NewsScan Daily, 1 April 2004 ("Above The Fold")

NewsScan Daily, 1 April 2004 ("Above The Fold")
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"ABOVE THE FOLD"
        Google Ups the Ante with E-Mail Service
        Cable TV Music Channel Expands to PCs
        Cell Phone Firms Hope to Cash in on Moblogs
        In Defense of Data Mining
        Kazaa Owner Welcomes Survey Findings

FEATURES
        Flash Card
        Worth Thinking About: Nobel Honors

GOOGLE UPS THE ANTE WITH E-MAIL SERVICE
      Google is launching a new e-mail service dubbed Gmail, which it says 
will offer users better access to searching their e-mail as well as a large 
amount of free storage capacity. The move raises the stakes with 
competitors Yahoo and MSN, which have long provided e-mail services but as 
a tiered product that provided only minimal storage at the free level while 
charging fees to users who wanted more capacity. Google plans to support 
Gmail through advertising rather than fees. (New York Times 1 Apr 2004)
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/01/technology/01google.html

CABLE TV MUSIC CHANNEL EXPANDS TO PCs
      Music Choice, a TV network that pipes nonstop commercial-free music 
to cable TV and DirecTV customers, is extending its music service to PCs, 
allowing cable operators to incorporate the broadband offering in their Web 
sites. "This is a potentially powerful tool for the cable companies to 
fight churn," says Gartner G2 analyst Laura Behrens. "The notion that you 
can offer this music service piece as something customers can recognize as 
the same thing through their TVs and broadband is appealing." Music Choice 
says about 60% of the households eligible to receive its service actually 
use it, averaging about 17 hours a week of listening. "But we're stuck in 
the rooms where there are cable boxes, such as the living room or the 
parents' rooms. Now we want to expand our reach into the rest of the 
house," says Music Choice president and CEO David Del Beccaro. Customers 
will be able to select among 52 channels of streamed music or download 
songs to their PCs through Music Choice's non-exclusive alliance with 
Napster 2.0. Del Beccaro says the broadband service is a "stepping stone" 
to the next phase, when Music Choice hopes to offer its service to any home 
or mobile device that can be connected to a computer network, such as MP3 
players. "That's where Music Choice is headed -- where we can feed content, 
even wirelessly, to all of these devices." (AP/Washington Post 1 Apr 2004)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A41600-2004Apr1.html?nav=headlines

CELL PHONE FIRMS HOPE TO CASH IN ON MOBLOGS
      Moblogs -- mobile Web logs of cell-phone photos snapped on the go -- 
are the next step in the evolution toward ever-more personalized Web sites, 
and cell phone makers and carriers are looking for ways to capitalize on 
the trend. "We're definitely looking at this," says an AT&T Wireless 
spokesman. "You could take a picture [with a cell phone camera] and shoot 
it over to the laptop, but that does me no good because it doesn't use the 
network. The same way people don't think twice about making a phone call, 
you want to get them comfortable with how this is done and how much it's 
going to cost." Meanwhile, handset makers are jumping on the bandwagon, too 
-- Nokia last month announced it would launch a site called Lifeblog that 
will allow subscribers to archive their cell phone photos in chronological 
order, augmented text, video and audio, if desired. "We're definitely 
watching (moblogs) and watching what people are doing, and trying to figure 
out how we're going to fit in," says a Nokia spokesman. According to a 
study by InfoTrends Research Group, 150 million camera-equipped cell phones 
will be sold this year -- about one-fourth of all cell phones sold. (CNet 
News.com 1 Apr 2004)
http://news.com.com/2100-1025-5182709.html

IN DEFENSE OF DATA MINING
      Heather MacDonald of the Manhattan Institute is critical of the new 
"zealots" who obstruct any use of computer technology to fight terrorism: 
"The privacy advocates -- who range from liberal groups focused on 
electronic privacy, such as the Electronic Privacy Information Center, to 
traditional conservative libertarians, such as Americans for Tax Reform -- 
are fixated on a technique called 'data mining.' By now, however, they have 
killed enough different programs that their operating principle can only be 
formulated as this: No use of computer data or technology anywhere at any 
time for national defense, if there's the slightest possibility that a 
rogue use of that technology will offend someone's sense of privacy. They 
are pushing intelligence agencies back to a pre-9/11 mentality, when the 
mere potential for a privacy or civil liberties controversy trumped 
security concerns." (Wall Street Journal 1 Apr 2004)
http://tinyurl.com/2lrlq (sub req'd)

KAZAA OWNER WELCOMES SURVEY FINDINGS
      Sharman Networks, owner of the Kazaa peer-to-peer software, has been 
quick to seize on the findings of a survey released in the U.S. on Monday 
which concluded that downloading music had no effect on album sales. In a 
media release issued last evening, Sharman chief executive Nicola Hemming 
said "We welcome sound research into the developing peer-to-peer industry 
and this study appears to have covered some interesting ground. The 
findings certainly support the vision we've always held for Kazaa and 
crystallizes our vision for the future of content distribution." The 2002 
study was conducted jointly by researchers from Harvard Business School and 
the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and used data from 
file-sharing services with 1.75 million downloads being studied over 17 
weeks in autumn 2002. "Consider the possibilities if the record industry 
actually cooperated with companies like us instead of fighting," Ms. 
Hemming said. "We've offered content providers the opportunity to work with 
peer-to-peer customers for nearly two years, yet the record industry 
continues its narrow-minded strategy of litigation and legislation. (The 
Age, 31 March 2004, rec'd from John Lamp, Deakin University)
http://theage.com.au/articles/2004/03/31/1080544527334.html

*****

FLASH CARD
      "Competitions are for horse, not artist" (Béla Bartók)

WORTH THINKING ABOUT: NOBEL HONORS
      In her biography of scientist Rosalind Franklin, Brenda Maddox makes 
this interesting aside about the Nobel Prize as she deals in with the 
lingering controversy over Franklin's role in the discovery of the Double 
Helix structure of DNA.
      "Founded in 1901 the Nobel prize is the world's most coveted 
intellectual award, but it is also arbitrary, inherently unfair and 
possibly damaging. Many who deserved it have not got it; many who didn't, 
have. The literature prize offers glaring examples: Thomas Mann, Leo 
Tolstoy and James Joyce were passed over, Somerset Maugham and Pearl Buck 
honoured. In science the effect is particularly baleful, because science is 
collegial. As research becomes progressively more expensive, moreover, 
scientific discoveries are harder to attribute to particular people. The 
Nobel prize, by canonizing individuals, disguises the truth that they are 
all, in Newton's famous phrase, standing 'on giants' shoulders' and on each 
other's as well.
      "The list of deserving scientists who never got the summons to 
Stockholm is long, glittering and bitter, and contains a number of women: 
the physicist Lise Meitner and the Cambridge astronomer Jocelyn Bell. 
Oswald Avery, who discovered that DNA was the genetic material, was 
deprived of the prize by the persistent and unfair criticism of his 
Rockefeller colleague Alfred Mirsky. In the view of Erwin Chargaff, whose 
finding of the base pairs of DNA went uncelebrated, 'Avery should have 
gotten two Nobel prizes for his discovery.' ...
      "Such omissions and exclusions would not matter except that the Nobel 
prize changes lives, and divides colleague from colleague by touching the 
winners with a magic of which the generous prize money is only part."
                           ***
See 
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0060184078/newsscancom/ref=nosim 
for the Brenda Maddox biography "Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA" 
-- or look for it in your favorite library. (We donate all revenue from our 
book recommendations to adult literacy programs.)

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