The Newspaper Shop -- Thursday edition

[walktalker]

New PCs to help airports improve security
The Bush administration said Thursday that it will upgrade computer systems used by passenger screeners in more than 100 U.S. airports in an effort to improve security. Security screeners who are now employed by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) receive only cell phones, pagers and computers with dial-up modems. This plan aims to create an information technology "infrastructure" that would give screeners a faster, more coordinated way to receive sensitive information. The plan is a joint project of the TSA, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), and the U.S. Customs Service.
http://news.com.com/2100-1001-962490.html?tag=cd_mh

XML spec moves ahead despite gripes
The Web's leading standards body this week advanced its seminal XML specification amid complaints that it was breaking XML's backwards-compatibility in order to benefit IBM. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) this week released XML 1.1 as a candidate recommendation, the penultimate phase in the consortium's recommendation process. XML, or Extensible Markup Language, is a widely adopted syntax for creating documents that are more easily read by computers. It's become central to a new software development trend called Web services that's supported by IBM, Microsoft and many other software makers.
http://news.com.com/2100-1001-962392.html?tag=cd_mh

Series tickets prove popular draw
Tickets.com's Web site was slammed Wednesday with San Francisco Giants fans eager to get a seat for the baseball team's first appearance in a World Series in 13 years. Tickets.com was unavailable for much of the morning after ticket sales began at 10 a.m. PDT. Many Fans looking to buy tickets were either timed out from the site or received error messages. Tickets.com spokeswoman Melissa Zukerman acknowledged the problems, but said that some fans were able to get through and buy tickets. She likened the Web site problems to fans trying to buy tickets over the phone to a popular concert and getting a busy signal.
http://news.com.com/2100-1017-962357.html?tag=cd_mh

Phones getting cozy with photos
A new kind of wireless message is about to arrive in the United States, sources said Thursday. Multimedia Message Service, or MMS, is a technology that allows e-mails to carry attachments such as documents, sound recordings or movie clips. Personal computers have been exchanging MMS messages over e-mail for years. In the next few weeks, Verizon Wireless and T-Mobile plan to launch MMS services for cell phones, according to sources. AT&T Wireless and Cingular Wireless are expected to sell MMS-capable phones sometime next year, an indication that both carriers will make MMS services available to subscribers, sources said.
http://news.com.com/2100-1033-962489.html?tag=cd_mh

AOL's pop-up sacrifice
America Online's decision to drop paid pop-up advertisements on its service underscores concerns about the strength of its most valuable asset: subscribers. The world's largest Internet service provider Tuesday took its most aggressive step yet against the reviled advertising format when AOL CEO Jonathan Miller promised to phase out all pop-ups sold to third-party advertisers. The proliferation of such ads has been one of the biggest complaints among AOL's 35 million subscribers, and the AOL Time Warner division has progressively cut back on them in a bid to win back fading customer loyalty.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-962345.html

Film site halts service pending lawsuit
Online film distributor Intertainer said Thursday it will close its service next week, citing litigation with the motion picture industry. "As many of you already know, on September 24th we filed a federal anti-trust suit against AOL Time Warner, Sony, Universal and Movielink," wrote Intertainer CEO Jonathan Taplin in an e-mail to site members. "On October 23rd we plan to take the site down until we can work out a fair business model with the defendants, who control more than 50 percent of the theatrical motion picture business and more than 60 percent of the music business." The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, charged the entertainment giants as conspirators that have been hindering Intertainer's business of offering movies on demand. The suit also alleges that the studios engaged in a "group boycott" of licensing their movies to Intertainer to buy time in launching their rival Movielink joint venture.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-962463.html?tag=cd_mh

This Is Your Brain on Magnets
Neurologists happily shared stories this week, vividly depicting their virtual journeys deep into human brains at a scientific symposium that occasionally felt a bit like a medical peep show. But attendees at the American Neurological Association's annual meeting aren't cerebellum-snooping just for the sheer joy of it. They are using investigative technology to treat conditions ranging from memory loss to schizophrenia and general human snarkiness. Scanners, magnets, radioactive solutions and sensors allow the scientists to observe and graphically map the ways their human subjects' brains process every thought and motion.
http://www.wired.com/news/medtech/0,1286,55824,00.html

Finns Declare: Don't Thread on Me
Last week's bomb blast in a suburban Helsinki shopping mall may have given message boards a bad name, but it's doubtful it will slow down their burgeoning popularity in Finland or elsewhere. Finnish authorities believe that a chemical engineering student, Petri Gerdt, 17, acted alone in triggering the blast, which killed him and six others and left another 70 injured. Police believe Gerdt learned his bomb-building skills at a small Finnish message board called the Forum for Home Chemistry. But on Thursday, police released a 17-year-old who had been arrested on suspicion of providing information to Gerdt through the message board, making it unlikely he will be charged -- and underlining how difficult it is for authorities to reign in message-board culture.
http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,55861,00.html

I Want My Show Now
Time Warner Cable has announced plans to roll out an expansive video-on-demand service in New York that will be the nation's broadest offering of the technology to date. The move reflects the cable industry's need to expand their services in order to create new sources of revenue, and is a step closer to its ultimate goal of delivering video, data and voice traffic to consumers through a single broadband connection. Within two weeks, some 250,000 of the company's subscribers in New York will have access to video-on-demand services. By the end of the year, that should expand to all 500,000 digital cable subscribers in that area. "This rollout is happening quite quickly," said Barbara Kelly, general manager and senior vice president for Time Warner Cable of New York.
http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,55870,00.html

Singapore SMS: Tlk Drty 2 Me
A wireless service in Singapore is encouraging citizens in the tightly controlled city-state to talk about sex. Meggpower.com's iReach service lets subscribers use their mobile phones to send sex-related questions via short-messaging service (SMS) to an international panel of doctors and health educators. Subscribers can expect answers within 48 hours. Meggpower.com is offering the service free through Friday as part of its Sex in the Air campaign. The campaign targets young people who are too shy to seek public sexual health information, and is supported by local health education groups.
http://www.wired.com/news/wireless/0,1382,55818,00.html

The Planet Seekers
As astronomers go, RayJay — his nickname in the tight-knit community — is a rock star. At age 27, he made the cover of Newsweek for his 1998 discovery of a protoplanetary disk — a dusty region of planet formation — around a star labeled HR 4796A, in the constellation Centaurus. Now, the University of Michigan assistant professor is after bigger quarry. RayJay is one of a dozen astronomers around the world vying to be the first to photograph an extrasolar planet. Some 100 exoplanets have been found indirectly. The primary technique, called radial velocity, detects Doppler shifts in a star's light caused by the gravitational pull of a nearby massive body. Thirteen new planets joined the list only last June, including a Jupiter-sized sphere as far from its star as our fifth planet is from the Sun. Astronomers believe there might be 30 billion planetary systems in the Milky Way alone. So far, though, no one has managed to view an extrasolar planet directly. In the past few years, that quest has become one of astronomy's foremost goals.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/10.11/planet.html

Taking a Risk for Science
A revolutionary surgery that involves drilling a hole in the skull and injecting cells could repair some devastating effects of multiple sclerosis. Specialists in multiple sclerosis say it's a bold effort that could have limited results and carries a high risk. But the surgeon leading the clinical trial to test the procedure -- one of the leading researchers in the field -- thinks the risks are worth taking. Dr. Timothy Vollmer, chief of neuroimmunology at the Barrow Neurological Institute in Arizona, has completed the trial, which included surgery on five patients. No data will be released until it's published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal, probably in December.
http://www.wired.com/news/medtech/0,1286,55833,00.html

MIT: Smart Tech Ideas Mean Biz
A lack of steady collaboration between academia and business means unproven ideas don't often advance beyond the drawing board. A new center at one of the nation's top universities will attempt to bridge the gap between research and commercialization. This week, MIT launched the Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation to serve as catalyst for innovation and entrepreneurship. Financed by a $20 million gift from Sycamore Networks co-founder Desh Deshpande and his wife Jaishree, the center will allow MIT researchers and students to explore new technology with local entrepreneurs and venture capitalists who might not otherwise have the opportunity to collaborate with MIT. Over the next five years, the center will award more than $15 million in grants directly to MIT research.
http://www.wired.com/news/school/0,1383,55796,00.html

Better PCs With Plastic Magnets
An ultrafast, low-cost computer that boots up instantly and safeguards data in case of a crash may sound like a mythical fairy tale beast, but the idea behind it comes from less fanciful stuff: the quantum theory of spintronics combined with plastic magnets. The trick to spintronics, however, is to exploit the electrons' spin instead of, or in conjunction with, their charge. "It's another level of function that opens up -- a new way of doing circuitry," said Arthur Epstein, professor of physics and chemistry at Ohio State University and a member of the team working on the supercomputer's design. To take advantage of the spin, you have to control it. This is where the magnets come in. Applying a magnetic field to the electrons aligns, or polarizes, the random jumble of spinning, so all the electrons spin in the same direction. Data can be transported, via the electrons, along a wire and then read at a terminal.
http://www.wired.com/news/technology...,55386,00.html

Technology exists to double gas guzzlers' fuel efficiency. So what's the holdup?
To get a sense of the auto industry’s progress in fuel efficiency, look no further than the 2002 Chevy Blazer. The model with automatic transmission, six cylinders, and four-wheel drive gets 18 miles per gallon (mpg), two miles less than a comparably equipped Blazer did in 1985. Indeed, in those 17 years the average fuel economy of the entire fleet of U.S. cars and light trucks declined from 26 mpg to 24 mpg—in part because of the rising proportion of gas-guzzling sport-utility vehicles (SUVs). Yet in March, when auto industry lobbyists claimed that building more fuel-efficient cars would be “too difficult,” the U.S. Senate once again killed legislation that would raise the country’s Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards. It was a familiar dance; Congress has not raised the standards even once during those same 17 years.
http://www.technologyreview.com/arti...chetti1102.asp

Star Clinches Case for Milky Way's Supermassive Black Hole
The discovery of a star orbiting the center of the Milky Way galaxy provides compelling evidence that a supermassive black hole lurks there, according to a new study. Previous research had pointed to the presence of a supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy, but the observations could still be explained by other theories. Now findings published in the journal Nature all but rule out those alternate theories, scientists say. Using 10 years of high-resolution images collected by telescopes around the world, a team of astronomers led by Rainer Schödel of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Germany tracked a star as it moved around the astrophysical object known as Sagittarius A (SgrA*) at our galaxy's core.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/ar...E2809EC5880108

EU to permit new GM crops
Following years of deadlock, the European Union could soon permit the development and sale of new GM crops. This follows the adoption on Thursday of new, stricter rules governing the approval of such products. Although the rules are tougher, the fact they have been agreed at all has been welcomed by backers of biotechnology. "If there's a move at all it's a good thing," says Vivian Moses of CropGen, an independent think-tank funded by industry to make the case for crop biotechnology. The move could also forestall a potentially damaging trade war with the US, which sees Europe's opposition to GM crops as a barrier to free trade. GM crops have been in commercial limbo in Europe since 1998 when member states agreed to impose an unofficial "moratorium" on the approval and commercialisation of new GM varieties.
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99992940

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