* USENET NEWSGROUPS

Usenet is a decentralized discussion system running on tens of thousands of cooperating computers around the world (much of the traffic runs over the Internet). It covers some 6,000 subjects in areas called newsgroups. The estimated number of readers ranges in the low millions and traffic each day is approaching 50 megabytes. Some mailing lists "mirror" Usenet newsgroups and vice-versa.

In many ways, Usenet has its own culture and the new user is wise to read carefully before posting messages. The newsgroups news.announce.newusers and news.newusers.questions are for those new to Usenet. Since it runs on a variety of systems, consult your local site for information on how to access it.

         Newsgroup                  Topic
     comp.text.tex                    TeX and LaTeX
     comp.soft-sys.spss               SPSS
     comp.soft-sys.shazam             Shazam
     comp.soft-sys.sas                SAS (same as mailing list SAS-L)
     comp.soft-sys.matlab             Matlab
     comp.infosystems.announce Internet Information System Announcements
     sci.stat.edu              Statistics and Education (same as mailing
     sci.stat.math             Statistics and Math       list edstat-l)
     sci.stat.consult          Statistics and Consulting
     sci.math.stat             Statistics Discussion
     sci.op-research           Operations Research
     sci.econ.research         Research in Economics (Moderated)
                                 All past discussions are indexed and
                                 organized into topic areas by one moderator,
                                 Forrest Smith. They are archived at 
                                 ftp://sunsite.unc.edu/pub/academic/
                                 economics/sci.econ.research or
                                 http://walras.econ.duke.edu
      sci.econ                 Discussions in Economics 
                                  (often dominated by current
                                  political economy questions; 
                                  a good place for economic
                                  education if you're patient)