Search high-court cases or catch the buzz at the HIVE

You can read a selection of recent and past decisions of the Supreme Court on a World Wide Web service maintained by Cornell University at http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/supct.table.html. Visitors to the site - especially those more fluent in legalese than in computer code - will be relieved to find an extremely simple layout.

The site provides a word-search capability that makes it a snap to search for cases. The search engine does a lot of the work for you, arranging the cases in a number of different ways for easy browsing. Click on the home page entries to find the cases arranged by date, term or topic. The database covers rulings from the past seven terms, including the last term, which ended in June.

The site also offers an express newsletter service, accessible via the Web or by electronic mail, that provides synopses and analyses of Supreme Court decisions "within hours after their release." The service, operated out of the Legal Information Institute of Cornell Law School, is called the "lii-bulletin." This fall, the institute will kick off liibulletin-ny, which will offer analyses of key decisions form the New York Court of Appeals. To subscribe to liibulletin, send an e-mail message to listserv@lii.law.

cornell.edu. Keep the subject line blank and write in the body of your message "subscribe liibulletin Firstname Lastname." For example, John Doe would write in the body of the message, "subscribe liibulletin John Doe." Find out more about this service at http://www.law.cornell.edu/focus/bulletins.html.

Reinvention Review

The National Performance Review offers its own electronic newsletter called "Reinvention Express," offering information, updates and tips for federal managers and employees. The July 12 issue gives inside information on how agencies are using intranets to improve business practices and on upcoming intranet workshops sponsored by the NPR and the NPR's Government Information Technology Services working group. You can access the "Reinvention Express" archives by pointing your browser to the NPR's home page at http://www.npr.gov and by clicking on News Room. Or send an e-mail message to Listproc@etc.fed.gov with the message "SUBSCRIBE EXPRESS-L FIRSTNAME LASTNAME," putting three spaces between each full word.

NPR's home page also offers links to state, local and federal government resources. At the NPR home page, click on Web Links and then click on Executive Branch, Congress, and State and Local. The site will link you to a meta-index for state and local government information, including an index of state government Web indexes called StateSearch, sponsored by the National Association of State Information Resources Executives.

Virtual Reality Buzz

This acronym has a nice ring to it: the HIVE. Sponsored by the Naval Postgraduate School's Department of Computer Science, the Laboratory for Human Interaction in the Virtual Environment (HIVE) aims to develop "human-centered" training systems for the military. For example, researchers at the HIVE are analyzing how the military carries out standard training for medics so that the military can effectively translate training elements into a virtual environment. To see what's happening at the HIVE, point your browser to http://www-npsnet.cs.nps.navy.mil/hive/hive_research.html.