NewsScan Daily, 21 November 2003 ("Above The Fold")

NewsScan Daily, 21 November 2003 ("Above The Fold")
***********************************************************
NewsScan Daily is underwritten by RLG, a world-class organization
making significant and sustained contributions to the effective
management and appropriate use of information technology. NSD is
written by John Gehl and Suzanne Douglas, [email protected].
***********************************************************

"ABOVE THE FOLD"
        Michael Dell on Innovation
        Imagining Life Without Wires
        SBC Set to Launch VoIP Service
        'Dog-On-a-Chip' Rivals Man's Best Friend
        Burlington Northern Puts Wi-Fi in the Driver's Seat
        Tapscott and Ticoll Have New 'Big Idea'

FEATURES
        Flash Card
        Spyware Continued
        Honorary Subscriber: Henrietta Swan Leavitt

MICHAEL DELL ON INNOVATION
Michael Dell says spending big on pie-in-the-sky R&D is just a waste of 
money: "If you look at innovation, it doesn't just occur in the lab. Comdex 
is the place you go to show things that nobody knows what to do with, 
because they haven't found a market yet. We don't develop things nobody 
knows what to do with. We develop things people want to buy and buy in 
volume. Innovation can occur in supply chain and logistics, manufacturing 
and distribution, and sales and service. We've made computing products far 
more affordable. If you look at the cost of computers 20 years ago versus 
now, we've caused the whole industry to get more efficient." (CNet News.com 
21 Nov 2003)
http://news.com.com/2008-1001-5110303.html?tag=nefd_lede

IMAGINING LIFE WITHOUT WIRES
Technology analyst Bill Thompson says Bluetooth technology could make life 
without wires a liberating experience: "Forget all the talk about wireless 
hotspots and video phones. Getting rid of cables will change people's lives 
in far more important and interesting ways. And Bluetooth is the way to do 
it. Imagine never having to plug in a digital camera or MP3 player again. 
Imagine not having to buy a £20 USB cable when you get a new printer. 
Imagine no more worries about how many Scart sockets your TV has when you 
buy a new games console to add to the VCR and DVD player piled up 
underneath it. And imagine never again having to untangle the thin wires 
that link your headphones to your CD or MP3 player, and not ripping them 
apart when they get caught in your bicycle crossbars as you cycle across 
town, and I speak from bitter experience." Thompson envisions a day when a 
Bluetooth iPod will enable him to carry 10,000 tunes around in one 
pocket-sized device that could then be shared by friends or fellow 
travelers on a bus or train. "Of course, they need to sort out the security 
stuff before we do all start using Bluetooth. It is bad enough having my 
address book stolen [a phenomenon dubbed bluestumbling where someone with a 
Bluetooth device taps into another Bluetooth device and copies the address 
book], but imagine if the strange man sitting next to me on tonight's train 
could look at the photos on my digital camera." (BBC News 21 Nov 2003)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3226116.stm

SBC SET TO LAUNCH VOIP SERVICE
SBC Communications says it will begin rolling out 
voice-over-Internet-protocol (VoIP) services in the first quarter of 2004 
to customers in all 50 states. The move marks a major technological shift 
for the regional Bell company, which up until now has based its local and 
long-distance phone services on traditional circuit-switched networks. 
(Reuters 20 Nov 2003)
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=KDLBBBALC5FZMCRBAELCFFA?type=technologyNews&storyID=3861318

'DOG-ON-A-CHIP' RIVALS MAN'S BEST FRIEND
Researchers at Georgia Tech have developed a new high-tech 'nose' whose 
sniffing power is keen enough to rival that of man's best friend. "This 
works the same way as the dogs," says Georgia Tech electrical engineering 
professor Bill Hunt, who heads up the project. "They're picking up the 
vapors coming off the cocaine." The electronic nose can "smell" microscopic 
amounts of a substance, ranging from cocaine to anthrax, bomb material, 
chemical agents or even cancerous cells, although currently it's designed 
to focus on cocaine. And while the rectangular plastic box doesn't need any 
care or feeding, it lacks a certain 'something' offered by its canine 
counterpart. "Dogs are more fun," says Dan Gordon, owner of Homeland 
Security Dogs. "You can throw a Frisbee with them." (AP 20 Nov 2003)
http://apnews.excite.com/article/20031120/D7UUEHBG0.html

BURLINGTON NORTHERN PUTS WI-FI IN THE DRIVER'S SEAT
The Burlington Northern and Santa Fe Railway Company (BNSF) has found a 
novel way to use Wi-Fi technology. It's using the wireless system to 
remotely move locomotives around its rail yards. The company says it's not 
only more efficient (one driver can move multiple engines without leaving 
the control center) but it's also much safer than hopping from train to 
train to perform the job manually. "You can even blow the horn," says BNSF 
CIO Jeff Campbell. (The Register 20 Nov 2003)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/69/34101.html

TAPSCOTT AND TICOLL HAVE NEW 'BIG IDEA'
A recent issue of The Economist asserted that the new book "The Naked 
Corporation: How the Age of Transparency Will Revolutionize Business" 
provides the first "big idea" since management books slumped a couple of 
years ago. Comparing Tapscott to management gurus Hamel, Peters and 
Christensen, the article notes that Tapscott argues that greater 
transparency is an unstoppable force: "It is the product of growing demand 
from everybody with an interest in any corporation -- what he calls its 
'stakeholder web' -- and of rapid technological change, above all the 
spread of the Internet, that makes it far easier for firms to supply 
information, and harder for them to keep secrets." (Economist 16 Oct 2003)
http://www.economist.com/

*****

FLASH CARD
      "Anyone informed that the universe is expanding and contracting in 
pulsations of eighty billion years has a right to ask, 'What's in it for 
me?'" (Peter De Vries)

#SPYWARE CONTINUED
     Anyone interested in the George Sadowsky's comments on Spyware in 
yesterday's NewsScan Daily should check out the URLs he's sent us:
      CDT Report: "Ghosts in Our Machines: Background and Policy Proposals 
on the "Spyware" Problem" November 2003:
     http://www.cdt.org/privacy/031100spyware.pdf
     Join CDT's Campaign Against "Spyware":
     http://www.cdt.org/action/spyware/

HONORARY SUBSCRIBER: HENRIETTA SWAN LEAVITT
      Today's Honorary Subscriber is the American astronomer Henrietta Swan 
Leavitt (1868-1921), who established the Period-Luminosity Relation for 
Cepheid variable stars -- which led to the development of a new method for 
determining how far extremely distant stars and galaxies are from the 
earth. She also discovered four novae (stars that become suddenly brighter 
and within a few months gradually fade away) and more than 2,400 variable 
stars.
      Leavitt, the daughter of a minister, was born in Lancaster, 
Massachusetts, and graduated from the school now known as Radcliffe 
College. Despite being left deaf by an illness incurred shortly after 
graduation, she was able to obtain work as a research assistant at the 
Harvard College Observatory. In 1902 she became a permanent staff member, 
where under the legendary director, E.C. Pickering, she conducted studies 
of stellar magnitudes (star brightness).
      In virtue of "her scientific ability and intense application" she 
quickly rose to head the department of photographic stellar photometry. In 
1912, after about five years of single-minded study, she made her great 
discovery that the periods of the Cepheid stars were proportional to their 
luminosity, a relationship that became important to the measurement of 
interstellar and intergalactic distances. Harlow Shapley, who succeeded 
E.C. Pickering as director of the Harvard Observatory, later used this 
relationship to determine the distance of globular clusters.
      Leavitt was indefatigable in searching Harvard Observatory's 
photographic plates to locate numerous variable stars in the Magellanic 
Clouds (named for the navigator Magellan, the large star collections lying 
outside our galaxy but not too far off as galactic distances go). Her work 
once prompted Princeton astronomer Charles Young to say: "What a 
variable-star 'fiend' Miss Leavitt is. One can't keep up with the roll of 
her new discoveries."
      At a time when women scientists were scarce, Leavitt was a member of 
Phi Beta Kappa, the American Association of University Women, the American 
Astronomical and Astrophysical Society, the American Association for the 
Advancement of Science, and an honorary member of the American Association 
of Variable Star Observers. Sadly, Leavitt died young of cancer in 1921, 
leaving incomplete her work on a new photographic magnitude scale. However, 
her important contribution to scientific advancement was internationally 
acknowledged when, in 1925, the Swedish Academy of Sciences nominated her 
for the Nobel Prize. She has also been honored by having her name given to 
a crater of the moon memorializing deaf astronomers.

See http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1552093026/newsscancom/ref=nosim 
for "Nightwatch: A Practical Guide for Viewing the Universe" by Terrence 
Dickerson -- or look for it or other astronomy books in your favorite 
library. (We donate all revenue from our book suggestions to adult literacy 
programs.)

SUBSCRIPTION INFO FOR NEWSSCAN DAILY:
      To subscribe or unsubscribe to the text, html, or handheld versions 
of NewsScan Daily, send the appropriate subscribe or unsubscribe messages 
(i.e., with the word 'subscribe' or 'unsubscribe' in the subject line) to 
the addresses shown below:
      Text version: Send message to [email protected]
      HTML version: Send mail to [email protected]
      NewsScan-To-Go: http://www.newsscan.com/handheld/current.html

TELL YOUR FRIENDS ABOUT NEWSSCAN DAILY! Send them our little frog: 
http://www.newsscan.com/newsscan/newscup.html

***********************************************************
Please visit the site of RLG, the great organization that makes NewsScan 
Daily possible. (RLG has no influence over, nor any responsibility for, our 
editorial content.) Created in 1974 as the Research Libraries Group, RLG is 
a not-for-profit membership corporation of more than 160 universities, 
national libraries, archives, museums -- and other institutions with 
remarkable collections for research and learning. Its major initiatives are 
long-term retention of digital materials, resource sharing among member 
institutions, and improvement of researcher access to primary source 
material. RLG supplies online research resources worldwide. Visit RLG at 
http://www.rlg.org.

*********

To subscribe or unsubscribe to the TEXT version of NewsScan Daily, send an 
e-mail message to [email protected] with 'subscribe' or 'unsubscribe' 
in the subject line. To subscribe to our HTML version of NewsScan Daily, 
send mail to [email protected], with the word 'subscribe' as the 
subject. (Subscribing to the HTML version won't automatically unsubscribe 
you from the text version; please unsubscribe yourself as explained above.) 
Please note: To unsubscribe from an account to which you no longer have 
access, send mail to at [email protected].

*********

We call our news section "Above The Fold" to honor the tradition of the 
great "broadsheet" newspapers in which editors must decide which news 
stories are of such importance that they should be placed "above the fold" 
on the front page. The NewsScan Credo: Be informative, have fun, and get to 
the point! See http://www.newsscan.com/, and send us mail: John Gehl 
<[email protected]> and Suzanne Douglas <[email protected]>, or call 
770-704-7517.

*********

Get a free 6-week trial subscription to Innovation Weekly, an executive 
summary of trends, strategies and innovations in business and technology. 
Send mail to [email protected] with the word 'subscribe' in the 
subject line.

What customized news and information services do you need for your company? 
Get in touch with us at [email protected] or call 770-704-7517 to talk 
over the possibilities.

Copyright 2003. NewsScan Daily (R) is a publication of NewsScan Inc.
***********************************************************