Search

While studying Gender Issues in Distance Education at Athabasca University, the author has read about nomadic Fulbe women in Nigeria who learned by radio. She became inspired to explore the idea of serial drama as education. She began searching the Internet for ideas. She discovered a striking example of entertainment-education--an educational soap opera called "Urunana." Urunana was created to provide specific information on sexual and reproductive health to the remaining 70 percent of the Rwanda after the 1994 genocide. In this article, the author presents in a diary-style manner all the information she learned about various technology that can be used effectively for delivering entertainment education to learners. She shares how the convergence of radio, podcasting, and mobile phones will provide learners with the convenience of listening to serial educational dramas.

University science education has been undergoing great amount of change since the commercialization of the Internet a decade ago. Mobile technologies in science education can encompass more than the proximal teaching and learning environment. Podcasting, for example, allows audio content from user-selected feeds to be automatically downloaded to one's computer as it becomes available online, and then later transferred to a portable player for the user's consumption at a convenient time and place. Enjoying a phenomenal growth in mainstream society, podcasting is asynchronous and could be provided at a distance from a classroom. This paper reports a case study from the University of British Columbia that implemented podcasting for physics content. It presents the rationale for, technical details, and step-by-step guide to creating podcasts in the sciences.

Traffic collisions kill about 43,000 Americans a year. Worldwide, road traffic injuries are the leading cause of death by injury and the ninth leading cause of all deaths. Photo Radar speed enforcement has been implemented in the United States and many other industrialized countries, yet its cost-effectiveness from a societal viewpoint, taking all significant impacts into account, has not been reported. This paper fills this gap, reporting on a Photo Radar traffic safety program introduced in 1996 in British Columbia, Canada, and incorporating the results of rigorous statistical analyses on speed and crash impacts into a comprehensive cost-benefit analysis from both societal and sponsoring-agency perspectives. The study reveals that the Rhoto Radar Program cost C$27 million per year in 2001 Canadian dollars (?US$21 million) and generated benefits valued at $142 million per year (?US$109 million), for net societal benefits of C$115 million per year (?US$88 million). It was estimated that the sponsoring agency saved C$38 million (?US$29 million) annually in claim costs. These results are robust to plausible alternate assumptions. Societal net benefits become negative only if the reduction in injuries and fatalities is one standard error below the expected value, or if private travel time is valued at or above C$15 per hour. Agency claim cost savings are greater than program costs under all scenarios tested. These results are likely applicable to jurisdictions in developed countries with similar traffic infrastructure: Greater use of highway photo radar speed enforcement would be good public policy.

This paper describes several small printed circuit board planar antennas that can be integrated with amplifiers for short-range vehicle wireless communication. The antennas are designed for the 315-MHz frequency band, which is commonly used for control and security devices in the USA and Canada. Each antenna has dimensions of 50 × 70 mm (much less than the free-space wavelength λ = 0.95 m) and is implemented on FR-4 dielectric substrate. These investigated antennas were compared with respect to input impedance, radiation resistance, radiation efficiency, directivity, directionality, bandwidth, matching system complexity, and gain. This paper also includes experimental verification of the final antenna design in the vehicle. It is shown that the antenna diversity method can increase communication range for remote keyless entry systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the widespread popularity and reliability of microcomputers and the availability of easy-to-use application generators and application packages, it has become possible to introduce computer systems into environments where this was not practical either from a technical or an economic standpoint. This paper will describe how an integrated, multi-application system was developed and successfully implemented two years ago for a forest products company. Emphasis will be placed on: * How the application generator aided or constrained development. * How the development process and system design differed from the traditional approach, in view of the requirement that the system should operate entirely without trained technical support. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]