NewsScan Daily, 3 November 2004 ("Above The Fold")

NewsScan Daily, 3 November 2004 ("Above The Fold")
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"ABOVE THE FOLD"
        Touchscreen Voting Spawns Glitches
        Political E-Mail Smacks of Spam
        Cell Phone Photos Make the Front Page
        IE Losing Ground to Open Source Browsers
        Inuit Language Finds Home on the Web

FEATURES
        Flash Card
        Honorary Subscriber: Étienne Gilson

TOUCHSCREEN VOTING SPAWNS GLITCHES
      U.S. voters across the country reported some 1,100 problems with 
e-voting machines, bearing out scientists' concerns that touchscreen 
machines are prone to tampering and unreliable unless they're equipped to 
print out paper records for recounts. Some problems were blamed on factors 
as mundane as power outages and incompetent poll workers, but there were a 
number of voters in six states -- especially Democrats in Florida -- who 
said that although they voted for John Kerry, when the computer asked them 
to verify their choice, it indicated that they had voted for President 
Bush. One voter in Clearwater reported that it took her about 10 tries and 
a quick touchscreen clean-up with a wet-wipe towel before she could 
successfully select Kerry. A spokesperson for Sequoia Voting Systems said 
the machines' monitors may need to be recalibrated periodically to ensure 
the touchscreen is sensitive enough to record users' votes. (AP/CNN.com 3 
Nov 2004)
<http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/11/03/electronic.voting.ap/index.html>

POLITICAL E-MAIL SMACKS OF SPAM
      An online survey of 1,000 U.S. Internet users indicates that 
unsolicited e-mail supporting both the Bush and Kerry presidential 
campaigns were common in the past few weeks, and about 20% of recipients 
said the messages may have affected their votes. "The cat's out of the 
bag," says Anne Bonaparte, president of MailFrontier, which commissioned 
the study. "E-mail is a powerful communications tool and it has 
vulnerabilities that are being exploited by people who have a point to 
make." Engaging in political spam does entail the risk of backlash, 
however, says Jonah Seiger, co-founder of Connections Media. "Spam is a 
tactic of snake oil salesmen. I don't see an advantage for a group or a 
candidate associating themselves with this technique." Meanwhile, Larry 
Purpuro, president of Republican online consulting group RightClick 
Strategies disagrees: "In the 2004 election, political e-mail is a tactical 
nuclear weapon. It is to a large extent under the radar screen, but its 
ability to target and to penetrate the attention of individuals makes it an 
extremely effective communications tool." Spam advocating a political 
position is free speech, protected by the First Amendment, and is not 
considered illegal under the law. (Washington Post 2 Nov 2004)
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A18746-2004Nov2.html>

CELL PHONE PHOTOS MAKE THE FRONT PAGE
      Twice in the last month De Telegraaf, the Netherlands' largest 
newspaper, has run front-page photos snapped by amateur photographers using 
their cell phones. Wednesday De Telegraaf published a grisly picture of the 
body of filmmaker and columnist Theo van Gogh, who police suspect was 
stabbed to death by an Islamic militant. Passerby Aron Boskma took the 
photo at the crime scene in Amsterdam before the body had been covered. 
"This picture was the story. There was a discussion if we should use it, 
but everyone who would have had this picture would have published it," says 
Telegraaf pictures editor Peter Schoonen. Last month Dutch newspapers 
published cell phone pictures of a police shoot-out in the town of 
Enschede. In Japan, where many citizens now have camera-equipped cell 
phones, it is common practice to sell news-breaking pictures to TV stations 
and other media outlets. (Reuters 3 Nov 2004)
<http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=UJYGZ4EES4VDICRBAEOCFEY?type=technologyNews&storyID=6702434>

IE LOSING GROUND TO OPEN SOURCE BROWSERS
      Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser is still the overwhelming 
market leader, but the percentage of Americans using open-source 
alternatives Mozilla and Firefox inched up to 6% in October from 3.5% in 
June. Apple's Safari and the Opera browsers combined were employed by just 
a little over 1% of users, according to online research firm WebSideStory. 
The results were gleaned by sensors embedded on major Web sites that 
identified which browsers visitors were using to access the sites. And 
although Mozilla and Firefox constitute a miniscule portion of the browser 
market, some analysts say their steady rise may signal a trend. "What we're 
seeing is (Mozilla and Firefox) looking more like a vanguard than a flash 
in the pan," says WebSideStory analyst Geoff Johnston. (CNet News.com 1 Nov 
2004)
<http://news.com.com/Study+Firefox+still+gaining+on+Internet+Explorer/2100-1032_3-5435176.html>

INUIT LANGUAGE FINDS HOME ON THE WEB
      Inuktitut, the language spoken by the Inuit people living in Nunavut, 
northern Canada, can now be used on the Internet, thanks to attavik.net, 
which provides a content management system that allows native speakers to 
write, manage documents and make online payments in their native language. 
Web Networks, a nonprofit Canadian group that provides Web services for 
socially committed organizations, worked with the Piruvik Center in Nunavut 
to develop the system. "It was a big challenge to give the Inuit and 
Inuktitut speakers the ability to have Web pages published in their native 
language," says Web Networks chief executive Oliver Zielke. "A lot of 
people have older computers and limited ability to use technology." The 
content management system used in attavik.net can also be used for other 
syllabic languages, such as Cree, Ojicree and Korean. (BBC News 3 Nov 2004)
<http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3975645.stm>

*****

FLASH CARD
      "History is the only laboratory we have in which to test the 
consequences of thought." (Étienne Gilson)

HONORARY SUBSCRIBER: ÉTIENNE GILSON
      Today's Honorary Subscriber is the internationally eminent French 
historian of medieval philosophy Étienne Henri Gilson (1884-1978), whose 
intense interest in medieval philosophy -- an academic field he may be said 
to have rescued from oblivion -- began with his work on the "sources" of 
Descartes. He wrote books on such luminaries as Bonaventure, Bernard of 
Clairvaux, Augustine and Dante, but the principal focus of his scholarship 
became the historical context of St. Thomas Aquinas, showing the 
contemporary relevance of this cornerstone figure of scholastic philosophy.
      Gilson was born into a Roman Catholic family and owed his early 
education to Catholic schools in Paris. He began the study of philosophy in 
1902 at the Lycée Henri IV and received his baccalaureate in 1906 from the 
Sorbonne (the University of Paris). For the next six years he taught 
philosophy in various lycées. In 1913 he took his doctoral degree, for 
which he had investigated René Descartes and the medieval roots of his 
philosophy. For the next several years, except for the interruption of 
World War I years, he taught at the universities of Lille and Strasbourg, 
returning to the Sorbonne in 1921. In 1916, at the Battle of Verdun, he was 
wounded and taken prisoner. During the two years of his imprisonment, he 
took on the study of the Russian language and the thought of St. 
Bonaventure. He was later awarded the Croix de Guerre for bravery in action.
      In 1932, Gilson left the Sorbonne to inaugurate the first chair in 
the history of medieval philosophy at the Collège de France. In 1926 he 
made the first of what later became his annual visits to the United States 
and Canada, lecturing at the universities of Montreal, Harvard and 
Virginia. Three years later, he was invited to establish the Pontifical 
Institute of Mediaeval Studies in conjunction with St. Michael's College at 
the University of Toronto. From then on he divided his academic year 
between Paris and Toronto, a practice that was interrupted only by World 
War II, during which he remained in Paris. In 1951 he relinquished his 
chair at the Collège de France to devote full time to his post at Toronto, 
a position he retained until 1968.
      Many of Gilson's best-known books resulted from lectureships. 
Included among these are the 1932 Gifford Lectures published as "The Spirit 
of Mediæval Philosophy" and "The Unity of Philosophical Experience" (1937) 
and "Being and Some Philosophers" (1949), perhaps the best examples of his 
use of the history of philosophy as though it were a laboratory for 
investigating ideas.

[To find a library copy of Gilson's "The Unity of Philosophical 
Experience," visit RLG's RedLightGreen.com: 
<http://www.redlightgreen.com/ucwprod/servlet/ucw.servlets.UCWController?ACTION=EDITION&WORKID=13452624&> 
-- or to purchase a copy go to: 
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/089870748X/newsscancom/ref=nosim> 
Note: We donate all revenue from our book recommendations to adult literacy 
programs.]

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