The smell of fat crayons, the snap of three-ring binders and the crack of book spines as they open for the first time bring back memories of those old school days. Students today, both in the classroom and on the job, are more familiar with the hum of a hard drive and glow of a monitor screen. One thing, however, has not changed--the up-front expenses for an education rarely reflect the final cost.

When it comes to education, industry is getting back to the basics: It is exploring the fundamentals of exactly how people learn. The objective is to perfect the virtual classroom by matching technology to the learning process rather than matching the learning process to the technology.

The U.S. defense intelligence community is changing its information philosophy from emphasis on-call functional or geopolitical expertise toward rapid access to relevant knowledge from vast data files. To accommodate this shift, new technologies are enabling planners to implement an information architecture designed to provide authorized customers with streamlined access to vital information or expertise.

Future North Atlantic Treaty Organization missions will rely extensively on information interoperability among member and nonmember nations. This will encompass combining existing military and commercial systems with emerging capabilities to provide rapidly deployable communications links.

The music of the e-commerce overture in Canada is getting louder and increasing in intensity. Even before year 2000 work began winding down, the country's government agencies began fine-tuning their ideas and following the lead of its prime minister in what has already become a global symphony of economic change.

A manportable sensor capable of detecting troops and vehicles up to 100 meters away offers commanders a variety of choices for defensive and surveillance operations. Consisting of a microwave Doppler radar unit and a passive infrared detector, the activated device transmits a message to a sentry who is equipped with a pager display that indicates the type of target and the direction it is moving.

Alarmed that its borders can easily be breached through technology in the hands of criminals, terrorists, nontraditional foes and even the merely inquisitive, the federal government has broadened the definition of national security. In doing so, it has established a timetable for erecting defenses, enlisted a host of recalcitrant bedfellows into its national security apparatus, and charged the intelligence and law enforcement communities to collaborate and perform what some believe without resources to be a near-Sisyphean task.

Past met present and looked toward the future as top-level decision and policy makers convened in Hawaii to discuss the role of the military in the Pacific. With reminders of Pearl Harbor and the Cold War present, key military, industry and government leaders expressed the need for preparedness in the region. They also explored the technologies that are key to operations in the area.

Future military cyberspace security may require next-generation network management and intrusion detection systems that combine both short-term sensor information and long-term knowledge databases to provide decision-support systems and cyberspace command and control. Sophisticated computer hardware and software would identify a myriad of objects against a noise-saturated environment. Cyberspace command and control systems would track the objects, calculate the velocity, estimate the projected threats, and furnish other critical decision-support functions.

Researchers are adapting voice over Internet protocol technology to establish communication between Earth and spacecraft, satellites, and, perhaps someday, other planets. Using modified commercial approaches, scientists will design space-based and mobile Internet standards that provide access to science mission data and interactive communication with inhabited and uninhabited spacecraft. These technologies also will become the connection to a future Mars-based communications infrastructure.