NewsScan Daily, 18 March 2004 ("Above The Fold")

NewsScan Daily, 18 March 2004 ("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"  
       Telecom Revolution?
       Wireless Flat-Panel TV
       Anti-Spam Law Goes Splat
       Australian Police in Racist E-Mail Controversy
       Sony to Offer Personal Radio to Mobile Phones
       Myth of the 'Exploding $20 Bill'

FEATURES        
       Flash Card  
       Worth Thinking About: Designer Medicine

TELECOM REVOLUTION?
     Skype, a California start-up created by Niklas Zennstrom and Janus
Friis (founders of the Internet file-swapping service Kazaa), is developing
software to make it possible for free phone calls to be made anywhere in the
world. Swedish-born Zennstrom and Friis, a citizen of Finland, decided to
adapt peer-to-peer technology to telecommunications: "We sat down and we had
talked about this for a long time. Where can we use this technology to solve
some real problems and take advantage of the competitive advantages of
disruptive technology? With peer-to-peer, whether we have 1 million or 10
million or 100 million users, our cost is pretty much the same. We can
provide it for free, because we don't have any costs for it." Venture
capitalist Timothy Draper says, "This is a major phenomenon that's going to
spread throughout the world," and he predicts that Skype will have "a really
tremendous business." Independent telecom analyst Daniel Berning says that
"the basic technology that they're applying, that's the way phones will work
in the future." (San Jose Mercury News 18 Mar 2004)
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/8215877.htm

WIRELESS FLAT-PANEL TV
     Sharp is introducing the world's first wireless flat-panel television,
a $1600 set that can be carried anywhere in your house as you move from room
to room. But one reviewer notes: "Sharp's LC-15L1U is a natural purchase
only for a unique demographic group: those with big video budgets but
smallish apartments. For everyone else, the new Aquos is best considered a
technology demonstration, like a concept car." The reviewer decides that
though the Aquos may be groundbreaking, innovative and wireless, "it's also
somewhat impractical." (New York Times 18 Mar 2004)
http://partners.nytimes.com/2004/03/18/technology/circuits/18stat.html

ANTI-SPAM LAW GOES SPLAT
     A new survey from the Pew Internet & American Life organization reports
the following findings: 63% of e-mail users who responded to the survey
think that spam has made them less trusting of e-mail as a communications
tool, and 77% think that spam makes being online "unpleasant and annoying."
[The respondents obviously don't get NewsScan Daily.] A spokesperson for
Senator Ron Wyden (D, OR), who co-sponsored the federal "Can-Spam Act,"
says: "It's premature to judge the effectiveness of the Can-Spam Act 77 days
after it becomes effective. It's not time to write Can-Spam's obituary."
Doug Peckover of Privacy Inc. suspects that the people spam is driving away
are probably the "fringe" Internet users, who "don't depend on it for
business, and for them, their pain threshold is a lot lower than for you and
me. These are the folks who are saying, 'You know, it's not worth it
anymore.'" (Washington Post 17 Mar 2004)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A2279-2004Mar17.html

AUSTRALIAN POLICE IN RACIST E-MAIL CONTROVERSY
     The New South Wales ombudsman will help police decide how to discipline
an officer who sent a racist email to his colleagues. The contents of the
email, found in the in-boxes of offices in four regional stations including
Broken Hill and Dubbo, were described as filthy and disgusting by Deputy
Commissioner David Madden at the time of its discovery. Thirty-five officers
received the e-mail but the message is thought to have originated from a
single source, who has been identified as an officer from Bourke in central
northern NSW. The discovery of the e-mail came just two weeks after an
alleged riot in the inner-Sydney suburb of Redfern, in which 36 officers
were injured. The riot was in response to the death of an Aboriginal
teenager. (The Australian 17 Mar 2004)
http://australianit.news.com.au/articles/0,7204,8991718%5E15306%5E%5Enbv%5E,
00.html (Rec'd from John Lamp, Deakin University)

SONY TO OFFER PERSONAL RADIO TO MOBILE PHONES
     Sony is introducing the first "personalized radio" service to mobile
phones, which consumers can tailor to their own tastes. The company says it
is talking with mobile telecom operators across Europe to bring personal
radio to handset users, and will be starting the service next month with the
Finnish arm of TeliaSonera. In trials earlier this year, the streaming music
service appealed to older, professional users, because it enabled them to
create their own music channel, and Sony executive Robert Ashcroft explains:
"These people don't tune into today's radio channels which are aimed at a
young audience. Our service allows them to discover their own music." He
adds: "There's been a sea change in the industry. All labels have been
willing to discuss licensing their catalogue to as many credible platforms
as possible. And Sony is a very credible platform."
(Reuters/USA Today 17 Mar 2004)
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/wireless/phones/2004-03-17-sony-phone-radio_x.h
tm

MYTH OF THE 'EXPLODING $20 BILL'
     One Web site recently published an "expose" about the supposed presence
of an RFID chip placed behind Andrew Jackson's right eye on the new $20
bill, and the source of the rumor has been quoted internationally; however,
AIM, a global trade association, says the expose is bogus: "Even a casual
examination of a $20 bill will reveal that there is no hidden tag.  Holding
the bill up to a bright light would expose any RFID chip or antenna." For
reliable information on RFID, see http://www.rfid.org. For the AIM calendar
of events see http://www.aimglobal.org/calendar/

*****  

FLASH CARD      
     "At bottom, every man knows perfectly well that he is a unique being,
only once on this earth; and by no extraordinary chance will such a
marvelously picturesque piece of diversity in unity as he is, ever be put
together a second time." (Friedrich Nietzsche)

 WORTH THINKING ABOUT: DESIGNER MEDICINE
     Sheila M. Rothman and David J. Rothman at Columbia University (where
she is a professor of public health and he is professor of social medicine
and history) are raising questions about modern biology's bold attempt to
re-engineer the human body:
     "For the past 150 years, the biological sciences have been at war with
nature, determined to penetrate its secrets in order to perfect it.
Investigators are eager to intervene, tamper, modify, and revise the forms
and substance of animal life and human life. They may share a grudging
respect or even wholesale admiration for the complexity of a biological
system or a particular organism, but their readiness to improve on it is not
inhibited. The proposition that the natural represents what can be or should
be is altogether alien. No matter how intricate the existing design, it may
still be enhanced, even if the result might be unusual or unimagined.
Biology has no fixed boundaries, only opportunities.
     "When confronting resistance from a secular or religious spokesmen,
some biologists attempt to deflect criticism by conflating scientific
methods with scientific goals. Since their methods are objective and
neutral, their findings should be considered objective and neutral. Others
emphasize the tangible benefits of the research, offering many examples of
better and longer living through biology. To be sure, critics challenge
their contentions, rejecting the idea of scientific neutrality or the
premise that a longer life is a better life. Although their negativity may
appear to represent a post-atomic age or post-genomic era response to
science, its roots are much deeper. In 1818, Mary Shelley was asking whether
Dr. Frankenstein ought to be plundering the graveyards of body parts in
order to try to create a living being, and in 1896, H. G. Wells wondered
whether Dr. Moreau ought to be transplanting body parts between animals so
as to construct a more perfect beast. But however persistent the hostility,
modern biology has not altered its fundamental approach to nature.
     "Giving the 'natural' a privileged position within biology made little
sense because the natural was nothing more than the result of a mutation
that provided one animal with an advantage in survival over another. By
definition, this mutation was accidental in origin even as it became the
standard for the species; change was driven by chance. Why, then, should
biologists give deference to the outcome of chance? Why not encourage
science itself to create the variation? Surely human forethought and design
were no less desirable than accident in altering nature."
                              ***
See 
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0679439803/newsscancom/ref=nos
im for "The Pursuit Of Perfection: The Promise and Perils of Medical
Enhancement" by Sheilah Rothman and David Rothman -- or look for it in your
favorite library. (We donate all revenue from our book recommendations 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 2004. NewsScan Daily (R) is a publication of NewsScan Inc.
***********************************************************