The Internet has obvious promise for the dissemination of instructional material, either formal or joyously informal, over very large distances and into remote corners of the world. To that end, AICS Research, Inc. has created two products: QCShow Player, a freely-downloadable player, and QCShow Author, an inexpensive authoring tool that translates PowerPoint and Adobe PDF files into exceptional quality audio and image slideshows at very low bandwidths. The quality, reliability and ease-of-use of these products is sufficiently high that they are likely to have a revolutionary effect on the way that the internet is used. A few of QCShow's more important features are outlined below: The Major Features of QCShow Lightweight, Reliable Player QCShow's Player was designed to run reliably on very small PCs. You should find QCShow to not only be very reliable and robust, but also very responsive on the smallest PCs that you have capable of executing 32-bit Windows, 98 or above. Highest Quality Sound and Images Moving images convey emotion. Still pictures carry information, and for that reason, quality is important. The full-screen images in QCShow are of a higher resolution than standard television, yet are so well compressed that they can be transmitted at telephone modem speeds, simultaneously with FM radio-quality audio. Very Low Bandwidth Encodings Low-bandwidth encodings are important for more than just rapid file transmission over the internet. They also imply small file sizes, both on the server and in the client. A 45-minute classroom lecture generally requires only about 10 MB in QCShow, thus a standard 39-session college semester class can be stored on slightly more than half a CD. Perhaps more interesting, the core lectures for an entire four-year college education can be put onto a single DVD. High Speed Search, Pause, Resume QCShow's player was designed for both the instructor and the viewer. The largest keys on the keyboard were made the pause keys so that lectures could be interrupted and resumed with ease, allowing a lecturer to team-teach with one or more presentations. For the viewer, the thumbnail search capabilities in the Player provide the very highest speed searches available in any technology. A lecture can also be watched in pieces, if desired. If a presentation is quit in mid-point, when it's resumed, it automatically begins again at the point you left it. Simple, Superior Post Production No recorded lecture is free of defects. Every talk has comments in it such as, "Can we have the room lights down?", "These aren't my slides," and the inevitable um's and ah's. If these spurious comments aren't removed, the resulting presentation not only comes across as unprofessional, it's tiring to listen to. Post production editing in QCShow Author is so simple to use that it quickly becomes the most enjoyable and creative part of the process of assembling a presentation. Near-Zero-Cost Television When you watch a presentation in QCShow, you very quickly forget that you're not watching television. The difference in costs at the production end however is huge. Creating an hour's worth of truly professional material in the QCShow format will cost you one-thousandth that of an equivalent television production. What this means is that "television" capabilities, even if it's just "podcasting-with-pictures," are within anyone's grasp, anywhere in the world.

QCShow Uses » Long Distance Education (classes delivered anywhere in the world at the highest quality) » Technical Sales Presentations (factory tours, adherence to standards, delivery capabilities) » Scientific & Technical Presentations Broadcast Worldwide » Internal Corporate Training (machine operation, human resources policy disseminations, customer relations) » Internal Corporate, Government & Military Policy Briefings (rapid distribution, on-demand, but without everyone needing to be assembled at the same time) » Continuing Medical Education & Residency Training using Highest Quality Images » Professional Continuing Education (certified public accounting, tax law, continuing legal education) » "Television" for smaller organizations (county extension crop and weather forecasts, commodity futures, insect & disease recognition classes) » Junior & Senior High School Class Presentations (lectures assembled and presented by the students themselves) » High School Journalism (a new form of on-line school newspaper, similar to both print and television journalism) » Real Estate Presentations (detailed house tours, including area schools and attractions) » Customer Education & Sales (many products are better sold by providing the customer detailed information on their use) » Audio Graphic Books (picture-filled "coffee table" books on history, archaeology, etc. as well as "how-to" books on home repair, birding, programming) » Family Postcards & Oral Histories (narrated photographs of summer vacations & recollections of old family photographs) » "Podcasting-with-Pictures" (edgy television as its smallest scale)

Sample Presentations (requires the use of QCShow Player) Worldwide Scientific & Technical Lecture Distribution Search for Life in the Universe In 1995, we only knew for certain of the existence of the nine planets in our solar system. Now, the count is approaching 150 known planets. Of the planets that have been discovered since, the majority of them have been discovered by the team of Geoff Marcy, Paul Butler and Debra Fischer. These people have discovered many times more new worlds than Galileo could have ever dreamt of, and in this talk, Exoplanets, Yellowstone, & the Prospects for Alien Life, Geoff Marcy estimates the chances that we will discover life on these new worlds. Encoding bitrate: 44 kbps The Future of Life on Mars It's possible that at some time in the future we might recreate a habitable climate on Mars, returning it to the life-bearing state it may have enjoyed early in its history. Chris McKay, of NASA's Ames Research Center, talks about biology and future of life on Mars. Part science and part science-fiction, serious studies of planetary ecosynthesis on Mars began after the results of the Viking mission indicated that all the compounds needed for life were present on the surface of Mars, suggesting that we can rebuild a living Mars at some time in future, if we choose to do so. These thoughts have implications for the objectives and conduct of current robotic and human exploration. Encoding bitrate: 44 kbps Internal Corporate Training Medical Residency Training Keeping laboratory personnel current and certified represents an enormous expense for a hospital. Everyone who is trained must have a trainer, thus training becomes a significant expense. These expenses are magnified when there is a high turnover rate. In a teaching hospital, the advantages of using QCShow become especially obvious, particularly so for the training of residents in pathology. Residents learn pathology by viewing tens of thousands of sectioned slides during their residency period. Dr. Barry Lawshe, Penrose Hospital, Colorado Springs, has been converting his lectures to QCShow format, creating an on-line library of training material. One of his lectures, Introduction to Gastric Pathology (Excluding the GE Junction), is presented here. Encoding bitrate: 96 kbps Very Low Cost Distance Education The cost to produce a 10- or 30-minute lecture in QCShow is only very slightly more than it is to produce and present the original PowerPoint slides, but the lecture can now be viewed by anyone anywhere in the world — in their native language. The use of educational television to achieve the same effect, which is an extraordinarily expensive medium and has a very short reach, is no longer necessary. In this lecture, Dr. Irena Boulytcheva of Hospital No. 62, Moscow, Russia, presents a short lecture on osteochondromas in Russian, but similar lectures could just as easily be presented on agricultural techniques in Hindi or microbanking in Mandarin. Encoding bitrate: 55 kbps Professional Presentations Mark Twain Excerpt In 2001, Ken Burns released "Mark Twain," another in his sequence of extraordinary documentaries on American life on PBS. This Mark Twain demonstration presentation was assembled early in the life of QCShow, based on that work (Hell, Sam Clemens would have said "stolen from" — if the words weren't so abysmally impolite). To create the QCShow presentation, a number of images were scanned in from the accompanying book, "Mark Twain," by Geoffrey C. Ward, Dayton Duncan and Ken Burns. The sound track for the presentation was created by copying snippets of sound from the show's video tape and CD. Encoding bitrate: 50 kbps Audio Graphic Book "The Seashell on the Mountaintop" is an extraordinary story about the dawn of the modern world, in that period of Western history when organized knowledge began to replace superstition. Alan Cutler of the Smithsonian Institution has written a captivating story about the life and times of Nicholas Steno, the first person to see "deep time." Cutler's book was made into a HighBridge audiobook, of which Chapter Five: Tongues of Stone is presented here in a new audio graphic book format using QCShow. Encoding bitrate: 50 kbps Student-Created Presentations High School Student Reports The Loretto Academy is a highly regarded Catholic high school for the girls of Texas, New Mexico and Chihuahua, Mexico. Zoology is a one-semester class taught in the spring. The girls were given only ten minutes instruction on how to use QCShow Author and then left alone to complete their presentations. The choice of the technical content, the formatting of the PowerPoint slides, the narration and its editing was wholly left to the girls themselves. One result can be seen here: The evolution and physiology of fish. Encoding bitrate: 58 kbps

Creating a QCShow Presentation How hard is it to create a QCShow presentation? If you routinely create PowerPoint slides and give presentations using them, you've already done 95% of the work. From the first day that QCShow's design was drawn on the blackboard, the intention has been to create a mechanism to distribute very high quality lectures over the internet at very low costs, perhaps one-thousandth the cost of creating an equivalent televised lecture. But the intention has also been to make the creation of these lectures be so simple that anyone can do it. There are only three distinct actions required to assemble a lecture in QCShow. They are: recording the narration capturing your PowerPoint or Adobe PDF slides synchronizing the two When you download and install QCShow Author, you'll find that it isn't one program. Rather, it's a collection of three programs, each representing one of the three principal steps you'll perform in creating a QCShow presentation: SoundRecorder ScreenCapture SoundEditor Each program does what it says it does, and its operation, once you become familiar with it, becomes extremely simple with practice. These programs weren't designed for audio and video "professionals." They were intended to be used by you in the anticipation that you will be able to create extraordinary results at professional quality levels. SoundEditor is the heart of the QCShow Author process. This is the program that brings everything together, allowing you to merge your image and sound files and make them ready for internet or CD distribution. SoundEditor is also the point at which you become the equivalent of a television director and select what will go into the final presentation and what will be deleted. This is undoubtedly the most enjoyable and creative part of the process of preparing a presentation. For more detailed information, the complete Instruction Manual for QCShow Author is avaliable here. Ordering QCShow QCShow is composed of two programs: QCShow Player and QCShow Author. The Player is distributed freely, at no charge. You are free to download as many copies as you wish. Similarly, QCShow Author is priced extremely inexpensively: US$249.99 Ordering Instructions To purchase QCShow Author, first download and install a 30-day free trial copy from: Download QCShow Author Once installed, run QCShow's SoundEditor and click on the Register pulldown menu option: Enter your credit card information into the data entry form. American Express, MasterCard, Visa and Discover cards are accepted. When you press the SUBMIT button, a block of encrypted text will appear. This text contains not only the information that you entered but also a "fingerprint" of the PC you're using. Copy and paste this information into your favorite email program and email it to the address shown in the text. In a few minutes, you will receive back a similarly encrypted block of text that will link your license to the PC you're currently using. Paste this information into the waiting form. Congratulations. You are now a fully registered user of QCShow Author. The Fine Print Your QCShow Author license specifically ties your copy of the authoring tool to your machine. What this means is that when your PC dies or you dispose of it, your copy of QCShow Author dies with it. However, things are not as bad as they sound. In order to make the registration process as simple, fair and generous as possible, you actually received five copies of the QCShow Author license when you bought the product, not one. In the return email that you received, a ten-character license was provided, similar to this: KB50DI45VUW Keep this licensing code in a safe place. It will allow you to register four more copies of QCShow Author on four more PCs, at no additional cost. While we would prefer for you to think of your purchase as being for one QCShow Author license — with four backup copies — there is nothing to keep you from immediately distributing your ten-character license to four colleagues, friends or relatives. The only danger with doing this is that should anything go wrong with your PC, or if you should wish to replace it, you would have to repurchase the product. Our best advice is to keep at least one or two of the licenses in reserve for emergencies. Updates Updates are free for the lifetime of your PC. All that you need do to update your copy of QCShow Author is download a new version from this website. Your license resides in the PC's registry and will not be affected by the new download, even if you should purge QCShow Author from your PC before you update it. Refunds Because there is no practical way for you to return the product to us once you've registered it, refunds aren't possible. Therefore, download the 30-day free trial of QCShow Author and use it extensively before you purchase the product to insure that you are completely satisfied. The 30-day clock starts with your first run of QCShow Author. During the trial period, and especially after you purchase QCShow Author, don't hesitate to call or write if you find yourself significantly confused. Our support contact information appear on this page: AICS Research Support