NewsScan Daily, 22 November 2004 ("Above The Fold")

NewsScan Daily, 22 November 2004 ("Above The Fold")
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"ABOVE THE FOLD"  
       Make Incision Here: RFID Tag Used In Surgery
       Microsoft Software for the Blind
       ACLU Attacks Microchip Passport Plans
       Adult Entertainment Group Sues Google
       The Coming Battle: Google Versus Microsoft

FEATURES           
       Flash Card
       NewsScan... A Thought Leaps on Floating Beam of Light
       Worth Thinking About: Haiku

MAKE INCISION HERE: RFID TAG USED IN SURGERY
     The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved use of radio
frequency ID (RFID) tags to ensure that physicians perform the right surgery
on the right patient. Manufactured by SurgiChip Inc., the radio tag is
encoded with the patient's name and the site, type, and date of the surgery;
the patient helps stick the adhesive-backed tag near the site of the surgery
and workers in the hospital's operating room scan the tag to compare that
information with the patient's chart. (AP/San Jose Merury News 19 Nov 2004)
<http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/10226986.htm>

MICROSOFT SOFTWARE FOR THE BLIND
     In Spain, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates has signed an agreement with
the National Association of Blind Spaniards to develop software for people
with visual impairments and give blind and visually impaired people access
to the Internet. Much of the work will focus on software for voice
synthesizers and braille keyboards that tell blind people what is on the
screen in front of them. Gates said, "Because software is so magic, we want
broad access." An estimated 1 million of Spain's 40 million people are blind
or visually impaired. (AP 20 Nov 2004)
<http://apnews.excite.com/article/20041120/D86FA8P01.html>

ACLU ATTACKS MICROCHIP PASSPORT PLANS
     The American Civil Liberties Union and some other privacy advocate
groups are charging that international standards for "electronic" passports
disregard a basic privacy approach protecting the security of the documents.
New passports will have a chip containing the holders' name, birth date and
issuing office, along with a "biometric" identifier that includes a photo of
the holders' face. Barry Steinhardt of the ACLU says, "There's no security
built into it. This will enable identity theft and put Americans at some
risk when they travel internationally." A spokesman for the International
Civil Aviation Organization and the State Department says those
organizations are working on security concerns: "This is a process that is
being implemented over the next few years, it is not something that happens
overnight." The spokesman says that one way to fight identity theft is
already in the standards, since the passports will have built-in encrypted
authentication to let electronic readers know they are original documents
and not forgeries. (AP/USA TODAY 22 Nov 2004)
<http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2004-11-22-hitech-passport_x.htm>

ADULT-ENTERTAINMENT GROUP SUES GOOGLE
     In a federal lawsuit filed against Google, the adult-entertainment firm
Perfect 10 Inc. is charging that Google's search engine has been displaying
copyrighted images from Perfect 10's magazine and Web site, along with
passwords to its subscription Web site, in response to user queries. The
company says that Google's computers retrieve the passwords and images
(mainly photos of female models) not from Perfect 10's own site but from
other sites that have pirated them; charging that it would be "virtually
impossible" for consumers to locate the stolen content if Google didn't
direct them to it, its complaint accuses Google of "putting them on their
servers knowing in most cases these pictures are unauthorized." Google has
not yet responded to the complaint. (Wall Street Journal 22 Nov 2004)
<http://www.wsj.com>

THE COMING BATTLE: GOOGLE VERSUS MICROSOFT
     Already competing against one other in Web search, free e-mail, and
techniques for searching individual computers, Google and Microsoft are
drifting into a war over control of the user experience now dominated by
Microsoft's Windows operating system. Industry-watchers say that Google
could make people less dependent on storing information on their
Microsoft-powered PCs and more dependent on free Web-based e-mail and search
functions accessible anywhere from any device regardless of operating
system, and analyst David Garrity says the real question is whether computer
buyers may one day simply decide that they no longer even need a Microsoft
operating system. (AP/Los Angeles Times 22 Nov 2004)
<http://www.latimes.com/technology/ats-ap_technology11nov22,1,1657103.story?coll=sns-ap-toptechnology>

*****

FLASH CARD
     "Waking in the night; the lamp is low, the oil freezing." (Matsuo
Basho)

NEWSSCAN... A THOUGHT LEAPS ON FLOATING BEAM OF LIGHT
     It's time we heard from you haiku-tech poets out there. Send us some
haiku on technology and self (or on technology and not-self), and we'll
include some of them in future NewsScans. See below for inspiration.

WORTH THINKING ABOUT: HAIKU
     In his book "No Visible Horizon" Joshua Cooper Ramo offers this
discussion of a Japanese tradition related to death:
     "In the middle of the fifteenth century in Japan, a time when the
kingdom was both at its most isolated and, to Japanese eyes, most perfect, a
strange tradition emerged: composing haiku as you died, at the very moment
of death. Perhaps it wasn't so surprising. Japanese culture had become
obsessed with the relationship between life and art. There was an increasing
belief that the two should never be separated, that a well-lived life was a
work of art. Was it surprising that some Japanese poets wanted to try to
weave the two together, to make a little tatami of life and art? What better
time than at the moment of death? After a lifetime of study, could you be
beautiful in three lines? Could you be perfect? Could you reduce it, all of
it, your life, down to seventeen syllables?
                           Farewell ... I
                           pass as all things do
                           dew on the grass.
"So it all awaited you. Special inks were mixed. A brush of the rarest hair
was prepared and left lying near your bed. The softest rice paper was
fetched. All this lay waiting for your last moment. The Zen monks who
collected the death poems looked for two virtues, two marks of beauty. The
first was awa-re, a sense of the sadness of things passing, the way birds at
dawn sing like mourners or cherry blossoms fall like tears in the spring.
The second virtue was mi-yabi, an attempt to refine oneself. Everything
about the poems -- their sound, how they looked on the page -- was meant to
evoke this attempt at refinement, at compactness. So Basho, dead in early
June 1807: 
                           On a journey, ill:
                           my dream goes wandering
                           over withered fields."
                                **
[To find a library copy of a biography of William J. Higginson's "Haiku
Handbook: How to Write, Share, and Teach Haiku," visit RLG's
RedLightGreen.com: 
<http://www.redlightgreen.com/ucwprod/servlet/ucw.servlets.UCWController?ACTION=EDITION&WORKID=14874647&>
-- or to purchase a copy go to:
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/4770014309/qid=1100896338/newsscancom/ref=nosim>.
We donate all revenue from our book recommendations to adult literacy
programs.]

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