Professional Association

American Academy of Family Physicians

Submitted by Anonymous on Thu, 11/08/2007 - 20:19.

URL:

http://www.aafp.org/

Author:

American Academy of Family Physicians

Excerpt:

The CDC asked the AAFP on Sept. 3 to remind FPs to be vigilant in considering West Nile virus infection in pregnant women presenting with unexplained fever and/or neurologic illness in areas where West Nile transmission is occurring.

Annotation:

Founded in 1947, the American Academy of Family Physicians is the national association of family doctors. It is one of the largest national medical organizations, with more than 89,400 members. This is the organization's main Web site, and it contains information for members, the general public and medical students. It also has a series of governmental (state and federal) policy papers. Currently (Apirl 2004) there is no history of medicine on the site.

Atomic Veterans History Project

Submitted by Anonymous on Thu, 11/08/2007 - 20:19.

URL:

http://www.aracnet.com/~pdxavets/

Author:

Atomic Veterans History Project

Excerpt:

The Atomic Veterans History Project contains over 600 personal narratives about the military duties and memories of US Servicemen who witnessed these atomic and hydrogen weapons tests. Many veterans have sent photos, certificates and newspaper articles which we have added. There are over 500 photos from the recently declassified DOE atomic test films. Over 2500 files (stories, pictures and documents) are posted.

Annotation:

This site has been established by the National Association of Atomic Veterans to provide an online archive of personal accounts of American veterans who served in divisions that were exposed to the effects of atomic weaponry. There are over 400 personal accounts from those who were there at Hiroshima, Nagasaki and military tests of atomic bombs from 1946 to 1962. There are also over 500 photographs from these servicemen and from declassified military archives. These images include the devastation of the Japanese cities in the immediate aftermath of the bombs and the activities of American servicemen in the testing and clean-up of atmospheric (above-ground) weapons testing. The site is also used to gather information about the subsequent medical effects of exposure to high-level radiation during these military exercises.

Chemsoc - The Chemistry Societies Network

Submitted by Anonymous on Thu, 11/08/2007 - 20:19.

URL:

http://www.chemsoc.org/index.htm

Author:

The Chemistry Societies Network

Excerpt:

Welcome to chemsoc - a brand new site for chemists and the home of the RSC's chemistry societies' electronic network. The site provides interesting features and useful services for the chemistry community. The information you find has been made available by various national chemistry societies for dissemination on a single site. Currently around 30 such societies are providing varying levels of information on chemsoc.

Annotation:

Website maintained by the Royal Society of Chemistry containing a variety of pages of potential interest to researchers ans students alike. An interactive timeline provides an interesting overview of scientific events and discoveries since the Big Bang. They also feature archives of their webzine "chembytes," as well as exhibition of exemplary chemistry projects. Links to a variety of sites, including the Royal Society of Chemistry's Library and Information Centre are made.

Jean Baptist Porta

Submitted by Anonymous on Thu, 11/08/2007 - 20:19.

URL:

http://members.tscnet.com/pages/omard1/jportat2.html

Author:

Scott Lincoln

Excerpt:

Giambattista della (John Baptist) Porta (1535-1615), was a Neapolitan scholar of notable ability who had devoted great attention to the study of natural and physical science. Porta visited most of his known world to gather and perfect the knowledge utilized in his writings. His first work, "Magia Naturalis"- "Natural Magick" was first published in 1558 in "four" books (written, according to the author, "Porta, " when he was fifteen years old, - see "Preface To The Reader" in "Natural Magick"). It was later expanded to twenty books compended into one volume in 1584. In this form the book had a great vogue, being translated from the original Latin into the principal European languages, and republished in the Latin edition in many places for a hundred years. The version presented here is the final compendium of his life's work, completed when he was fifty years old, transcribed from a original 1658 English translation.

Annotation:

John Baptist Porta (1535-1615), also known as Giambattista della Porta, was an early modern natural philosopher from Naples. This site by an amateur historian brings together short biographies (generally culled from other sites and works like the Encyclopedia Britannica) as well as primary source material on Porta available in other locations on the Web. Porta was best known for his 1558 book entitled "Natural Magic" (Magia Naturalis), which used an experimental method to describe magnetism and other elements of the physical and chemical sciences. He was also interested in the "occult" sciences and alchemy. This site is best for those with no knowledge of Porta looking for a basic overview and excerpts of his work. Several paintings and drawings of Porta enhance the site.

MouseSite

Submitted by Anonymous on Thu, 11/08/2007 - 20:19.

URL:

http://sloan.stanford.edu/MouseSite

Excerpt:

WELCOME to the MouseSite, a resource for exploring the history of human computer interaction beginning with the pioneering work of Douglas Engelbart and his colleagues at Stanford Research Institute in the 1960s.
As a graduate student in electrical engineering at UC Berkeley after World War II Doug Engelbart began to imagine ways in which all sorts of information could be displayed on the screens of cathode ray tubes like the ones he had used as a radar technician during the war, and he dreamed of "flying" through a variety of information spaces.

Annotation:

This wide-ranging site explores the history of many of the technologies that form the basis of modern personal computing. Many of these advances came from the pioneering work of Douglas C. Englebart and his colleagues at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) in Menlo Park, California in the 1960s. Using primary sources from Englebart and others this site recounts the story of an innovative decade. The computer mouse, the notion of "windows" and the graphical interface associated with them.

Automatic Speech Synthesis & Recognition

Submitted by Anonymous on Thu, 11/08/2007 - 20:19.

URL:

http://www.ieee.org/organizations/history_center/sloan/ASSR/assr_index.html

Excerpt:

Mechanical devices to achieve speech synthesis were conceived of in the realm of fiction, and first devised in the early 19th century. The invention of the telephone in the late 19th century, and the subsequent efforts to reduce the bandwidth requirements of transmitting voice, led back to the idea. In the 1930s, the telephone engineers at Bell Labs developed the famous Voder, a speech synthesizer that was unveiled to the public to great fanfare at the 1939 World’s Fair, but that required a skilled human operator.
Fully automatic speech synthesis came in the early 1960s, with the invention of new automatic coding schemes, such as Adaptive Predictive Coding (APC). With those new techniques in hand, the Bell Labs engineers again turned their attention to speech synthesis. By the late 1960s they had developed a system for internal use in the telephone system, a machine that read wiring instructions to Western Electric telephone wirers, who could then keep eyes and hands on their work. Further progress led to the introduction, in 1976, of the Kurzweil Reading Machine which for the first time allowed the blind to "read" plain text as opposed to Braille. By 1978, the technology was so well established and inexpensive to produce that it could be introduced in a toy, Texas Instruments’ Speak-and-Spell. Thus, the development of this important technology from inception until fruition took about 15 years, involved practitioners from various disciplines, most of whom are still alive, and had a far-reaching impact on other technologies and, through them, society as a whole.

Annotation:

This site was established to record the history of artificial voice machines, software and research. Most notably, the site contains numerous oral history accounts by engineers and programmers who developed this field in the second half of the twentieth century, and it is looking to add more of these recollections online. A timeline provides an outline of the major advances in automatic speech synthesis and recognition, and visitors are asked to add their historical notes, photographs and audio clips from early voice technologies. The site maintains an extensive list of links to institutes of higher education and companies that have been at the forefront of artificial speech research and development. Short biographical outlines of important figures are also available, as are citations to seminal papers and reviews from this area of electrical engineering and computer science.

History of Atmospheric General Circulation Models

Submitted by Anonymous on Thu, 11/08/2007 - 20:19.

URL:

http://www.aip.org/history/sloan/gcm/intro.html

Author:

Center for the History of Physics

Excerpt:

This Web site offers a brief history of atmospheric general circulation models from the 1940s to the early 1990s. It is also a forum for expanding our knowledge and understanding of that history, by collecting documentation and welcoming commentary. The site focuses on the following aspects of general circulation modeling:
Key scientific changes
Institutions (modeling groups)
Historical relationships among models and modeling groups
Political context: emergence of global atmospheric issues (greenhouse effect)

Annotation:

The American Institute of Physics (AIP) has produced and maintained this site, examining the history of how physicists, meteorologists and other scientists have worked to create models of the Earth's atmosphere in an effort to understand large-scale circulation patterns and predict future weather events. The site's five historical essays trace modeling from the early 1920s through to the present day, and include references to printed material on the subject. There is an innovative "family tree" showing the development and interrelationships between various modeling theories and methods. Physicists and others who participated in the research and use of these models and their associated technologies are asked to email the AIP with their memories of the evolution of this field. It is also possible to send in other archival material, such as photographs and data, relating to the history of atmospheric general circulation models. A Sloan Foundation project.

Electric Vehicle History Online Archive

Submitted by Anonymous on Thu, 11/08/2007 - 20:19.

URL:

http://sloan.stanford.edu/evonline/

Excerpt:

Welcome to the history of electric vehicles site, the first online archive created to encourage electric vehicle enthusiasts to help preserve the recent history of electric vehicles. This project offers a unique opportunity for electric car owners, drivers, and enthusiasts to chronicle their own history by adding to an online archive. Drivers and owners of electric vehicles can contribute to the growing online archive, and people interested in the history of technology can use this site to learn about the history of an emerging technology. Sponsored by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, this site is a non-profit historical research project intended solely for non-commercial use.

Annotation:

This site examines the history of vehicles (mostly automobiles) powered by electricity rather than by an internal combustion engine. Providing an overview of the technology and its development, this site includes several recent articles on electric vehicles as well as important historical pieces. Most significantly, the site encourages current and former owners and drivers of electric vehicles to contribute their recollections to a lasting archive. That growing archive contains stories from the early days of electric-powered vehicles from engineers, early adopters and others involved with their production and use. The site is useful for understanding the goals, attitudes, successes and failures of current and former electric vehicle advocates.

Eyewitness: Finite Element Method

Submitted by Anonymous on Thu, 11/08/2007 - 20:19.

URL:

http://www.asme.org/eyewitness/fem/femintro.html

Excerpt:

Welcome to the FEM Eyewitness site
The Eyewitness Project is an on-line catalyst, funded by the Alfred P Sloan Foundation. On these pages, we have poked at a few points and are standing back to listen to those who have made it happen. On-line gathering of information offers unprecedented opportunities for sharing and disseminating information. Part of our task is making the interaction easy for participants. The other part is encouraging the stories and reminiscences and, hopefully, identifying and locating significant records and reports, which demonstrate the evolution of specific areas of technology.

Annotation:

This site, produced by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, displays a timeline of events ocurring between 1941 and the present day relating to the finite element method, a powerful and important computational scheme. People who were involved in the research and application of the finite element method are asked to add their memories to the timeline. The site also reproduces a bibliography of books and monographs on the finite element method published by A. K. Noor in ASME Applied Mechanics Review in 1991.

Digital Audio Recording

Submitted by Anonymous on Thu, 11/08/2007 - 20:19.

URL:

http://www.ieee.org/organizations/history_center/sloan/DAR/dar_index.html

Excerpt:

The use of digital encoding in telecommunications and the other advances in DSP (digital signal processing), such as in speech synthesis, led to the use of DSP in recording. In 1972 Nippon Columbia began to digitally master recordings, and in the same year the BBC began using pulse code modulation for high-quality sound distribution in radio and television and in its studios began using an 8-track digital audio recorder with error correction. By 1975, it was demonstrated that DSP could improve old recordings (in the first case, by engineer Tom Stockham, historical recordings of Enrico Caruso), and digital audio tapes began to be widely adopted by audio engineers. Music synthesizers incorporating digital recording also began to proliferate. But then the technology took an interesting turn.

Annotation:

The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) has established this site to record the history of digital methods of sound recording and playing, the technology behind compact discs and digital audio tape. A brief historical essay prefaces the site, and a timeline beginning in the late 1950s and running up to the present day details the milestones in the technology. An extensive bibliography of digital recording accompanies the essay and timeline, as does an international list of educational institutions involved with the original (and continuing) research in the field. In addition, there are links on the site to other histories of the compact disc, CD-ROM and recording technology in general. The distinguishing feature of this site is its interest in collecting (via input forms) the personal recollections of those who worked on the research and development of digital audio recording and its associated technologies. Visiting engineers are asked to submit photographs, audio clips and other memorabilia to the site for its historical archive.