Spinning

Plagiarism Guidelines

The king, the engineer, the computer scientist and the toaster

Courses Taught

• APCO 1P00 -- Introduction to Media Computation
• COSC 1P50 -- Integrity in the Information Age
• COSC 3P01 -- Data Communications
  Check your connection speed

Education in Canada: F2F and Distance

• Canadian Universities and other excellent information
  
• On-line courses and other information
  
• Distance Education in Canada
• Distance education at Ontario Universities
• Canadian Virtual University
• Canadian Association for Distance Education
• National Distance Education Organizations
• Teaching and Learning on the Internet
• Distance Education Clearinghouse
• Distance Education Associations and Resources
• Peterson's. Colleges, Career Information, Test Prep, Distance Learning Information, ...

Fall Teaching Schedule

              Mon        Tue       Wed         Thu        Fri
             7-10pm     2-3:30                2-3:30
           COSC 1P96   COSC 3F00             COSC 3F00

Office hours: Wednesday 10-11am and Friday 10-11am

My COSC 4F90 Student Projects

• The Use of Equifrequent Word Fragments in Message Linking
• Modular Bill of Material
• CAA Charge Guard Protection Program

Other Starting Points

• New Zealand FAQ

• BRIDGE
  • American Contract Bridge League
  • World Bridge Federation. Try the individual links, such as: Anna Marsh
  • Bridge Passion. Aimed at beginners and novices
  • OK Bridge. Live playing
  • EBridgeMaster. Look at their newsletter
  • Bridge Companion
  • The Hand Generator
  • Bridge Base, Inc.
  • Bridge World Magazine. See some of the articles for beginners

• Cycling in Niagara (and further afield!)
  • Cycle Niagara. Note the other links to wineries, etc. I like the Niagara-on-the-Lake Loop. Download the pdf versions which also give a cue sheet (i.e. distances and where to turn). And the Niagara Falls Loop takes you past the Falls! The St. Catharines Loop takes you up the Welland Canal--always interesting.
  • Offroad Trails, especially the Niagara River Recreation Trail
  • The Niagara Freewheelers Bicycle Touring Club Inc.
  • Steve Bauer Bike Tours. Try his 'Links' button to get more information about the Region
  • Daily Guided Bicycle Tours of many of Niagara-on-the-Lake's boutique wineries
  • St. Catharines Standard Cycling Tours Article--June 2007
  • Ontario Theatre Tours
  • The Toronto Bicycling Network
  • Canadian Kilometer Achiever Program

• Bigwords. Textbooks purchased and sold, but expensive to bring across the border. Their top 40 books are cheap, though!
• The Robot Store. Wow!!
• Computer Science Resources, including sort animations, women in CS, ...
• Math Tools
• Canadian Marketing Association Use this site to reduce unwanted calls and mail
• Finding Information on the Internet: A Tutorial. Probably the best Tutorial available! Updated regularly, and includes Invisible Web, etc.
• Search Tools. Incredible information about engines available for implementing a search facility on a Web site
• All In One, a listing of many search engines and their particular areas of expertise (such as Sports, Education, Government, Encyclopedia, Financial, ...
• Beaucoup Search Engines, similar to Allinone (above)
• My favourite search engines:
  Google
  New ones emerging (15/8/01) to challenge Google are: Wisenut, Teoma, Lasoo (from Toronto, and can 'lasoo' geographic areas to search), DayPop (which indexes news and blogs mainly, and has different concepts of "word bursts" for instance), Plazoo, searching RSS feeds and Blogs, CURE (subscription service though), Vivisimo (metasearch engine)
  

  see also CNET's article

  Direct Hit
  Overture (taking over many smaller search engines in an attempt to catch Google)
  Fast Search (includes media searches)
  Ask Jeeves
  Open Directory This is what all the search engines (with the exception of only a few!) are using!
  About.com
  Mamma's Meta-search engine
  The Big Hub. Lots of specialised databases
  Search the Web Sideways (now closed down because of costs)
  Yep Scour, a media search engine (images, music, radio, movies, ...)

  Lookups galore!. ZIP codes, Postal Codes, addresses, you name it!

• The Invisible Net

  An article in Syllabus magazine provides a good introduction to this area of the Web (where many of these links originated).

  Direct Search. Does not appear to be recently updated. Compare to Invisible-Web.net below

  List of Lists

  The Invisible Web

  Invisible-Web.net

  The Complete Planet. 103,000 databases, and more

  Internets. "The database of databases"

  Guides to Specialized Search Engines

  InfoMine. "Scholarly Internet Resource Collections"

  Academic Info. "Your Gateway to Quality Educational Resources"

  BUBL Information Server

  Librarians' Index to the Internet

  Best Information on the Net. From St. Ambrose University's Library

  The Internet Public Library. By librarians

  Scout Report Archives

  Horizontal Searching--no it's not using a laptop while reclining watching hockey

  ProFusion Search Engine

  Also try Copernic or WebFerret. Programming-based solutions that make data-driven content crawl-able are out there right now. Check out the July issue of ColdFusion Developers' Journal (http://www.sys-con.com/coldfusion/) for an article entitled 'Disappear Yourself From the Invisible Web' that describes a dirt-simple technique for getting the job done.

  There's another "invisible web"--various databases that include copyright materials such as magazine articles. Frequently, these materials are only available for a fee. Many of these documents are available through the Northern Light search engine (www.northernlight.com). They are listed as "Special Collection" documents to distinguish them from the regular free web page results.

  However, many public libraries subscribe to these databases, and make them available to their patrons at no charge to anyone who has a library card.

• Medical Resources with a Canadian Bias

  "Wherever flaxseed becomes a regular food item among the people, there will be better health" -- Mahatma Gandhi

  Evaluating Health Information--an excellent resource from BC

  Budwig Diet -- careful!! --

  Udo Erasmus

  Lemmon Oil!!

  AltaVista Canada Health

  Sympatico's HealthCentral

  Canadian Health Network

  Medbroadcast Corporation, "Canada's source for health information"

  Health on the Net

  Mayo Clinic

  UK's National Health Service Health Care Guide

  US Department of Health's Health Finder

  The Merck Manual Home Edition

  Miscellaneous Health Links from a Fitness Guru!

  Independent Prostate Information

  WholeHealthMD. "Rather than prescribing powerful antibiotics or surgery to treat chronic conditions, we prefer to combine the best of conventional medicine with alternative therapies to help the body strengthen and then heal itself."

  Preventing Falls and Fractures, for the aging (sign of the times for me?!)

• The Canadian Privacy Commissioner, where you'll find Privacy Links in Canada and Abroad, in the Resource section
• E-Business. Concepts for starting a Business in Canada
• Canadian Satire. Funny!!
• Top 100 employment and education sites. Looking for a job? Scholarships? ...
• Jobs in Canada
• Internet Explorer 5 Easter Egg. Can you believe that the source for this file is merely:
  <!-- introducing the Trident team -->
  Another Easter Egg is described here
• World's Largest Viewable Spelling Dictionary. All the words are visible, but there are no definitions. There is also an anagram dictionary available
• On-Line Dictionaries
• On-Line Grammars
• WWWebster's Dictionary. In addition to the excellent dictionary, WWWebster has a thesaurus, a word of the day feature, and a cornucopia of word games.
• On-line Dictionaries and Writing Help
• Visual Thesaurus. Requires Java, but is interesting
• FOLDOC (Free On-line Dictionary of Computing) Denis Howe has been compiling computing terms since 1985, and now has nearly thirteen thousand entries in his searchable dictionary. The definitions are detailed, accurate, and often wickedly funny--try the definition for 'suits', for instance!
• The Quotations Home Page. See also The Quotations Page, and Quoteland
• Wordspy. "This Web site and its associated mailing list are devoted to recently coined words, existing words that have enjoyed a recent renaissance, and older words that are now being used in new ways."
• Stats and more Stats with a Canadian slant!
• PC Magazine's Top 100 Web Sites--Feb 2001
• LemonAid for Cars and Car Cost Canada--did you want to know the actual sticker price?!
• Information about Canada
  "A set of pages which point to websites which I deem to contain comprehensive information about Canada. It includes geography, language issues, identity/heritage/culture, history, the arts, news, education, sports, and many other Canadian-only information
• Kathy Schrock's Guide for Educators
• Another Niagara Guide, but this one seems quite comprehensive on the static information
• Another Niagara Guide--this seems to be more useful than the others, as it has sponsorships!
• The Weather in St. Catharines and the Niagara Region with their Radar images
• St. Catharines, from the Weather Network
• Search and Re-Search Pointers to search engines and strategies
• Plagiarism Seminar
• Notes from a Search and Re-Search seminar, given to faculty in August/September 1995
• OAPT'97 Search Seminar for Physics School Teachers

Compilations of Interest

• Copyright Pointers
• For a brief on the days news (The Daily Brief, delivered to your email inbox!), send email as follows:

  To:
       incinc@tiac.net
  
  with the words
  
       subscribe db
  
  in the *subject* line of your e-mail letter
  

• Some Statistics about the 'Net
• Web Site Statistics
• Jobs? Try:
  • Job Universe, from ComputerWorld
  • Monster Board (Canadian)

Disability Links

• Teaching Students with disABILITIES
• Ability Hub. Assisstive technology solutions. A US Portal
• The Complete Solution for Developing Accessible and Usable Websites
• Chronic Pain Topics
• Sign Languages and other Forms of "langculture", including Baby Sign
• Accessible Web Design. Lots of good links, Include some tutorials.
• The Disabilty Resource Network. A US Portal
• WeMedia. A "leading media company revolutionizing access for the millions of people with disabilities who are interested in quality of life without compromise." A US Portal
• CanDo. Another portal
• iCan ONLINE. Another portal
• W3C Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI)
• SNOW Resources:Disability Organizations. Mainly Canadian. SNOW itself is a wealth of information, including accessibility checkers, like Cynthia Says and Bobby
• InfoAbility. Information and links in Ontario
• Accessible Niagara. Still needs a lot of work done. (For instance, only mentioned 4 restaurants, 7 hotels and 6 attractions as at 28/10/00.)
• Esmerel's Collection of Disability Resources. Includes many Canadian-only links. All the links you'll ever need!
• Disability Web Links. Compiled by Government Departments and Agencies in Canada
• EnableLink. Sponsored by the Workers' Compensation Boards of Canada. WOW!
• Ontarians with Disabilities Act: A guide to the Act, maintained by Accessibility Ontario - Ontario Ministry of Citizenship

Call Centre Links

• Call Center Magazine
• Agent Initiatives. "Everything you want to know about working in a Call Center"
• ACD Call Center. On-line Learning Center. Other Reference Sites

Worth visiting, especially the Humor Links

To keep you occupied while page dynamics are being sorted out here are some of my favourite groaners:

• I think we're in for a bad spell of wether
• Did you know that in 1947 the first all-white Dalmation was spotted?
• When the first book on clocks was written, everyone said it was about time
• Does the name Pavlov ring a bell?
• What is a pit bull computer?
  I don't know, but when it megabytes, it megahertz
• Perhaps the new Ontario Provincial Government should take this to heart:
  "If you think education is expensive, try ignorance"
• Define a TV critic
  A grouch potato
• How would you describe a friendly loan shark?
  Userer friendly
• How do satirists exercise?
  By pumping irony
• Only intuition can protect you from the most dangerous individual -- the articulate incompetent
• Energizer Bunny arrested - charged with battery.
• A man's home is his castle, in a manor of speaking.
• A pessimist's blood type is always b-negative.
• My wife really likes to make pottery, but to me it's just kiln time.
• Dijon vu - the same mustard as before.
• Practice safe eating - always use condiments.
• I fired my masseuse today. She just rubbed me the wrong way.
• A Freudian slip is when you say one thing but mean your mother.
• Shotgun wedding: A case of wife or death.
• If electricity comes from electrons...does morality come from morons?
• A man needs a mistress just to break the monogamy.
• Marriage is the mourning after the knot before; and
  With her marriage she got a new name and a dress
• A hangover is the wrath of grapes.
• Corduroy pillows are making headlines.
• Is a book on voyeurism a peeping tome?
• Dancing cheek-to-cheek is really a form of floor play. (What about dancing tongue in cheek???)
• Banning the bra was a big flop.
• Sea captains don't like crew cuts.
• A successful diet is the triumph of mind over platter.
• A gossip is someone with a great sense of rumor.
• Without geometry, life is pointless; and
  Geometry holds clues for the meaning of life; look and you will see the sines.
• When you dream in color, it's a pigment of your imagination.
• Reading whilst sunbathing makes you well-red.
• When two egoists meet, it's an I for an I.
• Of all the things that I have lost, I miss my mind the most.
• Serious campers are intense.
• Nut screws washers and bolts. (Headline following a launderette sex crime)
• A girl who screamed and shouted for a pony got a little hoarse.
• The carpenter's heavy tools were uncomfortable so he got a little sore.
• Nuns generally wear plain colours because old habits never dye.
• Lions eat their prey fresh and roar.
• You can't beat a pickled egg; and
  A boiled egg in the morning is hard to beat
• If a leopard could cook would he ever change his pots?
• See one melée of unruly people and you've seen a maul.
• A bicycle can't stand alone because it is two-tired; and
  Old bikes should be retired.
• What's the definition of a will? It's a dead giveaway
• Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana
• A backward poet writes inverse; and
  Poetry written upside-down is inverse; poetry of very few lines is universal.
• In democracy it's your vote that counts; in feudalism it's your count that votes
• She had a boyfriend with a wooden leg, but broke it off
• A chicken crossing the road is poultry in motion
• If you don't pay your exorcist, you get repossessed
• Show me a piano falling down a mineshaft and I'll show you A-flat minor
• When a clock is hungry, it goes back four seconds; and
  Do hungry time-travellers ever go back four seconds?
• The man who fell into an upholstery machine is fully recovered
• A grenade thrown into a kitchen in France would result in linoleum Blownapart
• You feel stuck with your debt if you can't budge it
• Local Area Network in Australia : the LAN down under
• He often broke into song because he couldn't find the key
• Every calendar's days are numbered; and
  The days of digital watches are numbered; and
  The days of the pocket diary are numbered.
• A lot of money is tainted. 'Taint yours and 'taint mine
• He had a photographic memory which was never developed
• A plateau is a high form of flattery
• The short fortune-teller who escaped from prison was a small medium at large
• Those who get too big for their britches will be exposed in the end
• When you've seen one shopping center you've seen a mall
• Those who jump off a Paris bridge are in Seine
• When an actress saw her first strands of gray hair she thought she'd dye
• Bakers trade bread recipes on a knead to know basis
• Santa's helpers are subordinate clauses
• Acupuncture is a jab well done
• Marathon runners with bad footwear suffer the agony of defeat; and
  Sports people can avoid the pain of defeat by wearing comfortable shoes.
• Gardening Rule: When weeding, the best way to make sure you are removing a weed and not a valuable plant is to pull on it. If it comes out of the ground easily, it is a valuable plant.
• I used to work in a blanket factory, but it folded
• Condoms should be used on every conceivable occasion
• From The Star, Saturday November 26, 2005
  A colleague passes along the novel proposal that many non-living things have a sex, or gender, in modern, albeit incorrect, parlance. For example:
  • Ziploc bags are male, because they hold everything in, but you can see right through them.
  • Copiers are female, because once turned off; it takes a while to warm them up again. It's an effective reproductive device if the right buttons are pushed, but can wreak havoc if the wrong buttons are pushed.
  • A tire is male, because it goes bald and it's often over-inflated.
  • A hot air balloon is male, because, to get it to go anywhere, you have to light a fire under it, and of course, there's the hot air part.
  • Sponges are female, because they're soft, squeezable and retain water.
  • A web page is female, because it's always getting hit on.
  • A subway is male, because it uses the same old lines to pick people up.
  • An hourglass is female, because over time, the weight shifts to the bottom.
  • A hammer is male, because it hasn't changed much over the last 5,000 years, but it's handy to have around.
  • A remote control is female. Ha! You thought it'd be male, didn't you? But consider this: it gives a man pleasure, he'd be lost without it, and while he doesn't always know the right buttons to push, he keeps trying!
• Superb Optical Illusions
• Owed Two a Spelling Chequer, or Eye halve a spelling chequer. If these links die, search for "Eye Halve a Spelling Chequer". There are several versions floating around!
• Office Buzz Words and Phrases for the 21st Century
  From http://www.itworldcanada.com/yukitup/default.htm, accessed 20/2/08

  BLAMESTORMING

  Sitting around in a group, discussing why a deadline was missed or a project failed, and who was responsible.

  SEAGULL MANAGER

  A manager who flies in, makes a lot of noise, craps on everything, and then leaves.

  CHAINSAW CONSULTANT

  An outside expert brought in to reduce the employee headcount, leaving the top brass with clean hands.

  CUBE FARM

  An office filled with cubicles.

  MOUSE POTATO

  The on-line, wired generation's answer to the couch potato.

  PRAIRIE DOGGING

  When someone yells or drops something loudly in a cube farm, and people's heads pop up over the walls to see what's going on.

  SITCOMs

  (Single Income, Two Children, Oppressive Mortgage) What yuppies turn into when they have children and one of them stops working to stay home with the kids.

  STARTER MARRIAGE

  A short-lived first marriage that ends in divorce with no kids, no property and no regrets.

  STRESS PUPPY

  A person who seems to thrive on being stressed out and whiny.

  SWIPED OUT

  An ATM or credit card that has been rendered useless because the magnetic strip is worn away from extensive use.

  TOURISTS

  People who take training classes just to get a vacation from their jobs. "We had three serious students in the class; the rest were just tourists."

  TREEWARE

  Hacker slang for documentation or other printed material.

  XEROX SUBSIDY

  Euphemism for swiping free photocopies from one's workplace.

  CHIPS and SALSA

  Chips = hardware, Salsa = software. "Well, first we gotta figure out if the problem's in your chips or your salsa."

  PERCUSSIVE MAINTENANCE

  The fine art of whacking the heck out of an electronic device to get it to work again. (Try not to dent the case.)

  SALMON DAY

  The experience of spending an entire day swimming upstream only to get screwed and die in the end.

  CLM

  (Career Limiting Move) Used among microserfs to describe ill-advised activity. Trashing your boss while he or she is within earshot is a serious CLM.

  ADMINISPHERE

  The rarefied organizational layers beginning just above the rank and file. Decisions that fall from the adminisphere are often profoundly inappropriate or irrelevant to the problems they were designed to solve.

  DILBERTED

  To be exploited and oppressed by your boss. Derived from the experiences of Dilbert, the geek-in-hell comic strip character. "I've been Dilberted again. The old man revised the specs for the fourth time this week."

  404

  Someone who's clueless. From the World Wide Web error message "404 Not Found," meaning that the requested document could not be located--missing. "Don't bother asking him ... he's 404, man."

• INFORMATION SUPERHIGHWAY:
  Interactive Network For Organizing, Retrieving, Manipulating, Accessing, and Transferring Information On National Systems, Unleashing Practically Every Rebellious Human Intelligence, Gratifying Hackers, Wiseasses, And Yahoos.
  Thanks to Kevin Kwaku, who obviously has way too much time on his hands.

  With no apologies!

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