Electronic information on HIV/AIDS
The United Nations approach to work on HIV/AIDS was revised at the beginning of this year with the effect that several agencies are now cooperating under the leadership of the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS, or UNAIDS, rather than the World Health Organization alone as had previously been the case.
The South-East Asia HIV/AIDS Project of UNAIDS, which is located at Bangkok, recently established an electronic information service aimed at providing timely and accurate information about HIV/AIDS.
For a free-of-cost subscription to the service, which is called SEA-AIDS, readers should send an e-mail message to: majordomo@ lists.inet.co.th containing the following in the text body of the message: subscribe sea-aids
For those who are not sure if they should subscribe, further information may be obtained by sending an e-mail message to the same address containing the following in the text of the message: info sea-aids
For those not having access to e-mail, write to: South-East Asia HIV/AIDS Project/UNAIDS, 3rd Floor (B Block), United Nations Building, Rajdamnern Nok Avenue, Bangkok 10200, Thailand. Tel: (66 2) 288-2498; Fax: (66 2) 288-1092
Navigating on the Internet
For those members of Asia-Pacific POPIN who use the Internet to search for data and information on population-related subjects, the task can be a formidable one without the use of powerful "search engines".
In a recent article on this subject, writer Rex Baldazo said that "searching for a specific subject or topic on the Internet's World Wide Web is a lot like driving cross-country without a road map: You'd better enjoy the journey because you may never reach your destination".
Index sites such as Yahoo (http://www.yahoo.com), Lycos (http://www.lycos.com) and Alta Vista (http://www.altavista.digital.com) are very helpful both to new users and veteran users of the World Wide Web of the Internet. There are others perhaps less well-known ones, too: http://www.albany.edu/library/newlib/index.html, which has access to over 100 idexes and "spiders"; http://metacrawler.cs.washington.ed:8080, an older multi-engine searching tool; and http://www.excite.com/, to name but a few. Yet another search engine -- one that recently won an award for excellence -- is WebCompass, which can be purchased for a relatively low price. The WebCompass is called a "metasearch tool", which means it can pass requests to other search resources and then process the results. "Thus WebCompass adds value to search engines, but it is not dependent on any particular one", says the article.
Readers who wish to obtain more information on this search tool may access the following site: http://www.quarterdeck.com for the details.
(Source: Byte, March 1996)
FID/ET homepage
The International Federation for Information and Documentation, Education, and Training Committee (FID/ET) may be accessed on the World Wide Web at: http://www.db.dk/fid/home_uk.htm.
The Internet to change way of working
Although not all Asia-Pacific POPIN member countries have access to the Internet, the so-called electronic "super-highway", it has been frequently predicted that this telecommunications technology will become increasingly common in the near future.
Said two experts on the subject in a recent magazine article: "Internet . . . . marks the beginning of what many analysts feel is a fundamental shift in how we compute".
In the article entitled "How the Web Will Change Computing", Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols and Rachel Schmutter describe some of the latest software developments in the field, giving details of the various "browsers" currently available. The more features a browser offers, the easier it is for Internet users to perform a variety of functions and find their way around the enormous resources contained on the Internet.
On the hardware side of developments is the recent creation of "on-ramps" to facilitate and lower the cost of gaining access to this technology.
States another article in the same magazine: "A new class of low-cost devices may soon replace the personal computer as the most common method of getting on the Internet".Written by Dave Andrews, the article is entitled "Coming: Thousands of Internet On-Ramps". The author describes how one company is manufacturing a telephone set with a small screen and an alphanumeric keyboard. The price of the set currently around US$300 is expected to drop to around $200 in 1997.
It will enable information seekers to access the Internet without having to use a personal computer or the like to do so.
(Source: Byte, January 1996)