NewsScan Daily, 15 July 2004 ("Above The Fold")

NewsScan Daily, 15 July 2004 ("Above The Fold")
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"ABOVE THE FOLD"  
       Linked: The AOL, MSN, & Yahoo Messaging Systems
       This Land is WiMax Land
       Got You Under My Skin: RFID Used To Tag Employees
       Broadband Over Power Lines
       Gov. Removes Part of S. Dakota Library Site

FEATURES           
       Flash Card
       Worth Thinking About: Symbiosis and Beatrix Potter

LINKED: THE AOL, MSN, & YAHOO MESSAGING SYSTEMS
     The separate messaging services offered by AOL, MSN, and Yahoo are
being linked so that corporate computer users can communicate with one
another no matter which systems they use. Companies will have to license new
Microsoft network software that will serve as the hub connecting the three
messaging systems. Industry analyst Nate Root of Forrester Research says:
"This is a very significant announcement. The value here is for
corporations. Corporations will now have the ability to span the instant
messaging landscape." But he notes that the arrangement does not reach "the
holy grail of instant messaging, which is to allow anybody on any network to
send a message to anybody on any other network." The three companies have no
plans at this time to allow users outside the workplace to communicate with
one another over different instant message systems. (Washington Post 14 Jul
2004)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A50182-2004Jul14.html

THIS LAND IS WIMAX LAND
     Improved wireless technology has allowed Internet providers across the
U.S. to offer inexpensive broadband services to remote areas via antennas on
hilltops, barns and homes -- usually by feeding off a fixed broadband line
to a central antenna site or base station. The technology standard called
WiMax is expected to expand wireless broadband to most of rural America.
Unlike Wi-Fi, which covers just a 300-foot radius, WiMax can transmit data
as far as 30 miles and lets carriers mix equipment from different vendors.
By 2007, chips will be common in laptops and handhelds, allowing connections
anywhere reached by an antenna. "WiMax is going to push broadband usage to
rural areas and developing countries," says Pyramid Research analyst Anshu
Dua.
(USA Today 14 Jul 2004)
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2004-07-14-wireless_x.htm

GOT YOU UNDER MY SKIN: RFID USED TO TAG EMPLOYEES
     RFID tags have been implanted under the skin of Mexico's top federal
prosecutors and investigators to give them quick access to restricted areas
inside a new federal anti-crime information center. The chips also could
provide more certainty about who accessed sensitive data at any given time.
(In the past, the biggest security problem for Mexican law enforcement has
been corruption by officials themselves.) The microchip tags lie dormant
under the skin until read by an electromagnetic scanner, which uses a
technology known as radio frequency identification (RFID) that's now
commonly used for inventory control. (San Jose Mercury News 14 Jul 2004)
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/9154114.htm

BROADBAND OVER POWER LINES
     AT&T and Pacific Gas and Electric are testing a plan to send broadband
communications over power lines as an alternative to cable and DSL for
delivering high-speed Internet access. The test will involve about 100
residents in Menlo Park, California, where the power grid is used to feed 13
megabits-per-second Internet access to Wi-Fi repeaters on street lampposts.
Homes then receive up to 3mbps of wireless Net access. Federal
Communications Commission Chairman Michael Powell says that broadband over
power line (BPL) technology makes it "theoretically possible to reach every
power outlet in America with a broadband connection." (CNET 14 Jul 2004)
http://news.com.com/AT%26%2338%3BT+plugs+into+power+lines+for+high-speed+Net
/2100-1034_3-5269512.html?tag=nefd.top

GOV. REMOVES PART OF S. DAKOTA LIBRARY SITE
     South Dakota Governor Mike Rounds has had the teen section of the State
Library's Web site shut down because it provided links to material he
doesn't believe young people should see. The links to which he found
objection included one to a Planned Parenthood site and one to Columbia
University's Go Ask Alice! Rounds said: "As a parent, I would be very
disturbed to have my children connecting to any of these Web sites." His
position is that state government should not feature links to any advocacy
groups and that removal of the links isn't censorship because users can
still go directly to those organizations' sites. (AP/13 Jul 2004)
http://apnews.excite.com/article/20040713/D83Q3ON81.html

*****

FLASH CARD
     "A thing long expected takes the form of the unexpected when at last it
comes." (Mark Twain)

WORTH THINKING ABOUT: SYMBIOSIS AND BEATRIX POTTER
     In his book on symbiosis, biologist Tom Wakefield comments on the
aborted scientific career of famous children's author Beatrix Potter:
     "Had Beatrix Potter been allowed to follow her vocation, Peter Rabbit
and Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle might never have been born. Instead of writing and
illustrating stories loved by children all over the globe, she would have
been writing groundbreaking articles for scientific journals. Beatrix's
ambitions were thwarted not only because she was a young woman attempting to
contribute to a profession almost entirely dominated by Victorian men, but
also because she was a symbiologist -- a proponent of the dissident theory
that some organisms were composed of not one but two different beings. Her
story has become a legend of youthful scientific inquiry stifled by
pomposity and prejudice, and of a heresy that was later vindicated.
     "Middle-class Victorian society was in awe of the apparent power and
moral superiority of the scientific world-view. Keen to make her own
contribution, Beatrix kept careful notes of everything she saw, and compared
them with what other naturalists had observed. During her teens, she also
made detailed studies with her microscope of various botanical specimens.
She quickly discovered that one of her favorite subjects of study, the
lichen, was the battleground of an increasingly heated scientific
controversy.
     "Lichens are the crusty green and gray covering of rocks and tree
trunks... On a walk along a rocky coastline you might see only a handful of
different wildflowers, but you could have walked past 80 or 90 different
lichen species. In 1869 the Swiss botanist Simon Schwendener startled the
scientific world with a 'dual hypothesis' for the taxonomy of lichens. He
proposed that all members of the group came into being via the liaison
between a fungus and an alga. Most biologists treated Schwendener's ideas
with contempt. They could not believe that even the most bizarre form of
parasitic relationship could lead to a permanent merger between two
organisms. 
     "All the studies she made of the fine details of lichens, algae, and
fungi drew Beatrix to share Schwendener's conclusion: lichens were made up
of two completely different kinds of organism. Today it is clear that the
only scenario more remarkable than the evolution of the lichen would be one
in which this joint organism had not evolved; the metabolisms of algae and
fungi complement each other perfectly. Neither Victorian prejudice nor the
marginalizing of her favorite life-forms by twentieth-century evolutionists
could prevent Beatrix's symbiotic manifesto from finally proving its
scientific worth. Nature may, as Darwin seemed to imply, be red in tooth and
claw, but it also, as Beatrix taught us, survives by being green-fingered."
     [See 
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0471399728/newsscancom/ref=nos
im for Tom Wakeford's "Liaisons Of Life: From Hornworts to Hippos, How the
Unassuming Microbe Has Driven Evolution" -- or look for them in your
favorite library. Note: We donate all revenue from our book recommendations
to adult literacy programs.]

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