Have you ever noticed the verification you hear when you punch in an extension to send a voice mail message? Sometimes you hear the extension number repeated and sometimes you hear the person's name. Have you ever wondered why?

The technical term for the message you hear from you punch in someone's extension is the "Personal Verification." The voice mail system automatically records the Personal verification as the extension number. Voice mail users can change the Personal Verification by using the same menu used to record Internal and External greetings. The steps to record your Personal Greeting are:

Log onto Voice Mail as you normally do.

Press '8'
Press '9'
Press '5' to record your Personal Verification

Your Personal Verification should be short, usually just your name or the department name. External and internal callers who roll to voice mail because you are on the phone or not available to answer your phone, will still hear either your internal or external greeting. The Personal Verification is only heard by other voice mail users and is a quick confirmation that they have entered the correct extension. It is especially helpful to people who are sending a message to more than one person to hear names rather than the extensions. If you've ever quickly punched in an extension from memory only to later find out you sent the message to someone other than the person you intended, you will quickly appreciate the value of a personally recorded "Personal Verification."

So pick up that phone and record your Personal Verification now, while you're still thinking about it!

And for those of you who haven't recorded your Internal and External greetings yet, we know you're out there, you can do it at the same time. Simply log onto Voice Mail and press "8," press '1' for External or '2' for Internal, press '5,' and record.

Year 2000 and Date Arithmetic
by Celia Abrams

Articles have begun to appear in the media warning of computer disasters related to the change of century, sometimes referred to as the Millennium Bug. The concerns are based on systems written with 6-digit dates; e.g., 960701 for July 1, 1996. Programs are frequently required to decide when one date is greater than another and subtract the two dates, stored in the above format, to reach a decision. One can quickly see that by this arithmetic, 000101 would be "earlier" than 990101. We use date arithmetic to determine such things as how many accounts are 30 days overdue, how old an applicant with a birth date of 8/15/78 will be on September 1 and whether to use a seasonal address that is valid from November until May for a mailing going out in 60 days.

Designers of many databases systems, including UniData, the underlying structure of Colleague and Benefactor, foresaw this problem and decided to use a different approach. Rather than storing dates as yymmdd, dates are stored as the number of days since a fixed point in time. UniData uses 1/1/68 as day 1. February 1, 1996 is stored internally as 10259; 1/1/2000 is 11689. Built-in algorithms are used to display dates in various formats for screens and reports. Dates are added, subtracted and sorted in internal format but are presented in recognizable form by filtering them through the output conversion algorithm. The algorithm can display 2/1/96, 1 February 1996, Quarter 1, Thursday, Winter or any of a number of other choices. Similarly, a date entered on an input screen as 2/1/96 passes through the input conversion algorithm to be stored as 10259. Older dates can be entered with a 4-digit year and will be stored as negative numbers, for example the birth date for a member of the class of 1901 is entered as 9/1/1884 and will be stored as -30435.

So for the most part, Exeter's central database will be spared this particular agony of the new century. We will have to do some minor programming to accommodate circumstances where we add, subtract or sort 2-digit classes. Most of these changes have already been put in place by creating "virtual" fields, which logically convert the 2-digit year to a 4-digit year without having to store it in the database. Users of PC software might do well to check with the authors or vendors of their software to determine whether it will correctly handle dates and date arithmetic in the new century.

Technology Capital Process
by Shelley Nason

The technology and capital requests for 1996-97 have been turned over to the Academic and Administrative Computing Committees for review. This review will take several months and during this time you may be contacted to clarify your request(s), to provide additional information or to prioritize your requests. If you do not hear from either of these committees you can assume there is no question about your request.

There are some departments that have not submitted a request. If you are one of these departments and realize you are looking for capital technology equipment next year, please submit a description of your program plans to Kathy Taylor at your earliest convenience.

Conference at Wheaton College
by Joyce Kemp

Wheaton College is sponsoring a conference entitled Systems Thinking & Dynamic Modeling for K-12 educators this coming July 17-19, 1996. This conference will not only provide use and experimentation with the tools but promises sessions on how to utilize technology in the classroom. For more information, contact Helga Spande at 3405 or Andi Miller at the Creative Learning Exchange at 508-287-0070. ON-LINE SERVICES By Shelley Nason Mark and I frequently asked about on-line services and have been asked to use the newsletter to provide information about services that the Exeter community can purchase for their home use. Although the department does not endorse any one service over the other, we have consistently been mentioning Blue Fin, located in Portsmouth, since it provides a local (Exeter) exchange. The monthly service charge is $10/month which includes 10 hours of internet time. Many of our colleagues are also using other services. America On-Line, CompuServe (800-848-8199) and Prodigy (800-333-5779/800-284-5933) are among the most common national services. The telecommunications department has some free America On-Line diskettes which we will give to anyone who asks while the supply lasts.

Publishing Web Pages
by David Rea

A mini-course on creating "pages" on the World Wide Web will be offered soon. The course will meet (at least) three times, covering the following topics:

Class 1: Files and the Internet, intro to the HTML Language, nuts and bolts of editing pages.
Class 2: Links and named links, tables, URL basics.
Class 3: Graphics, picture placement, formats, importing, special effects.

If you are interested in taking this three-part course, please contact David Rea or Shelley Nason (ext. 3693) and indicate which of the following times would be possible for you:
Tuesday W
Any D Format
Thursday X

Only one of these times will be selected for the course, but we will try to fit in everyone who wishes to participate.

Training
by Shelley Nason

During discussions this past month, various groups on campus expressed a desire and need for training. David Rea is planning and prepared to offer an advance course on creating web pages, but we also feel this is a great time to plan training on some standard software used on campus.

During the spring term look for scheduled workshops for faculty and staff. Our goal is to offer training on Windows 3.1 and Windows 95, WordPerfect 5.1 and 6.1, Word, Excel, Email and accessing the Internet. Please contact the telecommunications office if you have been looking for some training that is not mentioned here. Training classes will be kept small but we hope to offer multiple sessions on a regular basis until we have met campus needs.

Since the telecommunications department has been set up as a utility, Mark and I are not necessarily going to be doing the training. At this time we look more for our department to coordinate the training with members of other departments or outside sources, to provide the training.

Bookstore
by Kevin Morse

Often the question arises where to obtain computer supplies on campus. As with many items necessary to the life of the Academy, the Exeter Bookstore is often the answer. Our computer supplies are available in the computer and textbook annex located behind the main bookstore. It is open Monday through Friday 9:00 a.m. until 3:00 p.m., and computer supplies can be purchased anytime during normal bookstore hours, Monday through Friday 8:30 a.m. until 5:00 p.m., and Saturday 8:30 a.m. until noon. The annex phone extension is 3503. In addition to our normal selection, we can order a wide assortment of software, hardware, and peripherals. Many of these items are available at national academic prices; in some cases these prices are hundreds of dollars below normal retail. (We cannot give additional discounts on academically priced items. Computer items at regular retail prices still receive normal discounts). Catalogs are available from the annex containing listings of some academically priced items that we can order for you.

As the campus bookstore, we are of course the primary source for computer books. We stock a good selection of titles in the annex, and can special order others, which often arrive within a few days. The bookstore is also the primary campus source for individual staff and student software needs. We can provide IBM compatible computers on a special order basis, mainly as a convenience to community members. Campus demand for computers, particularly portable systems, is growing constantly, and we anticipate stocking systems to meet that need in the near future.

Departmental purchases of software and supplies are best directed to telecommunications (for software) or purchasing (for supplies). We will happily supply a department's immediate needs in areas such as diskettes, peripherals and printer ink and paper. Telecommunications is the primary source for departmental software purchases and licensing.

Departmental technical support questions should be directed to telecommunications. The computer help we can offer is very limited; the best source for personal computer questions is the manufacturer's technical support hotline. Repair issues for personal computers are best directed to the appropriate off-campus source. Computer Mart (800-726-9797) services Macintoshes; SOS Computers (772-5880) services IBM compatibles. Consult the Yellow Pages for other appropriate sources.

Click! Click!
by Mark R. Bodnar

In Search of Searching…

There are a variety of search tools available to the Internet using the WWW. This week's column illustrates a number of those "search engines" and their relative strengths or weaknesses. The sites could be classified into two categories, "subject directories" and "web databases". Subject Directories Subject directories provide a broad based index to subject specific information available on the Internet. Each link then connects to a more specific list of categories. Ideally, each selection will narrow the scope, taking you to the resources you seek. As you explore the WWW, you will find which subject categories are structured in a manner compatible with your logical interpretation of an efficient search. I will attempt to give you some of the more active sites and provide you with an abstract of each. Here we go!

Yahoo
http://www.yahoo.com Operated by a couple of Stanford graduate students, browsable with links, search engines, link descriptions

World Wide Web Virtual Library
http://www.w3.org/hypertext/DataSources/bySubject/Overview.html The oldest, distributed structure, maintained by individuals throughout the world, good content - individuals responsible for subject specific material are typically knowledgeable on the subject. The distributed nature of the site prevents searching the entire library.

Galaxy
http://galaxy.tradewave.com Simple search interface, similar in structure to Yahoo with the addition of sub-category paragraphs with links below the main index.

Clearinghouse for Subject-Oriented Internet Resource Guides
http://www.lib/umich/edu/chhome.html Operated by University of Michigan and Argus Associates Topics are researched and an annotated and evaluative bibliography of links are provided to the user. These guides will help you get up to speed quickly on a particular topic.

More…

W3 Catalog
http://cuiwww.unige.ch/cgi-bin/w3catalog

GNA Library
http://uu-gna.mit.edu:8001/cgi-bin/meta

Internet Catalog
http://nearnet.gnn.com/wic/nerescat.toc.html

Aliweb
http://www.cs.Indiana.edu/aliweb/search

Web Databases

Web databases typically provide full text searching of web page titles, indexes, and web page content currently indexed by that particular search engine. Pages are collected by human or robot software engineers which search the web, collecting and indexing pages throughout the world.

Alta Vista
http://altavista.digital.com Index of over 16 million web pages and over 8 billion words, 13,000 Usenet news groups

Infoseek Guide
http://guide.infoseek.com Link provided in netscape browsers. Nice attempt to combine subject directory with web database.

Lycos
http://www.lycos.com Carnegie Mellon CS Dept., claims to index over 90% of the Internet, Lycos 250 subject directory, advanced search confusing, stick with the simple search

Inktomi
http://inktomi.berkeley.edu The searching algorithm often buries what you would think is important several pages deep in the results…

Excite
http://www.excite.com Web database/subject directory which is average but well supported financially. It may improve.

More…

WebCrawler
http://webcrawler.cs.Washington.edu/WebCrawler/WebQuery.html

Open Text Web
http://www.opentext.com:8080 RBSE's http://rbse.jsc.nasa.gov/eichmann/urlsearch.html

NIKOS
http://www.rns.com/cgi-bin/nikos

NorthStar
http://comics.scs.unr.edu:7000/top.html

JumpStation
http://www.stir.ac.uk/jsbin/js

EINet Galaxy
http://galaxy.einet.net

Search Engine Collections

Mr. Cyberguide
http://www.olumpus.net/biz/citizenNews/MrCyberGuide.html

W3's collected search engines
http://cuiwww.unige.ch/meta-index.html

CUI's collected search engines
http://cuiwww.unege.ch/search-form.html

CUSI's collected search engines
http://web.nexor.co.uk/susi/susi.html

New Awards from the Technology Incentive Fund
by Grants Review Committee

At a recent meeting of the Grants Review Committee, funds were granted to Marcia Carlisle for the purchase of specialized, portable video taping equipment to be made available to Academy instructors. The equipment will enable teachers to videotape and then view their classes, or the classes of other instructors in an effort to improve leaching at Exeter. Part of the grant will fund a workshop on observation skills and analysis of classroom dynamics so that concrete, professional suggestions can be made. The grant proposal was created after consultation with personnel at the Bok Center for Teaching and Learning at Harvard where the videotaping of classes is an integral part of their efforts to improve the quality of teaching. Several Exeter faculty have already expressed interest in being filmed and others can volunteer to participate as the project evolves. A second proposal was granted to Carol Cahalane to develop a Web page which will contain an annotated bibliography of health education-related sites. The bibliography may be used by other health instructors and other faculty who desired assistance and information regarding health concerns of their students and advisees. The committee has proposed to Carol that she add a component to the proposal that would entail her tutoring other members of the department on her project. They also suggested that she be available for a faculty workshop next fall so that others will be aware of how she went about creating her Web page(s) and what information is available to them as a result of her work.

The Technology Incentive Fund was established to encourage exploration of the use of technology in support of both curricular and administrative programs. Proposals may include funding for hardware and software related to the goals outlined in the Technology Vision Statement. With less than four months remaining in the fiscal year, money is still available from the fund. Guidelines for grant applications are available in the Dean of Faculty's Office.