About this Issue

Publishing the July issue of Interface has presented significant challenges. During June and July our Berglund Center labs and offices at Pacific University commonly reach 85+ degrees Fahrenheit before 10 a.m. After all, we have eight computers and three to five people working at all hours, and no windows. Finally, fearing that our student workers were going to find jobs in cooler quarters for which they might actually be paid what they are worth, we contracted to have the air conditioning spruced up. This has resulted in a week of men crawling around in our ceiling. This might be regarded as simply another form of overhead, but our old-fashioned foot-square ceiling tiles began crashing to the floor. When Heather Hawkins, our web master, began working in her bicycle helmet, we felt it time to shut down until the work could be completed.

What has sustained our efforts through this period is our belief that the material in this issue is both timely and of a high quality. Certainly the general motif for the month of July has been the beating that things technological have been taking in the stock market, along, of course, with other equities. Workers and investors have been coming to the understanding that perhaps their retirement is either farther down the road than assumed, or will be a lot less plush. For educators, the realities of shrinking finances hits home as school districts prepare their fall budgets. Mark Szymanski, our K-12 grants editor, prepared a column to instruct teachers in how to seek additional funding in his column, "A Dream Deferred: Maybe Not... "

Kevin Kawamoto, in "Subduing the Digital Dragon: Controlling the Internet in Asia," reminds us that the Internet has all sorts of impacts, including very challenging political ones for certain sorts of regimes. As complicated as the Internet has made the American political and economic systems, it is even more threatening to many Asian governments as it breaks down "Chinese Walls" and lets in the varied perspectives of globally distributed opinions.

David Staley, noted writer on issues dealing with graphical uses of the Internet gives us "Visualization-ism: An Art History." David both outlines the many ways in which graphical materials can contribute to our understanding of apparently non-graphical materials, and make a splendid use of such materials in doing so. It is a great pleasure when we can begin, as David does, to utilize some of the non-textual capabilities of the Internet to communicate.

Donna Anderson, one of our Berglund Affiliates from the just-concluded Berglund Summer Institute has been kind enough to write up her experiences in "Berglund Center for Internet Studies 2002 Summer Institute." This year we announce the call for applications for the 2003 Berglund Fellowship Program much earlier---in this issue in fact. See also our call for applications for participation in the 2003 Summer Institute.

In an effort to further push my own understanding of the impact of the Internet into more complex areas, I reviewed several recently published works, one dealing with security, Alexis D. Gutzman's Unforeseen Circumstances. Strategies and Technologies for Protecting Your Business and Your People in a Less Secure World. The other, John Cassidy's dot.con. The Greatest Story Ever Sold, is a very thorough and lively coverage of the economics and politics of the dot.com crash of the spring of 2000.

Emboldened by the insights and information that Cassidy presented I went farther in my editorial, "The Internet, Securities, and Security" to present my own understanding of this particular impact of the Internet.

As always, we hope that you will find this issue of Interface useful and challenging.

Jeffrey Barlow,
Editor, Interface
(barlowj@pacificu.edu)