NewsScan Daily, 27 April 2004 ("Above The Fold")

NewsScan Daily, 27 April 2004 ("Above The Fold")
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"ABOVE THE FOLD"
        Bush's Agenda for High-Speed Internet Access
        The Web Messaging Wars
        CNet Targets Independent Musicians with New Web Site
        IBM and Stanford Put a New Spin on Electronics

FEATURES
        Flash Card
        Worth Thinking About: The Rewriting of History

BUSH'S AGENDA FOR HIGH-SPEED INTERNET ACCESS
      Outlining a high-tech agenda, President Bush has announced a proposal 
to make broadband Internet access more affordable and provide universal 
broadband access to the Internet by 2007. The U.S. Senate is still debating 
whether to renew or make permanent a ban that bars state and local 
governments from imposing taxes on Internet access. About 13.7 million 
consumers receive their service from cable companies (at $40 or more a 
month) and 7.7 million get broadband from telephone carriers via digital 
subscriber lines (DSL) for about $30 a month. (Reuters/USA Today 26 Apr 2004)
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/techpolicy/2004-04-26-broadband-campaign-promise_x.htm

THE WEB MESSAGING WARS
      Yahoo's new Messenger software, available now in a beta test, 
reconfigures the main window so that while you remain in Instant Messenger 
(IM) you can visit other Yahoo services such as news, stocks and calendar. 
The new software also adds such free features as games, songs, and 
buddy-lists that allow friends or coworkers to search the Web and share the 
results. (A recent survey by the Pew Internet and American Life Project 
found that 29% of full-time workers use IM at work, and a Harris 
Interactive study done last year reported that one in five workplace IM 
users populated at least 705 of their IM lists with personal as opposed to 
business contacts.) Needless to say, Yahoo is joined by competitors AOL, 
Google, and Microsoft in the pursuit of strategies aimed at leveraging IM 
use to expand customer services. MSN product manager Brooke Richardson 
says, "IM is such a social experience. We think of these activities and 
doing things together as a natural extension of messaging." (AP/San Jose 
Mercury News 26 Apr 2004)
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/8524640.htm

CNET TARGETS INDEPENDENT MUSICIANS WITH NEW WEB SITE
      CNet Networks launched a Web site on Monday that will allow 
independent bands to post their music, and fans to browse the offerings and 
download what they like. The move follows CNet's purchase of MP3.com from 
Vivendi Universal last December. Before the sale, MP3.com had been a 
popular hangout for independent artists interested in sharing their musical 
creations, and CNet is hoping many of those will migrate over to its new 
music.download.com site. It's facing competition, however, from 
Garageband.com, which also provides a venue for independent musicians and 
is hoping many of them will choose to go with its site instead. CNet also 
announced plans to relaunch the MP3.com site as a digital music information 
resource and has debuted a site for downloadable games for computers and 
handheld devices. The company says it plans to add more types of content 
later this year. "Our goal is to be the primary destination for free, legal 
downloadable content," says CNet exec Scott Arpajian. "We're very confident 
that the ad model will support the business." (Wall Street Journal 26 Apr 
2004):
http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB108299472415993551,00.html

IBM AND STANFORD PUT A NEW SPIN ON ELECTRONICS
      IBM and Stanford University are launching a joint research program 
geared toward the study of spintronics, an esoteric field that focuses on 
using magnetic fields to manipulate electronic spin into one of two states 
called up and down. The ultimate goal will be to use that technology in 
designing electronics based on how electrons spin instead of how they 
transmit electrical charges. These spintronics applications could, in 
theory, lead to far smaller devices with much lower power requirements and 
fewer problems with heat buildup. The Spintronic Science and Applications 
Center underscores IBM's desire to work with academia in its future 
research endeavors. "It's something we need to do more of since support for 
basic physical science research at IBM has shrunk," says Stuart Parkin, the 
leader of the spintronics group at IBM's Almaden Research Center. (New York 
Times 26 Apr 2004)
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/26/technology/26ibm.html

*****

FLASH CARD
      "The very ink with which all history is written is merely fluid 
prejudice."  (Following the Equator)

WORTH THINKING ABOUT: THE REWRITING OF HISTORY
      Revisionist history has become a hot war zone for battling factions 
of today's education historians.
      "To understand the act of writing history we must also recognize, as 
Thucydides did twenty-five hundred years ago, that the past is necessarily 
embedded in the present human condition. Frederick Jackson Turner, whose 
'Frontier Thesis' in American history made him famous, understood that to 
comprehend the United States on the eve of World War I 'demands that we 
should rework our history from the new points of view afforded by the 
present.' Carl Becker, a much revered historian of the same generation, 
spoke of the humility that all scholars ought to have in their search for 
the most convincing re-creation of the past: 'In the history of history a 
myth is a once valid but now discarded version of the human story, as our 
now valid versions will in due course be relegated to the category of 
discarded myths.' England's Lord Christopher Hill echoes this: 'History has 
to be rewritten in every generation because, although the past does not 
change, the present does; each generation asks new questions of the past, 
and finds new areas of sympathy as it re-lives different aspects of the 
experiences of its predecessors.'"
                               ***
See 
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0679767509/newsscancom/ref=nosim 
for "History on Trial: Culture Wars and the Teaching of the Past," by 
Charlotte Crabtree, Ross Dunn, and Gary Nash -- or look for it in your 
favorite library. (We donate all revenue from our book recommendations to 
adult literacy programs.)

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