SITE BYTE
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Value For No Money

Remember what it was like finding an article in the bad old days? You went to a library, preferably an academic one, found nothing there, then started snail-mailing friends overseas who might have seen it. The Internet helped, but the really good searches in this sector, like Northern Light, still had to be paid for. But now there’s www.findarticles.com, the first free full-text article search service on the Net. Don’t expect miracles, though. It covers more than 300 publications worldwide, but that’s a drop in the ocean of international publishing, especially if you include Webzines. Within those 300, however, the text-search works rather well. Findarticles seems to run a pretty diligent spider which digs well beyond the top links in a publication. I found something on the New Statesman which did not even feature under the section headings on the main page of the day. The service could use some support from the databases of existing search engines but even so, it’s good value. Especially because it’s for no money.

Childspace

PITARA.COM is among the best Indian kids and parenting site on the Net. It exhibits the primary virtue of a children’s site: it never talks down to its audience.
Pitara follows the familiar pattern — story, poem, folklore and DYK (did you know?), but its content is commendably sophisticated and part of the learning process. Gandhi’s life is told as a story. History, geography and sacred culture inform a story about two children’s journey to Gomukh. The Irula tribe of Tamil Nadu, traditionally associated with snakes, is also explored in story form.

Reading recommendations come from none less than Majula Padmanabhan. Nothing very new in the list — Carroll, Kenneth Graham, E. B. White, T. H. White, Frank Baum, Tolkien, Blyton, Nesbit, Montgomery, Burroughs. But then, how many children can get to know all these names from their parents and peers alone?
Pitara is published from New Delhi and should be on the bookmarks list of parents who want their children to value reading.

Live Bees, Etc

With a full hour of compressed video documentaries and interviews of medical practitioners besides the usual databank,
A Guide to Alternative Medicine is more credible than most products in its category. It is anchored by the first director of the US National Institutes of Health’s alternative medicine initiative, who happens to be of Mohawk extraction and saw strong medicine worked at home in his childhood. Excellent credentials.

Alternative medicine is rarely as radical as its appellation. It prefers to restrict itself to guaranteed markets — herbal arts, acupressure, the virtues of ginseng. But this CD is commendably venturesome. It goes to the extent of apitherapy, the art first mentioned by Hippocrates which specialises in the application of live bees. For arthritis, attach a bee to the affected joint. Frozen shoulder? One sting, strategically delivered. Migraine? An incisive intervention at the base of the skull. To get used to the idea, see live footage of vengeful bees being applied to unnaturally calm humans. Another area that is rarely explored: Amerind holistic healing, explained by a Cherokee physician. Learn that Sundance was a procedure first and a film festival afterwards. Learn about the Sweat Lodge, a camp sauna to the pale faces but a source of great medicine to people of the blood. There are also sections on therapy by movement, art, music and guided imagery, besides the oldest method known — prayer.

(The writer is Chief Operating Officer of Expressindia.com.
He can be reached on pratik@crosswinds.net)

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