The San Francisco Examiner from San Francisco, California • 58

ASTRONOMY- stronomer must nx Hubble scope or else uled to be flown to Hubble by a space shuttle in 1993. If the new camera succeeds, at least two of Hubble's four other scientific instruments also will be replaced. Until those are ready, the instruments already on Hubble will continue to operate more poorly than planned. Vaughan's job of designing the corrective optics for the new camera got a little easier last week when a NASA board of inquiry, decided it had found the reason for Hubble's flaw: a 1-millimeter error in a piece of test equipment that led technicians to grind the mirror incorrectly. A mistake in positioning two parts inside the test equipment fooled technicians into thinking they were polishing and grinding a near-perfect mirror.

Instead, they were giving the mirror an improper curvature, or 6hape. The curvature was off by only 50 millionths of an inch, but in the world of precision experts say, such an error is "huge." 1 DENISE CARUSO INSIDE TECHH0L06Y He and his team get just one chance By Cindy Schreuder ORLANDO SENTINEL PASADENA Arthur Vaughan is an astronomer. In three years, hell be something else as well a nationally recognized hero, or a man living in exile. Vaughan, who works at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory here, is coordinating the effort to fix the ailing, $1.5 billion Hubble Space Telescope. The solution isn't to fix the telescope's flawed primary mirror but to modify a spare camera that's still on Earth the Wide Field Planetary Camera, the most im- portant of Hubble's five scientific instruments.

i.j.j,.,. If he and his colleagues succeed, the nation will finally have the first-of-their-kind pictures of deep space that NASA had promised Hubble would provide. If the scientists fail, Hubble will realize only half its potential, and the space agency will have a harder time persuading Congress and the public to support its projects. "It's a tremendous responsibility," said Vaughan, who has devel-, oped optics for some of the world's most advanced ground-based telescopes. "I need to make sure we get an answer." Vaughan and his colleagues get one chance to fix Hubble.

There are no plans for a third Wide FieldPlanetary Camera. And the Jet Propulsion Laboratory has one inviolable working rule: Do it right "That's the JPL message from the top Vaughan said. "Make sure you get it right." Shuttle delivery In 1993 A flaw, or spherical aberration, in the Hubble's primary mirror is scattering starlight and causing deep-space images to blur. Bringing the i94.5inch-wide mirror back to Earth for repairs is out of the question, so NASA in- stead must build new scientific instruments the telescope that include corrective optics that com- pensate for the mirror's flaw. The first and most important of those new instruments, a Wide FieldPlanetary Camera, is sched- tt ress.

But they also plan to move ahead on their own. By using complicated mathematical analyses of the blurry images, they plan to confirm independently the board of inquiry's conclusion that the spacing error in test equipment was to blame. "We're a sanity check," said John Trauger, a Jet Propulsion Laboratory astronomer and chief project scientist for the replacement camera. "Maybe there was another error we didn't notice in the excitement." Vaughan added: "We're fallible. The way we avoid mistakes is by admitting we're fallible and giving plenty of space for mistakes to be caught by people who aren't thinking quite the same way," Even if Vaughan and his col-.

leagues succeed in. devising the proper prescription for Hubble's fuzzy eyesight, there's more work to be done. Somebody has to build the corrective optics. That's where Philip Moynihan and his technicians come in 'car-, rying mirrors. Moynihan, a supervisor in JPLV Imaging Systems Section, has built optics for a Hubble camera twice before: first for the properly functioning camera now on the space telescope and again for the second camera.

Welcome news Knowing the exact error that led to the flaw will help scientists develop the exact prescription for the corrective camera lens more quickly. "You know what you're looking for now," said Robert O'DelL a Rice University astronomer who was Hubble's chief scientist from the late 1970s until the mid-1980s. "It is about as welcome news as you can have, considering the situation." NASA's board of inquiry pays a second visit this week to Hughes Danbury Optical Systems, the Connecticut company that made Hubble's primary (The 'company a division of Dan-bury, Perkin-Elmer Co. back when Hubble 'was built but was renamed last year when it was bought by Hughes Aircraft, a General Motors subsidiary.) The board will concentrate on two areas during its Wednesday and Thursday refining the measurement of the 1-millimeter spacing error and examining the faulty test equipment, known as a reflective null corrector. Vaughan and other scientists working on the new prescription will be watching the board's prog TV i Brain-storming' help in form of software Could you please provide the name of a source where I can purchase the soft- ware program Idea Fisher for a Mac? It is a program that is best described as a brain-storming tool.

I saw information on this pro- gram about six months ago but, unfortunately, no longer have the i. information. -C. Hopkins, Sure, it's available from the company, Fisher Idea Systems, Inc. at 18881 Von Kaman Ground Floor, Irvine, CA 92715, phone (714) 474-8111.

product is becoming the "in" brain-storming tool in Southern I California where a lot ot screen- 1 I writers are playing with it. Of course, they can atford the Vv price tag on this rather elaborate system. I have not yet discovered its charm which I'm assured is therei It's definitely the best sys- L' tem I've seen, though. Available for both the Mac and the PC. Please forward any informa-v tion you have regarding a voice-mail system for an of- Vlj fice which has 15 telephones, a mo-' dem and a fax machine.

I These phones are used by 10 dif' ferent people. We need a cost effec- tive voice-mail system for our of v.1 fice. Your suggestions will be great 5.1 ly appreciated. J. Keyes, Burlingame I I'm not a big fan of voice ijl.

i i i' i anu wouiu ue remiss uuvise peu- pie to use such a system. V. Q. A lot of ads for Macintosh monochrome monitors men- tionphosphorcolorasabig selling point. Why should I care what color the phosphor is? A.

Dudley, Sunnyvale Every monitor has a color cast, whether it's blue-white, 1 yellow-white, green-white, or what- ever. In the Macintosh world, a monitor is a metaphor for paper, so, you might feel that one monitor's white looks more like paper than zu another monitor's white. Tradi- 9. tionally, monochrome display ven-, f.ti dors have used a bluish-white formulation called P4, or a custom blend made by Clinton Electronics called PC104. The 1 same is true in the color monitor "'v industry, where the most white reference point has been 9300K, which is also bluish-white.

More recently some monitor ers are trying to get closer to the appearance of paper with a phos- phor that has a "warmer" white tone. For example, SuperMac now -1'. uses a warmer phosphor formula- tion called PC193. SuperMac's col-'; or displays are also now tuned to a color balance of 6500K, which is al-. so a warmer white.

At some point it; becomes an issue of personal taste. Request for Reader Input In the early days of the IBM PC there were a number of companies who made a not-quite compatible j. MS-DOS machine that had idio-syncratic "gotchas" that made the machine imijossible to upgrade -r over the years. Many still run MS- DOS 1.0 or some such old operat- -ing system. One such machine was 1 Canada's Hyperion computer, an attractive luggable.

Another one is the Texas Instrument aL a large desktop machine. If you have any experience with upgrad-. ing these old machines to run like a VC clone, please send me a letter. Thanks! Something for Nothing Dept. Next time you go out to buy diskettes kmk for the Fuji Film diskette, Fuji Film is offering a trial -version of Lot us Development Corj'-'s Magellan 2.0 in specially marked Ix.xes of Fuji 3.5-inch MF2HD and 5.25-inch MD2HD 'k.

floppy dihks. Send qurutions or comment to John C. Divrak, Sixrtra, San Francixco Ex-aminer, P.O. Ihx 7260, San Francisco, CA 94120. 1.

JOHN C. DVORAK mm mm mmm. an w-m mm mm designs i- mw Muiu-ivioae uispiay system $1499 list $1999 Six Monitors in One! With just, the click of your mouse, select the perfect display mode for every job! The revolutionary multi-resolution L-View is the most versatile 19" display for Mac IIxx. ment, he can create a whole new course based on his learning paradigm. And he's very excited about participating in a literacy revolution in this country, if well have him.

"We're going to be the Micros soft of education," he says. "If the market comes to us, we'll build the products." Another company that's doing neat stuff in a different area of lit-. eracy is the Electronic University Network in San Francisco. Though presently basking in the high re- gard of educators, government officials and business leaders for pro-viding some 150 higher education courses online, EUN has bigger or at least more plentiful fish to fry. i It wants to make the nation "te-leliterate" that is, give us the 1 skills to jockey a computer and a modem, two of the most important navigational tools of the 21st century and has nearly finished an online course to do so.

Company principals Sarah Blackmun and Steve Eskow believe that a national effort to increase teleliteracy is necessary in today's lightning-fast society, to help us operate andor compete in the dimension of time. As more information becomes available via PC and modem, people who are ignorant of how to use telecommunications will be as out in the cold (though I agree, on a much less elemental level) as those who can't read. EUN'8 courseware, which is 80 percent complete, consists of a book, 'Very easy" modem software and five or six sequential learning courses accessible online from EUN. Eskow hopes some enterprising modem manufacturer will see the benefit of pre-setting its modems to be included in such a package, to create a turnkey teleliteracy course for the masses. What's really remarkable about EUN'8 idea is how little it would cost to get off the ground.

Eskow says EUN would need Only $75,000 to finish and package the course. The next step would be to train 500 or so "evangelists" r-at a cost of about $300 per who would in turn "start spreading the word at their churches, synagogues and Rotary Clubs." And talk about making everybody happy if the teleliteracy project succeeds, not only will we have many more tech-nology-sawy citizens, but yet another entrepreneur will have made it happen. DeniseCaruoo is editor of Media Letter, a newsletter on interactiue media technologies. Write her in care of Spectra, The Examiner, P.Q Box 7260, San Francisco, CA 94120. She can also be reached electronically via America Online (DCaruno), The WELL or MCI Mail (Denise Cam- to).

1 mm Our correspondent, Amanda Bloom, claimed to extract a wasp's stinger from her ear. Wasps, however, do not leave their stingers behind. 1 Wiether you're working with spreadsheets or CAD, graphics or text, desktop publishing or word processing, choose the best view for the applications you use. Switch easily between 10 dpi, 92 dpi, 72 dpi (true WYSTO)k60t 46 36 dpi modes. Also: PageView Full Page Display System $899 Gist $1399).

Computers are enlisting in eraq wars KNOW this is an incendiary statement, but companies applying computer power to solve real problems for real people in the real world are all too rare. They do exist, however, and I found two in the Bay Area alone that are tackling two of society's biggest problems language and telecommunications illiteracy. DynEd International of Portola Valley is using technology to help make people language-literate. Founded in 1988 by Lance Know-les, DynEd now develops and sells what it calls "intelligent interactive courseware" to teach business En- glish to Japanese and European executives. Called "Functioning in Business" and "Interactive Busi- ness English," the products run on a PC clone, a videodisc and a CDROM at the moment, all running in one box under the hood of a Sony View workstation.

Knowles got the idea for DynEd during a lengthy stint in Japan as an English teacher. He found a useful way to help Japanese students learn real-world English, and knew he could make his method more efficient with existing technology. So he and partner Douglas Crane, director of engineering, built cutting-edge tools that eked out a higher level of performance from videodisc and CDROM technology than it was thought possible. Today they can ship a complete authoring system, application "tool kit" and a "run-time" version of the system that allows you to "play" a course without having to buy the whole application. Knowles says he approached Apple Computer and IBM about investing in the company and help- ing develop the technology, but got the cold shoulder from both.

As a result, he went back to his friends in Japan, many of whom had taken his courses, and landed Sony Enterprise Sumitomo Metal In- dustries and then Longman UK, the world's largest educational publisher, as equity partners. What's exciting about DynEd is not just what it's doing for foreigners, but what it could do here. The technology is getting cheap enough now that I can imagine a DynEd system, or something similar, in schools, community centers, libraries and corporate human-resource programs to help stem the tide of functional illiteracy. Knowles says it costs about $150,000 to convert an existing course to a different language (Spanish, for example, or Vietnamese). For a larger invest illit 1 $65 list $99 1 1 Win a Free L-View St-e a demo enter a drawing for a chance Type Manager New version just End the jaggies today.The best-selling utility that brings the quality of Adobe PostScripu outline fonts to QuickDraw printers and to the screen display is now faster and easier than ever to use! Display! to win! Visit stores for details.

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