NewsScan Daily, 29 October 2004 ("Above The Fold")

NewsScan Daily, 29 October 2004 ("Above The Fold")
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"ABOVE THE FOLD"  
       Getting Inside Your Head
       Identity Theft Suspects Caught in Sting
       Crime-Fighting in the 21st Century
       West Virginia's New Computing Grid
       Do-Not-Fly Lists: Do-Not-Take-Seriously!

FEATURES           
       Flash Card
       Worth Thinking About: Schools

GETTING INSIDE YOUR HEAD
     Brain scanning technology (long used to detect conditions such as
Alzheimer's and autism) is now being used to understand how people make
choices and how they react to such things as religious experiences, Coke
versus Pepsi marketing, and Democrat versus Republican political campaigns.
Known as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), brain scans measure
blood flow. During an fMRI, active regions of the brain can be seen lighting
up on a computer monitor, indicating either empathy or opposition to what
(or whom) the subject is being asked to think about. But the technology is
raising strong ethical concerns about "neuromarketing" from critics such as
Gary Ruskin of the nonprofit organization Commercial Alert: "This is a story
of the corruption of medical research. It's a technology that should be used
to ease human suffering, not make political propaganda more effective."
(AP/San Jose Mercury News 28 Oct 2004)
<http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/10040162.htm>

IDENTITY THEFT SUSPECTS CAUGHT IN STING OPERATION
     "Operation Firewall" -- an international law enforcement dragnet
conducted by the U.S. Secret Service, the Justice and Homeland Security
departments, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, Europol and local police
departments -- has led to the arrest of 28 individuals on suspicion of
operating Web sites created to steal, sell and forge credit cards and ID
documents. The sites operated under names such as Shadowcrew, Carderplanet
and Darkprofits, and were hosted on multiple Internet servers outside the
United States. The suspects are thought to have bought or sold about 1.7
million stolen information and counterfeit documents such as credit cards,
driver's licenses, birth certificates and foreign and domestic passports. A
MasterCard security executive familiar with the operations says, "We're
talking about an international network that has new sites popping up all the
time. These aren't high-tech individuals. All it takes is a computer, a
little bit of knowledge, and these guys can do a lot of damage." (Washington
Post 28 Oct 2004)  
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A7614-2004Oct28.html>

CRIME-FIGHTING IN THE 21st CENTURY
     Law enforcement officials have charged a Uniontown, Pennsylvania man of
killing a hunter seven years ago and stealing a dear the hunter had shot.
The killer's only mistake was to take the deer and put it in his freezer.
"They're claiming that I shot him and took his deer," the man told his wife
in disbelief. He insists that he is innocent. Police searched the man's
house in March 1998 and took venison from his freezer, which they matched it
with deer entrails found near the victim's body and deer blood on his
hunting pants. Investigators believe it's the first homicide case involving
deer DNA. (AP/USA TODAY 29 Oct 2004)
<http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science/genetics/2004-10-29-deer-dna_x.htm>

WEST VIRGINIA'S NEW COMPUTING GRID
     West Virginia is about to have a state-funded Global Grid Exchange that
will function as a supercomputer. The project is a joint effort of the
state, the West Virginia High Technology Consortium, Verizon and Hewlett
Packard. Amy Beaudry of the Consortium says, "As with any other state-funded
infrastructure, whether it's a roadway or a power station, this grid in the
hands of West Virginia companies and researchers will give them the capacity
for innovation and greater potential for new products in the state of West
Virginia as well as an influx of research dollars into the state... A West
Virginia engineer or researcher will be able from their desk top to get
access to math computing power on demand. The potential is staggering."
(AP/Los Angeles Times 28 Oct 2004)
<http://www.latimes.com/technology/ats-ap_technology13oct28,1,7625475.story?
coll=sns-ap-toptechnology>

 DO-NOT-FLY LISTS: DO-NOT-TAKE-SERIOUSLY!
     The current issue of Ubiquity, an online publication of the ACM (edited
by the editors of NewsScan), contains an article by Norwich University
professor M.E. Kabay arguing that "the current implementation of do-not-fly
lists and the use of documents to authenticate passenger identity won't
necessarily improve airport security."  A sample: "Deirdre McNamer (how
appropriate) wrote a story in The New Yorker magazine in October 2002 about
a 28-year-old pinko-gray-skinned, blue-eyed, red-blond-haired criminal
called Christian Michael Longo who used the alias 'John Thomas Christopher.'
His alias was placed on the DNFL used by the Transportation Security
Administration. He was arrested in January 2002 but his alias was not
removed from the DNFL. On March 23, 2002, 70-year-old brown-skinned,
dark-eyed, gray-haired grandmother Johnnie Thomas was informed that she was
on the master terrorist list and would have special security measures
applied every time she flew. Indeed, the poor lady found that she was
repeatedly delayed by a scurry of activity when she presented her tickets at
an airline counter, extra X-rays of her checked baggage, supplementary
examination of her hand-baggage and extra wanding at the entrance gates. On
one occasion she was told that she had graduated to the exalted status
labeled, 'Not allowed to fly.' She discovered that there was no method
available for having 'her' name removed from the DNFL; indeed, one person
from her local FBI office dismissively told her to hire a lawyer (although
ironically, he refused to identify himself). An employee of the TSA informed
her that 'four other law-abiding John Thomases had called to complain.'"
(Ubiquity 28 Oct 2004) <http://www.acm.org/ubiquity/views/v5i34_kabay.html>

*****

FLASH CARD
     "In a few hundred years, when the history of our time will be written
from a long-term perspective, it is likely that the most important event
historians will see is not technology, not the Internet, not e-commerce. It
is an unprecedented change in the human condition. For the first time --
literally -- substantial and rapidly growing numbers of people have choices.
For the first time, they will have to manage themselves. And society is
totally unprepared for it."  (Peter F. Drucker)

WORTH THINKING ABOUT: SCHOOLS
     The great business and social analyst Peter F. Drucker has lots to
suggest about what we should be doing now to be ready for tomorrow:
     "Delivering literacy -- even on the high level appropriate to a
knowledge society -- will be an easier task than giving students the
capacity and the knowledge to keep on learning, and the desire to do it. No
school system has yet tackled that job. There is an old Latin tag: Non
schola sed vita discimus (We don't learn for school but for life). But
neither teacher nor student has ever taken it seriously. Indeed, except for
professional schools -- medicine, law, engineering, business -- no school to
the best of my knowledge has even tried to find out what its students have
learned. We compile voluminous records of examination results. But l know of
no school that tests the graduates ten years later on what they still know
of the subjects -- whether mathematics, a foreign Language, or history -- in
which they got such wonderful marks. We do know, however, how people learn
how to learn. In fact, we have known it for two thousand years. The first
and wisest writer on raising small children, the great Greek biographer and
historian Plutarch, spelled it out in a charming little book, Paidea
(Raising Children), in the first century of the Christian era. All it
requires is to make learners achieve. All it requires is to focus on the
strengths and talents of learners so that they excel in whatever it is they
do well. Any teacher of young artists -- musicians, actors, painters --
knows this. So does any teacher of young athletes. But schools do not do it.
They focus instead on a learner's weaknesses.
     One cannot build performance on weaknesses, even on corrected ones; one
can build performance only on strengths. And these the schools traditionally
ignore, in fact, consider more or less irrelevant. Strengths do not create
problems -- and schools are problem-focused."
                                     ***
[Source: Peter F. Drucker's "The New Realities"; to find a library copy of
Drucker's wonderful memoir, "Adventures of a Bystander," visit RLG's
RedLightGreen.com:
<http://www.redlightgreen.com/ucwprod/servlet/ucw.servlets.UCWController?ACT
ION=EDITION&WORKID=11733568&>
-- or to purchase a copy go to:
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0471247391/newsscancom/ref=nosim>.
Note: We donate all revenue from our book recommendations to adult literacy
programs.]

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