News 04-10-2001
Destination:Digital Initiative Unveiled
The Austin Area Semiconductor Executive Council, a group of nine high tech
companies, recently announced the creation of Destination:Digital (DD)--a comprehensive
initiative designed to provide a road map to students, educators, parents, and
career seekers to explore and enter into high tech careers such as engineering,
computer programming, microchip manufacturing and a myriad of other technology
opportunities. The nine companies that have formed the Austin Area Semiconductor
Executive Council (SEC) include Applied Materials, AMD, Cypress, Kinetics, Motorola,
Samsung, International SEMATECH, SEMI and Tokyo Electron America.
For more information, visit http://www.DestinationDigital.org.
Digital C-Pen to Access Merriam-Webster Reference Products
A recent agreement between Merriam-Webster and the Swedish technology company
C Technologies, developers of the image processing digital C-Pen will soon integrate
databases from both the Collegiate Dictionary and Collegiate Thesaurus, as well
as a number of other titles from Merriam-Webster. C-Pen works as an electronic
highlighter that scans printed text, which can then be stored in the product
or transferred to a personal computer using infrared technology. Users will
now be able to instantly access Merriam-Webster's dictionaries directly from
their pocket-sized C-PEN whenever they want, wherever they happen to be.
For more information, visit http://www.Merriam-Webster.com.
Educational Directories Unlimited Launches New Site
Educational Directories Unlimited, (EDU), a provider of online academic program
directories targeted toward prospective students, has launched Certificates.Gradschools.com
as an expansion of Gradschools.com--an online directory of graduate programs.
Visitors to the Web site will find listings for more than 2,400 U.S.-based post-baccalaureate
certificate programs in a range of disciplines. The site allows prospective
students to focus solely on post-baccalaureate, non-degreed programs, eliminating
the frustration of sifting through thousands of programs that do not meet their
needs. Programs are searchable first by subject, then by location.
For more information, visit http://www.edudirectories.com.
Full-Text Index of Computer Science Literature
The NEC Research Institute has launched ResearchIndex (http://researchindex.org/),
a free, full-text index of computer science research articles. The result of
years of advanced research, ResearchIndex automates the tasks of searching,
organizing, and navigating a library of more than 300,000 scientific research
articles in the computer science field. The library incorporates advanced functionality
such as autonomous citation indexing, which allows users to follow links between
articles formed by citations, and to estimate the importance of individual contributions
based on the number of times they are cited in the literature.
Additionally,
ResearchIndex employs advanced methods for identifying relationships between
individual articles, and features context extraction, which enables scientists
to follow a chain of research, highlighting how a particular development has
been utilized or analyzed in subsequent research. The service is free for all
to use and is also available as a software application for non-commercial use.
bepress.com Launches Economics Journals
The Berkeley Electronic Press, bepress.com, has launched its inaugural set
of academic journals, The B.E. Journals in Theoretical Economics and The B.E.
Journals in Macr'economics. Each set consists of four journals whose new titles
are available free for a limited time at http://www.bepress.com.
The B.E. Journals are involved with each step of the publishing process--from
initial submission through to subscription delivery--via the Internet.
Lexis-Nexis to Offer Web-based U.S. Presidential Information
Lexis-Nexis recently introduced Access to Presidential Studies, an online resource
for high-school and college students and researchers that will provide historic
information about all 43 U.S. presidents. Users will be able to search and retrieve
the complete text of inaugural addresses, State of the Union addresses, and
scholarly articles dating back to George Washington's presidency. Access to
Presidential Studies will also include autobiographies, office diaries, executive
orders from 1862 through 1904, photographs, and images. The Web-based reference
will house information from the Office of the President, as well as other sources
like the media. Additional documents will be added during scheduled quarterly
updates. Users can log on at http://cisweb.lexis-nexis.com/histuniv/.
College Times Web Site Launched
The New York Times has launched its College Times Web site at www.nytimes.com/college,
allowing college students and faculty to more easily locate information related
to their specific areas of interest. Visitors to the college site can search
for recent Times articles by subject and can sign up to receive free e-mail
alerts when new articles related to their specific fields of study are published
on NYTimes.com. In addition, users can access a number of additional resources,
from career-planning information for students to instructional resources for
faculty. The Faculty section includes Teaching with The Times, a set of free
curriculum guides that offer innovative ideas about how to augment course content
with The New York Times and suggest tips for lectures, discussions, research
essays and tests in various subject areas. Faculty will also find direct links
to education news and other relevant content from NYTimes.com.
MIT to Make Course Materials Available Free on the Web
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced recently that it plans
to make the materials for nearly all its courses freely available on the Internet
over the next ten years.
The Web site for the project--MIT OpenCourseWare--would
include material such as lecture notes, course outlines, reading lists, and
assignments for each course. Over the next decade, the project expects to provide
materials for more than 2,000 courses across MIT's entire curriculum--in architecture
and planning, engineering, humanities, arts, social sciences, management, and
science. The project would begin as a large-scale pilot program over the next
two years, starting with the design of the software and services needed to support
such a large endeavor, as well as protocols to monitor and assess its utilization
by faculty and students at MIT and throughout the world. By the end of the two-year
period, it is expected that materials for more than 500 courses would be available
on the MIT OCW site.
For more information, visit http://web.mit.edu/news/.
AppleWorks 6.1 Edition for Educators
Apple recently announced the AppleWorks 6.1 update, now featuring DataViz MacLinkPlus
translators allowing users to view, modify, share, and exchange Microsoft Office
documents. A special edition of AppleWorks 6.1 exclusively for educators features
support for both Mac and Windows computers. The software combines word processing,
page layout, image manipulation, spreadsheets, databases, and presentations
in one application. AppleWorks 6.1 also includes a library of Internet-based,
education-specific templates, designed by educators. An updater is available
immediately as a free download to all Mac users currently running AW 6.0.4.
The updater includes a preview version of AppleWorks 6.1 for Mac OS X. A retail
package including versions for both Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X operating systems
is expected to be available in spring 2001.
For more information, visit http://www.apple.com/education/k12/products/appleworks.
Virtual Tour Technology for the Palm
InPlace recently announced that its NetVisits virtual tour technology will
soon be available for use with handheld devices using the Palm OS such as the
Handspring Visor Prism, Sony Clie, and the recently announced Palm M505.
For more information, visit http://www.inplace.net.
Vweb Encoder Card Enables Video Over IP Services
Vweb, an MPEG video compression and broadband solutions provider for network
applications, has made available its MPEG-2 A/V encoder board. Designed to compress
audio and video for storage and network applications within a PC environment,
its main application is video over IP, enabling the delivery of streaming video
with multicasting technology, video on demand, and video conferencing. The board
takes S-video or composite video along with analog audio as inputs and performs
MPEG-2 compression. It fits into a standard PCI slot and includes a Windows-based
GUI, Windows 98/2000 WDM drivers or Linux drivers for easy installation and
setup.
For more information visit www.vwebcorp.com.
Accenture and ContentGuard Team for Digital Rights Management
Accenture and ContentGuard recently announced an agreement to work together
to provide digital rights management (DRM) solutions to enable clients to manage
rights in digital content uch as e-books, music, and video. Accenture and ContentGuard
are collaborating to meet clients' digital content distribution needs by offering
customized packages of ContentGuard's RightsEdge technology and services. This
will offer clients the opportunity to implement solutions in-house, outsource
the entire digital content distribution process, or select a combination of
the two.
For more information, visit http://www.contentguard.com
or http://www.accenture.com.
