The trial is an extension of an existing one which involves patients with skin complaints. This has been so successful that in June it will be widened to include patients with other ailments.

The surgeries of eight general practices in Montgomeryshire, Wales, are involved in the scheme, covering 30 GPs and about 65 000 patients. A commercial videophone card and minicamera are attached to each surgery’s personal computer, and a high-definition camcorder is also available if more detailed images are needed.

A patient with a dermatological problem that their GP cannot solve can arrange an “outpatient” appointment with a consultant in Bronglais hospital in Aberystwyth, 80 miles away. But instead of travelling to the hospital, they now visit their GP who operates the videophone and camcorder as requested by the consultant. Pictures from the camcorder are captured by the computer and sent to the hospital electronically.

“The patients feel special, rather than being traumatised by having to visit a hospital while uncertain about their condition,” says Stewart Low, who is in charge of the scheme for the Institute of Health Informatics, the academic body that organised the trial. British Telecom and IBM are funding the exercise.

The remote consultations were followed up by face-to-face meetings to check whether the dermatologist’s diagnosis was the same in each case. “Of 24 patients, 22 were given the same diagnosis face-to-face as by videophone. The other two could not be diagnosed at either meeting,” says Low.

The potential benefits are huge. The waiting time for outpatient appointments in dermatology can be months, while consultants in remote areas can spend up to two-thirds of their time travelling between appointments. “That’s all time that could be spent seeing patients,” says Low. “Using these systems could make a big difference to the number of patients that a consultant could deal with. That’s got to cut waiting lists.”

Calculating cost savings is more difficult. Both the patient and consultant save time, but the GP does not. However, the GP’s role in the teleconference could eventually be delegated to nursing staff.

The system costs about £2000 for the videophone and £900 for the camcorder. Most doctors’ practices already have a PC that is powerful enough to run the system, according to Low. The link-up requires a fast, ISDN telephone line, which is more expensive than a standard one.

The scheme is being extended to include systems in the surgeries that can perform echocardiology to check for heart problems, investigate eye disease caused by diabetes and perform ultrasonic and radiological examinations.

Internet Phone allows people to make long-distance and international calls for the cost of a local call. It works by digitising the speaker’s voice and sending it in real time over the Internet, giving speech quality comparable to a phone switched to a loudspeaker.

The large telecommunications companies have begun to take a keen interest in the software, written by VocalTec, a small company in New Jersey. Elon Ganor, president of VocalTec, says that one of the three main long-distance phone companies in the US has expressed interest in buying his firm. Since the new product was launched in February, 120 000 people have visited the company’s World Wide Web site to download a 90-second demonstration copy of the program.

Ganor predicts that within six months a million copies of the full version will have been sold. By the end of the year, he says, the software will be good enough to allow people to have a two-way conversation.

Phone companies and regulatory authorities on both sides of the Atlantic are powerless to prevent individuals using the software because the laws governing telecommunications do not cover programs used on the Internet.

Negroponte fears that Ganor’s software will lead to tighter regulation of the Internet. “It’s going to precipitate a certain kind of intervention,” he told żìĂš¶ÌÊÓÆ” last week. “We at the Media Lab have been using the Internet for phone calls for years. But once people start marketing this on a global scale they come into the face of an enormous industry which isn’t going to play dead.”

The Internet Phone software costs $49 and requires a powerful PC with a microphone, sound card and speakers, and a modem capable of at least 14 400 baud operation, which costs around £100 in Britain. To speak to someone abroad, the caller connects to the Internet via a local call and dials the other person’s “Internet phone address”. If the person at the other end is connected, they will be able to speak to each other.

Phone companies typically make around 50 per cent profit on an international call. British Telecom makes almost ÂŁ2 billion of its annual profits from international calls. At peak rates, a five-minute call from Britain to Japan costs ÂŁ4.37. Over the Internet it would cost 17p.

However, in Britain neither BT nor Mercury admits to being worried about the competition. “Obviously, there are limits on how well the system works. We think it will be very much a niche,” says a BT spokesman. The regulatory body Oftel says: “We’re looking at our powers, and whether this comes within them.”

Ganor says he is confident that if his company is bought in order to suppress the product, “the genie is out of the bottle. We have proven that this is possible. If we disappear, there will be others.”

However, the temptation to abandon eye contact for icons may grow stronger: 41 per cent of those surveyed felt that they should have a PC to keep up with the demands of a “modern” household. The PC is also seen as essential for improving life both at school and at work.

The survey, by Gallup, was carried out in Britain, France and Germany for Microsoft, the American giant whose Windows software is found on about 80 per cent of PCs. “We felt it was important to understand better the thoughts of ordinary people as to how changes in society, such as computers, are affecting aspects of their lives,” says Bernard Vergnes, president of Microsoft Europe.

The results also suggest that people are not intimidated by the idea that new technologies will increasingly become part of everyday life. Within five years, about half of those quizzed expect to be using videophones, ordering pizza by computer, carrying an ID card containing personal, financial and medical data, using electronic cash, and driving a car with a computerised navigation system. About a quarter also expect to be able to control their household appliances by voice and vote electronically.

The survey throws up a number of inexplicable national anomalies. Of British PC users, 62 per cent had lost data in the past year – far more than than those in Germany (41 per cent) or France (25 per cent). And the British were more likely to feel that computers had changed their life – 51 per cent, against 42 per cent in Germany and 31 per cent in France. The Germans don’t think PCs are fun” (only 22 per cent agreed with the idea). But 22 per cent of Frenchmen think women who use “technology products” are more attractive than those who do not, compared with only 13 per cent in Britain.

However, this may reflect a national difference in the way technology is used. France’s most common home computer is the Minitel terminal, a simple text-only system which connects to the phone network allowing access to other users and to directory services. Because Minitel was initially offered free, the nation has fewer standard PCs per head than other European countries (see Graph).

But other countries, particularly the US and Canada, are more than a year ahead of Britain in getting schools connected to the Internet, according to statistics on the World Wide Web. And the initiative has been criticised by the Labour Party as hiding larger cuts in education spending on information technology.

Tim Eggar, minister for industry and energy, says: “Our major concern is to address the issue of Britain’s overall competitiveness. Above all, we need a workforce that is computer literate.”

But Graham Allen, the MP coordinating the Labour Party’s policy on information technology, countered: “It’s only a drop in the ocean in terms of realising the potential of the Internet for education.”

The initial scheme will cost £600 000, £350 000 from industry and the rest from the DTI. If the year is judged a success, the DTI will commit £750 000 for a full programme in 1996 which could eventually set all of Britain’s 5000 secondary schools connected. But Allen contrasts the Internet scheme with cuts in Department for Education funding for the long-standing Grant Support Programme on School Effectiveness. The programme rewards schools for staff training and information technology initiatives, but its funding has dropped from £270.6 million to £251 million over the past year, he says.

Meanwhile, other countries have a substantial lead over Britain in using the Internet. Schools with full-blown World Wide Web servers (see Graph) are the tip of the iceberg, because e-mail or other Internet links require fewer resources.

Schools in California have been running a project for more than a year in which they try out experiments suggested by scientists, who communicate with them through video clips sent over the Internet. The first American school to have its own Web server came online in March last year.

In Canada, the SchoolNet project has been running since May 1993 with the aim of linking as many as possible of the country’s 16 000 schools to the Internet. The network is carefully configured to prevent children accessing any of the pornographic material usually available on the Internet, and to avoid potential copyright infringements caused by down-loading proprietary software.

The criteria that will determine whether the British pilot project is a success have not yet been defined. “These projects should be run on the basis of what the schools find most advantageous,” Eggar says.

Companies such as ICL, IBM, British Telecom, Intel, Microsoft and Cable & Wireless will provide equipment and training.

Earlier this month, more than 8000 Internet newsgroups, or bulletin boards, received an advertisement from a Florida-based computer retail company called Atlas Computer Systems, offering 1-gigabyte hard disc drives. While advertising is not condemned by the readers of newsgroups, it is expected to be restricted to those groups which are likely to find it relevant. To broadcast it to every group is known as spamming and is frowned upon, as the company quickly discovered.

For several days, irate Internet users bombarded the e-mail address in Atlas’s advertisement with rude messages, known as “flames”, as well as huge, useless files “dumped” from computers. Hundreds also called the phone number given in the advert to protest, left messages on the answering machine, or repeatedly dialled its freephone number in order to cost the company money.

Atlas’s vice-president, Matt Nye, says that the consultant who suggested using spamming to raise the company’s profile on the Internet has been fired. Nye will not reveal the consultant’s name.

“We have received a lot of negative publicity and hate mail which has interrupted the normal flow of business. This is the first time we’ve used the Internet in this way,” says Nye. He has now posted a message saying that the company “humbly apologises” for the incident and that it will not repeat the mistake.

Nye says the consultant suggested spamming the newsgroups after reading a book by Laurence Canter and Martha Siegel, called How to Make a Fortune on the Information Superhighway. The authors – who earned widespread disapproval among Internet users last year when they spammed thousands of newsgroups (Technology, 9 July 1994) – suggest it as an effective method of advertising.

Canter still defends the technique, although Cybersell, the company he runs with Siegel, has had its connection to the Internet cut off several times by different providers because Cybersell used it to spam newsgroups on behalf of clients. “We are well aware that anyone who mass posts to newsgroups will be the object of vicious threats, harassment, bullying, coercion, vandalism, obscene phone calls, mail fraud and assorted other illegal tactics,” says Canter. But he insists that “mass posting remains a profitable way to market to the huge majority of people on the Internet” and that “every day more and more businesses are mass posting because it is effective”.

Canter’s assertion that spamming is on the increase is borne out by a preliminary analysis from John Pike, in a newsgroup set up to discuss Internet administrative matters. “The rate of spamming seems to be increasing,” Pike notes.

In December there were 10 incidents, January and February saw 20 each, but in March there were already 15 by the middle of the month. If this trend continues, there will be hundreds of adverts filling up newsgroups every week by the middle of the year – which would sorely tax the software “cancelbots” that automatically track them down and erase them.

By the end of its first year, the database is expected to hold 135 000 samples and is forecast to grow to 4 million profiles within five years. The police and Home Office are investigating whether to widen the net by keeping DNA profiles of all convicted offenders.

Some scientists point out that in its early stages the system will be of limited use because it will hold data on relatively few people. In the long term, however, the police expect DNA profiling to be as important as traditional fingerprinting.

Profiles will be produced using an advanced DNA analysis technique which uses the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) to create millions of copies of DNA strands called short tandem repeats (STRs). These are repeating sequences of base pairs – the chemical building blocks of DNA – whose length and make-up are highly specific to individuals.

Because STRs are shorter than the stretches of DNA used in earlier profiling techniques, they can be useful even after chromosomes have begun to break down. This is likely to happen when traces of tissue or blood have been left in warm or humid conditions.

Forensic scientists will obtain DNA from suspects by taking a sample of saliva or hair. The Criminal Justice Act, which came into force last year, included a clause that specifically allows such samples to be taken. Previously, this required a court order. Details of the DNA profiles will be held on a computerised database. If a suspect is cleared of a crime, the data will be destroyed.

However, some scientists say that the new method has serious drawbacks. If, for example, a suspect’s blood sample is contaminated with blood from someone else, PCR will amplify the STRs of both people. The potential for contamination is a particular problem with this method, says John Brookfield at the Department of Genetics at the University of Nottingham.

In the US, the FBI coordinates an indexing system for DNA samples collected by 29 laboratories in 15 states. Since the system became operational in December 1993, it has helped in 34 criminal cases. The system is due to be opened up to police forces throughout the US from the end of this year.

This rather takes the shine off Gilster’s thorough rundown of how to download and use Mosaic. Aware of the impending competition, he suggests that you master Mosaic before going on to try other browsers. Even if you reject his advice, there is plenty of worthwhile information here about the Web, including an explanation of how to write your own pages. Most of this could be found on the Net, free of charge, but you would have to scratch around for it. Here it is all handily packaged, ready to use. Books still have their place.

PHONEDAY is coming. On 16 April, all British telephone numbers change. Most grow an extra “1” after the initial “0”. So the London codes 071 and 081 become 0171 and 0181. At the same time the international dialling code changes from 010 to 00. Five British cities are in for a shock: they will have completely new dialling prefixes: Bristol, Leeds, Leicester, Nottingham and Sheffield.

This will completely stymie all the computers that have been set up to search through a database for a subscriber’s name, and then dial their number automatically.

Anyone who tries to be clever and programs their computer to search out every “0” and replace it with a “01” will get in a terrible mess. The search and replace routine will also change any zeros that lie in the middle of telephone number strings. It will trample on the international codes and on numbers for cellphones, which are not changing. In all, there are 75 exceptions to the add-a-1-to-a-0 rule.

So anyone who has methodically built a database of telephone numbers will have three choices. They can go through the whole database modifying each number manually. They can give up using it for autodialling. Or they can use FixPhone.

FixPhone hunts through a database, adding 1s to leading 0s only where needed, and stripping them from international codes. The program also identifies the existing codes for the five special city codes and converts them to the new ones.

There are many different types of database on the market and in use. All store telephone numbers slightly differently. FixPhone can deal directly with the most common, including dBase, FoxPro, Access and Paradox.

What if your software is not supported? Virtually all databases have the facility to “export” their contents into ASCII plain text, and then “import” it back in again. FixPhone can process ASCII: I tried it, and it worked very smoothly. Although £49 may seem a lot to pay for a program that most people will only need to use once, the simplicity of use comes from clever design. For many people £50 will be a small price to pay for the time saved on manual conversion.

Fixphone for Windows is a telephone number conversion program for the IBM PC. ÂŁ49 from Subtle Software, 82 Upper George Street, Chesham, Buckinghamshire HP5 3EH. Tel/fax 01494 783229.

AS JOURNALISTS, especially science writers, followed scientists onto the Internet, they often had to hack their way single-handed through the jungle of obscure protocols along the way. Luckily, in the past two years, dozens of books have come out to help new users find the right gopher hole or ftp site, and now two American professors of journalism have written The Online Journalist, the first guidebook designed specifically for reporters.

Randy Reddick and Eliot King, both former reporters who now teach, provide a simple, step-by-step handbook for accessing almost any computer resource you can reach by modem: bulletin boards, commercial online services, government databases, and the Internet itself. Their emphasis is on things that reporters can find and use quickly, with a minimum investment in equipment and money. Obviously gearing The Online Journalist to older journalists, the only assumption they make is that the reporter has a computer and a telePhone line. They tell readers how to find a modem, how to dial up the first time, and then move onward to more complex subjects.

Reddick and King explain how to use e-mail, how to find information around the world via Gophers and the World Wide Web, and how to transfer that data back to their own PCs. They provide useful lists of the commands for each system, and give examples that readers can repeat on their own. After the mechanics, they discuss online etiquette, which every Net user needs to learn, and also some issues crucial for journalists: can you quote someone who posts a message to a newsgroup? When does criticism online become libel? Is it ethical to download text and incorporate it into your own articles?

Although The Online Journalist was designed for use in college courses for journalists in the US, and most of the examples are of information resources in America, the Internet itself is a world phenomenon, and its utilities work the same way anywhere. This would make a good primer for any reporter venturing onto the Infobahn from anywhere in the world.

The Online journalist: Using the Internet and Other Electronic Resources is by Randy Reddick and Eliot King, Harcourt Brace College Publishers, 6277 C Harbor Drive, Orlando, Florida 32887, fax: (619) 699 6320, pp 251, $16/ÂŁ12.50.

TO SEE the hacking world from the inside try watching. Unauthorised Access which is a 40-minute video available in either PAL or NTSC versions. Made by Annaliza Savage, it shows hackers as they see themselves, without the media’s usual hype.

Here are both hacking celebrities – Emmanuel Goldstein from the magazine 2600, Phiber Optik of the Legion of Doom (and later, prison) – and the rank and file hackers, including the German Chaos Computer Club. Watch them hacking phreaking with phones, trashing (rooting through the rubbish from big phone companies for useful information).

The world of adspeak intrudes only once when Goldstein, giggling, reads out a portentous MCI ad saying “Soon 
 all the information in the Universe will be available to everybody at the same time.” After viewing this, you’ll be better equipped to sort the hype from the reality when hackers are mentioned.

For a copy of Unauthorised Access, send ÂŁ15 to Savage Productions, Suite One, 281 City Rd, London EC1V 1LA; or e-mail Savage at savage@dfw.net.

IF YOU have always wanted an una bridged dictionary, but never had the necessary shelfspace or budget, you will welcome the new Random House Unabridged Electronic Dictionary. It is less than a centimetre thick and costs just $79.95. Provided you have the computer power to run it, and can handle American spelling and pronunciation, it is a good “book”. Based on a printed dictionary with 315 000 entries on 2500 pages, the RHUED can do some things paper cannot, such as use wildcards to find words you can’t quite spell, solve anagrams (from a?g?d it found algid, and finished a Guardian crossword) and pronounce almost every entry in the US equivalent of BBC English. Thanks to electronic production, deadlines could be stretched, and “Prague” is the capital of the Czech Republic, although “Blair” is just a male or female given name. This up-to-dateness supplies you with “fatwa”, “emotion” and “teraflop”, but the size, illustrations and sound come at a price: the 386 system with 2 megabytes of RAM it gives as a minimum requirement would be slow – the faster your system, the better your monitor, and the bigger your memory, the more you will enjoy using this power-hungry program.

Within ten years, systems like these could provide new ways to use electronic libraries, or allow designers or doctors to confer while they are many miles apart.

The meeting lasted 40 minutes and involved 10 people. “It was a great success. It was a project meeting, in which we introduced some of the people from the different sites to each other. They haven’t physically met yet,” says Tom Rodden of the computing department at Lancaster University, who is one of the project leaders.

The system creates a virtual “world” in which participants can interact at any level, from text typed into a keyboard, all the way up to a graphical interface showing the scene wIth audio input and output. “If someone in the ‘world’ only has a text interface, they have a ‘T’ on their forehead. We call them ‘Texties’,” says Rodden.

Virtual worlds have a number of advantages over videoconferencing, which uses cameras to relay exact images of participants, says Rodden. “If you go to a real meeting with more than two people, you sit facing each other. With videoconferencing, you tend to end up with a rogues’ gallery of postage stamp-sized faces on a flat screen. On our system you can get round a table.”

Virtual conferences also require less data to be transmitted between sites. Only small amounts of data are needed to update the participants’ movements once the “world” has been created. A full video link can require a data capacity of 1 megabit per second while a virtual meeting needs only 200 kilobits.

People in a virtual meeting can “view” equations or images of objects in the meeting place. “This would be useful for multi-user computer-aided design systems, or for medicine, where you might be dealing with facsimiles of objects such as a hip joint or an X-ray image,” says Rodden. “it could also work for ‘virtual libraries’, which draw information together from all over the world.”

Mark Allerton of the Institute of Education at the University of London presented the findings of a two-year study at a conference in London this week. The project, funded by the Broadcasting Standards Council, also showed that present restrictions intended to stop under-18s watching adult videos do not work. Children as young as 12 discussed the 18-rated films such as Child’s Play 3, A Nightmare on Elm Street and Silence of the Lambs.

Elizabeth Newson, a developmental psychologist from the University of Nottingham, called for European or even worldwide restrictions to reduce the violent images that children see, but added that she is “pessimistic” about how well such restrictions would work.

Allerton says that as children watch more and more violent programmes “existing controls are being evaded with ease”. However, he says: “There is a common stereotype that children passively absorb images on screen without reacting but this is not borne out by this research.” Allerton interviewed 72 London children from a range of social groups, and the parents of 20 of them.

Some youngsters discussed how they coped with their fears when watching 18-rated films. A typical response came from one child who saw A Nightmare on Elm Street. “I knew it wouldn’t happen in real life 
 It was just funny, because you know it wouldn’t happen, but it was a little bit scary at the same time.”

Allerton says the children distinguish this “pleasurable fear” from the feelings aroused by real or realistic programmes, such as crime reconstructions, drama documentaries, news reports, wildlife programmes – in which animals may be killed – and even soap operas when favourite characters are written out. Children find it more difficult to distance themselves from such events.

The problem of distinguishing real and fictional images was clearest with Ghostwatch, broadcast on Halloween in 1992. Children were so frightened by this programme because they did not know it was fiction. “The signs were that it was real and therefore very frightening,” says Allerton. When it became clear, towards the end, that the programme was fiction, he says, “the children felt cheated and very angry that they had been duped.”