Stretching the Mind This issue of KIDS, dated February 5, 1997, was written and produced by students of the New Vista High School in the Boulder Valley School District in Boulder, Colorado.

United Nations Home Page Reviewed by Brian York

The UN home page is a fairly large and varied site, including topics that range from current events around the world, to history, to complaints. Of particular interest to me is the information on Bosnia and the coverage of related documents and reports. To see this simply click "Search" on the home page and enter "Bosnia," and you will get over 60 UN documents. The site lacks major graphics, links to other useful sites, or intriguing Java animation; but then again it only takes a few seconds to load up instead of minutes. If you are doing a report on the UN, or on any current events in which the UN is involved, this might be a good place to start. The page also includes facilities for Spanish and French speakers.
URL: http://www.un.org

Newspeak and Doublethink Homepage Reviewed by Brian York

The author of this site examines issues and aspects of contemporary society by comparing them to points raised in George Orwell's novel, 1984. He also uses examples from the book to contrast with things in our society. While the text is a little long and generally devoid of illustration (unfortunately, this kind of information does not seem to mesh well with colorful graphics), it explores many interesting ideas, including gun control and gender politics; and he explores intriguing parallels between characters from the book and people in real life. So if you are up to a little bit of heavy comparative reading, or want an interesting analogue to 1984, you might want to visit this site.
URL: http://www.aloha.net/~frizbee/index.html

Andrew Pfouts' Virtual Library Reviewed by grateful students

Andrew is a Language Arts teacher at our school. He had a student (Tait Stangl) design this site in order to provide students in his classes with information about books they're reading or authors they're studying. Although the site looks like it's constantly under construction, which it is, and contains some errors in spelling and linkage, it gives students many useful connections for finding out about that literature stuff. We recommend it to Real Readers and teachers.
URL: http://robin-nvh.bvsd.k12.co.us/~pfouts/

The World of Escher Reviewed by Candice Kearns

This site is about M. C. Escher, who was a teacher and an artist. What I like about it is that you can actually look at his artwork as well as read about it (and him). The site provides a lot of good information about who this guy was, and you can choose a particular subject to check out about him -- for example, his home life, his artwork, or his education. They don't seem to update the site very often (it still has a tessellation contest from 1995), but the artwork alone is worth the visit to this online museum.
URL: http://www.texas.net/escher

The Changing Faces of Zines Reviewed by Brendan R.

This page discusses the continuing development of zines (low-budget, generally "underground," and often electronically published, magazines) and how they have been improving along with technology. The descriptions provided for each zine are great. They really draw you in, for the most part, and they give you a strong sense of what each publication is like. I also really enjoyed the graphics. The covers for these zines are really funny. The only downsides to this page are that it is very long and some of the pieces are dull.
URL: http://www.publish.com/0696/zines/

Art Crimes: The Writing on the Wall Reviewed by Aaron Gombar

Art Crimes is the phattest site because it has the best and the most from the graffiti world on the Internet. It has fresh color pictures (which I don't print) of trains, walls, and other cool stuff. It also has cool outline pages (sketches). It has info on important stuff, from where to buy your caps to the KrylonTM Color List. It has the most graf links on the whole Internet, and cool interviews with people like Twist, PER, and Ces. The only problem I have with this web site is that it doesn't get new stuff fast enough. For example, Colorado only has about four pictures. But that's partially the fault of the artists who don't send their pictures in. Overall it's a fresh site.
URL: http://www.gatech.edu/graf/index.html

Yahoo's Map Search and Yahoo's People Search Reviewed by Robert Bowen

These sites have way too much info for how little they get used. I didn't even know they existed until only a few days ago, but the People Search page is the most useful thing I've seen on the Web in a long time. I no longer need my little white pages at home; instead, I have a national white pages in my computer. Just today I found the address and phone number of a friend who lives in Utah. The Map section, which is also randomly cool, provides a map of the area that matches an address that you give it. I checked a teacher's address, and, sure enough, there was his neighborhood, right on the screen. Of course, it occurred to me that the combination of these two indexes could get somewhat dangerous. A psychotic serial killer (as opposed to a perfectly sane one) could find your address in People Search and then get a map that in detail explains where you live. Luckily enough for me (or unluckily enough, if I were in some random sweepstakes and they couldn't find out where I lived), my neighborhood is relatively new and not quite shown on their map. I've recently been playing with Yahoo a bit more, and I have found that there are some really cool search engines. These two sites are both informative and fun. Anyway, use this information; don't abuse it.
URLs: http://maps.yahoo.com/yahoo/ and http://www.yahoo.com/search/people/

Mind Machine Web Museum Reviewed by Chris Pelshaw

This site provides a photographic display of computer history; it contains pictures and basic consumer information about various computer games, calculators, and computers. I used this site for school research on the history of calculators, and it gave me a lot of useful information. Although this is a good site, it has a few problems. If you are looking for real depth or detail on particular machines, this is not the site to choose. Also, it has a few errors in some of the links. Despite these problems, the site is very interesting and a good site to use.
URL: http://userwww.sfsu.edu/~hlayer/computer.history.mm.html

PM Zone Reviewed by Chris Jones

Early in the year I needed some information on a Navy fighter jet called the F-22. First I went onto the Navy's home page, but there was no information. I was about to give up when I remembered the Popular Mechanics web site (the PM Zone). I logged on and, sure enough, I got some information and wrote my report. Another time I needed information on an upcoming event planned by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). I logged onto the Popular Mechanics web page to find my information. Ever since I found out about the Popular Mechanics web page, I have been there a lot. It has great information and is updated every day, so you know you are going to get the most current information. If for some reason you can't get everything you are looking for, they have links to other popular web sites. They also list their top 5% web sites and provide web site reviews, so you know where you can find the best on new technology. One problem is that there are many graphics; and if you don't have a fast computer, it will take a while to load. Nevertheless, I think that it is worth the wait. (Note: I've provided the URL for the PM Zone in two-dimensional form, which is all that most of us can access. But you can get the web site in Java, Shockwave, or VRML, by starting at http://www.popularmechanics.com/homepageSW.html)
URL: http://www.popularmechanics.com/homepage2d.html

Popular Science Web Page Reviewed by Chris Jones

This web site also has a lot of reviews on new technologies. It is laid out like the Popular Mechanics web site but deals more with the science part of technologies.
URLs: http://www.popsci.com/

These Internet resources were evaluated on the basis of the Site Selection Guidelines that the students developed. Questions and comments can be sent to teacher Stevan Kalmon, kalmon@bvsd.k12.co.us

Last Modified: 9:05AM 1/14/97