Audio Data Systems (ADS) recently enhanced their ACASI software to support character-based languages.

ACASI software is used to conduct self-administered interviews. Many top universities and prominent research companies to conduct surveys.

TeraTech developed the automated interview software with ADS.

For further information visit the ACASI website: http://www.teratech.com/ads/ or contact Lawrence Greenfield, Ph.D at (240) 687-2052.

E-MAIL: lg439@aol.com

Alternate E-mail: lg439@verizon.net

Have you ever needed to extract data from old tables and use it in a way the table designer never planned on? This seems to be an all-too-common experience.

Recently, I learned that I could parse a number out of a string field, cast it as an integer, and actually use that result in a JOIN (as if it were a foreign key) to another table's integer primary key. Here is the JOIN part of my query:

A few years ago, before I began to understand the power of SQL, I would have done something like this by hand in Excel. Details of the problem and solution are included below if you'd like to read on ...

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How about selling to colleges rather than directly to individuals? 

That was the question that our longstanding-client, Mark Robinholt, President of internships.com, brought to TeraTech recently. 

From his point of view, it was just a matter of a different pitch and a different mailing list.   From the technical point of view, it meant a dramatic change in the flow of the website and clever augmentation to the database.  Could we make these changes within a reasonable budget for a small business?  Since this e-commerce website was well-constructed – modular and well-documented – yes, we could do it!  Now internship-seekers have two avenues to the 60,000 internships listed on  www.internships.com .  They can go to the website directly and register to search and apply for internships.  Students who attend colleges that have purchased the service can search the database for free.  The students enter the website through a homepage that is customized for the college – header and left nav bar have school name, colors, logo, and contact information.  Customizing is easy:  it takes  internships.com office staff less than 5 minutes to generate the college’s custom page.  Yes, TeraTech can change the site to sell to colleges and to individuals.  The client has a new business opportunity and a new revenue stream.

TeraTech recently got the chance to turn around a challenging project for a large governmental organization.  A contractor had tried unsuccessfully for a year to automate a series of PowerPoint-generation routines based on extremely large, unwieldy sets of survey data.  The survey data changes frequently, and it needs to be aggregated in various ways including state and national versions. 

By applying our experience from similar projects, TeraTech created the solution our client was looking for.  Now, the client uses a simple web interface to upload a large flat text file of raw data, which our automated system parses and loads into a relational database, runs data transformations and calculates the needed statistics.  Next, through a series of steps utilizing ColdFusion, XML, and Java, it generates full-color charts and graphs, combines them with text into a finished PowerPoint presentation, and delivers it minutes later by email to the client.  The client was so happy with the result; we have now completed three more of these PowerPoint automations for them and looking forward to the fifth!

As a result of our past work on WMATA’s successful Trip Planner application (www.wmata.com/), TeraTech is currently working on another major transit project.  The client is a major transit authority, and the ultimate result will be real-time bus data for its customers, available via web browser, cell phone or PDA.  Two separate sources of internal bus routing and schedule data must be combined and converted into a proprietary XML format to be used by another application.  It’s a huge batch process that runs only occasionally, when anything changes in the routes or schedules, and it must be 100% accurate and reliable.  The client uploads nearly 300 MB of data, some in a database and the rest as flat text files, and our system performs complex data transformations including merging, validation, and interpretation.  We load the data into a relational database, and then use complex queries to generate the XML.  Although the processing is done in parts and combined at the end, the sheer size of the finished output file makes optimization of code and memory performance a critical factor.  After performing this “magic” our automated system notifies the client that their XML data is ready to download and sent to the customer-facing application.

We recently help union insurance company Ullico to create their first ecommerce site for selling insurance online. The site was personalized depending on which union a client belongs to and quotes differed depending on age, gender and other factors. We involved the Ullico development team in our development process and were able to hand over the fully commented code to them for maintenance.