Computer Program

The Octorara School District is revamping its computer program, the first revision in more than three years. The changes include earmarking considerably more money for computer education, officials reported at the school board meeting Monday. In addition, one school board member, John Carnes, asked the administration to produce a study showing how computers enhanced learning. Superintendent Timothy H. Daniels said Tuesday that the key to the revised curriculum was that students achieve "a comfort level" when working on computers.

"With a child you have so little margin for safety. " As Dr. Meir Mazala says this, he thinks of how easy it is for a human to make a mistake in calculating a drug dose and of how something as tiny as a decimal point, if misplaced, can control a child's destiny. He thinks of Tyhisha Smith, the 5-month-old girl who died in November at Mercy Catholic Medical Center's Fitzgerald Mercy Hospital when she was given an asthma drug in a dose 15 times stronger than her body could handle.

Jared Grove and Brian Sullivan decided to go out on a limb. Without knowing much about it, they decided to commit a lot of their time to a subject that they once couldn't have cared less about. For the last several weeks, the two have been researching and cataloging more than 200 trees on the campus of Friends' Central as part of their senior project. It will help the school plan its arboretum. Most area schools have a senior project or career elective in May and June in which students spend two to four weeks doing community service or working on a job they may be interested in pursuing after graduation.

The idea made the best sort of policy pitch: at once flashy and simple. Stick a free computer, wired to the Internet, in every day-care center in Pennsylvania, and let children, rich and poor, start handling technology as soon as they are introduced to blocks and pencils. But three years after the Ridge administration's CyberStart program hit preschools and in-home day care around the commonwealth, some educators and others still have questions about the program's training provisions and whether the program is appropriate for 3-year-olds.

Computerized calligraphy sounds like an oxymoron if ever there was one. But Linda DiOttavio figures calligraphy is calligraphy, no matter how it's done. And since the computer age has touched nearly every facet of life, why not calligraphy? DiOttavio, who calls her business the Guest List, uses a computer program to create by machine what traditional calligraphers do with hand stroke after painstaking hand stroke. And the finished product - be it a wedding invitation, birth announcement, Christmas card or notice of a new law firm - looks much the same as a hand-written item, she said.

Scientists and engineers gathered yesterday at Drexel University to share the latest inventions designed to help make life easier for the elderly. At the conference titled "Engineering Design for an Aging Society," Doug Chute demonstrates a computer program that can help with regular household functions.

Marie Homann's own family of four children had grown and flown the nest, leaving the 50-year-old Cinnaminson resident with a void that might be filled, she thought, by a business of her own. "I thought over the years of different businesses I wanted to be in. I didn't want to be tied down by having to open a store every day, so I was looking for something I could do from the home. " She found what what she was looking for at home, in the subject of families and religion. By mixing some old beliefs with some new technology, she started TapeSource Inc., a company that films and distributes family-oriented religious programming.

A computer "virus" that could have destroyed data in hundreds of library computers was discovered last month in a U.S. Census Bureau computer program, the bureau confirmed yesterday. To guard against future viruses - last month's infection was the bureau's first - Census Bureau officials said they would routinely screen all bureau programs for potentially damaging viruses. Copies of the infected computer programs were recently sent to about 350 libraries. The programs inadvertently carried the Friday-the-13th, or Jerusalem, virus, said Mervyn R. Stuckey, chief of the bureau's data- processing security branch.

Montgomery County Court Judge Horace A. Davenport may be no computer expert, but he has one firm belief about computers: "If you're going to steal one, then you might as well learn how to work one. " And so it was yesterday that he spared Reginald Harris of Philadelphia a jail sentence for taking a computer from Gwynedd Mercy College on June 14. "They're the wave of the future, young man," Davenport said as he ordered Harris, 23, to enroll...

The Willingboro Board of Education has refused to pay for a teacher's position to oversee a pilot computer program at Pennypacker Elementary School before and after school. On Monday, the board voted, 3-3, with one abstention, on the $2,000 honorarium, which was included in the district's budget. Last spring, the board had planned a computer program in all elementary schools, but because of cost constraints, that was scaled down to a pilot program in one school. Two basic-skills teachers have overseen the computer room before and after school, for a total of 7.5 hours a week, without receiving extra pay. Proponents of the honorarium said the program could not be run or evaluated effectively if no one was there to lead it. "The program can't function without someone to take . . . this job," acting Superintendent Austin Gumbs told the board at meeting earlier this month.

JERUSALEM - Software developed by an Israeli team is giving intriguing new hints about what researchers believe to be the multiple hands that wrote the Bible. The new software analyzes style and word choices to distinguish parts of a single text written by different authors, and when applied to the Bible its algorithm teased out distinct writerly voices in the holy book. The program has a range of potential applications - from helping law enforcement to developing new computer programs for writers.

Schuylkill Elementary fifth grader Chad Komar wound a blue measuring tape around the crimped edges of a petite apple pie and jotted "32 cm" on his work sheet. Then, after pausing to sample a few crumbs that were casualties of his work, he stretched the tape across the middle of the pie and found that the center was about a third as long as the crust. And so an 11-year-old got to know a number used by ancient Egyptians and NASA scientists, one that stretches into infinity and yet is less than 4. His pie taught him pi. Yesterday was Pi Day, and students at schools across the nation celebrated by learning about this famous figure, the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter - or, in the case of Chad's pie, the ratio of crust to middle.

We may never see Afleet Alex and Smarty Jones run a match race in real life. But there's always computer simulation. We asked racing fan and computer systems engineer Gary Darveaux to match Alex against Smarty using Horse Racing Fantasy, a computer game he developed and sells at the Web site at horseracegame.com. The game uses more than 30 performance factors to rate horses. We matched Alex, winner of this year's Preakness and Belmont Stakes, against Smarty, winner of last year's Kentucky Derby and Preakness, in three races, with both of them rated as 3-year-olds in their prime.

With much of a computer's innards extracted and set out before them, the three Deptford High School freshmen continued conscientiously, and playfully, their remove-and-replace mission. "I think we can put it back together," said Angelique Lee, 14, who was using a screwdriver to remove the floppy-disk casing from the computer. Had she and her team ever tried to "repair" a computer before? "No," said Sherri English, 14. "My dad knows how to do this. Maybe I can help him now. " The hands-on lesson of what makes a computer work - and how to fix it when it doesn't - was one of eight classes held simultaneously yesterday at Gloucester County College in Sewell.

If you want to know the number of streetlights in Camden, ask Josh Rivera. Rivera, 16, a sophomore at Woodrow Wilson High School, along with five other members of a Camden streetlight survey team, counted them all. "Actually, we counted them twice, once to find out where they were, and the second time to see if they were working," Rivera said. The five are learning computer skills through Hopeworks 'N Camden, a program run by the Rev. Jeff Putthoff, a Jesuit priest assigned to Holy Name Roman Catholic Church in Camden.

At the computer, kindergartner Matthew Lingerman was acing the task: Every time the word fan appeared on the screen, he was supposed to click on it, and a little green dinosaur would move a step closer to the waterfall. When other words, such as can, and and feels appeared, Matthew was not supposed to click. And he didn't. That was good news for his dinosaur pal, who soon was enjoying a virtual ride down the waterfall, much to Matthew's delight. Matthew and his classmates at Rhawnhurst Elementary in Northeast Philadelphia are using this new computer-based early literacy program, called Headsprout.

EVER SINCE shockingly high property tax assessments first started appearing in people's mailboxes, the Board of Revision of Taxes and chairman David Glancey have been the target of critics, especially on City Council. Councilman Frank DiCicco, in particular, has been especially tough in his remarks that the BRT is flawed in the way it conducts assessments. DiCicco illustrated his point when he asked the BRT for the addresses of people in his district for a mass mailing and 30,000 letters were returned with bad addresses.

Instead of scribbling orders for medical tests or drug administration on paper or shouting them out to nurses, physicians at some of the nation's hospitals are using handheld electronic devices to file orders. Such tools would seem to be of obvious help, but in practice, they often flop, in the view of the head of a Philadelphia firm that makes computer applications more usable. Harold Hambrose, president and chief executive of Electronic Ink Inc., said order-entry applications were not user-friendly enough or organized in a way that matched how doctors worked.

The idea made the best sort of policy pitch: at once flashy and simple. Stick a free computer, wired to the Internet, in every day-care center in Pennsylvania, and let children, rich and poor, start handling technology as soon as they are introduced to blocks and pencils. But three years after the Ridge administration's CyberStart program hit preschools and in-home day care around the commonwealth, some educators and others still have questions about the program's training provisions and whether the program is appropriate for 3-year-olds.

The red-and-yellow bumper cars hit the wooden barricade and went into a wild spin. "I was never a Lego person, but this is better than math," Goshen Friends School fifth-grader Katherine Law, 11, said as she watched the little cars, each made out of Legos. Law and about 15 other graduating fifth graders at the school outside West Chester had gathered for a test run of their robotics project. Called Goshenville Roboworld, the fictitious amusement park - complete with bumper cars, a merry-go-round, Ferris wheel and water slides - was made entirely out of Legos programmed to perform like carnival rides.