NewsScan Daily, 18 November 2004 ("Above The Fold")

NewsScan Daily, 18 November 2004 ("Above The Fold")
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"ABOVE THE FOLD"
        Google Debuts Scholarly Search Service
        Intuitive Search Engine Knows Just What You're Looking For
        Yahoo, SBC Expand Partnership
        NTT Offers Dual-Network Cell Phone
        Bill Gates Gets Million of E-Mails a Day

FEATURES
        Flash Card
        Honorary Subscriber: Louisa Lee Schuyler
        Mailbag: The World As We Find It

GOOGLE DEBUTS SCHOLARLY SEARCH SERVICE
      Google is adding a new search service geared toward the needs of 
academic and scientific researchers, offering a central starting point for 
scholarly literature like peer-reviewed papers, books, abstracts and 
technical reports. The new search tool, accessible at scholar.google.com, 
is the result of collaboration with a number of scientific and academic 
publishers, including ACM, Nature, IEEE and OCLC. The new service initially 
will be advertisement-free, but company executives say that will change. 
"The commercial reason for doing this is that you can target areas with 
high-quality, high-payback ads," says John Sack, director of Stanford 
University's HighWire Press. "An advertisement that goes next to an article 
on cloning techniques is probably going to be for services that are pretty 
expensive." SearchEngineWatch editor Danny Sullivan says Google's latest 
move is "a significant step forward," adding that Google likely will have 
competition soon from Yahoo and others. "We will continue to see an 
explosion of vertical search engines like this," he notes, referring to 
search services that focus on special collections. (New York Times 18 Nov 2004)
<http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/18/technology/18google.html>

INTUITIVE SEARCH ENGINE KNOWS JUST WHAT YOU'RE LOOKING FOR
      Liesl Capper says her Mooter search engine delivers results based on 
personalized algorithmic search technology that serve up more relevant 
information than the most popular commercial search engines. Capper says 
most search engines "obviously had been designed by people who know a lot 
about data but don't understand humans and how we are hardwired… I have 
spent the last decade studying cognitive styles, and how who you are as a 
person affects how you deal with information, so applying those skills to a 
human interacting with information and their world using technology was a 
natural progression for me." Most people are simply overwhelmed with the 
flood of data that they retrieve and therefore tend to make instantaneous 
decisions about whether to pursue a possible lead or ignore it. "This is 
the only way we have of surviving the complex world we live in without 
sitting and thinking about everything for hours at a time," says Capper. 
The Mooter search engine uses algorithms based on profiles of search 
"types," developed through observation of 600 users over four years. 
Recently, "we have started scoring our index psychographically, and we have 
had a lot of interest from online publishers who want to license it, 
because when you have no keyword to work from it is hard to guess what a 
person wants to see out of potentially millions of bits of information." 
(Red Herring 16 Nov 2004)
<http://www.redherring.com/Article.aspx?a=10972&hed=Searching+your+thoughts>

YAHOO, SBC EXPAND PARTNERSHIP
      Yahoo and SBC Communications have inked a deal to jointly develop 
online services for televisions, cell phones and home broadband networks. 
The arrangement allows Yahoo to piggyback on SBC's ambitious plans to 
upgrade its network by laying fiber optic cables to neighborhood "nodes," 
and then complete the broadband connections to each house via VDSL 
technology over legacy copper lines. SBC will use Yahoo's services for its 
new broadband service, dubbed Project Lightspeed. "The new services that 
will be developed out of this expanded relationship represent the next step 
in Yahoo's strategy to further deepen consumer relationships by extending 
our products and services beyond the desktop," says Yahoo CEO Terry Semel. 
(CNet News.com 17 Nov 2004)
<http://news.com.com/Yahoo%2C+SBC+expand+alliance/2100-1026_3-5457510.html>

NTT OFFERS DUAL-NETWORK CELL PHONE
      NTT DoCoMo is offering customers a cell phone that can make Internet 
calls via WiFi networks in addition to using the standard wireless 
networks. The dual-network N900iL phone uses 3G technology to deliver 
higher speed data transmissions. Nokia, the world's largest handset maker, 
says it will introduce a dual-network cell phone next year. (AP 17 Nov 2004)
<http://apnews.excite.com/article/20041118/D86E0F280.html>

BILL GATES GETS MILLION OF E-MAILS A DAY
      Think you've got spam? Microsoft chairman Bill Gates "literally 
receives 4 million pieces of e-mail per day, most of it spam," says CEO 
Steve Ballmer, who notes that the company uses special technology to filter 
spam intended for Gates. In addition, there are several Microsoft employees 
who provide human screening. "Literally, there's a whole department almost 
that takes care of it." (AP/SiliconValley.com 18 Nov 2004)
<http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/10213910.htm>

*****

FLASH CARD
      "Love is a condition in which the happiness of another person is 
essential to your own." (Robert Heinlein)

HONORARY SUBSCRIBER: LOUISA LEE SCHUYLER
      Today's Honorary Subscriber is the pioneering American social 
reformer Louisa Lee Schuyler, who was a leading figure in creating 
organized resources to meet humanitarian needs.
      As a young woman she was active in the work of the Children's Aid 
Society of New York, which was one of her family's charitable interests. 
When the Civil War broke out in 1861, she joined her mother in helping to 
organize the Woman's Central Association of Relief, becoming chairman of 
its committee of correspondence. Schuyler was largely responsible for the 
Association's success in establishing an extensive network of local groups 
through which food, clothing, medical supplies, and other items were 
collected and forwarded to army camps and hospitals. By the end of the war, 
Schuyler found herself so exhausted that she had to spend the next six 
years convalescing abroad, mainly in Europe and Egypt.
      Schuyler was born in New York City to the socially prominent Schuyler 
family. She was a great-granddaughter of two Revolutionary era notables, 
General Philip J. Schuyler and Alexander Hamilton. She grew up on the 
family's estate in Dobbs Ferry along the Hudson River and was educated 
privately.
      In 1871, rejuvenated by her post-Civil War sojourn overseas, Schuyler 
renewed her interest in humanitarian work. Visiting a poorhouse in 
Westchester County, she found much that needed improvement. Gathering 
together a group of civic-minded associates Schuyler founded the State 
Charities Aid Association (S.C.A.A.), to be an umbrella organization for 
local groups of volunteer visitors interested in the inspection and 
improvement of prisons, poorhouses, workhouses, public hospitals, and 
schools. Schuyler also devoted much time to her particular local interest, 
New York City's Bellevue Hospital, where she was instrumental in 
establishing the Bellevue Training School for Nurses in May 1873.
      The remainder of Schuyler's life is a litany of public service. She 
campaigned to have the mentally ill removed from understaffed, ill-equipped 
county almshouses to state hospitals. She had a law passed to provide 
separate accommodation and treatment for epileptics. She worked with 
Winifred Holt's New York Association for the Blind, the American Medical 
Association, the Russell Sage Foundation, and the S.C.A.A. to develop the 
National Committee (later Society) for the Prevention of Blindness. Her 
efforts on behalf of the needy always carried the message that such work 
should be professionally organized and not left to haphazard charitable 
instincts.
      Among the many honors accorded her for her lifetime of service were 
an honorary LL.D. from Columbia in 1915 and the Theodore Roosevelt Memorial 
Association medal in 1923. She died in Highland Falls, New York in 1926. 
The American Dictionary of Biography says of her that "had she been a man, 
she would have been a captain of industry."

[To find a library copy of "Louisa Lee Schuyler: 1837-1926" visit RLG's 
RedLightGreen.com: 
<http://www.redlightgreen.com/ucwprod/servlet/ucw.servlets.UCWController?ACTION=EDITION&WORKID=29142086&> 
Note: We donate all revenue from our book recommendations to adult literacy 
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MAILBAG: THE WORLD AS WE FIND IT

PROPORTIONALITY
Re: <http://www.newsscan.com/cgi-bin/findit_view?table=newsletter&id=11679>
      Mark Gibbs writes that spammers' sentences are disproportionate to, 
say, five years prison time for manslaughter. It's important to bear in 
mind that the criminal who merited five years prison broke a single law a 
single time. Spammers break laws sometimes as 10,000,000 or more times, 
often at the rate of more than one million times per month. I think we as a 
society have an obligation to help those who break a law the first time, or 
maybe even the second. But three times is usually a signal of a bad trend. 
Millions? I'm not sure the punishment *is* proportional. Gibb's suggestion 
of alternatives to prison might be more appropriate. (Rob Kolstad)

FINE SCOTCH
Re: <http://www.newsscan.com/cgi-bin/findit_view?table=newsletter&id=11695>
      A fine point, but it is Scotch Whisky (not Whiskey). The spelling 
with an 'e' is reserved for Irish and Tennessee Whiskey. But keep up the 
good work -- NewsScan is a must-read. (Patrick Reid)

WAKE-UP CALL
Re: <http://www.newsscan.com/cgi-bin/findit_view?table=newsletter&id=11550>
      In simpler words of the simple times, my teacher used to say, "When a 
student goes to sleep in my class, it is time for me to wake up." (M.A. Hameed)

IN SEARCH OF THE ARCHIVES
Do you have an archive that I can access of past issues? I'd like to find a 
clip you had recently about AOL telling some of its customers (I believe 
broadband customers) that they need to find another company for their 
Internet connections?? (Denise Bailey) [For the NewsScan archives, go to 
<http://www.newsscan.com/newsscan/index.html> The particular story you're 
looking for is at
<http://www.newsscan.com/cgi-bin/findit_view?table=newsletter&id=11674> -- J&S]

THE STATE OF EDUCATION
Re: <http://www.newsscan.com/cgi-bin/findit_view?table=newsletter&id=11677>
      As Audre Lourde wrote so succinctly: The master's tools will never 
dismantle the master's house. Thanks for printing Nadin's comments on the 
state of education... All that said, I'm proud as punch that my daughter's 
been accepted into the undergrad program at Iowa State. Of course, she 
graduated from high school 5 years ago and has spent that time wandering 
and collecting experiences, most recently in a 6-month stint as a volunteer 
at the Heifer Project. Her interest is in sustainable livestock production 
and community development, so she's coming to education with a pretty 
different background than most freshmen. For all that Nadin implies that 
academics are primarily interested in their own economic well-being, I know 
(from my own learning/teaching experiences) that one thoughtful, engaged, 
non-traditional student can make all the difference in a teacher's day. 
It'll be fun to see how my daughter meshes with the College of 
Agriculture... (Annie Grieshop)

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