July 7, 2012, Author: admin, Leave a comment

Retail POS Techniques

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When selecting a retail shop for shopping, shoppers choose exactly where to go depending on numerous things. Most frequently, word-of-mouth and an excellent suggestion from a buddy will lead a consumer to check out a new shop. Advertising and marketing is helpful, as well, and an excellent ad with coupons and aggressive sale prices will attract in the crowds of people.

A reputable point of sale is a retailer’s most effective device in luring in and producing loyal consumers. For stores, shopper loyalty is achieved when their requirements are met as well as their shopping experience simply leaves them pleased that they acquired high quality goods at aggressive costs and excellent consumer service. Understanding exactly what consumers would like from a store can assist retailers to create the best selections any time choosing and applying a new retail pos program.

Consumers don’t prefer to really feel they ought to very care fully view the checking of each product at checkout to create sure that the cost on the shelf complements the one in the register. Retail pos software programs may track client devotion and allow retailers to provide benefits and unique campaigns to faithful consumers in the type of immediate rebates, desired client scan cards, unique coupons and other bonuses. Retail pos techniques permit consumers to pay ‘their method. ‘Approval of all main credit cards, inspections and debit cards give consumers the versatility to select precisely how they want to pay for their acquisitions. Irrespective of the kind of retail pos software a store utilizes, clients would like and ought to have to be offered by a cashier that has been qualified and is aware of exactly how the program works.

Along with most modern retail pos techniques, you can possess immediate usage of product sales and expense data through your own retailers throughout the company hours. You are capable to gather relevant developments as of kinds of products being bought at any given period of day, coupons offered and redeemed at any kind of given time, sales efficiency of staff, plus much more. Because the data are immediately obtainable and enter into your retail pos accounting back office software program, you can right now spot developments as they occur, not following they are gone. Finding a pattern while it continues to be in impact can trigger a very effective increase to your bottom line earnings. By utilizing pos program, your data will be where you will need it for the computations and for trend recognizing, quickly.

Because shrinkage due to client theft and worker thievery is probably the major costs in most retail organizations, the current retail pos technologies has been designed toward avoiding shrinkage. Assume you have an individual who you suspect of taking money from the money register. With a strong POS retail program, it may be simple to correlate that individual or persons work routine with the minute-to-minute revenue details.

Alternatively, sales bonuses are easily executed with a contemporary retail pos answer. Each establishing the coupon strategies and redeeming client coupons is actually simple, which supports increase sales. Similarly, when it comes to employee’s efficiency, their sales amounts are easily followed via a pos program, and a percentage framework and payouts can be released every day. This particular information will help improve sales via clear and timely rewards.

Maybe we are already aware of that they call pos systems “point of sale system”. Unlike the old days, most businesses are using a notebook for accounting or cash register; these options were widely used for processing transactions but today, due to advancement of technology, not so many are still using them. Each company must look for a system where it will be a lot easier for them to do an inventory and keep a record of sales. It is also one way for them to become more competitive and pos systems have become one of the best tools to help the business grow.

Companies have discovered a lot of advantages when they use the pos systems. One of these advantages are they could get the real-time record or report of their daily sales. It helps them to improve their customer service since each transaction is processed in a short period of time. If you are a business enthusiast, you cannot refuse the help of pos system for the growth of your company. So start searching for the said system because it can do great job with so much time being saved if you let it work for you.

Aside from those advantages a POS or point of sale system provides it is a great help when you need to do the inventory by checking the status of supplies. It will allow companies to keep the record and easily track their transaction with customers. It can give useful information as basis that the transaction is made especially at circumstances that it must be pulled out to serve as proof for any purpose. If you want to get one for your business, you do not need to worry at all since pos systems is very easy to learn and very easy to use. It will help you cut-off you operations budget most especially in conducting end of month inventory since you do not need many people to do it for you.

You cannot deny the existence of pos systems they are all over the market and people are used to it especially the customers. They see the system that it can serve them fast by simply reading the barcodes and the transaction is perfectly accurate because the database of the pos systems is the one that registers and do the job to keep the information available when needed. See how useful to have the system right on your own store as well.

Great resources for POS software and systems research – http://www.possoftwaresystems.net.

May 29, 2012, Author: admin, 5 Comments

Really Cool Stuff On Point Of Sale Software

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Came across a really interesting point of sale article on the web the other day that had a lot of great stuff that I didn’t know about computerized POS systems. Check it out!

Sutton Place Gourmet, based in Bethesda, Md., has installed POS Software Associates open, PC-based POS system in four of its 14 stores. (Cost per lane: between $400 and $1,000.) Ray Hamilton, Sutton Place Gourmet’s vice president of information systems and technology, found many drawbacks to his older, proprietary system. Similar to a TV set, it is designed to be replaced, rather than upgraded, its proprietary controller can interact with a register, but with no other systems; and its maintenance costs are high.

On the other hand, open systems, observes Hamilton, are much easier to maintain. “You can go to a local computer store and buy components,” he says. The PSA system allows grocers to identify a valued customer and wish her a happy birthday on the screen and to use inactive lanes to display ads on the monitor. Hamilton also uses the system to do computer-based training of cashiers.

NCR’s Advanced Checkout Solution (formerly called Unity), incorporating the DynaKey keyboard and monitor, has been around for three years, but in 1996 the company added several new features. For one thing, the new system operates on Windows 3.1. Instead of DOS, allowing more graphical possibilities. For another, the Advanced Checkout Solution offers a “new interface with the consumer,” called the consumer information display, says Bruce Jones, NCR’s product manager, retail systems group. The color monitor display incorporates” the weight reading from the scanner/scale, as well as a scrolling receipt and advertising space. “The customer has just one point of focus,” he says.

The NCR system gives cashiers several different ways to accomplish a task, avoiding delays that stop the checkout line while the cashier is waiting for assistance. This makes it easier to train cashiers, who are taught how to navigate through options rather than memorize procedures.

The Advanced Checkout System keeps lists of PLU codes for produce, using standard PMA codes. Headquarters can download changes to the list over the network. The system also makes it simpler for cashiers to provide change to customers by allowing them to hit a single button, rather than key in a quantity. For example, if a customer owes $27.26 and is paying in cash, the cashier will be able to press a button signifying that the customer has handed over $30 (the most likely scenario), instead of keying in $30. The cashier monitor will also indicate graphically which tills within the cash drawer to take the bills and coins out of, and how many bills and coins to take out.

Jones says the Advanced Checkout Solution is “very open” to alternative components, although NCR provides all the hardware and software needed. “If a customer wanted a different printer, we’d write a printer driver for them,” he says. “But nobody has asked us to do that because ours is the best on the market.” However, the system is being used with alternative payment devices, scanners and monitors. The controller is 486-based PC that runs with either DOS or Windows, while the overall system is networked using the TCP/IP standard over an Ethernet LAN.

While alternative scanners are acceptable, NCR points out that its 7870 bioptic (two-window) scanner/scale won an American Product Excellence award from the Management Roundtable last year. Craig Maddox, product line director, bar code scanners, says that the 7870 will read bar codes within a 270-degree range and up to 8 inches off the counter. Despite claims to the contrary, no scanner can read in a total, 360-degree range, he says.

NCR helps its customers with design, training, integration and maintenance of POS systems. The company will also connect the system to a WAN, be it frame relay, leased line or satellite.

Brookshire Grocery Co., Tyler, Texas, which tested NCR’s Advanced Checkout System for more than a year at a single store, began rolling it out last month to all of its 118 stores. “We like it from a support standpoint,” says Nelson Bodenhamer, vice president of MIS. “Our retailers like it because it’s easy to use, it’s easy to train people on and it fits the way we operate.” Brookshire has been an NCR user for a number of years; its stores have used either the 2127 or 1255 POS units.

Bodenhamer is particularly pleased with the NCR systems backroom functions covering the financial and accounting side of the business. (Brookshire also uses Bass software to run other backroom programs like DSD and label printing.) He preferred NCR’s backroom capabilities over what San Antonio-based HEB has been doing with PSA software. (ACR, however, has recently upgraded its backroom system.) “What we require is stricter than what HEB had,” he says.

IBM’s StorePlace POS system, introduced in late 1994, was designed to be an open application architecture that could run on any PC using any operating system. Two large grocery chains are in the development stage with StorePlace, planning to roll it out in IN@. Mike Ringuette, director of retail software, distribution industry, says IBM customers can migrate from the 4690 to StorePlace in a stepwise fashion that “protects their investment in hardware and software.”

StorePlace employs a touchscreen monitor for cashiers. They can check their knowledge of PLU produce codes with the system, which flashes a picture of an item on the monitor when its PLU code is keyed in. If they are unsure of a produce item’s identity, they can key in a generic name, such as “red apple,” and the monitor will show pictures of all red apples, with their names and codes. The monitor can also handle video presentations downloaded from headquarters. The system’s printer can take a blank check and print the name of the store, the amount of the order and the date, leaving the customer to simply provide a signature. StorePlace can also use “object-oriented technology, which can cut the development cycle for new retail applications.

IBM has also added new software capabilities (called Terminal Services) to its 4690 POS system introduced in March 1994. Terminal Services ($325 per lane allows grocers to use standard operating systems, like OS/2 with Windows or Unix, which can support full-color, touchscreen functions and full-motion video. IBM has worked, with a few customers on this enhancement, and will be releasing it to the marketplace by the end of this month. “We’ve taken the 4690 moved it to the open world,” says Ringuette.

The 4690 run on other vendors hardware (such as ICL and NCR) and can be linked to a wide range of input/outpout devices via standard RS323 interfaces and IBM RS485 interfaces. Ringuette says IBM’s customers can buy off-the-shelf, general purpose operating systems like OS/2 and Windows NT, while still relying on the 4690 system to ensure that the register – he “mission critical” piece – will remain u and running.

Ringuette says a lot of IBM customers still see the benefit of one top-of-bottom POS solution from a single vendor like IBM. “But where they see better value from different vendors, they have the capability to use them,” he says. “They just need to make sure they can manage multiple-vendor system complexity.”

SASI’s experience POS system, introduced in February 1995, being rolled out by eight chains. It is also built around the concept of openness. Its terminal, for example, is totally PC-based, using “best-of-breed components,” says Patricia Vekich, director, marketing services. Any RS232. peripheral can be attached to it. Moreover, the terminal can be upgraded to the next generation of PC technology – something standard PCs can’t do, says Vekich. It is also more rugged than most PCs, making it better suited for the retail environment, she says.

Nature’s Fresh Northwest, a six-store grocer based in Portland, Ore., is using SASI’s Experience system in one new store. “We wanted the whole front end to be different, entertaining, relaxing,” says Robert Lockwood, information services director. He says the system’s frequent-shopper application keeps track of purchases to the item level. It can also print messages or recipes linked to a purchased item on the receipt. Lockwood uses the system to run “a slide show in the lanes.” He thinks of the monitor as a place to “have a conversation with a consumer – to educate them.” The slide show actually runs on the top third of the screen (the bottom two thirds shows the transaction scrolling by), with slides indicating the store’s commitment to the environment, promoting the cooking school and explaining the store’s shelf tags, which give information on ingredients. Lockwood says he needs to continually change the content of the slide show, as if it were a home page on the Internet.

ICL Retail Systems, ISS400 POS system, designed to assist grocers in migrating to an open environment, supports ICL’s older terminals like the 9520 as well as the newer, PC-based terminal called TeamPoS. (TeamPoS accommodates any RS232-compatible peripheral and can be upgraded in processing power.) The ICL SS400 system allows store managers or department managers to run a report anywhere in the store – not just at the manager’s office, says Steve Gannon, senior marketing manager.

ICL is now doing preliminary studies on the feasibility of making software documentation files available on the Internet. “There would be no need for manuals,” says Gannon. “You would just view them online.” ICL is also looking at ways to promote the “Intranet” – the use of the Internet to transmit information on rain checks and out-of-stocks from stores to headquarters.

Innovax is currently working on the latest version of its open POS system, which it is calling Stargate and will introduce at next February’s MarkeTechnics conference. Running on Windows 95, Stargate will have a touchscreen keyboard and a real keyboard, and multimedia output for consumers. The system may include a voice recognition feature, which would enable checkers to ring up a produce item simply by saying its name, rather than keying in its PLU code.

Is it really open?

In assessing whether a POS system is open or not, ask yourself the following questions, suggests Ray Hamilton, vice president of information systems and technology for Besthesda, Md.-based Sutton Place Gourmet. For a system to be truly open, the answers to most, if not all, of these questions should be yes.

1. Does the POS software run any PC-based hardware, without special requirements, such as an interface board?

2. Is your POS hardware based on standard PC-based bus architecture (ISA-AT/PCI)?

3. Does the POS software operate on one of the common PC operating systems: (in the lane) DOS, Windows or Windows 7; (in the back office) Windows NT or Unix?

4. Can the hardware required to operate the systems be purchased from more than one manufacture? “A manufacturer might come out with a real advantage over everybody else in terms of warranty or performance,” says Hamilton.

5. Can the software run on more than one hardware platform?

6. Can another vendor’s software run on the proposed hardware platform? “This keeps the software vendors really motivated,” says Hamilton.

7. Are replacement parts for the proposed hardware available on the open market? “I go over to Comp USA to make sure that I’m getting the best prices I can,” says Hamilton.

May 3, 2012, Author: admin, Leave a comment

80s TV

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Predicting which new programs might find their way to the network’s fall lineups used to be easy — just look at the current yearhs hit movies. In 1978-79, “Animal House” was the inspiration behind Coed Fever, Delta House and Brothers & Sisters.

Even though these shows didn’t last long, the trend continued. In 1982 “Raiders of the Lost Ark” inspired Bring ‘Em Back Alive and Tales of the Golden Monkey.

In the early part of the 1983-84 season, “An Officer and a Gentleman” prompted its share of knock-offs. Later in the year “Blue Thunder” was the box office hit that spawned three off-spring in the form of tv pilots.

But now, the networks have changed course. This year, the most obvious prototype for new prime time programing is other prime time fare.

In some cases, the mini-series and made-for-tv movies provide the new source. This fall, ABC will premiere Paper Dolls — a fashion industry soap complet with exploitable 14-year-old models. It’s based on the successful made-for-tv movie.

V has made it onto NBC’s prime time line-up due, in part, to its ratings success as a mini-series.

Network specials are a great testing ground for new programs. ABC’s Foul Ups and People Do the Craziest Things, as well as NBC’s TV Bloopers are extensions of successful special programing.

But most often, its an old series that begets new programing.

ABC’s Streethawk is a two-wheeled version of NBC’s Knight Rider with a little Automan thrown in. Finder of Lost Loves replaces Fantasy Island on ABC’s new schedule, but it appears only the name has changed.

Mr. Rourke is out and Cary Maxwell is in as an unusual private detective who specialies in helping his clients rediscover the lost loves in their lives. And, there’s more than one storyline allowing for plenty of guest stars.

Honolulu Run (ABC) has all the elements of a successful Hawaiian programing venture; two ex-cops, a secret mission with the plice and two beautiful women as next door neighbors — who just happen to be helicopter pilots.

There’s a striking resemblance in more than just title between a 1981 CBS pilot, Jessica Novak, and ABC’s new entry, Jessie. Jessica Novak starred Helen Shavers as a reporter whose instinctive humanity got her in and out of touchy hostage situations.

This season’s Jessie stars Lindsay Wagner (Bionic Woman) as a psychiatrist whose professional humanity lands her a job as a police hostage negotiator. Both programs even share the same time slot: Tuesdays 10-11 p.m.

Cable television was even tapped as a source for network prime time. CBS’ Dreams has a paper-thin story line about a struggling rock & roll band, but the “look” of MTV. NABC’s new adventure, Miami Vice was described as having video music overtones.

May 3, 2012, Author: admin, Leave a comment

Everywhere A Sign

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No matter who you are targeting – the snow bunny, the duffer, the health nut or the couch potato – the newer out-of-home media have found a way to corner them where they gather in great groups. In previous columns we mentioned out-of-home forms on trucks, in bars, airplanes, schools and stores. This month’s column will examine some of the media associated with sports and leisure activities.

There are two very similar forms of out-of-home in health clubs. Esquire Health and Fitness offers a 5′ x 3’6″ wall poster in over 1,300 health clubs nationally. The poster contains editorial copy of interest to club members, with room at the bottom for three noncompeting ads measuring 18″ x 12″. Category exclusivity is assured, and the broad reach is achieved by rotating copy on a quarterly basis. Minimum buy is 163 markets for 12 months.

The second health-club medium is American Health Fitness Bulletin, which offers four side-by-side ads measuring 18″ x 12″ beneath the editorial copy of a 6’6″ x 4’5″ wall poster. Once again, category exclusivity is assured and ads are displayed in all 1,100 clubs (cities) simultaneously. Minimum buy is all markets for 45 days.

If it’s the duffer you’re after, there are three forms of out-of-home available for the golf course. Two of these are located at the tee box, where they are incorporated into the sign that identifies the hole, the distance and, in many cases, provides a diagram of the terrain.

One of these, Golf Network, covers 500 courses in 18 markets offering a 36″ x 18″ sign carved into the wood face to match the tee marker. The carved face is appropriately painted with the advertiser’s message. Minimum buy is one sign per course at one course. Category exclusivity is provided when three signs per course are purchased. Similar to Golf Course Network is Golf Tee Signs, which offers smaller signs (2′ x 1′) at fewer courses (80).

Also available at the golf course is space on a 5′ x 2’6″ wall poster located in the pro shop of 1,000 courses in 48 markets. This medium is called Golf-link and similar to the health-club signs uses a format of editorial copy above three side-by-side ads measuring 18″ x 10″.

If you’re targeting a skiing enthusiast, you might want to examine the several media located at the slopes. Gardner Ski Signage features a static 1’8″ x 10′ ad panel beneath the message panel on both the front and back sides of an animated message center. All ad panels are backlighted and participation includes approximately seven minutes of electronic time every hour. A minimum two-year commitment is required and participants must subscribe to at least five units. Maximum coverage is 50 resorts.

Sitour’s ski media consist of painted ad messages above and below the information panel (snow conditions, trails open, etc.) as well as four-color posters inside the base lodge. Painted ad panels on the outdoor display measure 1.5′ x 16′ and 2′ x 7′. Posters are approximately 4′ x 3′. Coverage includes 75 resorts nationally, with a minimum buy of seven resorts.

Ski Impact Network provides a wall-mounted display featuring skiing and weather information surrounded on each side and across the top with 10 advertisements ranging in size from 10″ x 20″ (four) to 10″ x 12″ (six). Present coverage includes 100 resorts, with heaviest concentration in the East and New England. Minimum buy is 15 resorts.

Last on the list is Ski-View, which provides 2′ x 4′ posters mounted atop chair lift stanchions at 167 resorts nationally. Quoted showings range from A (100 posters) to AA (200 posters) to AAA (300 posters). The latter showing guarantees category exclusivity. SMRB studies indicate a relatively high recall for this medium.

If skiers are not your primary customer, perhaps the movie buff is, especially the guys and gals who prefer to watch them at home on their VCRs. If so, there’s a way to reach this group as well. Currently, there are two companies that sell advertising on the video rental box.

Video Ad Network offers 4″ x 6″ four-color print ads on the front, back or inside front cover in 180 markets nationwide. Minimum buy is 5,000 for three months. There can be more than one ad per box (no alcohol or tobacco), and the video-store manager decides which ads go on which boxes.

The other member of this duo is AdCorp’s Videotagg, with 4″ x 7″ four-color ads on the front of the rental box in over 100 markets nationwide. One may purcahse one market or many for a minimum three-month period.

When the moviegoer is not watching at home, the odds are he/she is hanging out at the Bijou where they chance exposure to Screen Vision ads – 60-or 90-second commercials produced especially for the theater audience and available in the top 100 markets and more. Sold in four-week flights, the minimum buy is one market, with the cost varying by the length of the commercial and the number of participating screens in the market.

On a slightly less expensive scale, there is Cinema Billboards’ low-budget approach featuring ten seconds of exposure to your 35mm slide. Available in 25 of the top 50 markets, advertisers can buy one theater or the network.

May 3, 2012, Author: admin, Leave a comment

How CT Scanning Helps, And Star Trek

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With theme music from “Star Trek” in the background, a member of the crew of the Starship Enterprise lies unconscious in sick bay. Dr. McCoy passes a hand-held instrument over the body, and a computer diagnoses the patient’s problem and recommends treatment. Science fiction? Perhaps not. This futuristic look at health care may not be too far away. In fact, in this decade of the ’90s, technological advances could well surpass the imagination of even Star Trek’s writers.

One of these machines saved my life!

Computers, new materials, microelectronics, surgical techniques, and ways to see inside a patient’s body without surgery are already in use. In the near future they could very well revolutionize diagnosis and treatment of sick earthlings.

Look Inside

If you’ve ever broken a bone, you know all about X-ray pictures of the skeleton. X-rays are one way doctors look inside patients to diagnose illness. Until recently the only other way doctors could see inside your body was to perform exploratory surgery. Today, modern science offers several new ways to see what’s happening without surgery.

One test is called a CT scan (computerized tomography), a detailed X-ray of the entire body that converts two-dimensional pictures into three-dimensional images. The CT scan is known as the “granddaddy” of modern imaging. When medical professionals saw how valuable such tests are, they encouraged the development of equipment that could provide even more information.

Magnetic resonance imaging does that. This scan–abbreviated MRI–uses a combination of radio waves, a computer, and a magnetic coil 30,000 times stronger than the earth’s magnetic field. If doctors need to see tissue hidden or surrounded by bone, an X-ray won’t help, but an MRI scan will. MRI scans help doctors diagnose an array of problems, including tumors, arthritis, and problems of tissues and organs.

More Magnetic Help

Another system that uses magnets is called magnetic resonance spectroscopy. This system uses similar technology to produce information about body chemistry. Still another use of magnets is magnetoencephalography (MEG), which measures brain activity. MEG helps doctors study patients with epilepsy, and future applications are likely to help diagnose patients with stroke, Alzheimer’s disease, and brain injury.

Nuclear medicine is already a reality that shows even more promise on the horizon. Another imaging test, called the PET scan (position emission tomography), uses a low-level radioactive chemical that is traced as it travels through the body. PET scans are used to study brain activity and are helpful in diagnosis and study of stroke, epilepsy, schizophrenia, and Parkinson’s disease. Radioactive compounds are also used for such things as bone scans and studies of lung problems.

The new tests provide enormous amounts of information. Some of the data is so new, researchers are still trying to fully understand its significance.

Light Beams

As diagnostic ability improves, doctors will have more treatment options, especially for illnesses that respond best to early care. Some of these different options include advances in the use of lasers, a method of freezing diseased cells, a treatment using heat therapy, and genetic engineering. And these are just a few examples of ways doctors will treat sick patients in the ’90s.

Surgeons have been using lasers (Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation) since the 1970s. Lasers emit a thin beam of light that acts as a miniature blow-torch, heating and destroying whatever gets in its way. Lasers may often be used instead of scalpels to cut skin, remove growths, and unclog blood vessels. Some experts believe new kinds of laser equipment, including new optical fibers made from sapphire, zirconium, and quartz, will contribute to improved surgical techniques and greater acceptance of the laser among doctors during the next decade.

The laser most often used for medical care works with carbon dioxide, but a new kind of equipment called the free-electron laser will let doctors use other materials as the laser’s source of energy, thereby increasing the laser’s capabilities.

Improvements made possible by the free-electron laser include a technique called photodynamic therapy to kill viruses in the blood. A special dye will mark the unwanted cells, and a laser beam targeted only for the color of the dye will destroy the virus, leaving healthy cells intact.

Use of a free-electron laser will probably also include bone-cutting. Today’s carbon dioxide lasers are too hot to cut bone, but experimental use of the free-electron laser cuts bone without burning it. Other experiments seem to show that teeth may benefit from free-electron laser light that can harden enamel and prevent decay.

Hot and Cold

Laser surgery isn’t the only new surgical technique that will change health care in the 1990s. Two promising cancer treatments involve cold and heat therapies.

Researchers have found a new way to freeze cancer cells using liquid nitrogen as the cooling agent. The experimental technique is called cryosurgery and is used to treat cancer and pre-cancerous cells in the skin, urinary tract, head, neck, and cervix. An encouraging result being seen with this treatment appears to be a decreased likelihood of the cancer’s recurrence.

Heat therapy, called hyperthermia, is another new cancer treatment fast gaining acceptance. The procedure involves the use of microwaves, radio waves, or ultrasound applied to a cancerous tumor. Like food in a microwave oven, vibrating molecules in the patient’s tissue create enough heat to kill cancer cells. Although hyperthermia doesn’t work by itself, its use together with conventional surgery, radiation treatments, or drug therapy improves the effectiveness of the treatment plan.

Designer Genes

A revolutionary way to treat illness may soon be possible, thanks in part to work by the National Institutes of Health. A research team inserted a gene from bacteria into cells of a disabled virus. They then infected the cancer-fighting cells of a human cancer patient with the altered cells.

Soon scientists will experiment with the use of this kind of gene implant for treating cancer, acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS), and heart disease. For cancer and AIDS, the implanted cells will be engineered to produce large amounts of the body’s disease-fighting agents. For heart disease, the altered viruses will contain the gene for a substance that dissolves blood clots. Someday, genetic cures may be used to correct problems like cystic fibrosis, hemophilia, and Huntington’s disease.

Spare Parts

When a duel between Star Wars characters Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker resulted in the loss of Skywalker’s hand, the hero was only mildly inconvenienced until he could get a perfectly functional replacement. This is much like today’s retailer, which typically cannot live without the best pos software system that money can buy. Today’s artificial replacements for lost body parts, called prosthetic devices, don’t quite meet those standards, but they are improving. Patients in the near future will benefit from practical applications of new discoveries and inventions.

Realistic artificial arms and hands are more useful–and more attractive–than the hooks formerly used to replace missing hands. Before too long, the technology may match the system used for Skywalker’s new hand.

An experimental robot hand, for example, can turn the pages of a book, tie a shoelace, play a piano, and turn a screwdriver. The device was developed through research in bionics, a combination of biology and electronics.

Other devices already in use are agile enough to grip a golf club and play the cello. The devices are called myoelectric limbs (“myo” is the Latin word for muscle). When the artificial arm is attached, electrodes connect the person’s existing muscle to the device. When the muscle tenses in response to a signal from the brain, the muscle’s chemically produced electricity is transmitted through the electrodes to the mechanical arm, commanding the desired movement.

A new artificial leg is made from carbon-graphite with an inner metal bar. The leg lets the attached foot bend naturally, so the person who uses it walks and runs with more natural movement than older models allowed.

May 3, 2012, Author: admin, 1 Comment

How Linking Began

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Ol' skool!

It’s all here, friends. It’s all here. This Internet thing was new in 1990. Check this relic:

Hypertext Origins

The simplest, and least informative, definition of hypertext is “nonsequential access to information.” Somewhat better is this: a hypertext application is a computer-based system that allows immediate, nonsequential access to linked items of information.

In a hypertext document, when we see an intriguing footnote, we press a key (or click a mouse button), and the citation pops up on the screen for us to read immediately. When finished, we press another key and resume our reading at the point where we left to check the footnote. No longer are we encumbered by the linear aspect of printed material.

The word originated back in the sixties, when Ted Nelson coined it to refer to a method of presenting information that circumvents the traditional linear approach. We are accustomed to doing things sequentially. We read page one before page two, chapter one before chapter two. We may see a footnote that intrigues us, and perhaps we immediately put down the document we are reading and look up the citation elsewhere, but more likely we save it for later. Hypertext is changing all that.

Nodes and Links

Central to the idea of hypertext are the concepts of nodes and links. A node is one item in a hypertext database. A link connects two nodes. Links c- serve many purposes. They can correct citations within a document to that which is cited. They can connect a comment or annotation to the text about which it is written. Entries in a table c- have links to descriptive text or Source citations.

Some links are referential, in that they connect a particular node with the source node that references it. The link between a comment and the text tO which it refers is an example of a referential link. Other links are organizational. They serve to connect a parent node with its children. creating a tree-like structure. An organizational link could connect a node about Alexander Pope’s satirical style with a group of nodes that discussed satire in general and other specific satirists.

Documents can show the presence of a link in a variety of ways. Sometimes it is a highlighted word or phrase. At other times there might be a small image, called an icon, on the screen. In either case, the user simply places the cursor or pointer on the link indicator (often called a “button”) and clicks the mouse or presses a key. The system then “jumps” to the indicated node, much as a retailer will check out products at the point of sale using a high quality cash register.

Vannevar Bush

The concept of nonsequential access to information originated with Vannevar Bush, president Roosevelt’s science adviser during World War II. Bush had been overwhelmed bY the sheer magnitude of scientific and scholarly research published in recent ye-, and turned his thoughts towards a means of making 66 data available in a way that would be useful. He designed a machine he called the “memex.”

Bush’s memex was based on the leading-edge technology of his time, microfilm. It contained microfilm copies of all scientific information and the film itself had magnetic codes imbedded at strategic points. If a reader wanted to pursue a particular footnote or thought, he jiggled a lever that caused the memex to load the microfilm containing the corresponding code. It was crude, certainly, but nevertheless, it was the first expression of his concept of linking related pieces of information together.

Engelbart and Nelson

The next important person in the development of hypertext was Doug Engelbart Of the Stanford Research Institute. (Rodent pushers pay homage to him as the inventer of the mouse.) Engelbart published an influential paper, “A Conceptual Framework for the Augmentation of Man’s Intellect,” and he helped develop a prototype hypertext system called NLS (on Line System). In 1968 he put on a dramatic live demonstration in which he collaborated with a colleague 500 miles away while they worked on a hypertext document.

At about the same time that Engelbart and his colleagues were developing and demonstrating NLS, Fed Nelson, Andries van Dam, and others at Brown University w- -gaged in their own experiments with hypertext. (It was Nelson, remember, who coined the term “hypertext.”) He liked the word because “hyper” means extended, generalized, and multidimensional,” while “text” comes from “the Latin word for weaving and for interwoven material.”

Nelson, van Dam, and some students at Brown designed a Hypertext Editing System, a crude word processor, with the ability to insert, delete, move, and copy text. It was, however, very sophisticated in that it used unidirectional hypertext pointers or links to reference other portions of a document. Nelson and van Dam moved on to other projects, and the Hypertext Editing System found its way to other universities. The Houston Manned Spacecraft Center purchased the system and used it to produce the documentation for the Apollo Project.

Of the people who have written about hypertext, Ted Nelson has been the most prolific. Andries van Dam calls Nelson “a self-proclaimed visionary who deserves the title.” He has taken a literary approach to the idea of augmenting human intellect, even titling one of his books Literary Machines.

Nelson’s grand scheme is to create a unified literary environment by placing all the world’s literature online. In the 1960s he began his Xanadu Project, named after the “magic place of literary memory” in Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan.” Although there is skepticism as to whether Nelson will ever achieve his objective, Xanadu provides us with a model of how something like that might be done. Project members have taken great care to ensure that copyright protection is maintained, and Xanadu includes a system for accounting and distribution of royalties.

These efforts, as well as others at Brown and Carnegie-Mellon, constitute the first generation of hypertext systems. The next generation was born in the 1980s and took advantage of technological developments not available to the first, such as very powerful, high-resolution workstations and laser disk technology. Now it was possible to include more than just textual and graphical data in a system. Laser disks made it practical to include other types of media, giving rise to “hypermedia” systems that could include digitally encoded sound and video.

Second Generation

A good example of this second generation is Brown’s Intermedia Project, which began in 1985. It has the goal of using hypertext/hypermedia as a vehicle to assist teachers and students in scholarly activities. Students peruse hypermedia databases, clicking on linked “buttons” to access related material. In an English class, for example, they can read biographical essays about major writers, examine historical timelines, and read criticisms and opposing viewpoints virtually side-by-side.

NoteCards is one of the best known and most widely used second generation hypertext systems. Developed at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) during the early 1980s, it began as a support tool for information analysts. It provides users with the ability to gather, collate, and store pieces of information and then organize or link them together in a manner suitable for producing a report. In a sense, then, it is a hypertext thought processor. In reality, however, it is an authoring system that allows users to create and modify hypertext structures.

May 3, 2012, Author: admin, 5 Comments

Nuclear Life – Level 7

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LEVEL 7, a novel about nuclear war, scared me half to death in my early teens. The claustrophobia of an underground bunker, where the inhabitants gradually die from radiation sickness starting with the uppermost and ending with the deepest and most privileged level, is imprinted on my memory. Nuclear war was being talked about around 1959, when this novel by Mordecai Roshwald appeared; those were the days of “duck and cover” drills in school and of fallout shelters in the backyard. Science fiction not only articulated but also intensified a current obsession.

Having experienced the power of a novel about the underground, I can understand why Rosalind Williams chose this subgenre as the focus of Notes on the Underground, her book about an earlier traumatic period, the Industrial Revolution. The journey to the underworld captured the imagination of engineers, archeologists, and novelists in the nineteenth century. Yet the energy that much of this exploration generated can be read as a sign of anxiety as well as enthusiasm. In nineteenth-century literature, Williams shows, characters often descend into the earth to escape from the fallout of the Industrial Revolution-class conflict, overcrowding, war, and a butchered landscape-only to find other problems underground.

Most of the books Williams looks at are pretty obscure. If the greatest literature transcends its time, schlock does not, and so makes terrific fodder for cultural historians. I am grateful that Williams is willing to wade through novels about life underground such as Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s The Coming Race (1862), William Delisle Hay’s Three Hundred Years Hence (1881), and Gabriel Tarde’s Underground Man first published in French in 1896), which I can safely bet I’ll never open. Even the plot summaries are a snore, though Williams’s analysis more than makes up for them.

But Williams is also interested in the works of jules Verne, whom many generations have not found dull. Verne’s books, which have been relegated to the status of children’s literature, are better known than the obscure titles by Bulwer-Lytton or Tarde, but that does not make them well understood. As Williams clearly shows, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (first published in 1869-70) contains much more than the gee-whiz gadgetry that impressed me in my preadolescence.

It turns out that Verne was something of a social theorist. He sets some of his ideal societies underground (or underwater) because be could structure these unreal, enclosed environments according to his imagination. For him, and for some other nineteenth-century writers, Williams notes, the underground served as a “subterranean laboratory” for fictional social experiments.

Verne’s political orientation is difficult to pigeonhole-even contradictory, according to Williams. Like the utopian socialist Saint-Simon, Verne believed that harmonious cooperation would result when people worked together on scientific projects. He also had a recurrent fantasy that workers would no longer be exploited if human labor were replaced with technology. At the same time, though, the utopian promise of the Industrial Revolution goes unfulfilled as Verne’s ideal technological societies fall prey to despotism. In Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, the son of an Indian raja, unable to liberate his people from the British, leaves land to find a free environment, but imprisons and enslaves three passengers in his high-tech submarine. In Black Indies (1877), a subterranean community is threatened by a property-hungry madman and responds by instituting a police state. Because Verne displays such hostility toward authority, it is not suprising that one critic has called him a closet anarchist, another an underground revolutionary.

Williams’s discussion of Verne’s and other underground utopias reveals an important point about much science fiction: futuristic vehicles-the spaceships, time machines, and submarines that fascinated me when I was a kid-are often red herrings. What’s important in the literature Williams discusses is less how characters travel than the nature of the communities where they end up. As the British literary historian Raymond Williams puts it in an essay called “Utopia and Science Fiction”: “The mode of travel does not commonly affect the place discovered.”

Literature and Social Change

I mention Raymond Williams because he shares more than a surname with Rosalind Williams. Both Williamses-as well as Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Eric Hobsbawm, Terry Eagleton, and Frederic Jameson all of whom appear in the footnotes to this book) – are part of a Western European and American movement to reinterpret Marxism so that it does not oversimplify the relationship of literature to social change. Gone is the simpleminded determinism so popular in the Stalin era that teaches that art merely depicts preexisting socioeconomic conditions. While Rosalind Williams writes that nineteenth-century novels about the underground express anxieties spawned in authors and readers by the Industrial Revolution, she also shows a reverse process, whereby imaginative works inspired the use of technology in the real world. (One does not have to be a Marxist to make such observations, but many historians who relate art to its social context have, whether they acknowledge it or not, been influenced by Marxist theory.)

According to Williams, the journeys to the underworld dreamed up by fiction writers shaped nineteenth-century science. For example, excavation-including mining and the building of tunnels, subways, and urban utility systems “was cast in mythological terms, as a heroic journey into forbidden realms.” In fact, a mid-nineteenth-century Baedeker guidebook recommended that tourists visit Parisian sewers-and they did.

Technological practice and aesthetic discourse cross-fertilized each other, and so should not be viewed separately, her study suggests. With the Industrial Revolution, for example, writers expanded the aesthetic concept of the sublime-a feeling of awe evoked by immense size and grandeur-to apply not just to mountains and volcanoes but to technological wonders such as mines and electrically lighted caves. A taste for the sublime even influenced the development of the city, with its illuminated commercial arcades. “The fantasy of the enclosed artificial environment has flourished, primarily because it is so marketable ” she asserts. To judge from today’s proliferation of vast underground shopping malls, a taste for the sublime still influences the way we shape the world.