Citation
Andrew, A.M. (1998), "Science on the Web: A Connoisseur’s Guide to over 500 of the Best, Most Useful, and Most Fun Science Websites", Kybernetes, Vol. 27 No. 1, pp. 105-106. https://doi.org/10.1108/k.1998.27.1.105.4
Publisher
:Emerald Group Publishing Limited
As the title indicates, this is a guide to a great many useful Websites. It is a valuable supplement to sources such as this journal’s Internet Commentary and the various sources such as the Internet Tourbus periodically referred to there. Such sources are of course more selective but their rate of announcement of sites is a trickle compared to the deluge presented here. As the author puts it, he has “endeavoured to provide a guide to the most useful and informationally rich resources for scientists on the Web”. He claims to have scoured the various Web information options in a range of scientific disciplines and to have cut out the shallow and trivial in favour of the deep and meaningful.
The author has gone a long way towards achieving his stated aims, though of course the range of topics and ramifications coming under the general heading of “science” is so wide that the selections must inevitably be somewhat arbitrary. This does not detract from the value of the work, since the nature of the Web is such that a user should expect to “browse” or “surf” to locate information, and this book will be invaluable in providing good starting‐points.
Before he embarks on the list of 500 sites, the author gives a lot of good background information on the Web, and discusses the hardware and software requirements for access.
Sources of the different items of Internet software are listed. The main types are tutorial packages, browsers, and HTML editors for creating new Web pages and documents. Available search engines are also reviewed. A remarkable amount of software can be downloaded free.
A selection of entries throughout the book are tagged with one or both of two special logos. One of them indicates a “meta site”, by which is meant a site giving links to most of the other significant sites within the subject area. The other special logo carries the message “free stuff”, and it indicates that the site provides some significant software or other valuable commodity free of charge. The commodity might be a downloadable expert system shell, downloadable images, a sample copy of a printed journal, a free subscription to an electronic journal, etc. All of the sites listed give free access to information, but those marked with this logo give something more.
The abundance of free software is perhaps most obvious on page 32, where no less than 12 alternative expert‐system shells are mentioned as being freely available, and similar examples of generosity can be found throughout.
The headings under which the 500 sites are placed are as follows: Artificial Intelligence, Artificial Life, Astronomy, Biology, Biosphere/Conservation/ Ecology, Chaos and Fractals, Chemistry, Fun Stuff, General Science, Geology, Mathematics, Meteorology, Oceanography, Origins: Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, Physics, and, finally, Publishers and Booksellers.
It can be seen that Cybernetics is not represented as such, but the related topics of Artificial Intelligence and Artificial Life are very well covered (and, within the former, Robotics receives thorough treatment). The only appearance of the prefix “cyber” in the index is in the name “cyberleaf”, referring to software for converting documents written in a number of word‐processing formats into HTML. Within the section on Artificial Life there are several offers of free software allowing experimentation.
Under the heading of “Fun Stuff” there is an intriguing miscellany, some of it humorous but also some that revives neglected and currently‐heretical theories and some that is reminiscent of the proposal made some years ago for a “Journal of Half‐Baked Ideas”.
The fact that it cannot hope to be complete is illustrated by the absence of any mention of fungi under “Biology”. I have to admit to a personal bias here, due to being still highly impressed by the exhibition in London last year marking the anniversary of the British Mycological Society. Anyhow, a meta site for fungi, which might be added to a later edition, is that of the BMS at <http://ulst.ac.uk/faculty/science/bms>. However, a few omissions do not disguise the fact that this is an extremely valuable source book for anyone wanting to use the Web for any kind of science reference. The price is commendably low, these days, for a book of its size, suggesting that it is expected to sell well, and there seems little room for doubt that it will.