NewsScan Daily, 20 January 2004 ("Above The Fold")

NewsScan Daily, 20 January 2004 ("Above The Fold")
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"ABOVE THE FOLD"
       Anti-Spam Law Largely Ignored
       The Hispanic Market and the Web
       Tracking Whereabouts of Cellphone Users
       New Computer Worm: Bagle-A
       Recognition for Vanderbilt's Hoffman, Novak

FEATURES
       Flash Card
       Worth Thinking About: The Fallacy of the Growing Edge

ANTI-SPAM LAW LARGELY IGNORED
     The new federal anti-spam law ("Can Spam") doesn't seem to being
changing the practices of the largest spammers: most of the largest bulk
e-mailers are continuing to send illegal mass mailings for porn,
get-rich-quick schemes and miracle drugs. The spam-filtering company
Brightmail says that about 58% of e-mail monitored in January has been spam,
in defiance of the new law, which took effect at the beginning of this
month. The only real impact of the law seems to have been felt by small
businesses, many of which have decided to discontinue e-mail marketing. One
business, calculating that it would cost $100,000 a year in personnel and
technology to make its e-mail system comply with the law, decided to switch
its advertising campaigns to Microsoft MSN and Yahoo. (USA Today 20 Jan
2004) http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/techpolicy/2004-01-20-spam_x.htm

THE HISPANIC MARKET AND THE WEB
     Although there are more Spanish-speaking users of the Internet in the
U.S. than in some Spanish-speaking countries, none of the three top online
travel agencies (Expedia, Orbitz, Travelocity) has Spanish-language
capabilities on its U.S. site. Richard Israel, v.p. of Hispanic Solutions
for comScore Networks, predicts: "Whoever is first out of the big three has
an opportunity to be the dominant player in the Hispanic market. It's a
demographic of 12-1/2 million individuals. Why wouldn't they go after it?
Honestly, I'm still perplexed why there isn't more activity." (Los Angeles
Times 18 Jan 2004
http://www.latimes.com/technology/la-tr-internet18jan18,0,1326926.story?coll
=la-headlines-technology

TRACKING WHEREABOUTS OF CELLPHONE USERS
     Bell Labs has developed a way of letting cellphone users decide who
they'll let track their whereabouts by using location-based services. Users
will be able to specify what location information is shared, when, with
whom, how and under what circumstances. Bell Labs calls this a
"rules-driven" approach to programming. Rick Hull, the company's director of
Network Data and Services Research, explains what it's all about: "You may
have a power user who's very concerned about being able to show his or her
location to different types of customers and family. There may be notions
about important customers and less important customers, breaking deals.
Maybe for his wife he wants to give very accurate information about his
location, but for someone else only wants to give his location within 15
miles. Maybe he doesn't want one customer to know that he's visiting another
customer's site." (AP/Washington Post 19 Jan 2004)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A28456-2004Jan19.html

NEW COMPUTER WORM: BAGLE-A
     A new computer worm called Bagle-A carries an expiration date, giving
security experts concern that it might be followed by more robust versions
of the now-buggy program. Daniel Zatz, security director for Computer
Associates Australia, says, "One of our biggest concern is that if we look
back a year ago at the Sobig variants, they all had drop-dead dates, and
every time one hit that drop dead date a new variant came out; a new and
improved variant of it." Bagle-A arrives in e-mail inboxes as a message
containing text suggesting the e-mail may be from a system administrator, as
well as an executable attachment. PC users should not open the attachment;
if they suspect their computers may be infected with the virus, they should
look for a file called bbeagle.exe in their Windows System directory. The
file disguises itself under the Microsoft calculator icon. (CNet/New York
Times 20 Jan 2004)
http://www.nytimes.com/cnet/CNET_2100-7349_3-5143115.html

RECOGNITION FOR VANDERBILT'S HOFFMAN, NOVAK
     The Web site ISI Essential Science Indicators says that the Internet
research of Vanderbilt management professors Donna Hoffman and Thomas Novak
received the highest percentage increase last year in academic citations for
business and economics. Hoffman and Novak, co-founders of Vanderbilt's e-Lab
(the nation's first center for the study of the Internet), are co-directors
of the Vanderbilt University's Sloan Center for Internet Retailing. (AP/The
Tennessean 19 Jan 2004)
http://tennessean.com/business/movers/archives/04/01/45707449.shtml?Element_
ID=45707449

*****

FLASH CARD 
     "I am happy to engage in discussion with those who accept that
technology and affluence are a net plus, but who worry about their troubling
side effects. Spare me, however, the sensitive souls who deplore
technological advance and economic growth over their cell phones on their
way to the airport." (Charles Murray)

WORTH THINKING ABOUT: FALLACY OF THE GROWING EDGE
     Here's one of the lessons learned by science guru Isaac Asimov:
     "When I was a freshly appointed instructor, I met a certain eminent
historian of science. At the time I could only regard him with tolerant
condescension. I was sorry for a man who, it seemed to me, was forced to
hover about the edges of science. He was compelled to shiver endlessly in
the outskirts, getting only feeble warmth from the distant sun of
science-in-progress; while I, just beginning my research, was bathed in the
heady liquid heat at the very center of the glow.
     "In a lifetime of being wrong at many a point, I was never more wrong.
It was I, not he, who was wandering in the periphery. It was he, not I, who
lived in the blaze. I had fallen victim to the fallacy of the 'growing
edge'; the belief that only the very frontier of scientific advance counted;
that everything that had been left behind by that advance was faded and
dead. But is that true? Because a tree in spring buds and come greenly into
leaf, are those leaves therefore the tree? If the newborn twigs and their
leaves were all that existed, they would form a vague halo of green
suspended in mid-air, but surely that s not the tree. The leaves, by
themselves, are no more than trivial fluttering decoration. It is the trunk
and limbs that give the tree its grandeur and the leafs themselves their
meaning.
     "There is not a discovery in science, however revolutionary, however
sparkling with insight, that does not arise out of what went before. 'If I
have seen further than other men,' said Isaac Newton, 'it is because I have
stood on the shoulders of giants.' And to learn that which goes before does
not detract from the beauty of a scientific discovery but, rather, adds to
it; just as the gradual unfolding of a flower, as seen by time-lapse
photography, is more wonderful than the mature flower itself, caught in
stasis."
 
See 
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B00005VAUX/newsscancom/ref=nos
im for Isaac Asimov's "Adding a Dimension: Seventeen Essays on the History
of Science"  -- or look for it in your favorite library. (We donate all
revenue from our book or other recommendations to literacy action programs.)

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