Today's article on the last commercial flight of the Concorde aircraft makes note that it travels at twice the speed of sound, or Mach 2. How many miles per hour might that be? NASA's Glenn Research Center has a very instructive page on supersonic speed, for elementary schoolers and upward, complete with a nifty calculator to help users convert speeds into Mach numbers and vice versa. Another site for converting measurements that is a Liblog favorite is OnlineConversion.com , which calculators for converting over 5000 units(Mach included).

Diebold, Inc. has run into a bit of a PR obstacle course of late. It seems that a report or two has linked vote tampering and vote security risks with electronic voting machines that Diebold and others manufacture. Wired.com has a report on Diebold's situation.

All of this has resulted in a legal melee, including Diebold and ISP (Internet Service Provider) Online Policy Group (OPG), over alleged infringement of copyright laws. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a "donor-supported membership organization" has stepped up to defend OPG and the Independent Media Center against the challenge of Diebold. A link to this announcement was featured on the website of the Chilling Effects Clearinghouse, a collaboration between the EFF and five universities. Its mission: "Chilling Effects aims to help you understand the protections that the First Amendment and intellectual property laws give to your online activities."

... and Some Additional Cyberlaw Thaw

In the further effort to help guide the casual observer through the maze of cyberlaw, the Franklin Pierce Law Center's IP (Intellectual Property) Mall has some very helpful resources, including access to the relevant reports on the subject authored by the Congressional Research Service.

Education tends to rank consistently highly when people are asked what they care about, certainly in the US, and likely in many other places. Often we look to other countries to discover how they have dealt with educational issues, ranging from the teaching of math to school safety issues, to addressing truany and graduation rates. Education Week, the well-regarded daily newspaper of K-12 education, has an International Page addressing broad issues in education abroad. A new International News section for the best articles from around the world on learning and schools. Updated every Wednesday, vistors can browse the topics or select a country of interest. Registration for the latter is required, but free.

You just never know when you might need to say 'How do you do?' in Taglog[ Kamusta kayó?] Or 'thank you' in Russian. [Spasibo!] In the past, this would have entailed tracking down multiple language dictionaries. The New York Public Library's World Languages collection has helpfully compiled a page of Useful Expressions and Greetings in 26 languages. Would you like to know how to say 'Peace' from Catalan through Yiddish? Por que não?

What are Californians thinking? A seemingly perennial question, that deserves more serious consideration, especially after the recall election. One of two recommended sites in today's Liblog is the Field Poll, an independent, nonpartisan research service since 1945. It has a concentration on California but also includes national survey information as well on topics from consumer information to high tech to public policy. With archives going back to 1993, visitors to the site can see how soon-to-be former Gov. Gray Davis' support eroded since the energy crisis, leading to his defeat to the Terminator this week.

Another recommended site is the Public Policy Institute of California, which is also an independent, nonpartisan body dedicated to conducting research and issuing papers on California's key economy sectors, demographics, environmental issues and other topics.

“CAUTION: THIS QUIZ MAY SURPRISE YOU, SHOCK YOU, OR MAKE YOU THINK”

Those who are perhaps a little too secure in their environmental stewardship would do well to take this admonition from Earth Day Network to heart. At the group’s Ecological Footprint Quiz site, those who dare can see just how environmentally friendly, or not, their daily activities are. Here's more on the quiz's methods and goals.

You’ve been warned.

Ever wonder who's trying to sell the leaders in Washington on the best arms deals for leaders in Africa or South America? Or which US legal and public relations firms have been knocking on doors in Capitol Hill and the White House on behalf of Afghanistan, Indonesia, or Venezuela over the last five years? Unless you're a diplomat or foreign official, you must register your foreign representative status with the US Justice Department. The Foreign Agents Registration Act, administered by the Justice Department, was created in 1938 by Congress as a "response to the large number of German propaganda agents in the pre-WWII U.S." The online-accessible FARA database starts in mid-year 1997 and goes through the first half of 2002. Here's a brief Q&A on FARA. FARA is not the only legislation governing lobbying activities in the United States. In 1995, Congress passed the Lobbying Disclosure Act, which also governs registration for those engaged in lobbying activities. An 1998 amendment to the laws exempted those registered with LDA from registering with FARA.

Whether you are backgrounding a new employee, looking for an old co-worker, or checking out a CEO's connections, there is yet another database to help you do all of these things. Eliyon is a service that allows users to enter a name, and it 'crawls' the web looking for a person's 'footprints' where the name and company appears in proximity. For example, this may be appearing within press releases, news articles, or corporate web sites.

National Security Archive's Dubious Files illustrates the inconsistent, obfuscating, and sometimes whimsical results of FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) requests and declassification logic. Case in point, it's 1997 and you're a seeking a document, a sample of the CIA's "Weekly Situation Reports on International Terrorism." You come across the entire document at The Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library. On the last page is an imagined brief on a proposed terrorist act on Santa and his train from the "GONP" (Government of the North Pole), but all you see is a blacked out box where the fiction appeared. Two years later you're at the CIA's CREST (CIA Records Search Tool) library in College Park, MD. You come across the same item and decide to take a look. Oddly the Santa sabotage sketch has now passed muster and become part of the declassified public record. This is a rather benign example. The National Security Archive claims it has an appeal pending at the State Department to release more information on the roles of the US government and outsourced contractors in Plan Colombia (a.k.a. Andean Initiative), the controversial effort at crop eradication in the decades-long "War on Drugs."

"In contrast to other briefing books that highlight the declassification and release of records, this one focuses on denials of information, including some highly questionable, sometimes silly, classification decisions by the national security bureaucracy."