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The unsustainable subprime loan conditions that are particularly resulting in foreclosures of minority homeowners thereby contributing to a housing slowdown are discussed.

The University of Southern California and Interactive Multimedia Learning Technologies Inc. have developed a cinema course for the Internet, slated to be offered in spring 1997. The 14-week-long introductory course, 'The Language of Cinema,' will cover screenwriting, film criticism, set lighting, sound design and other topics. Up to 400 students can enroll and will receive CD-ROMS of course materials, videotapes, and clips from movies. They will participate interactively with other students, the professor, and teaching assistants.

College coaches will be able to access a data base of 5,000 high school athletes beginning in September 1996. The service, Online Scouting Network, is free to coaches, but athletes will pay $69 annually. It is expected to improve recruiting for schools with limited budgets. Coaches generally think the service will be helpful, especially in making sure they have not missed a promising prospect.

US veterinary sciences may need to be replanned as the 27 veterinary colleges are being flooded with applications, a 69% increase in 1995 over 1989. A majority of applicants were women, 67%, indicating that the area is approaching a gender balance. Veterinary sciences is attractive because there is a strong demand for veterinarians, especially those who specialize in areas other than small-animals. Only 34.4% of 1995 applicants were accepted, compared to 55.8% in 1989 but the colleges are unwilling to increase their class size or number of colleges due to the expense.

ATM networks are high speed networks and the volume of information carried by them at any instant of time is enormous. Since this information is likely to be of high commercial value, the effect of a transmission link or node failure would be catastrophic. Therefore ATM networks need to be equipped with mechanisms by which the failure of a network entity can be detected and service restored by changing over to alternate entities. Restoration mechanisms based on the self healing concept have been successful in achieving restoration times -well below the two seconds limit to prevent any interruption of service to the users. This paper studies two self healing protocols for ATM networks. One is the Backup Virtual Path Self Healing protocol, and the second is the Broadcast Self Healing protocol, which is an extension of the protocol proposed for STM networks. Simulation studies were carried out to compare their restoration speeds, spare resource requirements and maximum restoration ratio. The results suggest that the backup virtual path protocol has an edge over the broadcast protocol. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]