Bioinformatics and the Undergraduate Curriculum Essay

Recent advances involving high-throughput techniques for data generation and analysis have made familiarity with basic bioinformatics concepts and programs a necessity in the biological sciences. Undergraduate students increasingly need training in methods related to finding and retrieving information stored in vast databases. The rapid rise of bioinformatics as a new discipline has challenged many colleges and universities to keep current with their curricula, often in the face of static or dwindling resources. On the plus side, many bioinformatics modules and related databases and software programs are free and accessible online, and interdisciplinary partnerships between existing faculty members and their support staff have proved advantageous in such efforts. We present examples of strategies and methods that have been successfully used to incorporate bioinformatics content into undergraduate curricula.     

Deaf people communicating via SMS, TTY, relay service, fax, and computers in Australia

Despite the expansion of Deaf people's use of communication technology little is published about how they use electronic communication in their social and working lives and the implications for their concepts of identity and community. Australia is an ideal research base because the use of a range of technologies is widespread there. To gain access to a wide age range of people who identify as Deaf, members of the national organization, the Australian Association of the Deaf, were surveyed by mail. Results showed that Short Message Service (SMS), telephone typewriters (TTY), voice/TTY relay services, fax, and e-mail were used regularly. Deaf users are discerning of the purposes for which they use each method: SMS for social and personal interactions, TTY for longer communications and (via the relay service) with people and services without TTYs, fax for business and social contact, and computers for personal and business e-mails as well as Web browsing, accessing chat rooms, word processing, games, and study.     

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