About this Issue

The September posting of Interface is inevitably an exciting project. As we are produced at Pacific University, we work largely with student workers. And in the fall of any given year, we always experience a significant turnover. One of our student editors, Jesse Snyder, is now teaching at Sam Barlow High School in the Portland area. His colleague Matt Ernst is in graduate school at Washington State University. Our Web Master, Heather Hawkins, is on an overseas studies program in France. To compound our confusion, we also have lost one of our "founders", Theresa Floyd, who is moving on to another job at the university. All of these will be sorely missed, but Theresa particularly so. She has worked with the Berglund Center from its beginnings three years ago, in fact, was one of the architects of the Center. Thanks, Theresa, and Jesse, and Matt. Heather, we look forward to your return.
But the nature of an educational environment like ours is the necessity of continued growth and change. Our acting Web Master, Marci Lim, has done a great job in getting us to post in a timely fashion. And our new student workers are all extremely talented and very energetic. We promise some exciting changes soon.
In the meantime, we present, we feel, another stimulating issue of Interface. If there is a single dominant theme to this issue, it must be "security." During the three-month period that we have been following the issue of electronic security and identity theft, we have seen this issue virtually explode into public awareness. In our editorial, "Database Intrusions... " we argue that there is an urgent need for federal legislation to ameliorate this problem. Jesse Snyder, in his feature, "Secure Internet Transactions" advises us on how to improve our own security measures while purchasing on the Web. And in one of our book reviews, Protect Your Digital Privacy, we introduce an encyclopedic source on problems in electronic domains and possible solutions to them. Kevin Kawamoto, perhaps our most widely read author, presents Privacy and Personal Health Information, continuing our concern with security.
We also have much continuity in the midst of change. Our feature editors all present their usual solid and useful work. Leonard DuBoff, our legal editor, argues that "Creative Business Should be Run Like Businesses" and discusses some of the legal aspects of this injunction. And our education editor, Mark Szymanski, discusses a major funding source in the educational arena, the Annenberg Foundation. Also of interest to educators will be Mary Chalmers' piece, "The Scavenger Hunt As an Interactive Teaching Tool to Develop Research Skills."

Jeffrey Barlow
Editor, Interface.