NewsScan Daily, 17 November 2003 ("Above The Fold")

NewsScan Daily, 17 November 2003 ("Above The Fold")
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"ABOVE THE FOLD"
        Ultra-Fast Research Network Lights Up Dark Fiber
        Utah Plans Fiber to the Home Broadband Network
        Music Labels Tap Into Download Data to Boost Sales
        Spam Clogs Blogs
        Dodging the 'Dodgy-Dossier Syndrome' Problem
        What's In a Name?

FEATURES
        Flash Card
        Honorary Subscriber: August Saint-Gaudens

ULTRA-FAST RESEARCH NETWORK LIGHTS UP DARK FIBER
The first leg of an ultra-high-performance network, dubbed the National 
LambdaRail, is set to go live this week, linking Chicago's TeraGrid 
facility with the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center. The rest of NLR, which 
will link hundreds of research institutions around the U.S., is expected to 
be up and running by the end of 2004. The network is being constructed 
using 10,000 miles of "dark" optic cable on the country's backbone network, 
and will give researchers a dedicated channel for exchanging vast 
quantities of data generated by large-scale projects such as the Sloan 
Digital Sky Survey and the human genome project. "The amounts of 
calculation and the quantities of information that can be stored, 
transmitted and used are exploding at a stunning, almost disruptive rate," 
states a National Science Foundation report on cyberinfrastructure. 
"Powerful data-mining techniques operating across huge sets of 
multidimensional data open new approaches to discovery. Global networks can 
link all these together and support more interactivity and broader 
collaboration." One of the first goals of the NLR project is to implement a 
10-Gb Ethernet across the entire system, enabling scientists to plug in 
easily. Future uses include "extreme multimedia," including 
videoconferencing at HDTV quality. "It would be like talking to each other 
in the hallway," says Ron Johnson, an NLR board member and CIO/CTO at the 
University of Washington in Seattle. (Wired.com 17 Nov 2003)
http://www.wired.com/news/infostructure/0,1377,61102,00.html

UTAH PLANS FIBER TO THE HOME BROADBAND NETWORK
Tired of waiting for the 21st century to arrive, Salt Lake City and 17 
other Utah cities are planning to build an ultra-high-speed network of 
their own, capable of transmitting data to homes and offices at speeds 100 
times faster than current commercial residential offerings. Dubbed Utopia 
(Utah Telecommunication Open Infrastructure Agency), the network is 
expected to bring high-speed access to 723,000 residents at about $28 a 
month for basic broadband Internet service. Utopia will also offer digital 
television and voice-over-IP telephone services. The project has come under 
fire from telecom and cable companies, who argue they shouldn't have to 
compete against a publicly sponsored digital network, but city officials 
say reliable access to high-speed data is so vital to their goals of 
improving education and boosting economic growth that it's the modern-day 
equivalent of building roads, sewers and bridges, which are often 
municipally owned in the Western U.S. Data infrastructure "is not a 
nicety," says Utopia executive director Paul T. Morris, who envisions 
eventually adding services such as video-on-demand and online video games 
to the basic package. Morris expects to secure financial commitment this 
month, with construction beginning next spring or summer. Projections call 
for the Utopia system to generate enough revenue by its seventh year to 
cover all expenses. (New York Times 17 Nov 2003)
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/17/technology/17utopia.html

MUSIC LABELS TAP INTO DOWNLOAD DATA TO BOOST SALES
Record labels have found the silver lining in the music downloading craze 
-- they're tapping into data mined by companies such as BigChampagne that 
track downloading patterns on popular peer-to-peer networks such as Kazaa's 
FastTrack. BigChampagne tracks how often its clients' artists show up in 
searches or how frequently their songs are downloaded, and packages the 
data so that it can be sorted by market or geographical region. The record 
labels can then use that information to create more effective marketing 
campaigns. Traditionally, labels waited weeks to get feedback based on 
limited audience sampling, but these new P2P sampling systems can tally 
what millions of music fans are doing every hour. If a label sees signs 
that demand for a new release is building on the file-swapping networks, it 
can fast-track its availability on online retailers such as Apple's iTunes 
music store. "It's the most vast and scaleable sample audience that the 
world has ever seen," says BigChampagne CEO Eric Garland. "What we do in 
effect is act like a superuser who demands access to the network in its 
entirety." (AP/Washington Post 17 Nov 2003)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A51488-2003Nov17.html

SPAM CLOGS BLOGS
Most weblogs are designed to allow readers to post comments on entries, but 
that capability is being abused by spammers, who leave remarks like "Sounds 
great!" submitted by names like "Generic Viagra," complete with links to 
questionable sites. Howard Rheingold, a futurist who touts the power of 
online communities, worries that the recent invasion could derail the 
revolution in public discourse just as it's gathering steam. "It forces you 
to either turn off the comments and lose some of the value of the medium, 
or spend your time deleting spam," says Rheingold. Meanwhile, some 
inveterate bloggers are taking matters into their own hands. Adam Kalsey, 
who's run his own blog for the past three years, has penned a "Comment Spam 
Manifesto," which warns spammers: "What you failed to understand is that 
bloggers are smarter, better connected and more technologically savvy than 
the average e-mail user. We control this medium that you are now attempting 
to exploit. You've picked a fight with is and it's a fight you cannot win." 
Kalsey tracks spammers down and reports them to their ISPs and domain 
registers in an effort to get their accounts canceled. "The blog immune 
system does seem to be responding," he says, noting that he receives help 
from other bloggers in his spam-slamming activities. (AP 13 Nov 2003)
http://apnews.excite.com/article/20031113/D7UPUB5G0.html

DODGING THE 'DODGY-DOSSIER SYNDROME' PROBLEM
Ninety percent of business documents are adapted from other documents, but 
68% of the people doing the adapting don't know that the revised versions 
often contain metadata that identify the source documents, according to a 
study by UK software firm Workshare. The phenomenon has been dubbed "the 
dodgy-dossier syndrome" after the infamous UK government report on Iraq's 
alleged weapons of mass destruction program, a significant portion of which 
was found to have been copied from a 12-year-old thesis written by a PhD 
candidate. "There are inherent dangers due to document metadata, which 
identifies the historical changes within a document, author histories and 
document origins," says Workshare in its report. "Awareness of the term 
'metadata' is low and fewer still know of its dangers." Exacerbating the 
problem of document adaptation is "document anarchy" -- which describes the 
lack of standard practice in the workplace for contributing to or giving 
feedback on a document. "More business users are contributing to shared 
documents than ever before," says Workshare European VP Andrew Pearson, 
"and companies are losing control of what happens inside the process. 
Changes in the way organizations work have made this problem more acute in 
recent years with restructuring and flattening of the organization 
(bringing) these problems to the fore." (ZDNet UK 14 Nov 2003)
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/business/management/0,39020654,39117905,00.htm

WHAT'S IN A NAME?
A prank Web site aimed at ridiculing management's penchant for rebranding 
old firms with "nonsense" names such as Accenture and Avaya has backfired 
on its creators after several of its spoof names were registered by real 
companies. The What Brand Are You? Web site was created by advertising firm 
Design Conspiracy as a way to generate publicity while poking fun at the 
"uninspiring" trend toward nonsense brand names. Users are asked to enter 
their names and select from a menu of core values, such as "dynamic" or 
"passionate," and a main goal, such as "global leadership" or "client 
focus." The database then offers suggestions such as Aliquis, Vulgo or 
Accumulo. "There are about 150 possible names. We just came up with them 
one afternoon last year," says a Design Conspiracy spokesman. "We used an 
online Latin dictionary to come up with some of the names, and just added 
an 'i' or an 'a' to the end. Others, like Ualeo, we don't even know how to 
pronounce. We were just literally trying to think of the most stupid 
company names." Tell that to businessman Amit Roy, who registered the name 
Winnovate, which he found on the site. "I wanted a name that had a positive 
feel that implied innovation," says Roy. Other names snapped up by unwary 
users include: Amplifico, Integriti, Thinc, Winwin, and Ovisovis. (BBC News 
17 Nov 2003)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/3276945.stm

*****

FLASH CARD
      "Another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptom of 
immaturity, the dread of doing what has been done before." (Edith Wharton)

HONORARY SUBSCRIBER: AUGUSTUS SAINT-GAUDENS
      Today's Honorary Subscriber is the Irish-born American sculptor 
Augustus Saint-Gaudens (1848-1907), who revitalized late-19th-century 
American heroic style monument statuary.
      Born to a French father and an Irish mother, Saint-Gaudens was 
brought as a child to the United States. Apprenticed as a cameo cutter at 
the age of 13, he used the trade to support his drawing lessons at Cooper 
Union and the National Academy of Design. With his father's support he went 
to Paris in 1867 and the following year was admitted to the Ecole des 
Beaux-Arts where he learned the lively French Beaux-Arts manner of modeling 
from the sculptor Francois Jouffroy.
      From 1870 to 1875 he lived in Rome and was greatly influenced by the 
neoclassical style. He particularly admired the bronzes of the Early 
Renaissance masters Ghiberti and Donatello. After commission work copying 
famous statues, he received a commission to reproduce in marble his first 
original work, Hiawatha, which he had begun modeling in 1870. In 1876 he 
settled in New York City where he would maintain a studio for more than 
twenty years, skillfully Americanizing the neoclassical style he had 
absorbed during his years in Europe.
      Saint-Gaudens's first triumph was his bronze statue of Admiral David 
Farragut completed in 1881 for placement in New York's Madison Square Park. 
It shows Farragut standing braced as if on a ship's deck, legs apart like 
Donatello's Saint George. In 1887 Saint-Gaudens created for Chicago's 
Lincoln Park what is perhaps the most expressive memorial portrait of 
Abraham Lincoln, showing his tall, gaunt figure, just risen from a chair, 
as if gathering his forces to speak the momentous words of the Gettysburg 
Address. What is often called his finest figure is the shrouded, seated 
woman that was commissioned by Henry Adams for his wife's grave in 
Washington's Rock Creek Cemetery. Embodying an oriental acceptance of the 
inevitable, it is the most abstract work in 19th-century American 
sculpture. The mysterious figure, with its shadowed face, is often called 
"Grief," but the sculptor had no such intention, believing the figure 
conveyed "peace" or "nirvana."
       His 1903 statue of General William Tecumseh Sherman in New York's 
Central Park climaxed a brilliant career. In this heroic-scale bronze, 
Sherman is shown riding through Georgia led by the surging figure of a 
Winged Victory--a distinctively original contribution to the equestrian 
monument tradition, brilliantly combining portraiture, a sense of movement, 
and appropriate grandeur.

See 
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1882507126/newsscancom/ref=nosim 
for more on Saint-Gaudens -- or look in your favorite library or video 
store. (We donate all revenue from our book recommendations to adult 
literacy programs.)

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