Webspector’s Site and Blog Inspection

This site has hundreds of fotos of tropical plants

This time we are going to review a site that shows that not all commercial web pages are the same. To begin with, Rain-Tree offeres such a big deal of information about tropical plants, with explanations, drawings and photos that it could be regarded almost as a website about plants or biology.  Of course the owners use the site to sell their products, which are pharmaceutical products obtained from the vast variety of tropical plants growing in the rainforests of the earth. However the company shows an ecological approach to making business with the resources of the rainforest. While using the land for cattle or timber harvesting destroys the rainforest, there are other ways of gaining profits from the rainforest: harvesting sustainable resources such as medicinal plants. There is a good question pointed out by the site owners: “How can we in rich developed nations tell poor developing tropical countries that they cannot exploit their resources to service their debts and feed their people when our own economies have been built on the extensive exploitation of our own natural resources?” They give an answer: economical viable alternatives must be provided. Surprisingly the alternative even makes more economic sense: an estimation states that sustainable harvesting of rainforest can result in profits of $2400 per acre per year which contrast dramatically to the poor $400 for cutting timber and $60 for cattle grazing.
The botanical products sold by the company are based on plants used for centuries by the inhabitants of the rainforests.
The company also claims to be protecting these plants form being pateted by a single company, since they put the informtion into the public purview, and what is public kowledge cannot be patented any more. This argument has already been used successfully in the denial of U.S. plant use patents.
This site shows us some good information about sustainable economy. We simpathize with the content of the site, but that is not the reason why we give it a full five stars out of five: The site is content rich, shows different faces of a situation, has lots of well taken photos and is easy to navigate.

We are convinced that everybody should have a look at this site with its marvellous photographs of the earth, our planetary system, the galaxies and clusters of galaxies brought to the public by the NASA on a daily basis. Since 1995, this has been a free service of the North American Space Agency for the general public. They started publishing these great photos in June 1995 with an image called ‘Neutron Star Earth’, followed by the Pleiades Star Cluster, the Supernova 1987a Aftermath, Earth from Apollo 17, a Gamma Ray Sky Map, Jupiter from Voyager, the Spiral Galaxy M100, the Cat’s Eye Nebula, the Hooker Telescope on Mt. Wilson and ‘Ida and Dactyl: Asteroid and Moon’, and have been publishing a photo a day ever since.
They published the first photographs made by the famous Hubble Space Telescope and have brought amazing pictures to the eyes of amateurs and people somewhat interested in deep space phenomena. This month the looked into the archieve and published a photo of the Earth with transiting Moon taken from a distance of 50 million kilometers (31 million miles) by a probe sent to space in July 2005. A clever combination of different wavelengths and obtained a photo with surprising details of continents, oceans and clouds.

One of the galaxies

The NASA doesn’t limit the publications to just photos: they always include a little caption with interesting technical details of the photo or photographed object, including contextual links for further reading.
This site gets a full five stars our of five from us because of the beauty of the images, the simplicity of the page and because they don’t have any ads or commercials on their site. We wish there were more web sites like this one.

The Astronomy Picture of the Day is also available for inclusion into the sidebar of WordPress-Blogs and we certainly recommend it’s inclusion go to your plugin page and add it right away,
And just in case you don’t see the Astronomy Picture of the Day in the sidebar, just throw away your Internet Explorer and get a real browser: Firefox.

This site has lots of forums for discussing all kinds of issues.

For those who are interested in learning about asian cultures, we recommend a visit to this great site. It’s a blend of blogs, forums, free stuff like smileys for your chatting activities and more of these annoying ingredientes of so many internet sites. So, you might wonder, why do dedicate a review to this site? The answer is quiet easy: it has a huge forum with a total of about 3 Million posts according to the owners, besides the blogs are wirtten by people from Asia or people pretty much interested in asian cultures such as chinese, japanese, korean, vietnamese, hmong, malaysian, indonesian, indian, cambodian, thai, filipino, lao, mongolian or singaporean.
For ourselves it was a little bit strange to read about a special singaporean culture, we thought that was the same as chinese, but we found interesting details about the differences between these two cultures. And we are sure that we are not the only ones who have no clue about what hmong culture is. Well, if you are interested in finding out, go to this site and discover Asia and asian people.
On the overall evaluation, we give this site a four stars out of 5 because of the annoying free smileys ads integrated into almost all of their pages. But that’s the only flaw we could find.
We entered the chinese culture section and quickly found some introduction into the chinese language, with explanations of the signs and audio files with the pronounciation of many chinese words. This is a great feature for language students for any language but especially welcome for a languaga such as chinese which consists only of very short words and since the repertoire of these short words is not big enough to express all possible concepts, chinese language makes use of the different possibilities for pronouncing the same word, changing the meaning with only pronouncing it differently. As far as we know, they have about 5 different ways of pronounciation for each word, with 5 sometimes very different meanings. We will look deeper into this site’s pages and we hope to find all the answers we need. We are sure they offer great guidance for beginning chinese language students.

We came across this usefull site when we were writing an hypertext document in english and needed to use the english translation for ‘contradicoriamente’. We thought it might be ‘contradictarily’, but we were not sure. So we truegled (I saw it on Google!) it first in order to find out how many times this word had been used in other hypertext documents (internet pages). It came up about 260 times. Checking one of the resulting pages, we stumbled upon a link to an ONLINE-DICTIONARY FOR ENGLISH-SPANISH-ENGLISH .
We typed in our word and were quickly served with a translation to spanish. We inmediately found the confirmation for our doubts, even though we had been a little sceptical since our searched word is not so common. In the truegeling world, you can see that when you compare the 262 mentions for ‘contradictarily’ to  4,630,000 references for ’sceptical’. 
From now on, we will use the word ‘contradictarily’ whenever we visit a web-site that offers online translations. Time will tell us, how good the dictionary from wordmagicsoft is. For the moment, we give it a full 5 stars.

The dictionary page is straight forward, just type in the word you need translated, choose direction for translation and click it.

The main page of the site reveals that the online dictionary is a free feature brought to the public by wordmagicsoft  who are using their site primarily to sell their off-line translation systems and dictionaries, as well as translation services on demand, both machine made translations and translations carried out by real persons.