NewsScan Daily, 9 November 2004 ("Above The Fold")

NewsScan Daily, 9 November 2004 ("Above The Fold")
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"ABOVE THE FOLD"
        Panel Calls for Gov't-Funded Supercomputing Research
        P2P Radio Is Latest Twist in Music Sharing
        Flash-Based Shopping Carts Aim to Close E-Sales
        U.K. E-University Record 'Abysmal'
        Nigerian Scammer Jailed

FEATURES
        Flash Card
        Worth Thinking About: Looking Around

PANEL CALLS FOR GOV'T-FUNDED SUPERCOMPUTING RESEARCH
      A panel of scientists convened by the National Research Council has 
issued a report titled "Getting Up to Speed: The Future of Supercomputing," 
which urges the U.S. government to significantly increase support for 
advanced research on supercomputing, or risk losing its lead in the field. 
"If we don't start doing something about this now there will be nothing 
available in 10 years when we really need those systems," says UC-Berkeley 
computer scientist Susan L. Graham, who co-chaired the panel. The report 
recommends that the federal government bump up its spending to $140 million 
from its current $42 million per year to develop new supercomputing 
technologies. "We are calling for a sustained and long-term investment to 
help develop advanced software and algorithms," says panel member Steven 
Wallach, a computer designer at Chiaro Networks. (New York Times 9 Nov 2004)
<http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/09/technology/09compute.html>

P2P RADIO IS LATEST TWIST IN MUSIC SHARING
      Now there's a new way to share music that's free and perfectly legal 
-- the trick involves marrying peer-to-peer technology with Internet radio. 
Pioneers in the field include Apple, Virgin Digital, and startups Mercora 
and Live 365, which offer tools that automatically stream users' private 
playlists over the Web while in some cases storing them in a searchable 
database for later retrieval. Mercora operates a Web-based network of about 
8,000 "broadcasters" who serve up their playlists to somewhere between 
175,000 and 200,000 listeners worldwide. "We're doing for music what Google 
did for the Web," says Mercora CEO Srivats Sampath. The company reasons 
that by using an Internet broadcast network model, it can take advantage of 
lower copyright fees, which are set by the U.S. Copyright Office rather 
than the record labels. As a result, Mercora can afford to pay the fees on 
behalf of broadcasters and offset the costs through advertising sales. "The 
big nut we had to crack is how to do this legally," says Sampath. "The law 
says you can broadcast as long as you pay. Fine, we will pay you." And if 
listeners happen to download a song? Technically, if the legally broadcast 
song is for personal use only, that's okay. "It's like a tape recorder," 
says Sampath. However, the downloader runs into legal trouble only when she 
tries to sell a track or transfer it to another person. (CNet News.com 8 
Nov 2004)
<http://news.com.com/Music+sharing+thats+free+and+legal/2100-1027_3-5441036.html>

FLASH-BASED SHOPPING CARTS AIM TO CLOSE E-SALES
      A recent study by DoubleClick shows that for every dollar spent on 
e-commerce sites, $4.10 is left in abandoned shopping carts, and now a 
handful of e-shopping sites are taking steps to recapture some of those 
sales. The key is a streamlined checkout process that allows the shopper to 
perform more functions -- from changing the color of a clothing item to 
filling out credit card information -- without leaving the page. Proponents 
of the new systems say that by preventing shoppers from jumping from screen 
to screen in the final stages of a purchase, consumers are less likely to 
become frustrated and quit. And while the new checkout screens look just 
like a Web page, they're actually small software programs written using 
Macromedia's Flash software that dynamically update the bottom line -- 
including tax and shipping costs -- as the customer adds or deletes items. 
Billing and other information is verified as it is entered to prevent 
customers from moving forward in the process without valid data. The 
Flash-based carts are being used by TJX Companies, owner of the T.J. Maxx 
and HomeGoods chains, and by PC Connection, among others. "This technology 
is very much in keeping with our sense of wanting to make it convenient for 
customers to shop our stores," says TJX VP Sherry Lang. "Even in our 
stores, we have a bank of cash registers so customers are able to check out 
very easily." (Wall Street Journal 9 Nov 2004)
<http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB109777032515145451,00.html> (sub req'd)

U.K. E-UNIVERSITY RECORD 'ABYSMAL'
      An ambitious, £50-million online university project in the U.K. has 
been canceled after succeeding in signing up only 900 students. The UK 
e-University, or UKeU, suffered from a "lack of serious marketing," says 
higher education minister Kim Howells, who calls the recruiting record 
"abysmal." Part of the issue was a failure to provide the new university 
with an appealing brand. "I get tangled up just trying to say UKeU. I don't 
know who dreamt that one up. It's typical of the sort of rubbish that was 
around at the time," says Howells, who inherited the project from a 
predecessor. When the e-university was proposed four years ago, the Higher 
Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) had promised a "dynamic new 
way of delivering high quality higher education to students via the 
Internet," says Labor MP Ian Gibson, who chairs the science and technology 
committee. But after labeling the effort an "absolute disaster" and a 
"shameful waste," Gibson says, "People who burnt public money in what was a 
political enterprise should be censured, and HEFCE, which took over the 
enterprise rather late, should explain what their role was in it." Howells 
notes that the e-university effort appeared to have been driven by a fear 
that online higher education would be dominated by institutions in the 
U.S., and that the U.K. needed to establish its own online university, 
particularly for overseas students. (BBC News 9 Nov 2004)
<http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/education/3995295.stm>

NIGERIAN SCAMMER JAILED
      The Australian mastermind of a global Internet scam was today 
sentenced to at least four years behind bars. Nick Marinellis pleaded 
guilty in the New South Wales District Court to 10 counts of fraud and one 
count of perverting the course of justice over the so-called Nigerian or 
West African scam. The ruse fleeced victims of $5 million. Judge Barry 
Mahoney sentenced Marinellis to five years and three months jail with a 
non-parole period of four years and four months. (The Australian 8 Nov 
2004) rec'd from John Lamp
<http://australianit.news.com.au/articles/0,7204,11319598%5E15306%5E%5Enbv%5E,00.html>

*****

FLASH CARD
      "The mastery of the turn is the story of how aviation became 
practical as a means of transportation. It is the story of how the world 
became small." (William Langewiesche)

WORTH THINKING ABOUT: LOOKING AROUND
      William Langewiesche, an author and pilot, has written a book to urge 
the practice of looking around:
      "Flight's greatest gift is to let us look around. I mean a simple 
form of looking around, and one that requires little instruction -- just 
gazing down at the ordinary scenery sliding by below. The best views are 
views of familiar things, like cities and farms and bottlenecked freeways. 
So set aside the beauty of sunsets, the majesty of mountains, the imprint 
of winds on golden prairies. The world beneath our wings has become a human 
artifact, our most spontaneous and complex creation. Tourists may not like 
to contemplate the evidence, with its hints of greed and self-destruction, 
but the fact remains that the old sterilized landscapes -- like designated 
outlooks and pretty parks and sculpted gardens -- have become obsolete, and 
that it is largely the airplane that has made them so. The aerial view is 
something entirely new. We need to admit that it flattens the world and 
mutes it in a rush of air and engines, and that it suppresses beauty. But 
it also strips the facades from our constructions, and by raising us above 
the constraints of the treeline and the highway it imposes a brutal honesty 
on our perceptions. It lets us see ourselves in context, as creatures 
struggling through life on the face of a planet, not separate from nature, 
but its most expressive agents. It lets us see that our struggles form 
patterns on the land, that these patterns repeat to an extent which before 
we had not known, and that there is a sense to them."
                            ***
[To find a library copy of William Langewiesche's "Inside The Sky: 
Meditation on Flight," visit RLG's RedLightGreen.com: 
<http://www.redlightgreen.com/ucwprod/servlet/ucw.servlets.UCWController?ACTION=EDITION&WORKID=17232236&> 
-- or to purchase a copy go to: 
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/067975007X/newsscancom/ref=nosim> 
Note: We donate all revenue from our book recommendations to adult literacy 
programs.]

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