Why? That is the question that has always been foremost in my mind throughout my life. From my childhood in northern Japan, through my teenage and college years in the United States, and my graduate studies in Canada, on through the various positions I have held in my adult life, the question of why things are the way they are has consumed a great deal of my attention.

My interest in technology has always been a very large part of this questioning process. I have always been interested in how things work, and in why it matters. Radio was a particular interest during my childhood. I was interested not only in the technology of radio, but in the reasons why that technology was so useful. My radio, for example, kept me company during the lonely evening hours in the boarding school. I could escape to different places far away with my shortwave radio tuned to the Voice of America, or Radio Moscow.

Understanding. Trying to figure out how it all came together. This also has occuppied my thinking for much of my life. When I graduated from high school in 1972, I hitchhiked from Oregon to Florida, because I wanted to understand America. I found out that it was too big a task for one summer. Some things take longer.

When I went to college, I chose to major in the Social Sciences and Humanities, because I believed that people were more important than machines. They are of course, but they are also quite a bit harder to understand. During the summer, I worked at a special hospital for people with mental problems. I was troubled by the complexity of the problems which haunted them, and the limitations of technology in dealing with such problems. This experience strengthened my belief that technology only has value if it can be used to help mankind.

Knowledge. The power of technology to assist me in satisifying my hunger for knowledge has perhaps influenced my thinking about technology more than any other factor. Of course, the Internet is a very big part of this. I still have a shortwave radio, but I can listen to the BBC on my computer now. And I can''''t even remember the last time I used an encyclopedia. So the technology of information is perhaps the most important technology. Which brings us to the world of database. Information. In the most general terms, we are talking about information storage and information retrieval. In my younger days as a school teacher in the countryside in America, I had a steel filing cabinet to store documents. Now I keep these documents on a USB drive in my shirt pocket. And if I forget where a particular file is, I can use the Windows search utility to find it in a matter of seconds.

Wisdom. How do we implement techology in a way that makes it work for us? Technology is a good servant, but a terrible master. How do we use technology without allowing it to take over our lives? And who gets to decide which technologies are good and useful, and which ones are destructive? These questions of course, lead us to history and philosophy. So you see, technology really touches every field of study in one way or another, either as a tool to pursue the discipline, or as, itself, the subject of discussion.

I hope you will not hesitate to let me know if you have questions along the way, or if you just wish to discuss some of these issues with me. The labs in the Oracle courses are as straightforward as I can make them. Although the lectures, assignments, and tests will be in English, you will have a choice between English and Chinese in your selection of a text. And there will be bilingual lab assistants to help you with any questions you may have about the lab assignments. If you need to contact me personally, please feel free to send me an email:

eric@beihangsoft.cn

Or you can hunt me down in the Oracle lab (Room 301). I am very eager to help in any way that I can. I hope your time in this course will be very beneficial to you, and I hope that you will be quick to tell me if there is something I can do to assist you in your study of it. The Oracle database courses may indeed be some of the most important courses you will take during your career as a student at Beihang College of Software. Thanks for giving me a chance to help you. I look forward to getting to know each of you better. I sincerely appreciate your scholarship.

Cheers,