Jan 07, 2008 04:30 AM
Michael Geist

Predicting the future of Canadian technology law is challenging at the best of times, but with upcoming national elections in the United States and possibly Canada, prognostications for the next 12 months are admittedly likely to be about as accurate as a coin flip.

With that caveat in mind, I offer up eight issues to watch in 2008:

Security breach reporting rules are introduced.

Scarcely a week went by last year without a report of a security breach that placed the personal data of thousands of Canadians at risk. Last spring, a House of Commons committee acknowledged that the country needs mandatory security breach disclosure legislation that would require organizations to advise Canadians when they have been victimized by a breach. A public consultation on the issue concludes next week and new regulations will be introduced before the summer. more>>>

What does this say about the Bush Regime’s priorities:

BETHESDA, Md., Jan. 8 (UPI) — The United States ranks last among 19 industrialized nations when it comes to deaths that could have been prevented.

The report by The Commonwealth Fund, published in the journal Health Affairs, said 101,000 deaths per year could have been prevented by access to timely and effective healthcare. The top performers were France, Japan and Australia.

Ellen Nolte and Martin McKee of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine looked at deaths “amenable to healthcare before age 75 between 1997-98 and 2002-03.”

The researchers found that while other countries saw these types of deaths decline by an average of 16 percent, the United States experienced only a 4 percent decline. “It is notable that all countries have improved substantially except the U.S.,” said Nolte, lead author of the study.

Commonwealth Fund Senior Vice President Cathy Schoen said the finding that other countries are reducing preventable deaths more rapidly with less money “indicates that policy, goals and efforts to improve health systems make a difference.”

Copyright 2008 by United Press International. All Rights Reserved.

Wow, just think about this:

ScienceDaily (Jan. 7, 2008) — A new study by two York University researchers estimates the U.S. pharmaceutical industry spends almost twice as much on promotion as it does on research and development, contrary to the industry’s claim.

The researchers’ estimate is based on the systematic collection of data directly from the industry and doctors during 2004, which shows the U.S. pharmaceutical industry spent 24.4% of the sales dollar on promotion, versus 13.4% for research and development, as a percentage of US domestic sales of US$235.4 billion. more>>>

the authors arrived at US$57.5 billion for the total amount spent on pharmaceutical promotion in 2004. The industry spent approximately US$61,000 in promotion per physician during 2004, according to Gagnon.

CHICAGO (AFP) – Scientists believe that a quantum leap in computing power and the development of powerful new telescopes will soon unravel the “cosmic web,” a theory by which the universe is bound by invisible threads of “dark matter.”

In a series of articles in Friday’s edition of Science magazine, leading astrophysicists explain how new technologies and experiments being launched in the coming years will open a new window onto the origins and complexities of the universe.

Current tools have granted a rough picture of how the universe was born out of the Big Bang and is held together by the gravitational pull of mysterious “dark matter.”

But they are not precise enough to truly map the cosmic web, which is said to hold together the 100 billion bright galaxies in the known universe, or reveal details like how galaxies form and interact.

Several upcoming projects will help change that, the authors argue.

“We are on the verge of making tremendous progress thanks to the new observatories (being planned) theoretical progress being made and the advances in super computing,” explained Harvard University’s Claude-Andre Faucher-Giguere, lead author on one of the articles. more>>>

January 3, 2008

There’s only one year left before over-the-air television signals switch from analog to digital, and many watchers who rely on “rabbit ears” or roof-top antennas will wake up to blank screens without the right equipment.

To that end, the government is offering $40 coupons for anyone who needs to purchase a converter box to properly watch digital television on an analog set.

The National Telecommunications and Information Administation (NTIA), an arm of the Commerce Department, is offering the coupons through its official digital television site.

Beginning January 1, 2008, and continuing until March 31, 2009, television watchers can apply for up to two coupons per household towards buying converter boxes, one per set. Consumers can also call a 24-hour hotline to take requests at 1-888-DTV-2009 (1-888-388-2009).

Beginning February 18, 2008, the government will mail the coupons to applicants, which can then be used to purchase the converter boxes at major electronics retailers.

Although most electronics retailers have not begun advertising or selling digital converter boxes yet, the devices are expected to cost between $60 and $70. LG and Phillips are expected to unveil their converter box models at next week’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

Daniel Geschwind reaches up to his office bookshelf, takes down a three-dimensional puzzle of the human brain, and begins trying to snap the plastic pieces together. A neurogeneticist at the University of California, Los Angeles, Geschwind hopes the puzzle will help him describe the parts of the brain that control speech and language. But for the life of him, he can’t figure out how the left and right hemispheres attach. “I’m really bad spatially, so don’t make fun of me,” he pleads. “It’s like I’m having a little stroke or something. I’ll get it together, and then I’ll figure it out.” more>>>

A coalition of 17 organizations, including the National Academy of Sciences, the American Institute of Physics, and the National Science Teachers Association, is calling on the scientific community to become more involved in the promotion of science education, including evolution. more>>>

When NASA begins launching astronaut teams on 800-day missions to Mars, one of the greatest survival tests these explorers will face is the inevitable alienation they’ll experience with their remoteness from Earth and the harshness of the frozen Red Planet.

After rocketing halfway around the solar system for 180 nights, these astronauts will start the first of 500 days on the Martian surface observing a cocoa-colored dusk fade into a star-saturated nightfall. Earth, 400 million kilometers away, will appear as just a twinkling blue diamond in the skies. The astronauts will have never felt so alone.

But NASA thinks it has an answer to the psychological challenge of interplanetary isolation. While aerospace engineers are designing the Ares rockets to be deployed in the Mars missions, a more starry-eyed contingent at NASA is testing networking and virtual reality technologies that they think will connect the first wave of Mars pioneers with their families, friends and colleagues back on Earth, in a 3-D virtual world cut from the mold of Second Life or World of Warcraft. more>>>

So Google and Wikipedia took you by surprise? Nick Galvin looks into his crystal ball and explains what you need to know to survive the next decade.

Think back to the days before the network we call the internet existed. Think back to a world before “google” became a verb, before a user-generated encyclopedia called Wikipedia replaced Britannica and before eBay turned the planet into one big garage sale.

It’s easy to forget that as little as a decade ago all these innovations that are part of daily life had yet to be dreamed of. The effect can scarcely be overstated and there appears to be no slowing in the number of new ways that are being invented to use this new connectedness. more>>>

A hearing aid is a straightforward device. Its microphone collects sound, its electronics amplify it, its tiny loudspeaker sends the sound into a tube placed in the ear canal, and the power comes from a disposable battery. There’s just one problem: people hate hearing aids. They get lost. They’re hard to wear while sleeping. They mustn’t get wet. They get chewed up by the dog. They’re awkward during sex.

I don’t have a hearing aid. But I do have a cochlear implant. Cochlear implants are for people who are so deaf that even the most powerful hearing aids won’t help. A processor worn on my ear collects sound and digitizes it, then transmits it by radio to a receiver embedded in my skull. The receiver sends pulses to electrodes attached to my auditory nerves. more>>>

InPhase Technologies hopes to bring its novel 3-D storage product to market by next year–and revolutionize how you store your data.

Although the offices of IBM and Hewlett-Packard are nearby, Longmont, CO, is decidedly not Silicon Valley chic. But in this Denver suburb, a radical experiment in data storage is under way. At the headquarters of InPhase Technologies, where the conference rooms are named after ski resorts, chief executive Nelson Diaz holds up a clear plastic disc, about the size of a DVD but thicker, and pops it into a disc drive. A laptop connected to the drive downloads streaming video of an old episode of Seinfeld as the drive writes it to the disc.

But this is no ordinary recording process. The disc has more than 60 times the storage capacity of a standard DVD, while the drive writes about 10 times faster than a conventional DVD burner. That means the disc can store up to 128 hours of video content — almost twice enough for the full nine seasons of Seinfeld — and records it all in less than three hours. more>>>

Nanotube height, diameter and spacing affect a “densification” process developed by James Jian-Qiang Lü of Rensselaer Polytechnic University and his colleagues to compact carbon nanotubes into dense bundles.

These tightly packed bundles are efficient conductors that the reserarchers believe could one day replace copper as the primary interconnects used on computer chips and even hasten the development of next-generation 3-D integrated chips. If the nanotube bundles are too short, like those on the left, there is no densification at all. If the bundles are too tall, like those on the right, bundles are not rigid enough and tend to stick with one another after densification.

The middle region, where bundles are between 30-65 micrometers tall, demonstrates good densification.

Credit: Rensselaer/ James Jian-Qiang Lü�