Discusses the features of America Online, a commercial online service designed primarily for use with a Macintosh computer. Several documentation guides are identified, and a step-by-step tour of the service is provided with samples of various screens in the program. (12 references/notes) (EA)

Explains how standardizing computer system hardware and software throughout the school campus can increase efficiency; reduce costs and acquisition lead time; and make training, technical support, and hardware replacement and repair easier. Questions to ask when choosing among different hardware and software systems are highlighted. (GR)

Presents a group of semiotic principles for software design and uses them to show how they explain different educational possibilities. Discusses interface design and describes Theater in the Computer, a software environment for children, to illustrate semiotic-based principle of interface design. (Author/LRW)

Discusses how to increase user satisfaction by designing information retrieval systems that inform the user while the user is interacting online. Models the information processing operations of a user who has received an information message from the system and is stimulated into grasping at a higher understanding of the information need. (Contains…

Presents a heuristic, attribute-based, noise-tolerant data mining program, HCV (Version 2.0) based on the newly-developed extension matrix approach. Outlines some techniques implemented in the HCV program for noise handling and discretization of continuous domains; an empirical comparison shows that rules generated by HCV are more compact than the…

Examines metaphor's limitations as a visual-rhetorical framework for designing, evaluating, and critiquing user interfaces. Outlines an alternate framework for visual rhetoric, that of genre ecologies, and discusses how it avoids some of the limitations of metaphor. Uses an empirical study of computer users to illustrate the genre-ecology…

Watts (1993) attributes problems encountered in developing computer-aided career guidance systems to political and economic issues rather than technical or professional ones, a conclusion based largely on experience with the UK PROSPECT system. Offers an alternative view which draws attention to the role of project management in creating some of…

Describes the design of an information retrieval system that permits the personalization of a search by developing a user profile in order to reduce noise and increase the number of relevant items retrieved. The preorientation system is explained and an example using full-text natural language processing tools is presented. (Author/LRW)

This case study, of an application to facilitate dispatch work in a large organization, describes a history of collaboration and conflict between information systems professionals and end users as system designers. A Social Construction of Technology approach is used to examine the mixture of cooperation and conflict between the departments.…

Discussion of terms and how they are used in queries in information retrieval focuses on a transaction log analysis of queries posed on an Internet search service that isolated basic query structure syntactic patterns. Describes a linguistic model that classified Web queries and suggests implications for information retrieval system design.…

Presents a session abstract that included speakers discussing current studies in successive searching during the information seeking process. Highlights include mediated successive searching; end-user successive searching; designing information retrieval systems to support successive searching; and search histories for user support in legal…

Presents an abstract for a planned session on the need to coordinate user studies and information retrieval system design research. Topics include human-based research and system-based research; children's information use; usability and cartographic information systems; and ethnomethodology and system design. Panelists included: Nick Belkin, Dania…

New economy corporate Web sites have pioneered exciting techniques-rich media, interactivity, personalization, community, and integration of much third-party content. Discusses business-to-business (B2B) Web commerce, with examples of several B2B corporate sites; portal and content elements of these sites; and corporate content outlooks. (AEF)

This article traces the historical development of the boundaries around computer software and hardware. On one hand, the author documents ongoing discussions about the technical equivalence of hardware and software. On the other hand, he accounts for the stubborn persistence of these terms as markers for two distinct spheres of technology,…

Streaming audio/video contents over the Internet requires large network bandwidth and timely delivery of media data. A streaming session is generally long and also needs a large I/O bandwidth at the streaming server. A streaming server, however, has limited network and I/O bandwidth. For this reason, a streaming server alone cannot scale a…