THE JOURNAL OF EDUCATION, COMMUNITY, AND VALUES
This issue marks the beginning of summer for us. Accordingly, like summer itself in Oregon, it is a bit late. Our apologies. We have been quite busy preparing for the Berglund Summer Institute <http://bcis.pacificu.edu/edinst.html>. The Institute is filling fast, and if you are interested in participating, we hope that you will apply soon. We would be pleased if the Institute were to consist largely of readers of Interface.
In this issue we have tried for a somewhat lighter tone, appropriate to summer itself. Mark Szymansky, our Grants editor, informs us of offerings from the George Lucas foundation. Our Book Review editor, Drew Harrington, reviews a work by Jeremy Rifkin, and the column also includes a recent work by noted IT professional Edward Yourdon, Byte Wars. (These two works, like the impact of the Internet itself, cannot be said to be "light".)
Our articles include two pieces with an unusual focus. Each of these is reprinted from our sister publication, the Journal of the Association for History and Computing. The first, by Carmen de Pablos Heredero, discusses the use of e-mail in Spain and appears in both a Spanish and an English version. This piece is important for several reasons. First, we know now that the impact of the Internet begins with E-mail use. This is invariably the first indication that a society is going on-line in a serious way. Second, Spanish is one of the fastest growing languages on the Internet. An increasing percentage of the readers of Interface are coming to us from non-English speaking countries. In a future issue we will do a run-down on our traffic as an index of the impact of the Internet, and of Interface itself.
Our other article, by Terry DuBose, discusses the utility of the Internet in documenting changes in medical technology, in this case, in Medical Sonography. We hope that this piece will be of interest to a slightly different audience than we usually reach with Interface. The medical community is among the most wired professional communities and many interesting electronic applications have begun in medicine and allied sciences.
One of our two student editors, Matt Ernst, discusses another important computer application, OCR or Optical Character Recognition. OCR strikes many people, anxious to convert documents prepared in a non-digital environment to a form useful for digital distribution, as a very promising process. Matt discusses the advantages and the limitations of our own OCR operations in our labs, and calls attention to a very useful and reasonably priced OCR program created in Russia.
My own editorial, "Globalism, Crime, and the Internet," began as an attempt at an exploration of some apparently laughable attempts at Internet fraud. As I got into the topic, however, (with the help of agents from both the F.B.I. and the Treasury Department) it proved to be a far more serious one. Organized criminal gangs have been among the first social groups to take advantage of the Internet. In the editorial I examine one such group, Nigerian gangs, and their very successful frauds which "net" millions of dollars annually.
As always, we hope that you find this issue of Interface useful and provocative. We invite correspondence, and welcome submissions from those with similar interests. Our editors are always willing to work with our readers to prepare pieces for publication. Please do not hesitate to query us.
Jeffrey Barlow,
Editor, Interface
(barlowj@pacificu.edu)
Carmen de Pablos Heredero, Irene Albarràn Lozano and Antonio Montero...
Carmen de Pablos Heredero, Irene Albarràn Lozano and Antonio Montero...
Terry J. DuBose - Polybiography of Diagnostic Medical Sonography
Mark Szymanski - Use the Force Luke: The George Lucas Foundation
Matt Ernst - Creating Digital Documents Using Optical Character...
Jeremy Rifkin and Jeremy P. Tarcher's The Age of Access: The New Culture...
Edward Yourdon's Byte Wars: The Impact of September 11 on Information...