Government Technology - January 2008 - (Page 17)

pectrum reports from the IT horizon spectrum ideas to managing editor Karen Stewartson Send j Missing in Action Britain’s tax and customs service lost banking and personal data of 25 million people — nearly half the country’s population — when two computer disks went missing in the mail in November 2007. The disks were sent to a government audit ofﬁce through an internal postal service and weren’t tracked. They were missing for three weeks before the loss was reported. The disks contained details of more than 7 million families in Britain who claim a child beneﬁt — the tax-free monthly payment available to everyone with children. The information on the disks included parents’ and children’s names, along with addresses, dates of birth, national insurance numbers and banking details. — INTERNATIONAL HERALD TRIBUNE PC Reliability The RESCUECOM Computer Reliability Report tallied a “reliability score” for each PC vendor based on the calculated difference between overall U.S. market share over a three-year period and the percentage of calls requesting service received by RESCUECOM’s call center. Higher scores indicate that fewer calls for service were received for the speciﬁc computer vendor versus expected levels based upon market share estimates. The top ﬁve vendors, according to the second-annual report, are: Apple Lenovo/IBM Hewlett-Packard Gateway Dell 126 103 94 236 Scarecrow 357 Scientists at Monsanto and deVGen identified an innovative and precise approach to protect crops against insects. The enabling technology, called RNA interference, is a biological mechanism found in nature that regulates gene expression. The technology is expected to provide farmers with a new “in-the-seed” option to protect crop yields, and it presents another tool to support agriculture’s mission of meeting the world’s growing food, feed and fuel demands. — DeVGen.com Soft Copy More consumers are logging on to the online equivalents of printed publications for their reading material, according to the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School Center for the Digital Future. While the ratio of printed material read hasn’t dropped dramatically — from three-fourths to 70 percent over the last six years — the portion of it read online has risen to 23 percent from 19 percent in the last year. At Your Fingertips Some consumers can now pay for gas with the touch of a ﬁngertip. At select Chicagoland stations, Shell Oil Co. has adopted Pay By Touch technology at its pumps and inside convenience stores. The technology veriﬁes personal identity using biometrics, the measurement of unique physical and behavioral characteristics. In this case, a ﬁnger scan is used to pay for a fuel purchase from an existing ﬁnancial account of the driver’s choice: a Shell Card, Shell MasterCard or eCheck — a direct debit from the user’s checking account. — SHELL.COM 17 http://DeVGen.com http://SHELL.COM http://www.govtech.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Government Technology - January 2008

Government Technology - January 2008 Contents Point of View Big Picture The Last Mile On the Scene CIO Sightings Four Questions for... Spectrum Location, Location, Location Digital Governor Back to the Drawing Board Waukesha Goes Green Collaring Dangerous Dogs Public Sector Goes Web 2.0 Bounce Back SACWIS Rollout Simple Strategy Products Personal Computing How It Works signal:noise

Government Technology - January 2008

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