Module 3 Unit 1

Now, the VOA Special English program, WORDS AND THEIR STORIES.

Computer technology has become a major part of people’s lives. This technology has its own special words. One example is the word mouse. A computer mouse is not a small animal that lives in buildings and open fields. It is a small device that you move around on a flat surface in front of a computer. The mouse moves the pointer, or cursor, on the computer screen.

Computer expert Douglas Engelbart developed the idea for the mouse in the early nineteen sixties. The first computer mouse was a carved block of wood with two metal wheels. It was called a mouse because it had a tail at one end. The tail was the wire that connected it to the computer.

Using a computer takes some training. People who are experts are sometimes called hackers. A hacker is usually a person who writes software programs in a special computer language. But the word hacker is also used to describe a person who tries to steal information from computer systems.

Another well known computer word is Google, spelled g-o-o-g-l-e. It is the name of a popular search engine for the Internet. People use the search engine to find information about almost any subject on the Internet. The people who started the company named it Google because in mathematics, googol, spelled g-o-o-g-o-l, is an extremely large number. It is the number one followed by one hundred zeros.

When you Google a subject, you can get a large amount of information about it. Some people like to Google their friends or themselves to see how many times their name appears on the Internet.

If you Google someone, you might find that person’s name on a blog. A blog is the shortened name for a Web log. A blog is a personal Web page. It may contain stories, comments, pictures and links to other Web sites. Some people add information to their blogs every day. People who have blogs are called bloggers.

Blogs are not the same as spam. Spam is unwanted sales messages sent to your electronic mailbox. The name is based on a funny joke many years ago on a British television show, Monty Python’s Flying Circus. Some friends are at an eating place that only serves a processed meat product from the United States called SPAM. Every time the friends try to speak, another group of people starts singing the word SPAM very loudly. This interferes with the friends’ discussion – just as unwanted sales messages interfere with communication over the Internet.

This VOA Special English program, WORDS AND THEIR STORIES, was written by Jill Moss. I'm Faith Lapidus.

(http://www.voanews.com/specialenglish/archive/2007-11/2007-11-20-voa2.cfm)

Module 3 Unit 2 Website of the Week — Universal Digital Library

Time again for our Website of the Week, when we showcase interesting and innovative online destinations. Our web guide is VOA's Art Chimes.

This time it's an online library with a rather ambitious goal.

SHAMOS: "Universal Digital Library is a project started at Carnegie Mellon more than 10 years ago with the unabashed objective of digitizing all published works of man and making them freely accessible over the Internet at any time, any place, for anybody."

Professor Michael Shamos of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh is a director of the Universal Digital Library at ulib.org. When he says "published works," he's not just talking about books. The library will eventually also include newspapers, magazines, photographs, and other media.

Institutions in China, India and Egypt are also involved, with books being scanned in 50 centers around the world. The library has digitized more than 1.5 million books so far in about 20 languages. Most of them are older works, no longer under copyright.

That sounds like a lot, but Shamos notes it's less than two percent of all books ever published. The priority for adding books to the digital library is pretty much based on what's available. Not every university library is willing to lend out thousands of books for months at a time while they are scanned.

SHAMOS: "We had many debates about this early in the project. Do you convene a committee of scholars to pick the million most important things there are on Earth? I don't think we could ever do that. So instead of doing that we said, look, the ultimate goal is to digitize everything. If you're going to do that, it doesn't matter what you do first."Shamos says the Universal Digital Library will equalize opportunities for those who don't now have access to a great library or the means to buy lots of books.

SHAMOS: "If there happens to be some brilliant kid who lives in an impoverished town in India, and he doesn't have access to educational materials, he will never be able to develop into the kind of genius that he might be. And so, this is critical for dissemination of information to those who don't have access."

But you don't have to be a budding, young genius to use the Universal Digital Library. All you need is an Internet connection to ulib.org, or get the link from our site, voanews.com.

(by Art Chimes, 2007, http://www.voanews.com/english/archive/2007-12/2007-12-07-voa30.cfm?CFID=23670522&CFTOKEN=99751850)