Fear Factor

Fredd Culbertson is not a psychiatrist. But he is an expert on phobias -- or, at least, the names of phobias. Mr. Culbertson's Phobia List (www.phobialist.com) is a collection of more than 530 such names (our world is a fearsome one, it appears).

Some phobias listed at the site were new to me, including fear of the color yellow (xanthophobia), fear of relatives (syngenesophobia) and fear of foreign languages (xenoglossophobia). Mr. Culbertson, who sets up Web sites for restaurants, is an amateur etymologist. His interest is in the ways phobias are named, not their treatment. He will list a phobia only if it can be found in a medical reference, which is why many of those submitted -- like the frequently proffered aibohphobia, the fear of palindromes -- fail to make the cut.

The most fascinating area of the site, under Notes, is the Most Wanted List of phobias that visitors believe should have names but don't. These include the fear of feet, fear of underwear and, um, fear of lists. Until a few years ago, fear of clowns was No. 1 on the Most Wanted List. But Mr. Culbertson ruffled feathers when he accepted the term coulrophobia.

Coulrophobia supposedly stems from the Greek ''koulon,'' or ''limb,'' the root of several words related to ''stilt walker.'' That doesn't spell clown for most phobia aficionados, who continue to suggest other names to Mr. Culbertson, like bozophobia. They argue that coulrophobia, like too many clowns, just isn't funny.

He Surfed, She Surfed

Are women better than men at finding what they want on the Web?

That is one interpretation of a new study that suggests women use their time online more ''purposefully'' than their male counterparts, who, to put it kindly, tend to be more scattershot browsers. The study, by Jupiter Media Metrix, tracked the Web activity of Europeans from January 2001 to January 2002.

Women spend less time online than men -- a total of 7 hours a month, compared with 10 for men -- and do so in shorter sessions. But women tend to go online with a purpose, like shopping, banking or sending electronic greeting cards, according to Michele Poliziani, the author of the study. Men are more likely to go on the Web to browse, read and download software.

Of course, plenty of women are link hoppers, and plenty of men send animated greeting cards. But other studies confirm the difference in overall usage patterns. Indeed, the often unstated assumption about why men's online sessions outlast women's is the popularity of pornographic sites among men -- though some might consider them ''purposeful.''

1911 Redux

There are few better ways to time-travel than by visiting the newly posted 1911encyclopedia.org. At this site you can peruse the text of the storied 1911 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, which broke new ground by having experts in each field prepare its articles. There is still relevant information here, but the site is compelling mostly for the glimpses it offers of Edwardian attitudes and prejudices.

Where else can you learn (in the fascinating subject area ''Women'') that in those days ''where a married woman commits a crime in company with her husband, she is generally presumed to have acted by his coercion, and so to be entitled to acquittal.'' Conversely, one cringes at the entry on Siam (''The children are pretty but soon lose their charm, and the race, generally speaking, is ugly from the European standpoint'').

Solving the technical issues involved in scanning the 29-volume encyclopedia was a two-year task requiring custom software -- and Britannica had nothing to do with it. The 1911 edition is in the public domain and was put online by Byron Reese, chief executive of the reference site Pagewise.com.

''The 1911 E.B. has been a personal passion of mine since I was in college,'' said Mr. Reese, who is 33. ''It was called a Wonder of the World when it came out and I echo that notion.'' That sentiment is seconded by Virginia Bartow, a curator in special collections at the New York Public Library. ''I have one next to my desk,'' she said, ''and it's wonderful that now everyone can,'' if only virtually.

Mr. Reese said he planned to run advertisements on the site to recoup the $200,000 he said it had cost him so far. There is still much work to do to clean up the text (optical scanning often introduced garbled copy) and doublecheck the 30,000 links that were manually coded for the subject headings. The site also lacks a search function, and one is planned.

If, as Mr. Reese said, there is interest in such older editions, why hasn't Britannica itself made them available online? The company, which offers a subscription site for its current edition, does not think there is a market for them, or at least a paying one. Tom Panelas, a spokesman for Encyclopaedia Britannica, said, ''When it comes to creating products that people will actually buy, we find that up-to-date information is what they want.''

Oops, Did It Again

One reason many Web users prefer Google to other search engines is its sense of humor. To demonstrate a practical application of machine learning at its site, Google recently posted a list of more than 1,000 different misspellings of ''Britney Spears'' that have been typed into its search function by at least two users apiece in the last three months and corrected by its spelling software (google.com/jobs/britney.html).

Poor Briteney Spears. People really seem to have trouble with her given name (there's not a single misspelling of Spears on the list). Perhaps Brittiny should have considered switching to one less troublesome.

Drawings (Chris Gash)