It has been said the future of our civilization will depend on the WEB. The way things
are, one might argue that the WEB is well on its way to become the center of our commerce,
the warehouse of all human knowledge, the source of latest gossip and eventually, the
essence of the human race. Whether we agree with that view or not, there is certainly no
reason why one should not take advantage of what is available on the WEB today and make
the best use of what is provided by the WEB. With that in mind, here are some web sites
that may be of interest to the Lighters and make live easier. www.nih.gov deals with
health; www.nolo.com with legal matters; www.northernlight.com with general search;
www.bestbookbuys.com with book buying; and expedia.com with airfare. Magazines and
journals have recommended these sites before. I just want to give you my own perspectives
regarding them.
www.nih.gov
There must be thousands of web sites dealing with all aspects of health issues: diseases,
cures, support groups and miracles. The National Institute of Health is the government
branch entrusted with the task to find cures for different diseases. The Institute is
located in Bethesda, MD and is the employer of our classmates Cheng Leepo and Chan
Yee-San. We all know how smart Leepo was when she was a student at Pui-Ching. She had been
working for NIH since obtaining her PhD from the University of Maryland. According to her,
she had been working on one particular rabbit muscle since that time. Isn't that
dedication?
Besides Leepo, NIH has thousands other employees and contractors working on millions of
different things. Over the years, they directly and indirectly supported the work of over
100 Nobel Prize winners. Some of them actually worked there. It has twenty-five institutes
dedicated to different specialties: the Heart and Lung Institute, the Institute for Cancer
Research, the Eye Institute, the Institute for Mental Health, etc. It is also the home of
the National Medical Library. Recently, the NIH is beginning to look into alternative
medicine although my impression is that most of their work in this area is farmed out to
other institutions. (I tried to find information on snow-lotus without success.)
One of the many missions of the NIH is to deliver medical information to the public. Since
we live nearby, over the years my wife and I have attended a number of lectures on
different subjects that were designed for laymen. In one of the more recent lectures, we
were shown MRI pictures of a diseased heart, showing live as well as ischemic
(non-functional) regions of the heart. Other interesting lectures include the bacteria
that can cause ulcer, the discovery of hepatitis C and the aging process of human cells.
Of course, it would be difficult for most of you to come to these events. However, a
significant effort is underway at NIH to disseminate medical information via the WEB. If
you go to www.nih.gov, you will find an opening menu showing the four categories of
information available online. To me, the most relevant is MEDLINEplus and National Medical
Library. MEDLINEplus covers all kinds of medical problems explained in layman terms. For
example, if you pick the subject 'acoustic neuroma', it will explain that the disease is a
tumor on the vestibular nerve in the ear canal. It can cause dizziness and the loss of
hearing. If the tumor is allowed to grow, it will eventually kill the patient. The article
also explains the various options available for treating the disease and removing the
tumor.
On the same topic 'acoustic neuroma', the National Medical Library page lists three
thousand articles that the user can order. Many of these are provided with an abstract.
These papers are fairly specialized and generally do not mean much to the layman. Even so,
on the subject of acoustic neuroma, I was able to pick one particular paper out of the
fifty that was of some interest to me. There might well be others.
On the day that I first visited the NIH site, I had an eye examination in the morning.
Therefore, I decided to see what I could find on glaucoma, the leading cause of blindness.
Besides a description of the disease, the site gives a list of risk factors that can
increase a person's chance of getting glaucoma. The factors that affected me personally
are
1. Age above fifty.
2. African American or Asian.
3. Excessive nearsightedness.
4. Family member with glaucoma.
The degrees of risk involved with each of these factors are not given but this list
certainly points toward a strong probability of glaucoma in my not-too-distant future.
Perhaps, you will never have a reason to visit this site but should there be a need to
consult someone on a health related question, this is a reasonable place to start. At
least, the creators of this site are relatively well informed and unbiased. Of course,
this site also has many references to other health sites in this country as well as
overseas.
I've often wondered how a physician can determine what is wrong with a patient in a mere
fifteen-minute visit. In my job, I have never had a problem that I can solve in less than
a few weeks or months or even years.
www.nolo.com
NOLO press is a publisher of legal information of general interest to the public. It is
dedicated to the premise that an ordinary citizen should be able to handle routine legal
matters without hiring an attorney. Having read a couple of their books, it is not clear
that they have succeeded in this goal but I am convinced that they meant well. As I see
it, handling one's own legal problem, even if it is a routine one, is more than just
reading a few chapter of a book. Besides the knowledge on the printed page, one must have
certain hand-on experience to be able to take care of the problems properly. The analogy
that comes to mind is baking. If one has never bake a cake before, reading a recipe is not
sufficient to make a desert as simple as a pound cake. At a minimum, it may take a few
tries before one can get the cake to look and taste right.
Nevertheless, I am of the opinion that the more knowledge one has about the law, the
better one will be able to take care of one's legal problem even if a lawyer is hired.
Even simple things such as making a will, it seems always better to know the ramifications
of all the provisos before consulting a lawyer. Since lawyers charge by the minute,
knowing what questions to ask ahead of time would at least save some money. Some years
ago, my wife and I decided to draft a will to divide our estate into to two equal parts,
one part to be divided equally among our immediate family and the other part to be shared
equally among the three colleges that we attended. To me, this seemed quite
straightforward but the lawyer that we picked from the phone book complained of its
complexity. When we finally got the will, it consisted just a few sheets of paper of
fairly standard legalistic mumble jumble. To this day, I do not see where the complexity
lies. For my next will, I think I will use the do-it-yourself kit from the NOLO press.
Among other things, NOLO press sells book and software about making a will at the site.
You can buy those at Barnes and Noble or your local discount bookstores. But you can find
a great deal of information about the making of a will at its WEB site. For example, it
tells you that if you want to disinherit one of your children, you will be better off
hiring a lawyer because your estate is likely to be sued by that child.
At these sites, you will find information on many legal subjects such as
power-of-attorney
living trust
probate
rental lease
contract
immigration
nursing home
and many other topics. Being an immigrant, I chose to spend a few minutes with the topic
on immigration. I found the first advice given by the site to be absolutely germane. It
advises that to qualify for immigration to the USA, the applicant must put him or her into
the 'right' category. If he or she does not qualify in the 'right' category, he or she
should go to school or get a job that will qualify him or her in the 'right' category. For
example, if there is a requirement for high school math teachers in the States and the
applicant happens to teach Chinese literature in Pui-Ching, he should immediately change
his teaching subject. This advice may seem obvious but it has not occurred to me until I
read it.
By the way, nolo.com was mentioned on Public Radio recently as one of the best-known
do-it-yourself legal sites. Apparently, there are many others but nolo.com is the only one
sued by the Texas Bar Association for practicing law in Texas without a license this past
year because of its legal software kits.
www.bestbookbuys.com
I had just read in today's newspaper that printed books is the number one merchandise sold
on the WEB, followed by CD and PC software. You must have heard of the big online stores
such as amazon.com, barnesandnoble.com and borders.com. But there are many others. The
price of a book varies greatly among the sellers. If you go to bestbookbuys.com and type
in the name of the book, it will query twenty-six online booksellers and return their
prices including shipping charges, the lowest price first. Sometimes, the price difference
may be $15 for a book listed at $75 by the publisher. Other times, the difference can be
much larger. On one occasion, I saved $50 on an up-to-date computer book listed at $80.
The book that I eventually bought was supposedly used but except for the 'USED' sticker on
the book, there was no way distinguish the book from a new one.
Here is a word of caution though. While amazon.com will charge more for a book, they are
usually very prompt on delivery, say two to three days. Smaller stores tend to take more
time, say two to three weeks. I suspect the reason for this is amazon.com has more books
in stock. However, if you are not in a hurry, you might be willing to wait.
www.northernlight.com
Recently PC Magazine did a rating on all the common search engines, the WEB sites that
catalog web sites. The two ranked the highest are YAHOO and NORTHERNLIGHT. Until that
article, I have never heard of northernlight.com. So, I decided to try it myself. After
some testing, I am of the opinion that as a search engine, northerlight.com is by far the
superior of the two. Let me prove my point with the following examples.
In the first instance, I asked for information on 'WAV format'. If you know a little about
PC sound, you will recognize that WAV is a sound file, which can be played on a PC. There
are many other sound file formats but I wanted to know how to write a WAV file. Yahoo
returned 15,000 or more items to my inquiry. There is no way I could scan 15,000 titles,
much less reading the contents of those web pages. Fortunately, the items were ranked
according to how well Yahoo thought they matched my search criterion. So, I limited myself
to the first 100 items or so. Even at that level, it took more than 10 minutes to scan the
titles and read a few of the more promising pages. Of the 100, none matched my interest.
Every one of the first 100 dealt with sound files in WAV format. None dealt with the
format. For me, it was a total waste of time. When I went to northernlight.com and made
the same inquiry, about half of the first 50 references supplied files in WAV format and
the other half actually explains the nuts-and-bolts about the WAV format.
In the second example, I searched for 'automobile repair'. I wanted to know what could
have caused the brakes on my vehicle to go bad in what I consider a very short time. YAHOO
returned thousands of sites again and the ones it considered best match to my inquiry were
all commercial garages that do brake work. Northernlight.com, on the other hand, returned
a few sites among the garages that actually explained how brakes work and what are the
symptoms when they failed.
It is possible that there are one or more web sites on the Yahoo list that is of interest
to me among the thousands. If there is, it is not rank high enough to catch my attention.
I think it is almost meaningless for a search engine to return more than a couple hundred
sites to any inquiry. Who has the time or the patience to scan more than a couple hundred
sites at one time? If the answer is not found in the first 200 sites, it might as well not
be there.
As a third example, I wanted to find a few Greek recipes in light of our recent delightful
40th reunion Greek Island tour. In response to the question 'Greek cuisine', YAHOO
returned seventeen sites, sixteen about Greek restaurants and one about a Greek cookbook.
No recipe at all. To the exact same question, NORHTERNLIGHT returned 24,000 sites. Of the
first twenty-five, there are at least three that are devoted to Greek cuisine with
recipes. Of course, I don't know if the recipes are any good but it is what I wanted.
Now, if I rephrase my inquiries, the results might have been different. In fact, on Yahoo
my experience has been that the returns to the same inquiry are often different. I am not
sure why this is the case but it is. Here are there sets of results out of three test
trials, I found northernlight to be much more responsive.
On the negative side, northern's web layout is somewhat on the Spartan side. The use of
color and graphic is minimal. So, I still use YAHOO as my home page for news headlines and
stock quotes but for serious information gathering, I would go to northernlight. On the
subject of new headlines, recently I asked for information on the location of the 1999
Egyptian airline disaster. YAHOO returned nothing relevant to the disaster at all.
Northernlight points me to an Air Force site, which provided a map of the disaster. Even
though the map is a rather coarse scale, it is still much better than nothing.
Often, I wonder what makes a web site tick and a particular internet stock to go through
the roof. Why are AOL, YAHOO, EBAY, etc so popular? I also wonder why the newspapers and
magazines always recommend MS ENCARTA when it comes to electronic encyclopedia. I have an
older copy of ENCARTA and I also own a copy of Encyclopedia Britannia. In terms of
substance, there is really no comparison between the two. EB is by far the more
substantial of the two.
p.s. In the latest issue of PC Magazine, it recommended the search engine www.google.com
and gave it one of its highest yearly citations. I felt obligated to run a test on it for
this article. Using the same questions above, the response from this site overlapped those
from northernlight.com.
p.p.s. I found bestbookbuys.com discussed above using northernlight.com. When I started to
write this article, I was using booksamillion.com to do comparative book shopping. By the
time I finished the article, booksamillion.com has transformed into yet another online
bookseller. Comparative book shopping is no longer supported at the site with that name at
all.
www.expedia.com
When it come to travel sites, I use them to find inexpensive airfares when I am planning a
trip. When I asked for lowest airfare, I expect lowest airfare. One day, I came across a
site named www.lowestfare.com and decided to give it a test. From expedia.com, I had found
out that I could fly to Denver from DC in December for $236 on DELTA. I was curious what
www.lowestfare.com can turn up. With a name like that, I expect that it will at least
match, if not surpass, the expedia response.
Well, the result was quite unexpected. The lowest fare that www.lowestfare.com could find
was $415. Of course, that was much more than the DELTA fare and was even more than the
second, third, fourth, and the fifth lowest fare found by expedia.com.
In my experience, expedia.com is really not much better than any other travel sites. If
you decide to use them, you should always take their recommendation with a grain of salt.
Do your homework and search as many travel sites as you can.
p.s. There is a new low airfare search site, www.itasoftware.com, mentioned in the
Washington Post today. I ran a short test on it. It does appear that this site will find
you the lowest airfares from one location to another. The user is allowed to specify the
size of the location centered on a specific airport. The one drawback of this site is that
the user must know the code name of the airports to make inquiries. If you do not know the
airport code names like me, try www.flyaow.com/citycode.htm. Of course, you always have to
specify the date and time of departure and the date and time of return. Even here, the
site allows the user to specify a window of arbitrary size and find the best fare within
that window.
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