Radio frequency identification tags are turning up in all sorts of places--from Wal-Mart pallets, wristwatches and luggage to dogs and even Japanese schoolchildren. Most recently, VeriChip, maker of subcutaneous RFID tags, has received a preliminary nod from FDA for subcutaneous RFID tags to identify hospital patients and staff.
Could forecasts of sensor ubiquity by 2015 prove conservative? I think not. Technological and economic issues surrounding RFID will continue to be accompanied by huge privacy issues.
As one reader put it: "Who'd want to be tagged and monitored like livestock? This technology gives me the shivers." Our ZDNet News Focus has the latest developments.
see full report: In 2015: sensors everywhere, computers invisible.
Politics and Connections
http://www.edweek.org/ew/ewstory.cfm?slug=43Edgrant.h23
Critics, though, question the reasoning behind the grant award and whether it’s appropriate for money intended to help rescue public school students from low-performing schools to be spent educating students who were previously home-schooled.
"To see money diverted from our public school coffers to support a for-profit company helping parents home-school does not seem like an appropriate use of public money," said Barbara Stein, a policy analyst at the National Education Association. (more...)
The New Radicalism
By Rachel Neumann, AlterNet. Posted July 22, 2004.
...While Globalize Liberation is a harsh critic of many tenets of corporate globalization, it seems, fundamentally, a hopeful book. "All we have to do," You write, "is change everything."
David Solnit: Hope is key. If our organizations, analysis, vision and strategies are lanterns, then hope is the fuel that makes them burn bright and attracts people to them. Globalize Liberation is consciously a hopeful book. The dictionary defines hope as "Desire accompanied by confident expectation of its fulfillment." Everyone who contributed to the book desires a radically better world, but the confidence that it will be fulfilled is told in concrete experiences from communities in North America and around the world. The essays in Globalize Liberation come out of these interesting times when social movements around the world that are bigger, stronger, more radical and democratic and more connected to each other than at any time in history.
What, right now, gives you the greatest hope?...(more)
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