Sportswriter is a $100 program that spins sports copy out of basketball game stats and a few quotations from the coach. 80 small newspapers are using it to cover high school events. [WSJ, 3/29/94. EDUPAGE.] Sportswriter is from Zybrainics Software Inc. (Rochester, MN), 507/252-9114. [Kelly J. Boldan (kboldan@mr.net), CARR-L, 3/31/94.] Roger Helms wrote Sportswriter as a training program for high school journalism students, but it didn't work out that way. Small-town editors say that many people want to do sports copy, but few do it well. Sportswriter does most of the job, and is cheaper than students. Helms worries about the threat to journalism -- especially the loss of entry-level jobs -- and is bothered by the computer doing the intellectual work while people do only the data entry and post-editing. He has turned down requests to do volleyball and other sports, and is no longer selling the program. [John Ochway, SJM, 5/8/94, p. 1F.]

Harvey Newquist's "The Brain Makers" is an expose of the AI business in the 1980s: Symbolics, LMI, Gold Hill, Intellicorp, etc. "A fun read." [John Nagle (nagle@netcom.com), comp.ai, 4/16/94. David Joslin.] Not to be confused with David H. Freedman's "Brainmakers," which trashes top-down AI and praises bottom-up research. [Hans Moravec (hpm@frc.ri.cmu.edu).] Jorn Barger is circulating a chronology of significant AI events, derived from "The Brain Makers." He'd call the book "The Great LISP-Machine Bubble." The publisher is Sams, $24.95 hardbound. [jorn@mcs.com, comp.ai, 4/22/94. Chuck Morefield.]

An index to David Kahaner's reports on Japanese and Asian CS technology -- AI, expert systems, fuzzy logic, neural networks, computational linguistics, artificial life, 3D graphics, supercomputing, etc. -- is available from Rick Schlichting (rick@cs.arizona.edu), the moderator of comp.research.japan. If you're traveling to Japan, this is a good way to study up on the labs. The listing lets you scan for keywords in 420+ reports for the past four years. FTP reports (and the index?) from japan/kahaner.reports on cs.arizona.edu (192.12.69.5). [4/5/94.]

For research on the merging of ontologies (e.g., hierarchies) see the huge ARPA Knowledge Sharing Effort based at Stanford: http://www-ksl.stanford.edu/knowledge-sharing/README.html and ftp:ksl.stanford.edu:/pub/knowledge-sharing. A good paper to start with is Thomas Gruber's "A Translation Approach to Portable Ontology Specifications." [Ralph Becket (rwab1@cl.cam.ac.uk), comp.ai, 4/27/94. David Joslin.]

Andy Pryke has collected Internet-accessible information on data mining and knowledge discovery in databases. Take a look at http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~anp/TheDataMine.html. [a.n.pryke@cs.bham.ac.uk, comp.ai, 4/26/94. David Joslin.]

CompuServe has an AI forum with "an enormous file of research abstracts, dissertation abstracts, book reviews, and the like." [Fred (bchristman@delphi.com), sci.psychology, 4/4/94.]

Thirteen BibTex bibliographies containing 240K CS references have been collected on ftp://ftp.ira.uka.de/pub/bibliography /www/bibliography.html, echoed on ftp://ftp.cs.umanitoba.ca/pub/bibliographies/www/bibliography.html and ftp://faui80.informatik.uni-erlangen.de/pub/literatur /Mirror/bibliography/www/bibliography.html. Some of the bibliographies prohibit commercial use. All are compressed with gzip (.gz). Alf-Christian Achilles (bibservadmin@ira.uka.de). [comp.ai, 4/27/94. David Joslin.]