By the time the New York Times covers a new technology, it's usually pretty well along. This NYT article entitled "A Device to Track Missing People" about Jennifer Durst and partners receiving three patents (soon to be four) for a GPS-enabled pet and people finder caught my attention.

In a nutshell, the unit worn by a pet, child, elderly person, etc. is triggered to apparently place a cell phone call when a pre-programmed geographical boundary is exceeded. Transmitted to your receiver of choice is the GPS-determined location of the unit/wearer, updated frequently to enable searchers to quickly find them.

The possible uses projected and more that come to mind, seem to me to make this technology a sure success. Check out gpstracks.com for additional info.

Favorites: New Yorker cartoon * David Coursey/Time * More ...

I attended the World Tecnology Summit & Awards in New York last week. I was impressed with some the more well-known of the information technology attendees: The Electronic Frontier Foundation's John Perry Barlow, Microsoft Tablet PC's Bert Keely, The Wall St. Journal's Walt Mossberg, Groove Networks' Ray Ozzie, and Lindows.com's Michael Robertson.

As with most such events, several of the less famous participants provided much food for thought. I'll be talking about some of them in future posts. Although I lived in the city quite a few years back, I had neglected many of the tourist activities ... made up for some of that this time around.

Some thoughts on privacy and the global village: Back when the web was young (1993), the New Yorker published its famous cartoon, "On the internet, no one knows you're a dog." To my mind, that kind of utopian anonymity just isn't possible in the new internet village.

The reality is better described in Roger Rosenblatt's Rule #2--"Nobody is thinking about you. They are thinking about themselves--just like you." That puts so-called internet security in a new light. The promise of the internet is that everyone can "stand up and be counted," not hide behind the spammer's ever-moving email addresses.

I've had a web presence since 1995 and from the beginning have used my real name, mailing address, telephone number and a constant email address. For better or worse, being who you really are and taking responsibility for the things you do is a lesson the internet community seems slow to learn.

Favorites: David Coursey/Time * More ...

ZDNet's David Coursey has an interesting article today, "Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is?" The commentaries are also enlightening and funny.

Essentially, the piece discusses the inaccuracies of PC internal clocks and efforts to synchronize them via the internet with various online atomic clocks or via GPS signals. Applications are available that do this automatically at intervals designated by the user or integrated into the OS.

Opinions on the accuracy necessary vary depending on the usage. To the nearest second seems fine for everyday use with accuracy to smaller increments required for radio, television, and scientific applications.

What is not discussed is an internal mechanism to adjust the PC clock that utilizes it's inherent "drift." For example, taking two or more samples, the discrepancies between the internal clock and the atomic clock divided by the intervening period between samples could be used to "automatically" adjust the internal clock. This feedback loop would "teach" the atomic clock accuracy to the internal clock.

Favorites: The World Technology Summit & The World Technology Awards. * GPS/ Dead Reckoning/ Wayne Newberry * Malcom Gladwell * John Allen Paulos * John Robb's The New Economy -II * Wired's New Economy Myth * Michael Moore * Probability Without Tears * John F. Simon Jr.'s Every Icon * Law of Diminishing Returns * Patently Absurd * Sir Arthur C. Clarke * W. Daniel Hillis * Claude E. Shannon -2 * The New York Times * The Buckminster Fuller Institute * Chautauqua * LuLu Press * Dan Bricklin * William Dunk