Volume 3. No 2 
Information Technology News of the University of California, Davis Winter 1995
Network News
Global Campus Debut
The road to Marshall McLuhan's global village passes another milestone
with the official debut in Canada on January 13th of the "global
campus". Thirty-five University of Toronto graduate students will link
up with the Universite d'Orleans south of Paris for a 12-week
course on culture and technology taught by some of France's leading
intellectuals. (Toronto Globe & Mail 1/12/95 C2)
Visible Man on the Internet
A convicted murder executed in Texas 16 months ago who left his body to
science can now be seen on the Internet as the "Visible Man," a digitized
encyclopedia of the human body, available free through the auspices of
the National Library of Medicine. The 15 gigabyte file comprises
thousands of X-rays, magnetic and photo images of razor-thin cross
sections of the human body. (New York Times 11/29/94 A14).
"Thomas" Offers WWW Access to Legislation
The Library of Congress unveiled the new Web "Thomas" (named after Thomas
Jefferson) as a way to allow people to use the Internet to call up the
full text of any bill introduced in Congress since 1992. Its URL is
http://thomas.loc.gov
(New York Times 1/6/95 A22)
Iowa is Wired
Iowa is the first state to have all of its counties linked through a
fiber-optics communications system, which is transforming the state's
schools, hospitals, and criminal system. One administrator there
cautions: "Teachers must be specially trained or they'll end up teaching
the same way they have for the last 30 years -- but in front of a
camera." (Newsweek 12/19/94 p.55).
More Internet Facts
Traffic on the NSFnet grew a whopping 110% in 1994, and the number of
countries online increased from approximately 137 in 1993 to
approximately 159 this past year. There were 1,964 phone calls to
InterNIC Registration Services during November '94. For more facts,
check out
http://www.openmarket.com/info/internet-index/current-sources.html
(The Internet Index, Number 5)
The Future of Higher Ed
"Intellectual work is social work -- notwithstanding the myth of the
solitary genius -- and the university is a social institution. The
Internet can enhance the society of the university and quicken its pace
of discovery and invention, but the electronic environment cannot replace
physical human society. We humans cannot thrive in a bodiless,
frownless, smileless ecology, and our intellectual society cannot be
complete without physical interaction," says the University of
Pennsylvania's provost -- a point of view that author Lewis Perelman
characterizes as "an expression of hope triumphing over logic."
(Chronical of Higher Education 1/27/95 A22).
Totally Hip, Totally Wired
Newsweek contributing editor Katie Hafner says that "to be a totally hip
campus is to be totally wired. That means installing a high-speed
network that spans from the bursar's office to the library to the
freshmen dorms." (Newsweek 1/30/95 p. 62)
Items appearing in this column were gleaned from Edupage, a summary of
news provided as a service by EDUCOM -- a consortium of leading colleges
and universities seeking to transform education through the use of
information technology.