Communications

For years, Pam and John Miller wondered whether their 16-year-old autistic son, Morgan, heard or understood anything they said. He never spoke, never responded to their requests and thumbed aimlessly through magazines. But now, with a keyboard and the encouraging touch of a human hand, Morgan has learned to communicate some of his thoughts. "He can now type what he wants for breakfast. He can type to me what he feels. He can tell me what he wants to do.

More than 20 years ago, a fearful 5-year-old boy leaped from a dental chair in Ernest Evans' Los Angeles office and ran out the door. "I had to run all the way down the street to catch him," Evans said. Such chases may not be everyday occurrences for most dentists, but about 300 dental workers showed up for a lecture Sunday from a child behavior specialist on "Control of Child Behavior in the Dental Environment." Dr.

Fridays signify more than the end of the work week for Dennis, 27, of Los Angeles. He sees them as a chance to "get together" via phone with the man in Washington, D.C., with whom he has had a long-distance relationship for the past year and a half. "Life comes together for us on Fridays. It's our special day. It keeps us together," he said. "Our conversations are about what we did during the week, but more importantly they're about how we feel about each other."

Worried that first responders cannot connect with one another during a major disaster, local officials pushed federal lawmakers and the White House this week to fund upgrades to the patchwork of emergency communications systems across Los Angeles County. Sheriff Lee Baca and L.A. County Fire Chief P.

For the second time since the start of the Mars Pathfinder mission, a whole evening of science was lost because of an eerily familiar communications snafu: When controllers on Earth tried to phone instructions to the spacecraft, it wasn't listening. "The phone was off the receiver," said deputy project manager Brian Muirhead. And by the time Pathfinder tried to call back three hours later, no one was home. By late Friday, Pathfinder was still being plagued by communications problems.

Computer software powerhouse Novell Inc. said Wednesday that it is working with a major utility to transform ordinary electrical wires into computer networks, an agreement that could both speed the arrival of "smart appliances" and accelerate the entry of power companies into the communications business. The technology being developed by Novell and UtiliCorp United Inc.

As it prepares to auction off valuable slices of the radio spectrum for new communications services, the Clinton Administration is coming under fire from critics who say it hasn't done enough to help women and minorities acquire an ownership stake in the information networks of tomorrow. The criticism surfaced last week in a letter sent by the Coalition for Wireless Competition to Federal Communications Commission Chairman Reed E.

Inside a windowless Hughes Electronics plant in El Segundo--renowned in aerospace circles as a ferocious engine of technology--workers are preparing for an unprecedented 16 spacecraft launches this year. The activity is nearly as frenetic at the two other major U.S. producers of big communications satellites: Lockheed Martin in Sunnyvale and Space Systems Loral in Palo Alto.

Giving a major boost to Los Angeles' hopes of becoming the world capital of the fledgling multimedia industry, the National Science Foundation is expected to announce today that USC has won a hard-fought competition to become the country's only national engineering research center for multimedia. While the award involves a relatively modest $12.