Technology

At The Sharper Image, the spanking new high-tech store in Ardmore, customers check out a $399 voice-activated telephone that shaves seconds off the task of dialing a number, while others eye the $99 digital diary that promises to help organize their hectic lives. At Strawbridge & Clothier's Food Hall in Center City, Roxana Canjura, 24, a speech communications student who would rather spend her time Christmas shopping than cooking dinner, buys a pound of Italian pasta salad with red peppers.

With an advanced new computer in her classroom, social studies teacher Kristen Webb is excited about what technology can offer, and she knows her students love it. So why is her computer screen dark most of the day? "I just don't have the time," Webb whispered in her classroom during the one free period among six classes. "I love using the computers, but it can take 45 minutes to set up a lab. Well, I don't have 45 minutes. " More than two-thirds of the county's classrooms boast computers.

"For people with every kind of disability, whether sensory, cognitive, motor or communication, technology can provide tools to speak, hear, see, learn, write, be mobile, work and play - in short, to live as fully and independently as possible. " - Sen. Bob Dole. Ordinarily, I might not have paid much attention to Dole's recent Senate speech. It provided no particular insight into his political philosophy. It didn't "define" his candidacy. It broke no new ground. Indeed, he gives some version of these remarks this time every year, around the anniversary of the World War II injury that cost him the use of an arm. But, as it happened, I had just seen a Pentagon display of some of the same technology Dole was talking about: computers with Braille terminals, computers that can read or respond to vocal commands, talking scanners, keyboards that amplify finger movement so that people with greatly reduced range of can operate them.

The man whose words can move markets sought yesterday to move the nation's governors, urging them to strengthen their education systems so their citizens would be equipped to thrive in a high-tech world. Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, whose every public utterance is parsed by Wall Street analysts, did not discuss inflation or interest rates as he addressed the final session of the 92d annual National Governors Association meeting. Instead, he repeated his observation that the explosion in information technology over the last decade had led to a new level of productivity gains, which have fueled the longest expansion ever.

Mayor Nutter yesterday praised the city's 3-1-1 nonemergency call line, which has been in service for a year. But he stopped just short of pledging funds to the program for a technology update. "It's one of a million things we want to do," said Nutter, who faces another tight budget year. "We have to look at all of our technology needs. " The 3-1-1 line provides a number for citizens to call with nonemergency complaints or questions. Since it began on Dec. 31, 2008, the line has taken 1.2 million calls and 60,000 service requests, according to city officials.

More than time and space separate Shirley Wilk from Bill Hickey. She's 75 and in business as B. Wilk Fabrics for 53 years, while Hickey is 39 and opened the nearby Red Hook Coffee and Tea two years ago. But as merchants on Philadelphia's Fabric Row - a stretch of South Fourth Street from Bainbridge to Christian Street - their interests are more shared than separate. Both want to keep the street bustling with shops and customers. But Wilk, Hickey and their fellow shopkeepers know they have something more valuable, more elusive, to preserve: the sense of place that Fabric Row has acquired through the generations.

Watching obsolete home technology in the throes of grand mal seizure is bound to be an increasingly common - and disquieting - 21st-century experience. There it was, my once cutting-edge laser-disc player, grunting and straining - and failing. There was no repairing it. Laser-disc players never really caught on, and quite rightly have been wiped off the face of modern technology by less hulking DVD players. The one hope for a replacement was on eBay, where a subculture of equally desperate souls outbid me on this video counterpart to the Edsel.

Consumer interest in online shopping was easily the biggest story of this holiday season. And what did people buy? With the click of a mouse, virtually everything. And, apparently, the latest technology. Or rather, technology as jewelry. One ad, for Orbitgems.com, depicts a glamorous, Blackglama-type woman. She's wearing an extravagant, black-feather chapeau and a fitted, scoop-neck, black T - perfectly complemented with a dangling, computer-mouse earring. An ad for beautyscene.

Which invention of the last 100 years has made your life easier? Consider your answer for a moment as we talk about what your fellow Americans say. In a survey commissioned by Harris Corp. and reported by the Association of Home Appliance Manufacturers, Americans said the computer, television and refrigerator were the top technological achievements of the 20th century. The survey showed that technology has made life more comfortable and added to the economy. When asked which 20th-century advance was most important in their everyday lives, 34 percent of those responding named the computer, followed by the television at 17 percent, the refrigerator at 10 percent, the microwave oven at 5 percent, and the washing machine at 3 percent.

Maybe someday, Alesia Brown joked, the futuristic Star Trek idea of instantaneously producing food items directly from an advanced computer system will come to Philadelphia's Central High School. If it does, said Brown, the teacher technology leader and computer support coordinator at Central, she would not be surprised. In the 30 years that Brown has been working with computers at Central, she has seen many changes in technology and its uses at the academic magnet high school.