Computer Applications

Testing the Internet's ability to extend the traditional classroom model, Cal State Northridge will launch a pilot program in the fall to teach classes online. Although students and their instructors will meet in person on a limited basis, much of the class will be conducted by computer, using e-mail, newsgroups and the World Wide Web.

The dawn of the 21st Century will find personal computers put to a wide array of new uses, such as voting, filing income tax returns and taking college entrance exams. Magazines will be available on floppy disks, and racing fans will watch contests on cable TV and place their bets from their couches, automatically debiting or crediting their bank accounts.

It may have been by the ghostly light of a computer screen that some of the men and women found dead in the Rancho Santa Fe house-turned-temple first got word of the oft-changing cult now called Heaven's Gate. The group's extensive use of the Internet--as a bulletin board, publishing medium, outreach device, income source and possibly recruiting tool--added a chilling new element to what will likely be remembered as an epoch-marking tragedy.

Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates looks at the Internet and sees a transformation in the way we get information. MIT sociologist Sherry Turkle looks at the Internet and sees a transformation in the way we view ourselves. Despite all the hype and babble about the information superhighway, Turkle says, most people actually have underestimated the coming knowledge revolution. When we log onto a bulletin board, chat room, forum or other cyberspace sites, she says, we are entering a world of possibility.

Everyone recognizes that companies can use technology to process information faster and more accurately. But the real key to working smarter is applying technology to re-engineer and reorganize business processes. Where one firm will use technology to make the old processes faster, the successful one will leverage the technology by creating new ways of getting things done. Insurance companies, banks and securities firms are a good case in point.

Forget "browser wars" and "the battle for the desktop." The new catch phrase in the software industry is "network computing architectures"--a way of placing the Internet at the center of a wide range of commercial uses. The idea is to put together comprehensive software tools for businesses to reach out to suppliers, distributors, customers and employees via the Internet.

William Potts never found his way into the history books, but most of us would be lost without him. Or at least stuck somewhere in traffic. Back in 1920, the Detroit cop erected a box with red, yellow and green lights at the intersection of Woodward Avenue and Fort Street to bring order to the chaotic streets of the Motor City. Seventy-five years later, the traffic signal designed by Potts has become the standard by which cities around the world regulate traffic.

Col. Richard Satava has a vision--a virtual vision--for medicine. He sees it shifting its focus from blood and guts to bits and bytes. Satava, program manager for advanced medical technologies at the Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency, has been a driving force in bringing virtual reality to medicine, where computers create a "virtual," or simulated environment for surgeons and other medical practitioners.

The steamy new novel is about "women . . . men . . . fame, fortune and temptation," says the dust jacket. A cover picture features a couple, the man's arm thrown around his partner. There ends any resemblance to the partially clothed, big clinch school of cover art common to this genre of fiction. In this photograph, on the back cover of "Just This Once," Scott French--scruffy, 40ish, wearing sunglasses, jeans and a T-shirt--cuddles a Macintosh 11CX computer named Hal.

Bank of America acknowledged Monday that it has abandoned a computerized accounting program after spending $60 million over several months in an unsuccessful attempt to fix the system. The system was supposed to provide the most advanced accounting and reporting services to the bank's lucrative institutional trust division.