Internet Resources and so on...

In response to your question about resources, there is obviously a wide variety. It's become accepted, for instance, when trying to gauge how much press a particular political story has gotten to run a search on Lexis-Nexis and simply report the results. Similarly, sometimes people simply throw a search term into google and calculate popularity based on how many pages pop-up.

Of course, google has its own uses for research: you can search google specifically for blogs, for books, patents, or scholarly articles. Or if you insist on using an unaffiliated search mechanism you can use google to find it. Handy.

For less formal, popular cultures searches I've found three sites to be invaluable: The Internet Movie Database, which contains the names of movies and the actors who played in them (with other miscellaneous facts), Amazon (the site has been so successful in expanding its inventory it can now be used reliably for finding book titles, authors and the like), and the much maligned Wikipedia for nearly anything else.

I hope this information will be of some use in your immediate search. If not, perhaps we can all sit back and marvel at the sheer volume of information now available on the internet.

And just a (dense and possibly incomprehensible) note about the newly disgraced Ms. Dudley-Eshbach. I've often wondered if severely punishing people who accidentally reveal bigoted views wasn't, from a long term perspective at least, counterproductive if our end goal is the obliteration of racism in all its forms. In my experience in the Eastern Shore and elsewhere, the kind of racism here on display--not tending toward overt action so much as cultural condescension--remains more widespread than people like to believe. Part of the reason for its survival is that it is inconspicuous. It doesn't manifest itself in racial epithets or off-color remarks in front of strangers. People who hold these views have already learned the lessons of Dudley-Eschbach, Mel Gibson and Michael Richards well enough to keep their views about the intelligence (and worth) of Latinos and African-Americans close to their chests. And far from relieving them of these views, I would imagine the harsh treatment doled out for what they view as innocuous offenses only hardens them and drives their backwards views deeper and deeper inside.

It's possible we gain more as a society by pillorying the wrongdoers as an example to the majority about proper conduct than we do by worrying about the few wayward souls.

Still, I wonder what would happen if Ms. Dudley-Eshbach said that posting the objectionable photos wasn't a mistake--or at least not a mistake in the sense that it was accidental and not representative of her personal views. If she said it was a mistake in the way she viewed people, and that she was wrong, and that she was sorry. And then people forgave her.

This all assumes the photos in question are actually representative of Ms. Dudley-Eshbach's views, of course. If they are an isolated example, perhaps the photos should make us question her character less than her character (as established by being the President of a University) should make us view the photos as an aberration. But you get what I'm saying.