Dr. Coombs.  Hello.  This is Norm Coombs with EASI for our regular Web cast, EASI, Equal Access to Software and Information.  I want to remind everybody to take a look at our workshop page and see the workshops that we have.  We have a series of them trying to help people to get trained to provide a whole variety of adaptive technology to students and professionals.  We have some special professionals and friends for interviews this week.  We are doing part two of an interview with the ADAPTECH project in Canada.  And our two guests are Catherine Fixton from Montreal, hello Catherine.

Catherine.  Hello Norm, and hello to the entire EASI listening group.

Dr. Coombs.  And we have Jennison Asumptian who has been working hard with ADAPTECH for a number of years and now has a job at the Bank of Montreal in Toronto.  Hello Jennison.

Jennison.  Hello Norm. It is great to be here and it is great to be here with all of your listeners and those who of just joined us now for the first time, and those who are really joining us for our second half.  Norm you made an interesting comment about me.  Coming to Toronto and getting a job with the Bank, although I have that job as a full-time one, your listeners may be interested to know that our team, our group, is an example of how telecommuting actually works on a number of levels.  Firstly in Montreal we have several of our employees who have disabilities for whatever reason sometimes is easier for them to work from home.  So they do that and we heavily use e-mail.  And we heavily use conference calls etc. etc.  Now when I moved to Toronto I was not 100 percent sure how this would all work with me being code director and working out of Toronto.  However I will say for my experience with IBM, I implemented a couple of the strategies that I learned what was working there, in terms of we use MSN Messenger to keep a synchronous chat whenever people were in the office.  Everyone was logged on and I am logged on when I can from Toronto.  And certainly we do conference calls.  So when we do meetings, and Catherine can certainly speak and attested to that, it is not always a given that we will be together in the same room.  And in fact I think that is one of our strengths is the fact that our team is reflective of reality as well in terms of telecommuting and using some of the latest technology that are accessible of course.  We are still working on and accessible conference telephone that will work well with our other co director, Maria Bareli, who uses a hearing aid.  So if anyone has any ideas on those they can certainly e-mail us.  Catherine, did you want to talk a little bit about the ADAPTECH project, who we are, and start from that point for all of our listeners?

Dr. Coombs.  Well first of all I would like to introduce our captain of the ship, at the helm and steering of our technology, my buddy Dick.  And we're using a conference technology on the Internet called Chatterbox, which does have a text window, which could help someone with hearing problems.  And Dick, would you say hello?  And are we coming through okay through Chatterbox here?

Mr. Banks.  Fine Norm.  And that will forgive you this time Jennison.  I am glad to be with you.  First interview is wonderful and I am really looking forward to this one.

Catherine.  Okay.  So I guess I would like to talk a little bit about our ADAPTECH project.  One of the co director's of ADAPTECH, and Jennison and myself part two of the three, is Maria Bareli.  She is a social worker and disability activist.  I am a psychologist, so as you can see with Jennison's educational technology and polysci background, my psychology background, and Maria's disabilities studies and social work background, we are really quite a diverse lot.  We have academics, students and consumers of team members.  We are really a research project who has gotten together at first to do research, and then to do dissemination of the research findings.  Our goal really has been to get some empirical data, which really tends to convince decision makers about the computer information and adaptive computer technology needs of students with disabilities.  And we're also trying to disseminate the findings to the people that matter so that changes can be affected as rapidly as possible.  We are based at Dawson College.  We have student trainees, we have interns, and we have employees.  Our policy in general is, everything else being equal, let's give a chance to a person with a disability.  But everything else really does have to be equal.  So we have a number of team members, forgive me for adding in all these names, to us their very important contributors to the work into the research.  Danielle Lamm our office manager.  Raymond Tamm, or graphic artist and Webmaster without whom our web page which is at www.adaptech.org, could not be happening.  Crystal James, who is a current research trainee.  Shawn Claude Rabiard, who is in charge of our Franklin Phone communications and our Franklin research.  Marties Fause who is a graduate student who has been with us for a long time and has had quite a and in one of the instruments that I am going to be describing later on today called the ACC questionnaire.  So this is what we do.  We are based at Dawson College in Montreal.  And one of the things that we're doing here with you today at EASI is trying to let you know what some of these research findings are, let you know where to find the hard numbers, and hope that you can use is to make changes in many areas that are important to you.

Dr. Coombs.  Well Catherine I really appreciate that.  A lot of us think we have our fingers on the pulse and have a good feel for what is going on.  And I think a lot of the time we are correct.  But that is not what the people who dish out the money want.  They do not want to just put their faith in us; they want some numbers.  And they are hard to find.  Not many people are doing what you are doing and you are really trailblazing getting these kinds of numbers.  We talked about the methodology of the study in a previous interview, I wonder if you could pick out what you think are some of the most important findings that are meaningful to us and fill us in on them.

Catherine.  Sure, that sounds like fun.  So I am reporting on the results of questionnaire study, which we conducted by interview with 156 Canadian post-secondary disability service providers who are based on campus.  This constitutes 80 percent response rate, which is something that we are really very proud of.  The U.S. signed off I told you that overall most of the disability service providers who are campus based felt that the computer related needs of students with disabilities were reasonably well met.  And that this was true both for campuses which had lots of technology, as well as for campuses that had close to nothing.  This was really quite intriguing to us.  And when we started looking at how the computer related needs of students can be really well met when there are no computers around, this is what we found.  There were three basic reasons for this.  A lot of the smaller colleges, it was mainly colleges but smaller universities were included as well, and colleges in Canada tend to be the two-year community college type of education.  But at this point had minimal integration of computer and learning technology in the curriculum.  So computers really were not all that important yet because they were not being used across the board.  A second reason for the anomalous findings was the ability of many students with disabilities to use the general use computers located on campus.  Some students in fact in a previous study is we found that approximately 60 percent of students with disabilities do not need special adaptations to use a computer effectively.  But they do need a computer.  The third reason was, and this one was very troubling to us.  A number of disability service providers said we take care of the problem that students have no access to computers because we have very few students, and we can provide expensive human assistance.  We will go with students to the library, we will read to them, and in other words we have a human being doing the work that should have really been done by a machine.  We are not all that thrilled with this.  Because it means that students are not really learning some of the basic skills that are necessary for the work world.  And although they are not being disadvantaged in their studies, they are being disadvantaged in terms of their preparation for the real world.  I think Jennison you have some possible feelings about this as well.

Jennison.  I wanted to first backtrack to one of the reasons that you mentioned earlier being that computer and learning technologies were not being integrated throughout the curriculum's, especially at the colleges and smaller universities.  What we want our audience to understand is that this is the perception of the disability service provider.  In my previous comments in the last interview I mentioned that this is something that is ongoing, and it is an important priority on college and university campuses.  And this show is very much.  We could not tell them during the interview that this was the case of things not looking to good.  But this is an illustration of how separate these two offices or these two groups are on the same campus, when they might even be next door to each other.  I cannot think of one college or university campus in Canada that is not integrated in computer and or learning technologies to some degree.  Whether or not to disabilities service provider is aware of that, and whether or not students with disabilities are enrolled in any courses that requires such technology is a different story.  I just wanted to put some context around that comment because I think it is important to know that Canada, like the United States and like a lot of other countries in Europe and elsewhere, are moving very rapidly into this knowledge-based economy where computer skills and computer literacy skills are so important.  And I think Catherine hit home the point there that students, if they are getting so much assistance whether it is doing online registration or being able to search and online database or to complete and online tutorial, when they get into the world of work where so much training and so much professional development and so much work is done on computer terminals now, they are going to be at a disadvantage.  Because they will not have those skills if the proper technologies are not in place where they should be, which is at the postsecondary level, which is where they are training all other students without disabilities.  I will turn a back over now to Catherine who will provide some more findings.

Catherine.  Thank you Jennison.  So what we found was that there are in number of aspects that are important in making a campus technologically accessible.  The key once, according to the disability service providers, are the following.  Sufficient funding to buy the equipment.  Adequate training opportunities for the students, which in Canada tend to come primarily from the (inaudible) agencies in the community.  Good access to adaptive computer technologies on campus.  Availability of technical services for the equipment.  Accessible computer-based teaching materials used by faculty.  Accessibility of the Internet, online education in the library.  So keep in mind and that these are the things that were considered important for being a technologically welcoming institution.  So what about the report card?  First the good things.  A third of the institutions indicated that they have provential or regional centralized computer technology loan bank available to them.  This means that one group owns the technology and ships it off to a college or university in its region on an as needed basis.  We found that this, according to a disability service provider, is by and large work very well.  The response times for good, the equipment was up-to-date, and institutions were able to get what they needed.  And when they didn't have the need for a particular piece of equipment, such as a in Braille printer, because they did not have any students who were blind, they shipped it back to the equipment loan bank who would then send the equipment out to an institution which did have a need for this piece of equipment.  Our service providers also said that the administration was generally supportive.  That is as far as it went.  They also said that when it came to putting the bucks behind the wonderful sentiments this was not true.  And that these good feelings often failed to translate into dollars.  Other strengths were the hours of access to adaptive computer technology were generally seen as good.  The equipment that they had on campus was reasonably up-to-date.  And the equipment that was provided by community agencies for the students for off campus use was reasonably up-to-date and appropriate.  That is for the good part.  Then there was the bad part.  Problem areas where numerous.  Perhaps the most important one was that there was little access to computer adaptations in general use computer labs.  What this meant was that in many cases students could not use general use computer labs which were usually located throughout the college campuses.  In addition to that it would ghettoize students.  Students would have to use equipment in a specialized laboratory for students with disabilities.  Everybody kind of agreed that it would be a very good thing if there were more adaptive computer technologies in general use mainstream labs.  Another real problem was no one knew how to fix the adaptive equipment when it broke.  The computer support folks did not seem to take responsibility by and large for the adaptive computer technologies.  And as I noted in the earlier interview, the disability service providers were not techies themselves.  They could not fix them, the IT people could not fix them, nobody could fix them.  Another problem was that faculty are increasingly developing computer-based teaching materials and resources.  These regrettably tend often not to be accessible.  Another problem had to do with lack of awareness of faculty about the availability of adaptations for students.  Nobody told them, they are busy trying to learn PowerPoint and figure out how to put a web page up.  They are often not able to even think of adaptations, computer adaptations, needed for students with disabilities.  Another problem was that when widescale computer infrastructure decisions are being made on campus, the folks who know about adaptive computer technology, the disability service providers or some of the students, are simply not been consulted.  What this means is that computer technologies are being put in place without any concern for accessibility.  What this ultimately means is very expensive and often very ineffective that come later.  Perhaps another and final major problem is inadequate training by community agencies for the students with disabilities.  They arrive with their technologies, but barely know how to use them.  The agencies seem to think that it is up to the college to teach the student how to use thier JAWS, or thier Zoomtext, or whatever adaptation, their Dragon.  The colleges think that we will teach them how to use word processing software and statistical software and spreadsheets let teaching you how to use your adaptive technology?  That is not our responsibility.  So the student kind of gets left hanging.  Jennison perhaps you have some thoughts on this?

Jennison.  So as not to be repetitive on my end I will defer any of my further thoughts just for the purposes of giving us enough time to talk about some other things.  But I will say though that the issue of training is one that constantly came up.  And it came up in different ways in different colleges.  Because as I said in my opening comments both here and in the first interview we get together, depending on which Provincie you live in the amount of technical support would very because the programs were different.  So in some provinces the equipment stayed with you from elementary school, high school, through postsecondary.  But it some other provinces the equipment totally changed.  So if someone was seized using software X and hardware Y in high school, they came to a postsecondary college or university and from software A and hardware B, which was problematic both on the adaptive and mainstream side. So that is one point that kept coming up.  And it was interesting that it did not matter whether it was a large urban college or university for a remote college or university that was there.  If I could mention one other thing is when we did surveyed we not only surveyed both English and French colleges and universities who are members of the Asociation of Uiversities and Clleges of Canada, and the Asociation of community colleges of Canada.  And in doing so we also interviewed at our distance education institutions.  Schools that do not have a brick and mortar presence but taught exclusively online.  That would be a conversation for another webcast.  And certainly I gather in the states it is the same way for any schools that are offering any large scale implementation of distance education as part of their mandate.  That itself is a challenge.  But in terms of the findings Catherine I think you have summarized things well.  And maybe Norm if you had any other comments, then we could move on.

Dr. Coombs.  Well my only other comment would be that there are some interesting differences between Canada and the states, but what it comes to overwhelmingly is the similarities.  And there are lots of grounds for us to cooperate.  I appreciate again the fact that you are doing all the statistical work, that is very helpful for us.  And I wonder if you can tell us about some of the other projects your working on?

Catherine.  I would like to tell you little bit about our other plans, but perhaps you're interested in knowing a bit about our findings and faculty and staff with disabilities?  Personal have to tell you that is virgin territory as far is we're concerned, and really as far as a postsecondary world is concerned.  There is very little information on what happens to employees with disabilities.  When we ask our respondents, the disability service providers, could you tell us how many employees with disabilities there on campus?  Most of them did not have a clue.  The most common response was zero.  With an aging faculty that is really highly unlikely and our experience.  In addition confusion existed about who should provide computer related services to these individuals.  When we asked them who should be doing this, about a quarter of the service providers said that the office for students with disabilities should be providing services.  It is the remaining three-quarters that we find very troubling.  People said human resources, but I have received many calls from human resources people saying what to do here?  They really are not well equipped by and large to provide computer-related services for employees with disabilities.  Another popular response was that it was the employees department's responsibility.  Well let me suggest that most employee departments and most academic departments haven't the foggiest about what appropriate adaptations are.  And perhaps the most dismaying answer was that the employee should bring the equipment and adaptations for him or herself.  So here there are some real difficulties and clearly some standardized policies about what should be done need to be formulated in the future.  One of the things I have not mention yet by the way is the funding for all these wonderful little numbers that we have been collecting, yet without the funding we do not get to do anything.  Our most enthusiastic supporter has been the office of learning technology and Canada.  They have now funded two of our studies, two of our major investigations.  In addition to that we receive money from SCAR, AEOQ (Administrative Office Of Quebec), Dawson college has been generous to us, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Councel of Canada (SSHRCC) has been especially helpful to us.  We have a grant right now which deals with the dissemination of our findings.  And Jennison perhaps you can give us a notion of what we're going to be doing about disseminating our current results, what we have been doing, and what our plans are?

Jennison.  Clearly one of the most important things, and what is of interest to me in particular where I come back in after all the numbers have been very comfortably crunched and hypotheses have been tested, what do we do now?  Clearly not that many people are going to be interested in wanting to read this thing back-to-back.  But that is our first line.  As soon as we publish this study, which we have just recently done in terms of disseminating, we let the world know.  Shamelessly sometimes in terms of, with apologies in advance to folks who have gotten multiple copies of this, but we go first to the list serves, e-mail and electronic discussion forums, both in the disability and in the nondisability community.  We deliberately and in a very calculated fashion figured out who our key groups are.  They are students with disabilities, they are faculty and staff at the colleges and universities, they are the DSS folks themselves, there are the developers and suppliers of mainstream and adaptive technologies, they are the government, and then the instructional and educational folks who are busy coming up with exciting and interesting new learning technologies. So that in mind we sit around the table and we look at each of those groups individually and we come up with strands and strategies.  And we figure out which way is best to reach people.  Some people read academic journals, so we develop and we right up our peer review journals to reach that particular audience.  Some people attend conferences, so the best of our ability into the best of our funding we attend conferences where we will find professionals in those areas.  We will submit our reports to CRICave and to anyone who has anything with disability and education.  If you have something written up I cannot encourage more strongly the idea of submitting their work to CRIC, which is the world's largest educational database.  They need more material because it is policymakers who are using these databases to find out what is the current climate out there and then can formulate decisions from that way.  So we are proud to say that our stuff is all upon CRIC as well and available around the world.  So from the peer reviewed academic journals, to glossy magazines, to on-line magazines, to conferences large and small, to list serves, that is the way we disseminate the results.  Keeping in mind that no one will lead the report in full, we will construct a set of results that would be interesting for government official verses results and information that would be more interesting to folks who are faculty members.  They are not interested in some of the policy participations from the government perspective.  So we are very careful and very deliberate in the way we disseminate.  And certainly it is important for us to disseminate both in English and in French, and to the best of our ability into funding in alternative formats.

Dr. Coombs.  Well that sounds like a very thoughtful plan.  And seeing as  ADAPTECH amd EASI is so close in a lot of what we are doing in terms of general interests and outreach, we should sit down in chatterbox some time and talk about some more organized collaborative dissemination.  But we will leave that to offline.  I have been really impressed with the statistical work you are doing.  As I have said more than once we need it.  Some of us who needed badly do not like doing it, and Catherine is a real angel in this regard.  Before we windup and sign off let me give both Catherine and Jennison a chance to talk about any other future things they see coming down the line that are hot topics.  So let me throw it to Catherine first.

Catherine.  I wanted to let your listeners know something about our future projects, in part because there in collaboration with EASI.  We are interested in studying employees with disabilities in of secondary education, issues related to infrastructure, issues related to course and authoring tools in colleges and universities.  And we have a number of research project grant that are already submitted.  We are also currently working on a pariah project where we are looking at what has happened to students with disabilities at Dawson college.  One of these where are they now kind of projects.  We also want to look at during the past ten years, the students with disabilities that have registered at our college, how did they fair compared to students who did not have disabilities?  How long did it take them to graduate?  What are their grades like?  At any rate this is one of our ongoing projects.  We have a number of partners in our upcoming projects.  And one thing we might be doing is we might be looking for doctoral students, postdoctoral students, to help us carry out some of this research.  Part of this research is going to be done in partnership of course with you Norm and EASI.  Part of it will be done in collaboration with the NCDS, the National Center for Disability Services with Fran (inaudible).  We also are in the process of setting up a couple of collaborative projects with University of Toronto's ATRC.  We have both the Shirk Project as well as the Panaty Project that we are doing in collaboration.  Among our partners are also WebCT as well as ThompsonED and PiercenED, and these are very interesting partners because they are in charge of most of the textbooks used in North American colleges and universities.  In addition one of our partners, again we are really very pleased to have them, is ADIOCthe assistive devices industry office of Canada.  And they are the folks who are government based and influential in making sure that Canada wide products are accessible.  One bit of research that we have done which might be of interest your listeners has to do with a scale called the ACCDSS, the Accessibility of Campus Computers Disability Services Scale.  One of the things that we would like to do is to administer this in North America, because we have already administered in Canada and we are doing a lot of developmental work on this.  Again this is one of the projects that we have in mind to do collaboratively with EASI and the NCDS.  Where also doing a variety of projects currently on free and inexpensive technologies, which I think Jennison can tell us a little bit more about.

Jennison.  I would be happy to.  And again to reiterate a lot of the projects that Catherine spoke about, the Paraya Project is something that is ongoing now.  The other projects, for the most part, some of the larger collaborations we are still waiting on funding.  We are always looking for new ways and new funding opportunities.  Those of you who are in the academic and research fields know how challenging it can be to find funding.  But we are always open to the suggestions and opportunities.  And this would be a great opportunity here now that we have a worldwide audience to say that if anyone has ideas on places where we can collaborate and find some funding to continue some of our other work, we would be happy to collaborate.  And certainly their methods by which you can communicate with us through our web page, www.adaptech.org.  In addition to carrying out our or more impirical research, we want to answer to some of the issues that have come up.  So one of the issues that has come up is that computer information and adaptive technology is often expensive for many colleges and universities to purchase, some of the smaller ones.  And for students that they want to try things.  So we undertaking a project, and we have over the years, a project where we are collecting in evaluating what we call free and inexpensive software.  Some of them are demos.  Some of them are completely free.  They are not as extensive and feature rich as say JAWS.  But there is software that is free that is out there that will read what is on the screen.  And some of them are in English and French.  There are other pieces of software to help people with other disabilities as well so we're busy combing around and finding these pieces of software, some pieces of hardware to, but mostly software that is free and or inexpensive.  And we have not set a cap or what we mean by inexpensive, but probably about $600 or $700 Canadian or U.S.  Although with the foreign exchange rate there is a big differential there.  However that is an ongoing project.  We just yesterday, Kathy I am surprised you sound so awake, because she was so busy yesterday with the Dawson and ADAPTECH Technology Exposition.  It answers another issue that students brought up, they do not have an opportunity to go out and try equipment or to see what is out there.  A lot of student in service providers kept saying as part of the interview, do you know of any software that will read what is on the screen for student with a learning disability or someone who is blind?  Or do you know of any technology for people with learning impairments.  And that troubles us a great deal.  Because we knew and we were able to provide some information.  Certainly on our web page you can find under our resources section information and different adaptive equipment.  However we decided to undertake an exposition, so yesterday was our first and we plan to have others in the future.  Both focused on technology of particular interest to blind and visually impaired students.  I'm going to turn back to Catherine so in her closing comments she can talk a little bit about that.  Again in turning over back to Catherine, she will speak the very briefly about an exciting project involving MP3 players, which is another example of a mainstream technology can be useful if it is adapted, or as adapted equipment.  And that is a message that we sort of carry and that we use often.  So Catherine I will turn back to you if you wanted to talk about MP3 and your reflections on the current project.

Catherine.  The MP3 project which we demonstrated yesterday to an audience of largely students with visual impairments really went well Jennison.  One of the things the disability service providers told us was that it was absolutely impossible to take electronic text like either your course notes or any kind of text file or a book that is in e-text, and carry it with you the way people carry a CD or a Walkman with them.  If you're going to have a student read electronic text they have to have a laptop which they are going to carry around, or they are going to be tethered permanently to a desktop computer.  And this did not sound right.  So with the help of lots of folks, and these are all acknowledged on our web page, we set about looking at is there any kind of text to speech software that will output to an MP3 or a wave file format?  Because JAWS, Zoomtext and a number of other products will output sound, but the only hope you have of making this portable is to record this sound onto a tape recorder and take it with you, with all the distortions that this entails.  So we took a look at three computer technologies that we found, and some of the technologies I have to tell you we find in the general use mainstream market.  We read the brochures that come and the flyers and say here is a group that wants you to be lazy and to be reading your e-mail by listening to it.  And it says that you can store all this on MP3.  Let's take a look at it.  So you have three different products, one of which works very nicely in French, which is one of our concerns always.  Where not only will save read clipboard contents are text, and this could be any kind of etext, but it will output this to an MP3 format which you can either download into an MP3 player or burn onto a CD, and this case an MP3 CD player can be used.  We found that a whole book will fit on a CD.  So next time a student wants to read his or her textbook it is quite possible that this might be done on a beach.

Jennison.  We need to start addressing disability a more systematic way, not piecemeal, but actually incorporating modules on accessibility in our faculty development training, including consultations with disabilities services offices as part of a range of activities around purchasing, deciding on developing any particular learning technology, information technology, information infrastructure, recruiting people from disabilities services and from other departments in the distributive learning departments where they are busy providing degrees solely online at major colleges and universities.  I know in the U.S. that things are little bit more bound because of Section 508 and some other legislation.  And so perhaps I'm talking more to our Canadian audience when I am saying that this stuff needs to happen.  And certainly employees and faculties with disabilities need to be addressed.  The whole issue of online registration.  How can a student with the disability attend school if they cannot register online on their own?  Certainly they could get assistance, but that is not a solution that we advocate for.  Certainly more technologies need to be made available for our (inaudible) college, and more information needs to be made available in French.  I know the folks at the ATRC, and they are working with an organization called  CAMO in Québec.  They have made APrompt, a tool, available in French.  I believe it is already available in French.  So that will go a long way in making colleges and universities have their websites accessible.  Just a whole range of activities around addressing and insuring that our (inaudible) students and colleagues in the service position area are also well served.  I wanted to also say that we would be remiss if we did not mention one core team member in our list.  And it should happen not for any other reason than we are excited about our team and about our activities, but I want to Jean Pierre Dumon from Dawson college who is also a core team member.  And what makes Jean Pierre interesting is he has got the whole IT infrastructure, I'm not sure of the exact title.  But it is important for us to have him on because he can influence and has influenced Dawson college for example to purchase WebCT because it is accessible.  So our team practices what we preach.  Our team encompasses people from a wide spectrum of college and academia.  Catherine?

Dr. Coombs.  Well I want to thank you guys for a very good two interviews.  And I look forward to a lot of the things that we can collaborate on in the future.  And to your next survey.  So if you all have a good quick good by comment, Catherine?

Catherine.  I am delighted to have had the opportunity Norm to speak to your listeners.  It is such a vast group who listen to the webcasts.  I also wanted to say that as far as I am concerned the most important issue is to go the route of universal design, of incorporating accessibility features into general use technologies.  So the issue of needing adaptations no longer applies.  In this regard on our web page, www.adaptech.org, we have a series of best practices for postsecondary institutions that might be of interest to some of your listeners.  So thank you once more for the opportunity to discuss our findings.

Dr. Coombs.  Okay.  And Jennison do you have a final word?

Jennison.  Thank you Norm.  Once again in closing we have always counted on and received such support in Canada, but also from our collaborators from around the world, and especially from the states and you at EASI.  We appreciate the opportunity to have this done twice.  Two interviews this time, and two interviews before.  Perhaps there is an opportunity of for folks to see our previous interview we did back in 2000 through some sort of archiving.  But thank you very much.  Anyone who is interested in anything we have talked about from ideas about how we could leverage funding opportunities to information or ways we should be disseminating, products we should be testing, if you're interested in getting involved with our research, I look forward to responding and speaking to you by e-mail or by phone.  And I know that I speak for Maria and Catherine in saying that we are here to help as much as we can with our empirical data, our enthusiasm, and with collaborators such as EASI it makes our job a lot easier.  Thank you very much again.

Dr. Coombs.  Thank you and little talked you again.  Bye bye.