NewsScan Daily, 15 December 2003 ("Above The Fold")

NewsScan Daily, 15 December 2003 ("Above The Fold")
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"ABOVE THE FOLD"
        Canada Rules P2P Downloading Legal
        Over-Reliance on PowerPoint Leads to Simplistic Thinking
        Toshiba Touts World's Tiniest Hard Drives
        Credit Cards Do the Wave
        Fastap Keypad Keeps Fingers Flying

FEATURES
        Flash Card
        Honorary Subscriber: Archibald MacLeish

CANADA RULES P2P DOWNLOADING LEGAL
The Copyright Board of Canada has ruled that downloading copyrighted music 
from peer-to-peer networks is legal in that country, although uploading 
files is not. The decision is intended to clarify what had been a somewhat 
ambiguous area of Canadian law. "As far as computer hard drives are 
concerned, we say that for the time being, it is still legal," says Claude 
Majeau, secretary general of the Copyright Board. Meanwhile, the Canadian 
Recording Industry Association is disputing the ruling: "Our position is 
that under Canadian law, downloading is also prohibited. This is the 
opinion of the Copyright Board, but Canadian courts will decide this 
issue," says a lawyer for the group. The decision has also rankled the U.S. 
recording industry, which has been aggressively battling music downloading 
on its own turf. In the same ruling, the Copyright Board imposed a per-unit 
fee of $15 to $25 on digital music players such as Apple iPods and MP3 
players but declined to extend the fee to computer hard drives. The fees 
are used to compensate musicians and songwriters. (CNet News.com 12 Dec 2003)
http://news.com.com/2100-1025_3-5121479.html?tag=nefd_top

OVER-RELIANCE ON POWERPOINT LEADS TO SIMPLISTIC THINKING
NASA's Columbia Accident Investigation Board has fingered the agency's 
over-reliance on Microsoft PowerPoint presentations as one of the elements 
leading to last February's shuttle disaster. The Board's report notes that 
NASA engineers tasked with assessing possible wing damage during the 
mission presented their findings in a confusing PowerPoint slide so crammed 
with bulleted items that it was almost impossible to analyze. "It is easy 
to understand how a senior manager might read this PowerPoint slide and not 
realize that it addresses a life-threatening situation," says the report. 
NASA's findings are echoed in a pamphlet titled "The Cognitive Style of 
PowerPoint," authored by information presentation theorist Edward Tufte, 
who says the software forces users to contort data beyond reasonable 
comprehension. Because only about 40 words fit on each slide, a viewer can 
zip through a series of slides quickly, spending barely 8 seconds on each 
one. And the format encourages bulleted lists -- a "faux analytical" 
technique that sidesteps the presenter's responsibility to link the 
information together in a cohesive argument, according to Tufte, who 
concludes that ultimately, PowerPoint software oozes "an attitude of 
commercialism that turns everything into a sales pitch." (New York Times 14 
Dec 2003)
http://partners.nytimes.com/2003/12/14/magazine/14POWER.html

TOSHIBA TOUTS WORLD'S TINIEST HARD DRIVES
Toshiba has developed a nickel-sized hard disk drive that's believed to be 
the world's smallest, and is capable of storing 2 or 3 gigabytes of 
information. A 2-gigabyte drive can store about 30 hours of music, 
according to a company spokeswoman. The 0.85-inch diameter drives will find 
their way into mobile phones and other portable gadgets, used for storing 
music and video clips. (AP 15 Dec 2003)
http://apnews.excite.com/article/20031215/D7VEKD080.html

CREDIT CARDS DO THE WAVE
MasterCard and American Express have been testing "contactless" versions of 
their credit cards that use an embedded RFID chip rather than a magnetic 
strip to store financial data. The cards can simply be waved in front of a 
reader to complete the purchase. "In some instances it's faster than cash. 
You're eliminating the fumble factor," says a MasterCard VP. The company 
plans to roll out its PayPass system next year, beginning in fast food 
joints and other venues where customers tend to be in a hurry. Forrester 
Research predicts it will take several years for the contactless cards to 
go mainstream, citing consumers' security concerns and unfamiliarity with 
the technology as impediments to change. (AP/Wired.com 14 Dec 2003)
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,61603,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_7

FASTAP KEYPAD KEEPS FINGERS FLYING
While teenagers seem to catch on to new communications channels at the 
speed of light, older folks generally take much longer to adapt and adopt. 
Part of the problem is physical, says Fortune columnist David Kirkpatrick, 
who complains that the cumbersome keypad on most cell phones is a major 
obstacle to adults interested in text messaging. Enter the Fastap keypad -- 
the brainchild of David Levy, an inventor who spent five years doing 
ergonomic work at Apple. His cell phone keypad features tiny raised 
surfaces around each numeral that represent letters of the alphabet. The 
concept is surprisingly simple and intuitive -- Levy says users can reach 
30 words a minute with a little practice. Panasonic has taken the plunge 
and produced the world's first Fastap phone, which is being tested by more 
than a dozen carriers around the world. "It's a fabulous technology, 
elegantly simple and intuitive for users. It still looks like a phone when 
you're finished integrating it into the devices. As a consequence, it 
should be picked up quite quickly by the manufacturers," says John Windolf, 
who's in charge of evaluating new technologies for the Cellular 
Telecommunications Industry Association. (Fortune 11 Dec 2003)
http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/ptech/12/11/fortune.ff.telephone.keyboard/index.html

*****

FLASH CARD
      "One important key to success is self-confidence. An important key to 
self-confidence is preparation." (Arthur Ashe)

 MACLEISH, ARCHIBALD
HONORARY SUBSCRIBER: ARCHIBALD MACLEISH
      Today's Honorary Subscriber is the poet Archibald MacLeish, who 
served under President Franklin D. Roosevelt as the Librarian of Congress 
from 1939 until 1944.
      MacLeish was a man of many accomplishments: not only as a poet and 
librarian, but also a playwright, lawyer, and college professor. His 
achievements include three Pulitzer prizes, and service as the assistant 
secretary of state.
      Born in Glencoe, Illinois in 1892, MacLeish attended the Hotchkiss 
School and then earned a BA from Yale in 1915. He next went to Harvard Law 
School, where he interrupted his education to serve as an ambulance driver 
and artillery officer with the U.S. Army in France, and saw action in the 
second Battle of the Marne. After the war, he returned to Harvard and 
finished law school, and then taught Constitutional Law at Harvard before 
practicing law in Boston.
      While still a law student, he married Ada Hitchcock, a singer. In 
1923, despite being married and having two young children, he abandoned the 
law and moved his family to France, where he began his career as a poet, 
and his wife found work as a concert soprano. There he associated with the 
British and American expatriate writers living there in the 1920s, 
especially T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, who greatly influenced the style and 
content of his early poems.
      He returned to America in 1928 and went to work as an editor at 
Fortune magazine. Both the poetry and the prose he wrote in the early 1930s 
expressed strong, and sometimes controversial, support for Roosevelt's 
social legislation, so much so that he was commonly referred to as "The 
Poet Laureate of the New Deal." In 1938 he was appointed the first curator 
of Harvard's Nieman Foundation of Journalism, and a year later he became 
Librarian of Congress. In the five years of his tenure as librarian he 
transformed the institution into a modern library. In 1949 he became 
Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard, retiring in 1962, 
but continuing to write and publish well into his senior years. MacLeish's 
verse drama "J.B." (based on the biblical story of Job) was performed on 
Broadway in 1958 and won the 1959 Pulitzer Prize for drama.
      Although concern for liberal democracy figured in much of his work, 
critics generally believe his most memorable lyrics deal with private 
concerns. A memorable quote from his frequently anthologized poem "Ars 
Poetica" shows MacLeish's deep respect for the poet's work: "A poem should 
not mean / But be."

See 
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0395083532/newsscancom/ref=nosim 
for MacLeish's drama "J.B." -- or look for it in your favorite library. (We 
donate all revenue from our book recommendations to adult literacy programs.)

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