I am in New York at the moment and was planning to be here this
week - I am going to Poughkeepsie to visit Community School 
Networks on Tuesday or possibly Wednesday, and I am on vacation
Thursday and Friday for 4th of July. However if you want I could
come up there Tuesday or Wednesday to talk, although I would prefer 
next week. Or I could call. In the meantime, here is a brief status 
report. 

There was a conference call for the NHSE a couple of weeks ago.
The main things that need to be done for the next review meeting
in September are to get the repository in a box (RIB) toolkit 
working, get some of the domain-specific repositories up and 
running and using RIB, and to get issue 2 of the NHSE Review 
Journal out. Our part in this is to do the computational chemistry
domain-specific repository, give guidelines on how to construct a 
roadmap for a domain-specific repository, and for me to finish
my random number generator review article for the second issue of
the NHSE Review Journal, which is scheduled for mid-August. 

I expect to have a draft of my review completed by end of July for 
comments. Sung-Hoon Ko is helping me with finishing some testing that 
still needs to be done, and tidying up some of my code to be put in
the NHSE catalog.

I talked to Dave Bernhold about setting up the computational chemistry
repository and we agreed that we needed someone to do the grunt work of
looking around the Web for appropriate information and codes, and to
help with the AskNPAC comp chem resource, by helping to find appropriate
newsgroups and mailing lists and finding the archives for these to
include in AskNPAC. You said it was OK to hire someone to help with
this. I asked a few people if they knew anyone who could do it - the
main requirements being a knowledge of the Web, search engines, etc,
Unix, and preferably at least a passing knowledge of chemistry. Gang
suggested his wife, Yang Meng, who is looking for a job for the summer
and seems to have all the right qualifications.  I interviewed her on
Wednesday and I think she will be fine for the job. She can spend a few
weeks gathering together Web pages and codes, and when the repository in
a box becomes available (supposedly in August) we can use it to catalog
the codes and also start to organize things a bit more and put together 
a roadmap. It should be easy for her to get help from Gang for the
AskNPAC stuff, also. If you think this is OK I can get Bonni to hire her
as an hourly over the summer to do this.   

As for terrain rendering, Alvin and I have been working with Chris
Walczak since he returned to NPAC, and I think he has put together a
great demo using Inventor. The main problem now is to improve the
download time for the data. Alvin came up with some ideas and code
to do this using wavelets, which we discussed with Chris and Marek 
and Czeslaw, and Chris is going to incorporate this into his program. 
I will also work with Chris on getting some more data.
Marek said another Polish intern could also work on this over the
summer, and Czeslaw could help out with improving the simple wavelet
implementation that Alvin is using.

The 2D Java applet still needs a lot of work, particularly to improve
the GIS stuff. Ki has been working on this. I recommended to you that we
hire him over the summer since this GIS applet is a crucial part of the
CIV project and he is the only person working on it, and he was just
doing it as an independent study. But Bonni tells me that he has not
been given an appointment for the summer. I would like to hire him as an
hourly over the summer to work on it if that is OK. He told me he is
willing to work on it part time or full time over the summer, but he
only wants to work full time if he can also get an RA for next year,
otherwise he will have to spend time this summer looking around for some
funding and another project to work on.  If we don't hire him then we
will need someone else to work with him over the summer and take over
this work from him in the fall.  

Community Schools Networks stuff is going OK - the teachers are starting
to use the Webboard and LivingPage. I still have some administration
programs to finish which are talking longer than I (and Gary) would
like, but they are nearly ready. I am supposed to visit them Tuesday or
Wednesday this week to show them how to use these new Webboard 
administration stuff.

Saleh's paper got delayed when I found a few problems in the results and
his technique. He is fixing them at the moment at his usual pace. 

I haven't had much time to work on Su's papers but I recently had a bit 
of a breakthrough in understanding the problems in his proofs and possibly
how to fix them. I will try to get back to him soon about that.