NewsScan Daily, 10 September 2004 ("Above The Fold")

NewsScan Daily, 10 September 2004 ("Above The Fold")
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"ABOVE THE FOLD"  
       Chicago Plans New Surveillance Network
       Oracle and PeopleSoft: Let The Takeover Begin
       Newspapers Experiment With Internet Event Auctions
       Hard Drives on New Samsung Cell Phones
       Intel Outside

FEATURES           
       Flash Card
       Honorary Subscriber: Mary Elizabeth Lease

CHICAGO PLANS NEW SURVEILLANCE NETWORK
     Chicago mayor Richard Daley says his city's going to install a network
of more than 2,000 surveillance cameras to alert authorities to suspicious
behavior or emergency situations. Daley says, "Cameras are the equivalent of
hundreds of sets of eyes. They are the next best thing to having police
officers stationed at every potential trouble spot." Software would be used
to detect unusual activity, such as a bag being abandoned in a stairwell or
movement in an off-limits area. Daley dismisses privacy concerns, on the
grounds that cameras will be installed only in public places (where a police
officer would have a perfect right to check what's going on). (AP/USA Today
9 Sep 2004)
<http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/surveillance/2004-09-09-chicago-cams_x.ht
m>

ORACLE AND PEOPLESOFT: LET THE TAKEOVER BEGIN
     A federal judge in San Francisco has ruled that the Department of
Justice Department failed to show that Oracle's takeover designs on
PeopleSoft would harm competition and violate antitrust laws. Saying that
the Justice Department used a too-narrow definition of the market for
high-end human resources and payroll software, the judge added that there
would be enough remaining rivals after a merger to assure healthy
competition. The decision is a major victory of Oracle chief executive Larry
Ellison, whose decision to challenge the Justice Department in court was
seen by many analysts as an exercise in futility. (Washington Post 9 Sep
2004)
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A9718-2004Sep9.html>

NEWSPAPERS EXPERIMENT WITH INTERNET EVENT AUCTIONS
     To ward off competition for the online classified business from online
services such as Monster, eBay, Craigslist and others, traditional
newspapers have begun changing themselves from advertising vehicles into
online marketplaces. Consultant Peter Zollman says, "Overall, newspapers
have fared moderately well with classified revenue, but market share is
absolutely shrinking." Melinda Gipson, electronic media director at the
Newspaper Association of America, says that commerce-enabled classifieds
never really took off at newspapers because readers found it just as
convenient to use the phone to complete their purchases. So what newspapers
are exploring now is the creation of online event auctions. During the last
two years, using technology from CityXpress, more than 150 newspapers have
sold more than $46 million in online auctions lasting from eight to 10 days.
(DowJones/AP/San Jose Mercury News 9 Sep 2004)
<http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/9621927.htm>

HARD DRIVES ON NEW SAMSUNG CELL PHONES
     Samsung's new SPH-V5400 cell phone includes a built-in 1-inch,
1.5-gigabyte hard disk able to store about 15 times more data, music files,
and photos than conventional handsets. The phone will be available in South
Korea later this month and will be equipped with a mega-pixel camera,
camcorder, MP3 player, a high-resolution 2.2-inch display, a microphone and
dual speakers. (Los Angeles Times 9 Sep 2004)
<http://www.latimes.com/technology/ats-ap_technology14sep09,1,870668.story?c
oll=sns-ap-toptechnology>

INTEL OUTSIDE
     Intel chief technology officer Pat Gelsinger believes that a new
network should be built on top of the current Internet to put an end to such
problems as virus attacks and traffic surges. Noting that the current
network (now three decades old) was never meant to cope with the number of
users and amount of data traffic seen today, Gelsinger says that a smarter
overlay would watch what is happening online and make changes to help it
cope with potential problems; he notes that a prototype for this new type of
Internet already existsin the form of the Planet Lab project, which is
funded by Intel and made up of 429 network nodes in 181 sites -- connecting
150 universities and corporate research labs to each other, including
Princeton, the University of Cambridge, Hewlett-Packard, and AT&T. Gelsinger
adds: "If the net grows to 100 billion devices connected to it, our goal is
to have a piece of Intel inside in every one of those hundred billion." (BBC
MMIV 10 Sep 2004)
<http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3643902.stm>
 
*****

FLASH CARD
     "The things that we love tell us what we are." (St. Thomas Aquinas)

HONORARY SUBSCRIBER: MARY ELIZABETH LEASE
     Today's Honorary Subscriber is the American populist reformer Mary
Elizabeth Lease (1850-1933), whose powerful and colorful oratory made her a
prominent political figure during the Progressive era of U. S. history.
     Beginning in the late 1880s until her retirement from public life in
1918, Mary Lease took up a series of activist causes that included agrarian
reform, woman suffrage, Free Silver, prohibition, the popular election of
senators, government supervision of corporations, and the nationalization of
railroads. When she first began speaking out she was mistakenly known as
Mary Ellen, and her oratory was so flamboyant that her enemies called her
"Mary Yellin Lease." At that time she was also advising Kansas farmers "to
raise less corn and more hell," and that phrase has been associated with her
name ever since. 
     In 1895 Lease committed her ideas to writing in her book, "The Problem
of Civilization Solved," in which she proposed ending militarism, poverty,
and business monopoly by an intricate mix of free trade, nationalization of
major utilities and other reforms.
     Lease was born Mary Clyens in Ridgway, Pennsylvania, the daughter of an
Irish political refugee who was killed in the American Civil War. In 1868,
upon graduating from St. Elizabeth's Academy in Allegany, New York, she
moved to Osage Mission, Kansas, to teach at St. Anne's Academy. In 1873 she
married Charles L. Lease, a pharmacist's clerk. In 1874 the couple moved to
Denison, Texas, where four of their five children were born, and she began
to educate herself in the law.
     In 1883 the Leases moved to Wichita, Kansas, where in 1885 Mary began
speaking publicly on behalf of Irish Nationalist causes. Earlier in Texas
she had discovered her talent for public speaking when she spoke at Woman's
Christian Temperance Union meetings. She entered Kansas politics full-time
in 1888 when she ran for office on the ticket of the Union Labor party and
then joined the Farmers' Alliance, or Populist, party.
     The populists called her the "People's Joan of Arc" and in their 1890
campaign she made more than 160 speeches. In 1892 she traveled the West and
South with Populist presidential candidate James Weaver, and the next year
she pursued a race for U.S. senator and was vice president of the World
Peace Congress in Chicago.
     By 1896, however, populist political prospects had so dimmed that Lease
gladly accepted Joseph Pulitzer's offer to write political copy for the New
York World. After moving to New York City she remained active as a speaker
for numerous reform causes, including prohibition, woman suffrage, and birth
control. She also supported the Theodore Roosevelt Progressives in the 1912
Bull Moose campaign.
     She never returned to Kansas except for a short visit in 1902 to obtain
a divorce. From 1908 until her retirement from public life in 1918 she was
an occasional lecturer for the New York City Board of Education. She died in
Callicoon, New York in 1933.

See 
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0690662521/newsscancom/ref=nos
im for Richard Stiller's "Queen of Populists: The Story of Mary Elizabeth
Lease" -- or look for it in your favorite library. Note: We donate all
revenue from our book and media recommendations to adult literacy programs.]

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