To: bpr-list@philologos.org (BPR Mailing List)
Subject: [BPR] - Comet & Asteroid Hunters' Discovery Streak Continues
From: bpr-list@philologos.org(BPR)
Date: Sat, 9 Oct 1999 13:32:41 +0000

From: research-bpr@philologos.org (Moza)

Comet And Asteroid Hunters' Discovery Streak Continues
By John Fleck
Albuquerque Journal
October 6, 1999

A team of New Mexico astronomers has discovered a comet that could be
bright enough to be seen with the naked eye next summer.

It's the latest in a string of significant finds for the LINEAR
telescope outside Socorro. In recent weeks, it has also:

* Found the fourth object ever discovered that has a chance --
  extremely remote at this point -- of hitting Earth

* Rediscovered a "Trojan," a rare type of asteroid shepherded in a
  stable orbit by the planet Jupiter. The asteroid was first seen in
  1906, then lost to science until the LINEAR telescope picked it up
  in September.

The newly discovered comet isn't going to be a dramatic sight like
Comet Hyakutake in 1996 or Hale-Bopp in 1997, but it could be bright
enough to be easily seen with binoculars, or possibly with the naked
eye, Marsden said.

Full story here:

http://www.abqjournal.com/scitech/1sci10-06-99.htm

via: SEDSNEWS@listserv.tamu.edu

--- BPR

BPR Web Site - http://philologos.org/bpr

========
To: bpr-list@philologos.org (BPR Mailing List)
Subject: [BPR] - No place to hide
From: bpr-list@philologos.org(BPR)
Date: Sat, 9 Oct 1999 13:40:58 +0000

From: research-bpr@philologos.org (Moza)

From Forbes Magazine,
http://www.forbes.com/forbes/97/0922/6006226a.htm
-
Computers/Communications

Get ready for the surveillance society. It will make things tougher
for killers, rapists, cheating husbands and bad guys in general. It
will also play hell with your privacy and be very convenient for
potential dictators.

No place to hide

By Ann Marsh

TYPICAL AMERICAN FAMILY, c. 2008. Above their home, foot-long robot
airplanes patrol several hundred feet up, on the lookout for criminals
and even casual pot smokers. Both family cars are equipped with
global-positioning satellite receivers and locator beacons. Devices
pinned to the kids' shirts sound an alarm if they wander too close to
the street. Mom and Dad carry cell phones that double as personal
locators that can find them anywhere on the planet. The parents, the
kids and the dogs all have microchips under their skin with ID and
medical data.

There's lively debate as to whether surveillance technology will bring
on Orwell's 1984, making us all slaves of the state, or constitute a
giant step toward human freedom. Either way, the damned thing is
practically here. Let the chips fall where they may.

When the E-ZPass electronic toll booth system opened for business in
New York City, the authorities announced that they would release
travel information to the police only under subpoena or to investigate
a crime against the toll authority itself. Two months ago the rule was
changed:Now the E-ZPass database is available to police when they are
investigating any serious crime. They apparently decided that the
theoretical risks were worth taking if the cops could use the
information to grab a rapist, a terrorist, an Andrew Cunanan.

This year more than 10,000 Cadillac buyers bought the OnStar
satellite-positioning service. The equipment calls a live operator who
gives directions or other assistance (see box, p. 234); it also has a
feature that automatically alerts the operator to call 911 whenever an
air bag is deployed. So far there have been 23 calls to 911 after
accidents. A couple of lives may have been saved. Already.

Loss of privacy, yes. But there are benefits.

What follows is a snapshot of the new tracking technologies. Most,
like the satellite-positioning systems for cars, are active. That
means they use their own power sources to generate and receive signals
from monitors. Some are passive devices that respond to scanners on
entering electromagnetic fields_like the antitheft tags used by
retailers.

Roads and rails

Can your husband use OnStar to find out whether you really went out on
a business call? "Big Brother we do not want to be," says Jeffrey
Depew, head marketer for General Motors' OnStar service, which is now
in three types of Cadillacs and rolls out in 21 other GM models next
year. "We will tell the police where a vehicle is, but not just any
individual. We do not want to be a national detective service."

Still, GM hopes that OnStar will offer an entr=E9e for selling other
services, such as instantaneous engine diagnostics or traffic reports.

Sales of global-positioning satellite equipment totaled $867 million
in 1994 and should exceed $8 billion in 2000. Once exclusively
military, GPS receivers today are bought by commercial users in nine
out of ten cases. Most long-haul trucking lines now use services like
San Diego-based OmniTracs, a division of Qualcomm, or HighwayMaster
Communications of Dallas. Satellite positioning is an option in car
models from Ford, BMW and Honda.

Stolen-car recovery services like LoJack of Boston and Teletrac of
Kansas City home in on radio beacons to track stolen cars. Teletrac's
specialty is fleet management: it helps manage the vehicle fleets of
utilities, cable companies and bakeries.

Using Teletrac, a company's dispatcher can send the nearest truck to a
customer, cutting down on slack time. He can also review records of a
route and verify the exact time it took to complete a job_helpful in
billing disputes. If a vehicle is stolen, a silent alarm alerts
someone at the Teletrac command center, who informs the company and
helps police track it. For an installation charge of about $1,000 plus
$15 a month, an individual in Los Angeles or Miami can get a Teletrac
transmitter for a personal car. Passive tracking Active trackin

Some of the companies that track

Top

Passive tracking devices respond to electromagnetic fields emitted by
scanners. Since the energy to power the transfer of data comes from
the scanner, the chip can be battery-free and tiny. A rice-sizeglass
capsule, containing a microchip and antennae, can be inserted under an
animal's skin or in a breast implant.

Sports

Tied to runners' shoes, microchips have recorded precise finishing
times at the Boston Marathon. Security

Sensors in security passes and on merchandise help keep track of
people and goods. Beer drinking

In Sweden customers use personal microchip cards to activate beer taps
and to pay for drinks. Breast implants

In an FDA-monitored trial, Los Angeles women get data-storing
microchips with their breast implants Salmon

Insert a microchip in a baby salmon and you can track its adult
migration past a controversial dam.

Here's a perfect case of a device that both promotes safety and offers
opportunities for snooping. James Frazier, who runs an Internet
software company called Gorillagent in Los Angeles, bought Teletrac
because his wife, Diane, got a job in a dicey part of the city.
Frazier demonstrates by phoning the tracking system called Ozz.

"The vehicle is traveling west on the Santa Monica Freeway near
Fairfax at 30 miles per hour," Ozz says in a stilted voice.

Good. Frazier knows where Diane is on her commute home. Using
Touch-Tone commands on the phone, he can remotely unlock and lock her
car doors. This feature comes in handy if Diane accidentally locks the
keys in the car. But it's also a good way to get her to turn on her
cell phone and call.

The phone rings. "Hi. What's up?" Diane asks. Frazier asks her to
detour to Westwood. He'll meet her there. They can just catch the
early showing of Men in Black.

Police in Southern California nabbed a lot of criminals by sneaking
transmitters onto suspects' cars. Civil libertarians objected. A
proposed state statute would compel the police to get a search warrant
before tagging an automobile this way.

Amtrak uses OmniTracs on 200 of its trains that run over tracks owned
by freight carriers like Burlington Northern. Amtrak can't count on
the freight lines to track Amtrak cars. So OmniTracs does that, then
forewarns the next stops of delays and can relay data on depleted food
stores. Boatracs is OmniTracs' service for the maritime industry.

The jewelry store

ProNet of Dallas has given police in 130 cities receivers that can
pick up signals from radio transponders as small as a quarter. Jewelry
stores hide the transponders under display trays. When
smash-and-grabbers make off with a tray, a switch trips and the device
emits a radio signal. Using receivers mounted on buildings and in
their cars and helicopters, police can track suspects from up to 10
miles away. The transponders are small enough to fit between dollar
bills in bags of money given to bank robbers.

Police set out bikes with ProNet's transponders to bait bike thieves.
Companies use them to track anything from shipping containers to
laptop computers. ProNet rents the devices for $20 to $40 a month.

Services like Teletrac and OmniTracs also monitor shipments of
sensitive goods, say, a shipment of fine art or enriched uranium.
Using OmniTracs, U.N. troops monitor convoys passing through hazardous
parts of the former Yugoslavia.

Breast implants

Now $250 million, the still-embryonic market for radio frequency
identification devices will grow by 35% a year over the next five
years, says Shannon Worthen, an industry analyst at Frost & Sullivan
in Mountain View, Calif. These are often passive radio transponders
small as a grain of rice. They consist of microchips attached to small
antennae. In a scanner's electromagnetic field, information from the
chip is emitted by the antenna and read by toll booths and security
gates. Since the energy to power this transfer of data comes from the
scanner, the chip can be battery-free and tiny. Competing in this
market are well-known outfits like Motorola and Texas Instruments and
a host of smaller, pioneering companies. Destron Fearing of St. Paul,
Minn. developed the technology to identify animals by injecting
transponders underneath their skin. The company founder invented the
device after his prize horse was stolen.

Seven years ago animal-control shelters around the country began
inserting silicon IDs in the scruffs of cats and dogs. A number stored
on the microchip references a national database of pet owners so that
a lost pet can be returned to its home. The chipmaker sells the ID to
the animal shelter for about $6 to $8; the pet owner pays the shelter
$7.50 to $25.

The chips are also used to track migrating salmon and endangered
animals. Tied to shoelaces of runners in the Boston marathon, they
record precise finishing times. Beer drinkers in Sweden use personal
chip cards to activate taps and dispense themselves drinks.

This stuff scares some people. Belinda Lewis of the Fort Wayne, Ind.
animal-control center remembers one outraged customer. "He called it
'The Mark of the Beast.' He said, 'You aren't doing that to my
animal.'" But he relented after Lewis wouldn't give him the pet
without the chip. Other customers accused Lewis of running a
government experiment to test microchips for human use.

In fact, humans are already guinea pigs in such a trial. Plastic
surgeon Grant Stevens of Marina Del Rey, Calif. has fitted more than a
dozen women with soy-filled breast implants as part of a Food & Drug
Administration trial. The implants contain the same kind of microchip
used in animals. The chips are meant to redress a common problem in
breast-implant care: Patients forget important details about their
cases. A number on the microchip allows a hospital to retrieve that
information from a database. Active trackin Passive tracking

Some of the companies that track

Top

Active tracking technologies use their own power sources to generate
and receive signals from monitors. They include ground-based radio and
global positioning satellite systems to track anything from vehicles
to railcars. Unmanned aerial vehicles can be customized to take
photographs or sniff out chemicals.

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

Some big as jumbo jets, others as small as model planes, they are the
future of tracking. Trains

Satellite receivers on railcars help accurately predict arrival times
and keep tabs on traffic. Jewelry

Jewelers hide tiny radio transponders on their display trays. They
lead police to thieves. Police

Steal a vehicle with a radio or satellite tracking system and law
enforcement can follow your every move.

The potential loss of privacy leaves Dr. Stevens uneasy, he concedes,
but there is no better way to insure the accuracy of a person's
medical records. He thinks it inevitable that microchips with medical
information will become common in humans, possibly inserted under the
skin of the upper arm.

Will that mean, say, that a potential boss can find out whether you
have a medical problem before he hires you? Possibly. This stuff works
both ways.

Now that we implant medical information, why not a security pass? An
excited security professional recently called Lewis in Indiana. He
wanted subcutaneous microchips to monitor employees' access to
buildings. This gets really scary when you think of what a Saddam
Hussein could do by ordering his subjects to carry implanted chips on
pain of jail or worse.

On the other hand, Teletrac is working on a locator intended for
personal safety. One example: helping Alzheimer's sufferers, an idea
that was sparked when a son located his elderly father after he drove
off in a Teletrac-equipped car.

Several small personal-security companies make transponders to help
parents find wandering toddlers (see table, below). They cost around
$50 and fit in backpacks or clip onto clothing. Electric bracelets for
monitoring criminals have been around for years, and their use is
expanding. BI Inc. of Boulder, Colo. makes a bracelet called
JurisMonitor, used in 26 states. It monitors whether wife-beaters and
stalkers keep the prescribed distance from their targets. Who knows?
Maybe some parolees will prefer an implanted chip to a clunky
bracelet.

ProNet, the specialist in burglary beacons, plans to sell a device
called My 911 to colleges and large employers. People would carry the
device when walking to their parked cars or to late-night classes.
Pushing an alarm button would summon the campus police or company
security to the caller's exact location. The receiving station would
also be able to see the victim's name.

You've heard about the satellite telephone systems that will let you
make a phone call from anywhere in the world. Those connections can be
used in reverse to find someone with a cellular phone. And within two
years, at least four separate companies will launch new satellite
networks (see table, p. 232). This, too, is a mixed blessing. When and
where can a person get away from it all and think?

Nevertheless, the Federal Communications Commission has mandated that
within five years all cellular phone companies provide the locations
of subscribers who call 911. Already 15% to 20% of 911 calls come from
cell phone callers, many of whom assume police know where they are.
FCC Deputy Bureau Chief Rosalind Allen believes technology has the
answer to this problem: "One of the main selling points of wireless
phones is safety. There will be substantial competitive pressures to
do this."

Spy planes

A new world of tracking lurks in a defense industry contraption known
as the unmanned aerial vehicle. These drones can be as big as jumbo
jets or as small as paper airplanes. Small ones can patrol an area
from only a few hundred feet up, little noticed.

On the drawing board are some vehicles that can fly through an open
door, perch inside a building and quietly observe their surroundings.
Airborne, they can detect the presence of chemicals, like air
pollutants or perhaps, someday, the whiff of hemp. Airplane-size
drones can fly halfway around the globe and survey the ground with
12-inch resolution.

Drones have already been used to patrol the U.S.-Mexican border and to
monitor miles of power lines. But the commercial market is still in
its infancy. Aerospace expert Richard Wagaman of Boeing predicts that
sales will reach $2 billion a year by 2005.

Near Bosnia, a few years ago, a group of Serbian soldiers dug up a
mass grave of Muslims they had slaughtered. They wanted to burn the
evidence of their crime. An unmanned airplane caught the digging on a
video camera. Soldiers on the ground shot the camera out of the sky,
but not before the video had been transmitted to and stored at the
Pentagon. The images helped force the Serbs to the Dayton peace
negotiations.

Wagaman says police departments have been testing drones but can't
deploy them in large numbers until the air traffic control system is
upgraded to keep track of them. That upgrade is likely to come within
10 to 15 years.

The earliest video cameras used to cost $50,000 and weigh more than
100 pounds. Now they cost $100 and weigh mere ounces. They will soon
become ubiquitous_appearing on doorways, street corners and drone
airplanes.

Like it or not, the world is becoming smaller and smaller and ever
more transparent. Your fenced-in yard won't be quite as private as it
used to be. But neither will the dark alley near your bank teller
machine. Tradeoff, tradeoff, tradeoff.

  By Ann Marsh
  Technology
  Computers/Communications
  From September 22, 1997 Issue

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