Submitted by:
Oliver Seely
Professor
Chemistry
California State University Dominguez Hills
1000 E. Victoria Street
Carson, CA 90747 USA
v: (310) 516-3778
f: (310) 516-4268
e: oliver@dhvx20.csudh.edu
Categories:
Education, higher
Keywords:
Innovative or improved ways of doing things; More equitable access to technology or electronic information
The Story:
Why I support the development of an International Data Network.
by Oliver Seely, California State University Dominguez Hills
The incidents I’m going to relate below are things that would never have happened if the Internet were not available to me. Though bordering on the trivial, and perhaps not the kinds of things that would look good in a proposal, they still represent a lively and certainly not unproductive experimentation with the new world of electronic information transmission.
*
Roland Behunin works for the U.S. Air Force somewhere near Salt Lake City. He is also a member of CAUSERIE. He has a satellite dish (being in the boondocks, it is necessary), and he needs a weekly schedule of TV5 and La Societe Radio Canada (two French Canadian TV stations which broadcast by satellite). We have found a guy in Canada, also by e-mail, who will supply us with the weekly schedules.
UseNet is resisting our making them available on that resource because the files will use up “valuable bandwith” (can you believe that?!), so I had our computing technician set up a subdirectory for me, accessible via anonymous FTP, and now each Thursday I retrieve the TV5 schedule file from UseNet, and transfer it to the subdirectory, giving it “read-only” status to outsiders and the schedule of French satellite television becomes available to the world of Internet, via Cal State Dominguez Hills in southern California!
There are now four satellite channels (of which I am aware) which offer French language broadcasting, and which are available to the U.S. (excluding Alaska and Hawaii) because of the “footprint” made by their transmission antennas. There is the Canadian Parliament in French and three others: La Societe Radio Canada from Montreal, TV5 which offers French language programming from France, Canada, Belgium, Switzerland, the Caribbean and other former French colonies, and there is SKOLA which broadcasts in several different European languages.
In any case, the conventional source of satellite programming information is the magazine “TV Satellite Week” but it is sadly lacking in details about any particular French language broadcast. In all fairness to the publishers there is getting to be so much programming from satellites that something has to be cut and since most of their readers are English- speaking, the French broadcasts get the short end of the stick. From time to time the National Film Board of Canada (well known for being a world-class producer of films) airs a new film in French on Canadian TV and if one doesn’t have some detailed information about the broadcast it is easy to miss. The same is true for some blockbuster broadcasts transmitted from France or Belgium. “TV Satellite Week” is likely to say simply “film” or “variety”.
In any case, the TV5 schedule at Dominguez Hills is just the beginning. As people on the Internet get to know that I plan to update the TV schedules each week, maybe one of them will find an electronic source of detailed schedules and make the transference process much easier to do.