wolfram Research, Inc. (Champaign, IL) solves integrals beyond normal human capability. You can too, at their Integrator website, . Visitors have used Mathematica's networked capabilities to solve hundreds of thousands of integrals. [Heather Albright , comp.soft-sys.math.mathematica, 17Jul97.]

Answers to other math questions can be had from Dr. Math, . [26Aug96.]

Hypatia Electronic Library is a directory of research workers in computer science and pure mathematics -- e.g., constraint satisfaction -- and a library of their papers (with bibtex bibliographic details). . [Ian Gent , csp-list, 09Jun97. David Joslin.]

Interval Solver for Microsoft Excel: interval constraint solver.

Voyager: agent-enhanced object request broker for Java.

Adaptive simulated annealing for EEG analysis, by Lester Ingber.

Homebrew robot arm plans, from Radio Electronics c. 1980.

GP-97 and GP-96 proceedings.

Handbook of Discrete and Computational Geometry, ed. by Goodman and O'Rourke.

Procedural Elements for Computer Graphics (2nd Ed.): book by Rogers.

Advanced Transaction Models and Architectures: book by Jajodia and Kerschberg.

Viking Group International offers a chat site that translates between English and French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish languages in real time. Free, for now. . [Network News, 20Jul97.] (It uses machine translation software from Globalink Inc. Portuguese <-> German translation passes through English first.)

The Universal Survey of Languages offers beginning linguists an overview of natural and invented languages. . [28Jul97.]

Ethnologue is a database of over 6K languages spoken in 228 countries, indexed by language family. . [30Jun97.]

Mandarin Chinese has the highest number of native speakers, at 865M. English has 334M; Spanish, 283M; Arabic, 197M; Bengali, 181M; Hindi and Urdu, 172M; Portuguese, 161M; Russian, 156M; Japanese, 125M; German, 104M; Wu Chinese, 94M; Panjabi, 76M; Javanese, 76M; Telugu, 72M; Cantonese, 70M; Korean, 70M; Marathi, 68M; Italian, 68M; Tamil, 65M; French, 65M; Vietnamese, 61M; Awadhi, 61M; Bhojpuri, 58M; Southern Min Chinese, 55M; Turkish, 52M; Ukrainian, 50M; Thai and Lao, 47M; Polish, 42M; Gujarati, 41M; and Persian, 40M. [Matthew Lennig , 22Jul97. Lily Laws.]

LingWhat? can tell you the language of a document, if you answer a series of questions about it. . [28Jul97.]

The Assoc. of Computational Linguistics website has an archive of pre-prints from 1994 to 1997, plus links to the J. of AI Research, Natural Language Software Registry, and Assoc. for Mathematics of Language. . [30Jun97.]

Wordbot is a dual-window translating aid, free for non-commercial use. Use the supplied dictionaries or one of your own choice. . [Bill Park , 21Jul96.]

The OneLook Dictionary indexes over 680K words in 128 dictionaries, in a variety of languages. . [28Jul97.] (Very slow, when I checked.)

A free Spanish/German/Italian-English dictionary has been made available for FTP by the Internet Dictionary Project. . [28Jul97.]

The Multilingual Glossary of technical and commonly used medical terms is in Danish, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish. . [30Jun97.]

An English-to-Hungarian dictionary with 130K records accepts queries with Latin-1 encoding or flying accents. . [06Jul97.]

WWWebster dictionary and pronunciation guide offers usage, grammatical function, brief etymology and definition. A thesaurus provides similar words, hypertext cross references, and suggested spellings are given for misspellings. Searching supports internal wildcard and right hand truncation. or . [Scout Report, 23Aug96.]

WordNet is an online lexical reference system inspired by psycholinguistic theories of lexical memory. English nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs are organized into synonym sets, each representing one underlying lexical concept. . [30Jul97.] (Developed by George Miller at Princeton on a DARPA/ITO grant.)

A free 300K-word dictionary can be downloaded from . [June Ellen Wallenberg , alt.binaries.pictures.gardens, 18Jun97.]

GIST extracts the unique words in a document, for automated indexing and content analysis. C source and executables, . [Glenn Scheper , net-hap, 10Sep96.]

Propero Software Ltd. offers Langsoft software to tag parts of speech in English text or to proofread and correct documents. . [Mike Oakes , comp.ai.nat-lang, 21Feb97.]

Cool Word of the Day offers unusual words to enhance your vocabulary. . [28Jul97.]

Word Play offers a variety of etymological information, palindromes, puns, name meanings, slang, etc. . [28Jul97.]

The Word Wizard offers word origins, new words, quotations, insults, Fancy Word Parties, (dress in a specific style and vocabulary for an expert-hosted online discussion), and a Lexicographer's club. . [, net-hap, 09Jan97.]

The free Word Detective newsletter discusses word origins and usage. . [27Jun97.]

Unusual Word Research Page by Terry O'Connor will research unusual words or phrases. . [27Dec96.]

Focus on Words can help you to build your vocabulary skills with online exercises, definitions, word histories, quotations, pleonasms, unusual word references, Latin and Greek combining elements, etc. . [26Jun97.]

World Wide Words offers 50 essays about the unique qualities of the English language and how they came to be. The Word Hoard describes words too new to appear in dictionaries. Free email newsletter. or . [Michael B. Quinion , net-hap, 10Nov96.]

The Queen's English Directive can help you speak proper British. Over 6MB of .wav files and an American-to-English translation guide. . [Chris Keene , alt.usage.english, 29Jan97.]

Another British/American translation sites is . Learn problem words such as pants, bomb, billion, first floor, enjoin, and revise. [28Jul97.]

Net Lingo is a dictionary of Internet terminology. . [03Aug96.] (See for a chart of emoticons.)

Bag of Rubber Hammers explains expressions common on Prince Edward Island. . [28Jul97.]

San Jose is reportedly considering Geekonics as a second language. "This entirely reconfigures our parameters. No longer are we preformatted for failure." Other language groups approve: "This is just, like, OK, you know, the most totally kewl thing, like, ever," said Jennifer Heather Notat-Albright, Valleyonics supporter. "Yeee-hah," said the president of the Dixionics Coalition. Bill Flack, public information officer for the Blue Ribbon Task Force on Bureaucratonics said that organization "would not comment on the San Jose vote until it convened a summit meeting, studied the impact, assessed the feasibility, finalized a report and drafted a comprehensive action plan, which, once it clears the appropriate subcommittees and is voted on, will be made public to those who submit the proper information-request forms." [Unknown. David Coombs, 05Feb97.]

(Richard Fritzson says his son has been going around saying "Hmm. Use Yodaonics. Help you it will. But beware the dark side." [, 28May97.])

-- Ken