Apendice al Boletin Juarez de Marzo de 2004:
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Topico I: College Rankings
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US News and World Report University and College Rankings

http://www.usnews.com/usnews/edu/college/rankings/rankindex_brief.php 

Doctoral Research Universities: top tier

http://www.usnews.com/usnews/edu/college/rankings/ranknatudoc_brief.php 

Top Public schools:

http://www.usnews.com/usnews/edu/college/rankings/brief/natudoc/natudoc_pub_brief.php 

Liberal Arts Colleges:

http://www.usnews.com/usnews/edu/college/rankings/ranklibartco_brief.php 

Top Tier

http://www.usnews.com/usnews/edu/college/rankings/brief/libartco/tier1/t1libartco_brief.php 

Universities (Masters) by Region

http://www.usnews.com/usnews/edu/college/rankings/rankumregion_brief.php 

Top Tier:

http://www.usnews.com/usnews/edu/college/rankings/brief/univmas/ummidwest/tier1/t1univmas_mw_brief.php 

Comprehensive Colleges

http://www.usnews.com/usnews/edu/college/rankings/rankccregion_brief.php 

Top Tier

http://www.usnews.com/usnews/edu/college/rankings/brief/ccbach/ccmidwest/tier1/t1ccbach_mw_brief.php 

Unranked Engineering:

http://www.usnews.com/usnews/edu/college/rankings/brief/unranked/eng/eng_brief.php 

Best Engineering

http://www.usnews.com/usnews/edu/college/rankings/rankengineering_brief.php 

Unranked Business:

http://www.usnews.com/usnews/edu/college/rankings/brief/unranked/biz/biz_brief.php 


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Topico 2: Indice de Graduacion en Universidades:
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Subject: Postsecondary Institution Graduation Rates Now Available in IPEDS COOL



             IPEDS COOL (College Opportunities On-Line) is your direct link to
        information on nearly 7,000 colleges and universities in the United
        States. Now available for the first time are the graduation rates for
        postsecondary institutions based on all first-time full-time degree or
        certificate-seeking undergraduate students that began in the stated cohort
        year. Graduation rate information is further broken down by bachelors
        degree-seeking students, gender and race/ethnicity. IPEDS COOL helps you
        find out about a specific postsecondary institution or set of
        institutions. You can name the institution and obtain information about
        them. Or you can search for an institution based on its location, program,
        or degree offerings either alone or in combination. The more criteria you
        specify, the smaller the number of institutions that will fit your
        criteria.
             To search for information on postsecondary institutions, including
        graduation rates, please visit:
        http://nces.ed.gov/ipeds/cool/Search.asp



        --------------------



Topico 3:  Busquedas en la Red y Materiales de Libre Acceso
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Subject: 50 from the Best of the Internet (Part 1 of 2)

50 from the Best of the Internet

PC Magazine
February 9, 2004
By  Don Willmott


Editor's Note: PC Magazine has partnered with Wiley Books to create a series of PC Magazine and ExtremeTech books. In PC Magazine's Best of the Internet, Contributing Editor Don Willmott has collected 1,000 of the Web's best sites in 100 categories. Here, we reproduce a sampling of 50 site reviews in 31 categories from the book.


Portals and Starting Points

MSN: www.msn.com

MSN has gone through an excruciating evolution since it first burst on the scene in the mid-1990s to try to grab market share from America Online and convince Net newbies to log on the Microsoft way. AOL's lead proved to be insurmountable, no matter what Microsoft tried, including one zany attempt to create a TV-like interface that was a hopelessly mixed metaphor for the online world and a real bandwidth hog to boot. Today, MSN is a respectable (but still distant) competitor to AOL in the Internet access business, and any Web user, not just MSN subscribers, can go to its home page and build a customized Web starting point. You will have to have an online identity with Microsoft, something most people get through free Hotmail e-mail accounts. Once you have this Microsoft "passport," you are more than welcome to sort through dozens of newsfeeds (including those of Microsoft properties and partners such as MSNBC, Slate, Newsweek, and The Washington Post) and services to help yo!
 u start your day. Get local news, weather, and city guides, and position them next to showbiz headlines, tech news, or stock quotes. You lay out the page to your liking, putting as much or as little on the screen as you want. The page also serves as a jumping-off point for Web searching and will guide you to all of Microsoft's other excellent sites, including MSN Money and MSN House & Home. Like any portal, MSN strives to find ways to encourage you to stick around, do some reading, check out a few ads, and maybe do a little shopping. There's so much here that you're likely to do just that.

My Netscape: my.netscape.com

Once upon a time (circa 1995) Netscape was flying high. Its browser had 90-percent market share, its IPO broke Wall Street records, and its young and visionary CEO, Mark Andreessen, was the man of the year. Today, Netscape is a humble division of America Online that's dedicated mainly to providing a customizable portal to people who have stayed loyal over the years. My Netscape is still a fine place to start your computing day, with a three-column design into which you can place the items that matter to you most in any layout you choose. As a registered member (there's no charge), you get an e-mail account with 5 MB of storage, access to AOL Instant Messenger, and an online calendar into which you can put appointments and birthdays. You'll also be invited to enter the Netscape Network message boards, which you can visit if you like to spend time chatting about the events of the day with others. Why not add a soundtrack to your surfing while you're at it? Netscape Radio deliv!
 ers dozens of free online radio stations in every imaginable format for your listening pleasure. The one thing you won't find on your custom page is a Web search tool, although whenever you leave the site to read one of the news stories on your menu, you'll find a Netscape Network toolbar lingering at the top of the screen through which you can search or access your e-mail or instant messaging software with a single click.


Search Engines and Directories

Google: www.google.com

Is Google God? The New York Times op-ed columnist Thomas Friedman was only half kidding when he posed that question in the summer of 2003. He was referring not only to Google's omniscience and ubiquity but also to its Internet omnipotence. As the leading search engine (one whose results are also used by many other sites, including Yahoo!), Google wields enormous power through the search results it generates. Get the address of your flower shop to the top of Google's search results for flowers, and your business is guaranteed to improve. Entire books have been written about Google, and it's hard to summarize all that it can do a brief review. The two most important things to know about it are that it's big3 billion pages indexed and countingand it's fast, with no annoying graphics or flourishes to slow it down. Google will typically return thousands of results on a search, but it will only return results that include all the words you entered, so if your search is too broad!
 , just keep adding words to it. Google first gained fame for its astonishing ability to deliver relevant results. Its secret: the proprietary PageRank technology that assumes that the most relevant search result is the one that has the most other sites linking to it. Google is so confident about this system that it includes the famous "I'm Feeling Lucky" button right on its main page. Click it to see the one result that Google believes is the one you're most likely to be looking for. Chances are it will be right.

The best way to become a good Googler is to take 20 minutes to learn some of the search techniques you can use to improve your research. Just click on the Advanced Search page to pick up some pointers. Remember that you can type just about anything into Google, including stock ticker symbols (get a quote) and addresses (get a map), to get useful results. You can search for photos, and Google's news summaries are outstanding, too. The site also searches newsgroup archives (groups.google.com) and retail catalogs (catalogs.google.com), and can do all this in 88 languages, including, for your amusement, Pig Latin, Klingon, and Elmer Fudd. No one uses the Internet without using Google. It may be the single most important Web site of all time, a pretty impressive achievement for a site that didn't even exist before 1998.

All the Web: www.alltheweb.com

All the Web lives up to its name by searching more than just the usual two billion or so HTML-based Web pages that all search engines tackle. The site specializes in helping you search everything else that's accessible online, including "hundreds of millions" of FTP files, MP3 music files, other audio and video files, news headlines, and pictures. Such a search can yield an intimidating number of results, but All the Web takes an additional step by grouping similar search results into what it calls "clusters," subcategories based on keywords in the search results that help make sense of what are potentially thousands of results. A search on "Paraguay," for example, yielded more than three million hits but only seven clusters such as "business and economy," "society and culture," and "travel and tourism." Each cluster contained 25 or fewer high-quality links, so what at first glance seemed like a daunting number of links actually became quite manageable. All the Web also retu!
 rned a few news headlines, nine video files (although it was hard to tell what they contained from their descriptions), 6,000 photos, and four similar Web queries that you could use to further your Paraguay research. The overall idea: to make sense of too many search results by sorting them for you before you start sorting with your mouse and keyboard.

People Finders

Switchboard.com: www.switchboard.com

Like InfoSpace, Switchboard.com is an online phone book for the entire United States, with millions of residential and business listings for you to search. There are no surprises here. Just type in what you're looking for, and get the result. Unlike InfoSpace, Switchboard includes business listings by town. Type in your ZIP code, and you'll get category-by-category listings of businesses around town, a service that will be especially useful if you're new to the area. Because Switchboard.com acquired the popular MapsOnUs mapping site back in 1998, it has strong mapping skills, too. Use the Road Trip Planner to find the optimal route for your next drive, as well as listings of the sights and services you'll find along the way. The site also features city guides powered by Digital City to help youstorical maps (such as nineteenth-century railroad maps), and even study the surface of Mars. Conservation maps show you what's going on in the rain forests of the world, and several maps are designed for easy printing. Special sections for kids and teachers help make geogr!
 aphy fun, and once you've captured the kids' imaginations, give them gifts from the site's expansive online store.

Dictionaries

yourDictionary.com: www.yourdictionary.com

You can certainly look up a word at yourDictionary.com, but that's just a tiny slice of all that's available here. With online dictionaries for 280 languages, links to free online language courses in more than 100 languages, links to more than 50 specialized glossaries, a plethora of free puzzles, and a word of the day you can have e-mailed to your inbox, there's plenty here to keep word lovers hip deep in fun and learning. English is only a starting point here. The site handles translations to and from English and seven other languages, and if an English word of the day isn't enough to satisfy you, get the Spanish and Chinese words of the day, too. Extras at the site list the 100 most frequently misspelled words (you'll see all your personal spelling devils there) and the 100 most frequently mispronounced words as well (it's "intents and purposes," not "intensive purposes"). It's all entertaining and informative, and if you care about language, you can get swept up for hour!
 s reading the lesThe first thing you'll see is five big sections focusing on personal injury, always a popular topic in our litigious society. Beyond that, 25 main sections cover everything from bankruptcy to probate, each containing introductory articles (many from Nolo), frequently asked questions, forms you may need, links to other Web resources, and additional FindLaw resources. If you want to disinherit your kids, 10 minutes here will get you off to a running start. Find!
 Law's main site has additional sections devoted specifically to small-business legal issues, a great collection of resources for small-business owners who don't know much about employee rights, liability issues, or taxes. Use the search box, and see if you can get yourself educated before you make that first expensive call to a lawyer.

FreeAdvice: www.freeadvice.com

FreeAdvice divides the world of law into 20 categories and then subdivides it into dozens more. Drill down through the categories until you arrive at the Q&A page that best addresses your concerns, whether they revolve around airline crashes, elder law, or insurance claims. Though the site's main purpose is to hook you up with a lawyer, you can get lots of questions answered here without ever having to talk to an attorney. One way to get free advice is to post your question in the most appropriate of the 42 discussion forums. They cover every possible legal topic from drunk driving to domestic abuse, and they're active enough to yield answers the same day you ask your question. You'll also find a powerful search feature to help you sort through the thousands of questions and answers, and the site will even offer to hook you up live on the phone with an attorney for a flat fee of $20 (a service powered by Keen (www.keen.com)). Because so many legal procedures vary from state !
 to state, FreeAdvice is by necessity rather vague in its responses sometimes, but it offers links to state government resources in all 50 states so you can easily do further research on your legal question.

E-mail Services

Hushmail: www.hushmail.com

Does sending personal and confidential correspondence across the Net make you edgy? While it's not as easy for someone to tap into your e-mail while it's in transit as it is for someone to reach into the mailbox at the end of your driveway and tear open your mail, it can happen. Some people - especially businesspeople - have very good reason for wanting to keep their missives as private as possible. If you're one of them, consider Hushmail, a free Web-based e-mail system that guarantees end-to-end encryption. Before your e-mail message heads to the Net, Hushmail encrypts it using an elaborate system of passwords and private encryption keys. You know your own password, of course, but no one, not even you, knows the details of the private key you create when you set up your account. Your messages are sent in their garbled form to your recipients, who ideally are also Hushmail users. At the receiving end, the message is unscrambled on recipients' systems using their own sets of!
  keys. You can also give permission for a non-Hushmail user to see your messages, but, in that case, your encryption only works for the first half of your message's journey, which defeats the purpose somewhat. Users of the free service get 2 MB of mail st supremel!
 y shocking, depending on where you happen to browse. Though SpotLife may be just slightly ahead of its time, there's no doubt that as more of us get fast Web access in our homes, video is the next big Web wave, and SpotLife is ready to roll.

Meetup.com: www.meetup.com

Were you laid off in Toronto? Are you a New Zealand vegan? Are you a hacker from Providence, Rhode Island? There are people at Meetup.com who want to shake your hand. Here's a site that's making a noble attempt to bridge the gap between the Web world and the physical world, helping people with similar interests find each other online and then facilitating meetings where people actually get together face to face (a touching notion in our modern world where the more connected we get, the more disconnected we seem to feel). Meetup.com claims more than 600,000 members in 586 cities in 43 countries (the numbers grow daily). Most services are free. As Meetup members express interest, the site generates meeting dates and suggests meeting venues that the group members vote on as they RSVP. Interestingly, Meetup.com made its first big news in the summer of 2003 when the nascent presidential campaign of Howard Dean started staging meetups with tremendous success. Naturally, other cand!
 idates followed. One obvious potential glitch in the system is that there's no guarantee people will actually show up after they RSVP, so a meetup may in reality fizzle. If enough groupase of use of the free service should motivate you to give it a try, if only to share some photos with friends and family.

Homestead: www.homestead.com

Like Bigstep, Homestead is designed to help small businesspeople of all types build a home on the Web, and it offers a wide variety of service levels to attract the largest possible number of users. At around $6 per month (prices vary depending on the length of your contract and how much you pay up front), you get a simple 10-page brochure-style site. Building the pages is a what-you-see-is-what-you-get experience. There's no coding. You drag and drop elements until you like the way they look on the page; 25 MB of storage space is included. At the next level, around $15 per month, Homestead adds a personalized domain name, two e-mail accounts, 100 MB of storage, and e-commerce features via PayPal. The final step up, to $26.25 per month, gets you up to three personalized domain names, 10 e-mail accounts, and 300 MB of storage. If you need inspiration, check out the site's success stories, which document how several small businesspeople have used Homestead's tools to start sel!
 ling online. Homestead also posts detailed feature comparisons that highlight its benefits compared to other types of Web-site creators, including expensive consultants who could charge you thousands for work you can actually do yourself. It's a wise investment of a few hours to study this world of do-it-yourself site building.


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