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Other
Resources
The following resource list is extremely
idiosyncratic. It is for graduate students and faculty in the
AU
Economics Department, and it includes a few leisure oriented
resources. Perhaps the most useful are a site where you can
register to avoid unwanted email, remove
your phone and address info from the Web, a site with hints
on ending spamming, a FAQ on email
filters, and a site where you can
make yourself anonymous. If you are interested in using computers
in the classroom, check out
Computers in Higher Education Economic Review It is increasingly
useful to pay attention to the nuances of copyright law. Try
10 Big Myths About Copyright Explained, A
Brief Intro to Copyright and its links, including
Copyright FAQ which Goffe notes "has not been updated in awhile,
but other than the above mentioned law, little change since then".
Finally, please support Project
Gutenberg. You might also like to get the exact time, using
YATS32
for Win95 or, for Win3.1,
ACS. AU students will want to use US
Naval Observatory as their time server. You can find more
info at the University
of Delaware Time Page If you ever get an email message about
"internet computer viruses", the first thing you should do is
consult the
Department of Energy Computer Incident Advisory Capability
or http://kumite.com/myths/.
Other resources include
Symantec Anti Virus Research Center | Dr.
Solomons Hoax Page | The
Urban Legends Web Site |
The Mining Company's Urban Legends and Folklore Urban
Legends Reference Pages | Datafellows
Hoax Warnings. Resources on evaluating sources: Evaluating
Internet Research Sources |
Evaluation of Information Sources | Bibliography
on Evaluating Internet Resources And perhaps every economist
should look at some jokes
about economists.
Other Economics Related Links
Organizations Involved in Economic Policy
U.S. Government
Local Government
General Information about the Washington, D.C. metro area
Finance Material
on the Internet
Cellular
Automata
Cultural Evolution
Activism
TRAVEL: You can book flights with LowestFare.com,
PC Travel, Internet Travel Network, or Wholesale Travel Center.
Expedia will comparison shop for you. If you register on their web
sites, some airlines will email their bargain fares (USAir, Continental,
TWA, American). You have to check El Al and Cathay, and Northwest
Airlines yourself. Locally, Travel-On offers recordings of the weeks
local reduced fare opportunities at 301.585.7131. Most airlines
have toll free numbers. To check bumping statistics, it seems you
have to leave the net: call the US Dept of Transportation at 202.366.2220.
You may also wish to consider courier travel, which appears to be
available only by membership (e.g., WCA). Consider reading Air Courier
Bargains by Kelly Monaghan. If you are traveling somewhere potentially
dangerous, check the U. S. State Department's Travel
Warnings and Consular Information Sheets. Weather information
is available via The Weather Channel, The National Weather Service,
CNN Weather, and WeatherNet. For a general resource page , see The
Air Travel Handbook. General travel information is offered by Travel
Web, which offers bookings at 8000 hotels. Some hotels can be "previewed"
on Travel Wiz. You can review restaurants and sometimes make reservations
on the Dining Out on the Web page. It is also possible to arrange
automobile rentals.
ODDS AND ENDS
Cars
Art
I have not actively looked for art, but there is a lot out there.
I stumbled across the following: ArtStar
| Mark Harden's Artchive |
National Gallery of Art | National
Museum of Women in the Arts | Rodin
Museum | Dali
Museum | and the Vatican Library.
And don't miss
The Psychedelic 60s.
Music
There is much more out there, of course.
Fave Raves
MP3
MP3 is the Part 3 of the approved MPEG-1 standard of the Motion
Picture Experts Group. It is an audio compression standard that
gives very good sounding audio in files (.mp3 files) about 1/12
the size of the corresponding CD tracks (.cda files). To participate
in the MP3 explosion, first get an MP3 player. Winamp
is apparently the most popular, but I like Sonique.
Next get music. The search engines mp3.lycos.com,
www.audiofind.com, www.audioseek.com,
www.palavista.com often lead
to dead ends, so start at www.scour.net
or www.listen.com, which have
limited but very reliable archives of legal music. You can also
try the newsgroup alt.binaries.sounds.mp3.requests.
To get music on your computer from your own CDs, you need a CD ``ripper''.
If you are willing to sacrifice some speed for accuracy, pick Andre
Wiethoff's excellent and (except for a postcard) free EAC.
(Popular alternatives are Musicmatch 4.0 (at www.musicmatch.com)
and especially Real Audio's Real Jukebox.) Rippers typically produce
.wav files from the .cda files on you music CDs. To produce MP3
files, you need an MP3 encoder program such as Tord
Jansson's free and excellent BladeEnc. Suppose
you have downloaded and installed Sonique, downloaded and unzipped
EAC, and downloaded and unzipped the BladeEnc.exe and bladeenc.dll
files (don't miss that last one). I'll assume you put everything
in a folder called MP3, except perhaps the Sonique installation.
Stick a CD in your drive. Sonique will pop up (unless you foolishly
told it not to be your default player), but close it for now. Double-click
Eac.exe to start your exact audio copy. You should see the track
list from your CD in the EAC window. From the menu, pick EAC, Compression
options and under Wave Format choose BladeEnc. Under Sample Format,
choose your quality. Many people use 128kbit/s, but 160 is better
and not all that much bigger. (Right now I like 256kbit/s.) While
you are at it, I recommend checking ``Do not write WAV header to
file'' so that you can change the default file extension to .mp3.
(Otherwise, after you've made your copy, you'll have to change the
extension to .mp3 by hand.) Click OK and then highlight the tracks
you want to copy. Finally pick Action, Copy Selected Tracks. The
tracks will take much longer to copy than they do to play. Suppose
after copying the first track, you open Explorer and find Track01.mp3
waiting for you on your hard drive. Now you can just double-click
it, and Sonique will start playing your new MP3 file! You can also
play Internet radio. First download MP3spy. Once loaded, MP3spy
will arrange Internet radio stations by genre and let you know what
song is playing, how many people are listening and the quality of
the transmission.
A Few Composers
Books
You can buy books at the wonderful Amazon.com
Books. Other big sites include Powells,
Barnes & Nobel
and Simon & Schuster
Super Site. Comparison shop using BookPrice
or Best Book Buys, or do extensive search on the
BookSearchEngine metasite
and search engine. Also see Laissez
Faire Books for inexpensive, pro-market texts. You can also
find antiquarian and out-of-print books on the Web:
Advanced Book Exchange,
Antiquarian BookWorm, bibliofind,
Booksearch Online,
Interloc, ABAA-booknet,
Bibliocity. Finally (or
perhaps firstly) one-stop comparison shopping for your books is
offered by Acses.
Software
You can buy software at Cyberian
Outpost or Software Net.
You can buy wine at the Virtual
Vinyard, lots of stuff at Shoppers
Advantage, and auction items at Live
Online Auction House.
Film
Health Info
Two metasites are Hardin
Meta Directory of Internet Health Sources and Medicatl
Matrix. A few specific sites are
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[phone]
202-885-3770
[fax] 202-885-3790
econ@american.edu
Copyright
© American University. All rights reserved.
Updated: 10/15/2004
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Department
of Economics, American University, Roper Hall 105
4400 Massachusetts Ave., NW, Washington, DC 20016-8029 |
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