About this Issue


As we begin our third calendar year of publication, we will do so with dispatch, with a very full new issue. But we cannot avoid remarking that in the past year, our first full year of publication, Interface has become an increasingly important source of information on the impact of the Internet. We now serve more than one thousand pages a day to our audience, field many queries, and have the pleasure of hearing regularly from delighted readers. We thank you for your support during this year.

Our first issue of 2003 is posting a bit late. Many If not most of our editors are academics, and virtually all our staff our students. The beginning of a new semester is always an extremely busy time for us. Our apologies, but we think that you will find this issue well worth waiting for.

Ryan Johnson, Electronic Resources Librarian at Washington State University leads off with his Berglund Fellow article, "The Changing Nature of Scholarly Publishing and the Tenure Process." <http://bcis.pacificu.edu/journal/2003/01/johnson.php>This is, of course, for academics an important issue, but it should be an important issue for all who read, because the "Iron Triangle" of university faculties, libraries, and presses has done much to define the intellectual life of Western cultures for many centuries. Just as the printing press did much to create the triangle, the development of electronic printing promises, at least, to bend it into a new shape, as Ryan shows.

As all of us are aware, one impact of the Internet has been to multiply by a factor of many thousands the amount of material available to any of us. This is both a blessing, when we need the material, and a curse, when we must find it among the welter of stuff on the Web. There is an increasingly common distinction being made between "data"---the raw stuff of the content on the Internet, and "information"---that portion actually of use to us for any given reason. Our editor Lenny Chernoff, in his feature article, "News Aggregators---Automatically Delivered News" <http://bcis.pacificu.edu/journal/2003/01/charnoff.php> stells us how to utilize a relatively unknown set of applications, news aggregators, which have the capacity to separate the information from the data. These applications can save us a great deal of time while raising our confidence that we will at least be exposed to most of the information in which we are particularly interested.

One of the most common uses of the Internet is to search for information on issues related to health. Our editor Kevin Kawamoto is a rising star in this universe of information, as his column on health-related materials on the Internet has rapidly become one of our most popular features. In this issue Kevin writes on "Teaching Students About Cyberhealth Information." <http://bcis.pacificu.edu/journal/2003/01/kawamoto.php> Kevin believes that an important part of being an educated person is to learn to use the Internet for one's own health needs, and here he outlines an approach to separating reliable information from the all too common other sort of data.

After spending a month in Taiwan early in 2003, I felt that I gained a new insight onto some of the impacts of the Internet abroad. The recent economic and political history of Taiwan is, I argue here, inextricable tied to the development of the Internet. I begin a two-part analysis of "The Internet, R&D, and U.S. Policy in the Taiwan Straits" <http://bcis.pacificu.edu/journal/2003/01/edit.php> swith an overview of the relations between Taiwan, China, and the United States."

In our "Life-Long Learning" column, Christine Guenther, of the Math and Computer Science Department at Pacific University, reviews Keith Devlin's book, The Millennium Problems: The Seven Greatest Unsolved Mathematical Puzzles of Our Time. <http://bcis.pacificu.edu/journal/2003/01/guenther.php> Chris provides, we think, a model review of a work that would appear at first glance to be over limited interest. But Chris brings even those of us who fled gratefully from our last required course in math into the world of contemporary studies in math. For those with a strong background, Chris writes, Devlin provides an overview of current problems in the field. For the rest of us, it shows the excitement and the beauty of mathematics as it is currently understood.

In our regular book reviews, we review two recent works, Howard Rheingold's Smart Mobs, <http://bcis.pacificu.edu/journal/2003/01/rheingold.php> and Kenichi Ohmae's The Invisible Continent. < http://bcis.pacificu.edu/journal/2003/01/ohmae.php > These are, of course, two very different books, but each deals with the near future of the Internet. Rheingold argues that mobile computing will transform even our political processes, for better or worse, and Ohmae sees a world in which those groups that take advantage of Internet-enabled economic activities will become increasingly dominant, culturally, economically, and politically as they enter the "Invisible Continent" while all others fall rapidly behind. We think that their ideas are worth examining, and each of them has a substantial record as a thoughtful and influential observer of the Internet and its widely varied impacts.

Our Education Editor, Mark Szymanski, revisits the issue of the Digital Divide by examining the Beaumont Foundation, <http://bcis.pacificu.edu/journal/2003/01/grants.php> a group that has five years to give away $350 million. Most of the monies awarded will be as grants of technology to school districts. Let the grant writing begin!

At the Berglund Center, an increasing problem for us is digital storage. With our partner, the Matsushita Center for Electronic Learning, we serve a great number of digital materials in a wide variety of formats. Most recently, we have spent more and more time working with film and sound files, both of which demand increasing storage capacity. Our two technical editors, Matt Ernst and Jesse Snyder, spend much of their time working with issues related to storing and serving such materials. In this month's Technical Corner Matt, a graduating senior in Computer Science at Pacific University, takes us through a survey of the many different storage technologies currently available, and gives our readers guidance on how to make the best choice among them. Depending on one's specific needs and resources. <http://bcis.pacificu.edu/journal/2003/01/tech.php>

The Berglund Center no longer notifies a large group of potential readers of the appearance of Interface. If you wish to receive an automatic notice of our postings, you need to so inform us at: <http://bcis.pacificu.edu/journal/signup.php>

We also invite your participation as Berglund Affiliates for our annual summer Institute. <http://bcis.pacificu.edu/journal/affiliates03.php>

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 at <barlowj@pacificu.edu>

Jeffrey Barlow,
Editor, Interface
The Berglund Center for Internet Studies Pacific University
<http://bcis.pacificu.edu/>