In V5 N39, I mentioned ONR's FY'96 DoD Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) Program. A second MURI competition is for "Integrated Approach to Intelligent Systems": hierarchical, modular, adaptive learning systems with emergent behavior, able to deal with unknown environments. "Conduct multidisciplinary research to develop the theoretical underpinning for design and exploitation of emergent behavior. Integrate varied approaches to enhance overall performance." $1.5M/year may be available, split between 1-2 projects led by US institutions of higher education. 5-page white papers are due 12/15/95 at the Army Research Office; proposals will be due 3/20/96. See . [Raphael Malyankar , 11/11/95.] (The other announcement was about "Authoring Intelligent Training Systems with Speech Interaction Capability.")

NSF is currently in shutdown status, and has no authority to obligate funds until the next budget is passed. Grantees are warned that nearly all spending is at your own risk. [grants, 11/14/95.] (And don't think rescissions can't happen, now or at any other time that funds have not been contractually awarded.)

NSF has announced awards in its Digital Libraries competition. For a list, download pr9452.txt from stis.nsf.gov. [grants, 11/13/95.] (Now that there's an established Digital Libraries community, proposals should usually be integrated with the funded projects. Reviewers from that community will be asking what's in your proposal for them.)

Summer Programs in Japan for US Graduate Students in Science and Engineering (NSF 95-88) has an annual deadline of 12/1/95. , (703) 306-1701. Ditto for the Summer Institute in Korea for US Graduate Students in Science and Engineering (NSF 95-88), (703) 306-1704, (703) 306-0476 Fax. [NSF Bulletin, 11/95.] The new NSF guideline on 1996 Summer Programs in Japan is publication NSF 95-160, or nsf95160.txt on stis.nsf.gov. [grants, 10/30/95.]

Netscape stock is splitting 2-for-1, after having risen above $100/share. The company is valued at $3.5B -- compared to Apple's $5.1B on $11B revenues -- even though it's barely turned its first profit and has revenues under $40M. Most profitless IPOs achieve values nearer $250M or $300M, but Netscape started at $1B just 97 days ago. The Internet industry as a whole has about $1B in revenues, but may reach $25B by the end of the decade. [Arthur M. Louis and Herb Greenberg, SF Chronicle, 11/15/95, B1.]

Another skyrocketing Internet company is Spyglass Inc., which also makes browsers. It closed at $92 on 11/10/95, up $20 for the week. UUNet Technologies Inc. closed at $72.50, and Sun at $89.87 -- double its price this summer. Borland's shares rose 40% after it announced that it would develop Java software. [Lee Gomes, SJM, 11/11/95, 1D.]

Arbor Software Corp. (Sunnyvale) is another astonishing IPO. It opened at $17 on 11/7/95, closing at $39.25 -- a 131% jump that beat Netscape's initial surge of 108%. Arbor develops OLAP software: online analytical processing, enabling spreadsheet users to explore data from corporate databases. The company has 115 employees. President James Dorrian, 43, holds stock worth $31M; CTO Robert Earle, 45, has $37M. Neither man has experience at a big Silicon Valley company, or even a degree from a prestigious university. (Ann Winblad, their first venture capital backer, calls them "smart mutts.") [Mike Langberg, SJM, 11/8/95, 1C.]

Life at the top is high-pressure. Richard Guarino, acting president of Taligent, died of a heart attack 10/29/95 while jogging in Los Gatos. [SJM. NewtNews, 11/13/95. Bill Park.]

Oracle says it will be selling $500 Internet "appliances" by summer, for connection to a monitor or TV. (Some analysts say it will be more like $1K.) Several phone companies are planning fast ISDN connections for about $19.95/month. [Michelle Quinn, SF Chronicle, 11/15/95, B1.]

Oracle has its own Network Computer Operating System (NCOS). [Mark Halper, SJM, 11/11/95, 1D.] Apple is rumored to be negotiating with Oracle concerning either Newton interface technology or running NCOS on the Newton. IBM and Sun like the idea of diskless home/school computers; Microsoft and many PC/Windows analysts scoff. "The idea has generated excitement in the computer industry, mostly because Microsoft and Intel are not leading the charge." [Michelle Quinn, SF Chronicle, 11/14/95, C1.]

(I say it'll work. Never run out of disk space again, or do backups, or use obsolete utilities or application versions, or have trouble with installations, or worry about viruses, or have to upgrade your home box with faster chips or new audio/video cards. It's like connecting a terminal to a university mainframe, except that the university is now the whole world. Still, couldn't I have a _little_ private disk space on my own machine? Maybe a ZIP floppy?)

MacWay, or the Macintosh EvangeList, is an announcement list from Apple evangelist Guy Kawasaki, . Send a "subscribe macway your name" message to . [comp.sys.mac.advocacy, 11/11/95.]

("With all this horse manure, there's just got to be a pony in there somewhere." -- Social scientist Langdon Winner, about the Web. [Technology Review, 11/95, p. 66. EDUPAGE.])

Big Dreams is a monthly magazine about business as a journey to personal development. "Reading this regularly should be a part of any new employee's requirements." . [Robert Jacobson , 11/2/95.]

Business Strategies is a monthly newspaper for business owners and managers. . Topics include human resources, marketing, selling, time management, creativity, managing people, etc. [, newjour, 9/3/95.]

FinanceHub lists financial info of all kinds, especially venture capital and project financing resources. Over 6500 users connected to last month, after it was named an October TOP 5% site. FinanceHub is from John Bro, who is finishing graduate studies at UFlorida and starting InterSoft Solutions, or . [, 11/7/95.]

Small US businesses hurt by defense cutbacks can tap a new $1B loan guarantee program from DoD and the Small Business Administration. Loans are at 2.25%-2.75% over prime rate. Call 1-800-8-ASK-SBA for info about the Defense Loan and Technical Assistance program. [SJM, 11/10/95, 1C.]

("It's always easy to work wonders with somebody else's money. The trouble is that you constantly need a fresh supply of somebody elses." -- , com-priv, 5/25/93.)

UMAX Data Systems Inc. (Taiwan) has just licensed Apple's technology to make Mac clones adapted for Chinese applications. [SF Chronicle, 11/15/95, B3.]

Apple demonstrated a working model of Chinese Voice Recognition (CVR) at MacWorld Expo Asia 95 -- a full-blown dictation translating spoken Mandarin into printed Chinese characters in real time. [Andrew Tong , NewtNews, 11/13/95. Bill Park.] (Macs have always led in non-English computing. iNews says that the latest language kits from Apple's Claris are for Arabic, Hebrew, and Cyrillic.)

Min-Hung Liao of UBuffalo's Center for Cognitive Science has added Chinese-to-English text translation to the CASSIE program built on Stuart Shapiro's SNePS semantic-network processing system. The system translates a page at a time -- using context to disambiguate meaning -- and can answer questions about the texts. Translations may vary depending on what is in the knowledge base, and CASSIE corrects itself if it discovers that its assumptions were wrong. Ellen Goldbaum , 716-645-2626. [Peter M. Weiss , 11/11/95.]

(This threatens Lazlo's Chinese Relativity Axiom: "No matter how great your triumphs or how tragic your defeats -- approximately one billion Chinese couldn't care less." [TFTD-L, 7/13/95.])

News from UGent's Contrastive Grammar Research Group can be found in the quarterly CONTRAGRAM on . [, newjour, 9/13/95.]

The Free On-Line Dictionary of Computing (FOLDOC), including acronyms and jargon, is at . [WEBster, 6/27/95.]

Dragomir R. Radev is compiling a new Natural Language Processing FAQ, to be circulated monthly in comp.ai.nat-lang. Lots of good info there, but he's looking for more. Topics include an introduction to computational linguistics; accomplishments; schools; graduate programs; research labs; publications; discussion lists; newsgroups; associations; conferences; competitions; resource archives; books; machine translation; and WWW resources. Contact with suggestions, after retrieving or . [comp.ai, 11/7/95. David Joslin.]

TechWeb Direct lets you specify news preferences and then download articles (via dial-up) from NetGuide and 15 other CMP publications. Free during beta test. Download the client program from . [Alan Gatlin , Network News, 11/11/95.]

LIBRES, the quarterly, peer-reviewed Library and Information Science Research Electronic Journal is now on . [Keith Morgan , newjour, 10/25/95.]

H. Vernon Leighton compared the precision of four WWW indexing/search services, back in 5-6/95: Infoseek (free version), Lycos, Webcrawler, and WWWWorm. He found Lycos to be the best, with Infoseek nearly as good and usually faster. Webcrawler and WWWWorm were disappointing. Jumpstart, Nikos, and other "minor league" services may be similar, with little depth outside computer science topics. . [, PACS-L. IRLIST, 11/14/95.]

The Minerva engine from IBM can simultaneously search databases such as Oracle, Sybase, and Basic Plus hosted on varying hardware at multiple locations. It creates an "info-droid" for each dataset search, generating faster searches than Lycos and other competitors. Try it at , for WWW citation searches ranked by relevance. It gives somewhat different "hits" from other search engines. [Alan Gatlin , Network News, 11/11/95.]

New format: For the full announcement texts, members and trial subscribers may write to me for the Computists' Career Jobs (CCJ) distribution or for individual CCJ digests. (Group members may receive CCJ unless the purchaser requests otherwise.) We also have a weekly Applied Jobs (APJ) digest that is available to anyone. Computists who are unemployed or subscribing to APJ will be sent CCJ by default.

Kent State (OH): chairperson for Mathematics and CS.

Stanford/CS: assistant professor in NL, HCI, theory, or software systems.

UCentral Florida (Orlando): two tenure-track assistant professors in AI (NLU, knowledge acquisition, and cognitive modeling), DB, architecture, systems, etc.

Indiana University-Bloomington: CogSci and CS opening in NN modeling, logic, reasoning, representation, language and discourse, robotics, computational vision and speech, machine learning, HCI, or other area.

North Carolina A&T State University (Greensboro): DBMS, object-oriented software engineering, and AI.

UMissouri-Rolla: assistant professor in distributed files and databases and software engineering for scientific computing, intelligent systems, etc.

JPL's AI Group and Machine Learning Systems Group (Pasadena): BS/MS/PhD programmers and scientists in planning/scheduling, intelligent systems monitoring/diagnosis, machine learning/data mining, and pattern recognition/image understanding.

[Lockheed Martin]: programmers and data analysts to develop data mining software for scientific databases. Machine learning, statistics, SAS, deductive DB, visualization, Prolog, RDBMS.

BHASHA (Wayne, PA): Prolog/Lisp software engineers with experience in NLP, AI, IR, text processing, compiler development, or RDB.

EuroSoft Inc. (Austin, TX): PhD NLP/AI R&D programmer.

Kurzweil Applied Intelligence, Inc. (Waltham, MA): PhD computational linguist to develop feature-structure task grammars for verbal control of Windows software. "Systems must fail in comprehensible ways."

An OH company: experienced BS/MS HW/SW engineer to develop IR/UV/magnetic NN/fuzzy logic classifiers for currency.

ULondon's Royal Holloway: a CS lecturer, especially in probabilistic inference, computational learning, formal methods, or information security.

UStrathclyde (Glasgow): researchers with experience in vehicle routing, search techniques, constraint satisfaction, and Ilog Solver.

Universitat des Saarlandes at Saarbrucken, Programming Systems Lab: 1/96 openings for a researcher in constraint grammars and another to work on the Oz concurrent constraint language.

Same deal, but also available to non-Computists: Write to me for the Research Software (RSW) distribution or for any single RSW digest. (I'll change the name to Computists' Research Software (CRS) Digest starting 1/1/96. Similarly, APJ will become Computists' Applied Jobs (CAJ) Digest.) This week's software listings include:

Egret multiclient, multiserver, multi-agent CSCW Platform.

ILU multilanguage object interface system.

wxWindows free multiplatform GUI class library.

Neural Lab v2.5 for DOS.

Overcoming Depression automated psychotherapy program.

PlainTalk 1.4.1 speech recognition XFCN and web site.

Grail 0.2 browser, with Python/Tk source code.

MicroEMACS 3.12 for Windows.

MOBAL 3.0b knowledge-acquisition and machine learning system.

SciE18 directory of scientific shareware/freeware for DOS.

SciV18 directory of scientific shareware/freeware producers.

Open Inventor 2.0.2 software development kit for WIN32.

OpenDoc 1.0 and the OpenDoc Software Development Kit for the Mac.

Glimpse 3.0 free Unix indexing and file query system.

PLOTTER v7.4 data plotting and analysis program for DOS.

CurveExpert 1.1 curve-fitting with nonlinear regression and splines.

NetBots 0.2 networked X11 game.

The History of Mathematics website includes 200 detailed biographies (most with pictures), 800 lesser biographies, and many other entries and links. . [WEBster, 6/27/95.]

"Math-Net Links to the Mathematical World" is a collection of about 700 resources for mathematics and scientific computing. , collected by Joachim Luegger of the Konrad-Zuse-Zentrum fuer Informationstechnik Berlin (ZIB). [Wolfram Schneider , de.sci.mathematik, 10/15/95.]

The Decision Support Systems Research Resources website is . Software, companies, university links, faculty directory, professional associations, online newsletters and journals, etc. Dan Power . [INFOSYS, 11/13/95. Frank Swift.]

Michael Ley's bibliography server for database systems and logic programming lists tables of contents for major journals and proceedings, plus an author index and links to many of the authors' home pages. 17,000 papers by 16,000 authors. , or start on the ACM SIGMOD WWW server . [, dbworld, 7/15/95.]

Parallel Performance Group (Sedona, AZ) offers 18 free email newsletters on high-tech software and applications of parallel processing. Write to for a list. . [comp.ai, 11/7/95. Ken Barker.]

InterStat is a site for PDF articles on statistical research and innovative statistical methods. . [, newjour, 8/18/95.]

DNA computers and molecular computation are the subject of . Several papers are available for download. [Chuck Morefield , 9/29/95.]

Elsevier's BioSystems journal is being offered to Evolutionary Programming Society members for $75, a $500 discount. Society membership is $40/year ($10 for students), to Bill Porto . BioSystems: the J. of Biological and Information Processing Sciences -- now in Vol. 35/36 -- recently added evolutionary computation to its coverage. Other topics include self-organizing systems, molecular recognition and computing, and evolutionary systems. The assoc. editor for computational models is David B. Fogel . [comp.ai.genetic, 10/31/95. Yan Hui.]

Educom VP Carol Twigg says that if industry would tell educators what kind of "product" they want, they could contract with educational institutions to obtain it. Distance learning schools are the most tightly coupled to community, industry, and student needs. [Multimedia Today, 10/95, p. 10. EDUPAGE.]

Harvard's John Kotter asks "Why should business schools offer a two-year 'terminal' degree to people at age 25? Why not a one-year program at 25 and a month-long program at 28, 31, 34, and so forth?" The continuing education need not be tied to campuses or classrooms. [The Futurist, 11/95, p. 27. INNOVATION. Chuck Morefield.] (Maybe the continuing education would look like our Communique!)

"In a one-room schoolhouse, the teacher taught English. On a nationwide net there is demand for Sanskrit, too. Knowledge workers -- not just teachers but bankers, engineers, insurers, translators and countless others -- can now sell skills nationwide or beyond." -- Peter Huber. [comp.society.futures, 10/31/95.] (Huber's essays are on .)

The acronym hasn't changed, but FASE is now the electronic "Forum for Advancing Software engineering Education". (It was the Forum for Academic Software Engineering, but now stresses education.) Articles about corporate and government training can be sent to Kathy Beckman ; other topics go to Keith Pierce or to . [FASE, 11/10/95.]

"KMi Stadium" is a Java-based experimental forum for multimedia "talk radio with graphics" events with 100K participants or more. (This requires a hierarchy of moderators to field audience questions and comments. Contact Adam Freeman to volunteer.) KMi Stadium is from the Open University's new Knowledge Media Institute. A prototype non-Java version is at . Obtain the RealAudio player from to listen to the KMi Stadium audio channel. [Marc Eisenstadt , comp.ai, 11/8/95. David Joslin.] (Guest speakers have been from the leading-edge communications community, which is nicely recursive.)

"The Outer Limits" TV show will soon be the object of a 5,000-player game from MGM Interactive and Worlds Inc. [Broadcasting & Cable, 10/23/95, p. 76. EDUPAGE.]

Music Encoding is a new mailing list for music representation and encoding: manuscripts, sound recordings, notional and logical representations, NIFF (Notation Interchange File Format), SMDL (Standard Music Description Language), whatever. Send a "subscribe" subject line to . [James K. Tauber , comp.music, 10/31/95.]

"New Voices, New Visions" is an annual international artistic competition in digital media sponsored by Interval Research Corp. and The Voyager Company. Any subject, any computer platform, any format. Three $5K awards are given each year. or info@nvnv.org, 415-855-0788 Fax. [Sally Rosenthal , Stanford PCD seminar announcement, 11/13/95. Bill Park.] (Rosenthal's talk will be 11/17/95, 12:30-2:00pm, Skilling Auditorium.)

Maria Zemankova has been asked to serve for a year as deputy division director (DDD) for NSF/CISE's Information, Robotics and Intelligent Systems (IRIS), under Y.T. Chen. Her Database and Expert Systems (DBES) program will be managed by Dr. Barbara Blaustein , 703-306-1926, 703-306-0599 Fax. [, IRLIST, 11/14/95.]

David Lloyd-Jones has just taken over as moderator of sci.econ.research, which he intends to shape into a center of excellence on the net. He's looking for good empirical reports (rather than "methodological stuff"). "Findings are product; methodology is overhead." Write to to participate. [, 11/8/95.] (David built the first 400 coin laundries in Japan, between 1972 and 1984. Then he went into manufacturing aftermarket auto brake parts, but the timing was wrong -- too much competition from China.)

-- Ken