NewsScan Daily, 3 September 2003 ("Above The Fold")

NewsScan Daily, 3 September 2003 ("Above The Fold")
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"ABOVE THE FOLD"
        Student Plagiarists
        Software Makers Find Silver Lining to Net Vandalism
        New Grid Supercomputing System
        Coalition Formed to Battle Identity Theft
        On-Demand Entertainment Set to Replace Hard Copy
        Movielink Speeds Up Download Times

FEATURES
        Flash Card
        Worth Thinking About: (Non)Voter Apathy

STUDENT PLAGIARISTS
A study of undergraduate students on 23 college campuses  has found that 
38% of those surveyed acknowledged that in the last year they had engaged 
in one or more instances used the Web to find and use material in academic 
without citing the source.  About half of the students said they considered 
such behavior trivial or not cheating at all. The study was organized by 
Rutgers University management professor Donald L. McCabe, who surveyed more 
than 18,000 students, 2,600 faculty members and 650 teaching assistants at 
large public universities and small private colleges nationwide. McCabe 
says, "There are a lot of students who are growing up with the Internet who 
are convinced that anything you find on the Internet is public knowledge 
and doesn't need to be cited... When I work with high school students, what 
I hear is, 'Everyone cheats, it's not all that important.' They say: 'It's 
just to get into college. When I get into college, I won't do it.' But then 
you survey college students, and you hear the same thing." (New York Times 
3 Sep 2003)
http://partners.nytimes.com/2003/09/03/education/03CHEA.html

SOFTWARE MAKERS FIND SILVER LINING TO NET VANDALISM
Business analysts expect to see continued growth in the anti-virus market, 
and Sarah Friar of Goldman Sachs predicts the market will climb 18% to $2.6 
billion this year and improve to $2.8 billion in 2004: "This last wave of 
viruses perked people up to say, 'My God, I need to protect my computer.'" 
Nitsan Hargil of investment bank Friedman Billings Ramsey adds: "Fear 
sells, especially among consumers, who aren't as well-protected as 
corporations." Since August 11th, Symantec shares are up 22%, Network 
Associates shares up 30%, and Trend Micro shares up 33%. (USA Today 2 Sep 
2003)
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2003-09-02-worm_x.htm

NEW GRID SUPERCOMPUTING SYSTEM
A new "international data grid" supercomputing system is being planned by 
scientists at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, the Argonne National 
Laboratory, the University of Chicago, and their colleagues worldwide. 
Lothar Bauerdick of Fermi Lab says, "It's a democratization of science. The 
resources will be there and you can tap into them. It gives equal 
opportunities to everyone to become part of science and part of the 
discoveries. It started as a need in science but offers a transforming 
technology for society." And Ian Foster of the Argonne facility explains: 
"The goal is to accelerate the handling of the dramatic increase in the 
amount of data scientists have to deal with. In the face of this data 
explosion the capability of an individual scientist to actually ask and get 
answers to interesting questions has become challenging. The data grid will 
allow them to get answers by harnessing large numbers of computing and 
storage resources to perform their computations." Foster is considered the 
father of grid computing. (AP/San Jose Mercury News 2 Sep 2003)
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/6674300.htm

COALITION FORMED TO BATTLE IDENTITY THEFT
The Information Technology Association of America has organized a new 
coalition aimed at fighting identity theft. The Coalition on Online 
Identity Theft, which includes e-commerce giants Amazon, eBay and Microsoft 
among its members, plans to launch a public education program and will 
encourage its members to work more closely with law enforcement officials 
to fight online crime. According to the Federal Trade Commission, the 
number of U.S. consumers who complained about some sort of identity theft 
nearly doubled last year to 162,000, but the Gartner Group says that 
statistic only scratches the surface of the problem. It estimates that 3.4% 
of U.S. consumers -- some 7 million adults -- suffered some form of 
identity theft in the past year. A report issued by Gartner in July says 
that while a consumer education campaign may make online users more savvy, 
there's still a major problem in the way ID theft cases are handled by 
financial institutions, who tend to treat such fraud as the cost of doing 
business rather than a crime against their customers: "There is a serious 
disconnect between the magnitude of identity theft that innocent consumers 
experience and the industry's proper recognition of the crime. Without 
external pressure from legislators and industry associations, financial 
services providers may not have sufficient incentive to stem the flow of 
identity theft crimes." (CNet News.com 2 Sep 2003)
http://news.com.com/2100-1019_3-5070601.html?tag=fd_top

ON-DEMAND ENTERTAINMENT SET TO REPLACE HARD COPY
In five years, about a third of music sales will come from downloads and CD 
sales will drop 30% from their 1999 peak, predicts a new study by Forrester 
Research. "On-demand services are the future of entertainment delivery," 
says Forrester analyst Josh Bernoff. "CDs, DVDs, and any other forms of 
physical media will become obsolete." Forrester predicts that over the next 
nine months, at least 10 Windows-based music services will emerge, boosting 
the market for online music to $270 million by the end of 2004. If the 
trend continues, digital music sales could account for $1.4 billion of the 
music industry's anticipated $12.8 billion in revenues three years from 
now. "The CD is turning out to be a transitory sort of item," says Roy 
Trakin, senior editor of Hits magazine. "The future of the CD may be in its 
enhanced content -- in a hybrid CD-DVD and the more upscale formats like 
DVD audio and super audio CDs." Meanwhile, Forrester urges Hollywood to 
take note of what's happening in the music industry. By 2007, the research 
group estimates that video rental revenues will plummet 37% and by 2008, 
overall revenues from DVDs and tapes will drop 8%. "Consumers have spoken 
-- they are tired of paying the high cost of CDs and DVDs and prefer more 
flexible forms of on-demand media delivery," says Bernoff. (CNN.com 3 Sep 2003)
http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/ptech/09/03/cd.future/index.html

MOVIELINK SPEEDS UP DOWNLOAD TIMES
Online movie service Movielink has tweaked its technology so that viewers 
can settle down with their popcorn and start watching movies minutes after 
purchase, rather than waiting a couple of hours for the download to be 
completed. The move is aimed at catering to impatient college students, who 
might otherwise seek out less legitimate content, says Movielink CEO Jim 
Ramo: "We're providing faster downloads so college students can get off of 
pirate sites." In another improvement, Movielink has upgraded its 
technology to enable a user to download a film to a laptop and play it 
later -- on a plane, for instance -- without having to first connect to the 
Internet to verify the validity of the license. The service has also added 
a feature than enables a viewer to "bookmark" his place in a film and 
return later to finish watching. Forrester Research analyst Josh Bernoff 
says Movielink's improvements will give it a competitive advantage in the 
upcoming battle over consumers' entertainment media preferences. "What 
we're predicting is once you give people a taste of the idea they can watch 
a movie anytime they want, they become frustrated with having to drive 
anywhere to get a piece of plastic." (AP 3 Sep 2003)
http://apnews.excite.com/article/20030903/D7TAV4H00.html

*****

FLASH CARD
      "No love, no friendship can cross the path of our destiny without 
leaving some mark on it forever." (Francois Mauriac)

WORTH THINKING ABOUT: (NON)VOTER APATHY
      Author Thomas E. Patterson offers this description of America's 
"Incredible Shrinking Electorate":
      "The voting rate has fallen in nearly every presidential election for 
four decades. An economic recession and Ross Perot's spirited third-party 
bid sparked a healthy 5 percent increase in 1992, but turnout in 1996 
plunged to 49 percent, the first time since the 1920s that it had slipped 
below 50 percent.
      "Many expected turnout to rise in 2000. The Clinton-Dole race four 
years earlier was one-sided from the start. The contest between Al Gore and 
George W. Bush, however, looked to be the tightest since 1960, when John F. 
Kennedy won by the slim margin of 100,000 votes. 'Close elections tend to 
drive up voter interest,' said CNN's political analyst Bill Schneider. 
Turnout did rise, but only slightly: a mere 51 percent of U.S. adults voted 
in 2000.
      "That was a far cry from the 63 percent turnout for the Kennedy-Nixon 
race of 1960, which became the benchmark for evaluating participation in 
subsequent elections. In every presidential election for the next twenty 
years, turnout fell. It rose by 1 percentage point in 1984, but then 
dropped 3 points in 1988. Analysts viewed the trend with alarm, but the 
warning bells really sounded in 1996, when more Americans stayed home than 
went to the polls on Election Day.
      "The turnout trend in the midterm congressional elections has been no 
less alarming. The voting rate was nearly 50 percent on average in the 
1960s, barely stayed above 40 percent in the 1970s, and has averaged 37 
percent since then. After a recent midterm vote the cartoonist Rigby showed 
an election clerk eagerly asking a stray cat that had wandered into a 
polling place, 'Are you registered?'
      "Fewer voters are not the only sign that Americans are less 
interested in political campaigns. Since 1960, participation has declined 
in virtually every area of election activity, from the volunteers who work 
on campaigns to the viewers who watch televised debates. Few today pay even 
token tribute to presidential elections. In 1974, Congress established a 
fund to underwrite candidates' campaigns, financed by a checkoff box on 
personal income tax returns that allowed citizens to assign $1 (later 
raised to $3) of their tax liability to the fund. Initially, one in three 
taxpayers checked the box. By the late 1980s, only one in five marked it. 
Now, only one in eight does so."
                                                              ***
See 
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0375414061/newsscancom/ref=nosim 
for Thomas E. Patterson's "The Vanishing Voter: Public Involvement in an 
Age of Uncertainty -- or look for it in your favorite library. [We donate 
all revenue from our book recommendations to adult literacy programs.]

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