Congress and the President have signed off on funding of numerous cabinet departments and agencies. Defense R&D was cut by 2%. The NIST Advanced Technology Program got $225M, despite an earlier Senate vote of just $60M. NIST also gets $268M for its laboratory research programs. [Robert L. Park, WHAT'S NEW, 10/4/96.]

An independent analysis of 30 House science bills found that twice as many Democrats as Republicans voted in support of science. [Science Watch, Inc. Robert L. Park, WHAT'S NEW, 10/4/96.] (This lopsided result is considered surprising and controversial.)

Florida is planning to offer tax credits and a $15M cash incentive fund to boost its semiconductor industry. The cash will be used in matching grants at state universities. [Enterprise Florida. WSJ, 10/2/96, F1. EDUPAGE.] (If you've got a business plan that would create jobs and tax revenue, talk to state agencies about creative financing.)

Microsoft is giving its ActiveX file-linking technology to the Open Group (Cambridge, MA), which should encourage more developers to build ActiveX modules for rapid construction of custom applications. CORBA is a competing technology, backed by Oracle and Netscape. [WSJ, 10/2/96, B1. EDUPAGE.] (Or one could use Frontier scripting, or Apple's solutions. Pipes? Shell scripts? Unix is doomed, although it won't die out for decades.)

Apple's System 7.5.5 Update will be the final System 7 release for the 16-bit Macs: the Plus, SE, Classic, Portable, PowerBook 100, SE FDHD, SE/30, LC, II, IIx, and IIcx. Future releases will require 32-bit addressing. [TidBITS, 9/9/96.] (System 7.5.4 was skipped, due to last-minute problems with a few Macs.)

Netscape's next release of Navigator will include group collaboration, plus multimedia email and a Web page editor. [BW, 10/7/96, p. 34. EDUPAGE.] (The groupware feature may be an attack on Lotus Notes, although Notes has other features such as database replication.)

The International Neural Network Society (INNS) is canceling its 1997 meeting in Boston (WCNN'97), and will instead co-sponsor the IEEE neural network conference in Houston (ICNN'97) on 6/9-12. Papers must be submitted by 11/15/96 (moved up from 1/15/97). . [Paolo Gaudiano , comp.ai.neural-nets, 10/3/96.] (This would seem to ease a split that took place several years ago.)

Markus Roskothen has been looking for links to neural-network Java applets. What he's found so far: Collections of AI applets at and ; a very nice character recognition application at ; and a nice natural-gas application at . [, comp.ai.neural-nets, 9/25/96.]

The S*i*ftware website offers notes on software for data mining and knowledge discovery in databases, including public-domain, research, and commercial systems. . [Bill Park , 8/30/96.]

Michael Trick has posted about 600 operations research (OR) links to . [, sci.op-research, 9/8/96. David Joslin.]

Need to solve a tough integral? The Integrator is a Mathematica-based service from Wolfram Research, hosted on an HP-supplied computer. . [Newsweek, 9/30/96, p. 12.]

For a comprehensive list of 3D engines see . You can search by platform, source code availability, etc. [Jerry Whitnell , comp.sys.mac.programmer.codewarrior, 8/27/96. Bill Park.]

3DSite is a graphics "information hub" and market, including a job board. . [, net-hap, 4/29/96.]

To learn about progressive JPEG image format and tools, see . [, net-hap, 7/29/96.]

Possibly an urban legend, but there's a message circulating about a phone scam offering a free Corel Office Suite. You're asked what kind of computer you have and when you'll be home to accept the shipment. Guess what? They show up when you're NOT home and ship out your hardware. The best defense is to tell them you don't have a computer. [Lily Laws , 10/8/96.] (Or you could coordinate with the police to catch thieves.)

I previously mentioned scammers tricking people into calling 809-area numbers in the Virgin Islands. A variant on that con game is a brief email message stating that "Unless you pay off your balance in full, you will be taken to court. ... Call Mr. ... at +1 (809) ... if you wish to discuss the matter." Callers get a recorded message and a $25 phone charge. [Matthew Dillon, best.com, 10/4/96.] (And another variant is a phone call saying that your CEO, or whoever might be traveling, is being held by the police in some far-away place. Anyone who returns the call is likely to get an incoherent response in broken English that delays recognition of the scam and extends the call length.)

The MIT Media Laboratory and the Computer Museum (Boston): lead software developer for The Virtual Fishtank alife simulation.

UNew Hampshire/CS: two faculty openings.

Iowa State U. (Ames): prof. in intelligent agents, robotics, computational biology, multimedia, or other experimental systems.

Virginia Tech (Blacksburg): two profs. in UI tools, networked information, or problem-solving environments.

Clemson U. (Clemson, SC): ECE prof. in evolutionary computing or in architectures, networks, etc.

Duke U./CS (Durham, NC): prof. of experimental systems.

North Carolina State U. (Raleigh): prof. of workflow management and data mining.

National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA; UIllinois Urbana-Champaign): MS/PhD sr. VR/visualization research programmers.

NASA Ames/IMG (Mountain View): VR/visualization/robotics/AI programmer to develop remote robotic interfaces.

Metrica, Inc. (Johnson Space Center, Houston, TX): developers for an intelligent robot, plus control and stereo vision research.

BGW (Golden, CO): MS/PhD sr. DSP engineer in adaptive signal processing, NN, FL, GA, and AI expert systems for stochastic system identification, spectral estimation, etc.

Metaphor Information Systems (Palo Alto): BS/MS/PhD handwriting and character recognition developer.

Empirical Media Corp. (Pittsburgh): research scientist in IR, filtering, ML, DB, and agent-based systems.

Thomson Technology Labs (Rockville, MD): BS research engineer for IR/NLP.

UWestern Ontario (London, Ontario): two prof. of CS, one in SE.

UBern (Switzerland): 2-year postdoc in neuromorphic perception via multisensor fusion.

UWaikato (NZ): postdoc in temporal logic programming.

I've been looking for ways to advertise our website, , and came up with the following -- mostly from Gleason Sackman's Net-Happenings list for the past six months. (Site counts are therefore probably out of date.) The "Postmaster" service is generally considered best for commercial website announcements, but charges a hefty fee. Submit-It! is one of the first and best of the free announcement services, but only serves the major directory services and search engines.

101 A Internet Promotion Service . Submission to 50 directories.

1 2 3 RegisterMe! -- submission to 100 sites, updated every 6 months.

@Submit! -- free submission to over 30 search engines.

A1 Web Page Promotion Services -- searchable directory of 670 submission sites.

AAA Internet Search Engine & Directory Links -- hundreds of submission links.

Absolute Submission .

Advertising Secrets of Successful Businesses -- marketing tips and links.

AutoReg Auto Registration of Web Sites .

Chuck's Free for All Link Page Submit Form .

CNC Technology -- Asia Pacific directory and publicity tips.

Commercial Directory -- thousands of promotional links. (Customers only?)

comp.infosystems.www.announce -- Usenet newsgroup for site announcements.

Crafters Page -- promotional tips.

ENTITY Global Site Submission -- free submission to 125 sites.

FAQ: How to Announce your Web Site .

Free For All Links .

FreeLinks -- lists free announcement sites.

Free Pointers for Your Home Page .

Go Net-Wide -- links to hundreds of submission sites.

HOW THE WEB WAS WON: A Self-Starter's Guide to Setting Up A Web Site .

How to Create, Publish and Promote a Web Page -- step-by-step instructions.

How to Promote Your Web Site -- marketing tips.

How to Publicize a Web Site over the Internet .

Instant Web Page Promoter .

Internet Advertising and Promotion Resource Directory -- submission to over 200 advertising locations.

The Internet Confederacy -- submits to more than 27 search engines.

Internet Link Exchange -- thousands of places to list your website.

Internet Marketing Tips -- info and a submission form.

Internet Secretary -- submits to hundreds of search engines.

Launch-it! (From the America's Business Funding Directory page) -- submits to 210 sites.

Launch Pad! -- submission to up to 500 sites. (Fee-based.)

LINKER page -- web publicity tips, links, and email discussion list.

The Marketing Resource Center -- EXPOSE area has links to over 500 submission pages (directories and awards). Also web tools, tutorials, and business software.

Netpost -- tailored submissions, for a fee.

Plug! .

Pointers to Pointers -- pointers to announcement sites.

Postmaster -- submissions to 417 sites and 1337 editors of publications. A "deep submission" option will submit each of your subpages individually. (Only a few spiders will search your pages automatically, and they may take up to six months to get around to it.)

Promote Your Web Site -- announce at "over 10,000 locations."

Promoting Your Page -- self-promotion links and tips.

PROMOTE-IT -- submission to 70 directories.

Publicizing Your Site .

Response-Net -- free submission to over 200 directories.

Search Mania! -- easy submission to over 50 sites.

Selong Submit Links Page -- list of submission pages.

SHOTGUN! -- submits to 58 major directories.

Site Promoter -- advertising tips.

SubmitAll -- more comprehensive than Submit-It.

Submit It! -- submits to Yahoo, Starting Point, WebCrawler, EINet Galaxy, Lycos, Harvest Broker, What's New Too! Infoseek, Whole Internet Catalog, Open Text Web Index, World Wide Web Worm, Apollo, Jump Station, New Rider's WWW Yellow Pages, The YellowPages.com, Netcenter, NIKOS, Pronet, Project DA-CLOD, etc. 2-4 week delay.

Submit It! Web Promotion Tips .

Submit URL -- promotional resources.

Super Mega Link -- free submission, search engines, etc.

SWWWAP! -- target free ads by site category, region, and time of day.

THE WEBLINK PUBLISHING PAGE .

WebMax -- free submissions to over 107 sites.

Web Point .

Web Promotion -- submission site.

WEB SITE PROMOTION NEWSLETTER -- tips plus links to free submission sites.

WebStep TOP 100 -- list of 100 best submission sites.

Weekly Web Internet Services -- promotional resources and URL submittal form.

WordOut -- submission site.

wURLd Presence -- another free registration service.

-- over 1000 places to submit your web pages.

-- Ken