A new school in England is to use retinal eye scanning technology to identify its pupils. According to the BBC, the Venerable Bede Church of England Aided School in Sunderland will use retinal scanners linked to a secure database on students when they purchase meals in the school canteen and borrow books from the library. Headmaster Ed Yates said the retinal scan was "safe, secure, very efficient and quick." However, the National Union of Teachers questioned the financial and long-term health implications of the technology. "I think there is a fine line between practical technology and James Bond technology and I think this might have crossed it," said Howard Brown, Sunderland secretary for the NUT, noting that "finances could be better used on teachers and teaching and learning."
The Welsh Assembly is piloting a new e-mail and SMS alert service to warn drivers of potential problems on the road, according to Government Computing News. Traffic Wales, which the Welsh Assembly claims is the first traffic information system of its kind in the UK, will automatically alert motorists who register at traffic-wales.com to road hazards, accidents and delays on their preferred routes. The system receives its information from traffic control centres, which monitor the traffic situation via an extensive CCTV network. The scheme is being piloted on the M4 before being rolled out more widely.
The European Union is this week launching a centralised fingerprint database aimed at preventing asylum seekers from making applications in more than one EU country, a practice known as "asylum shopping." From Wednesday, the EUR6.5 million Eurodac system will be used to record and store digital images of the fingerprints of all new asylum seekers over the age of 14. Immigration officials in the EU (except Denmark) will be able to crosscheck applicants' fingerprints on the Eurodac system to see if they are already in the database. The system will store fingerprints, but not names or personal details, for a maximum of ten years, and records will be erased if an asylum seeker gains full citizenship. The European Commission says the system will meet international human rights standards, but some refugee organisations have objected to its introduction.
The European Commission has pulled the plug on the EUSlanD initiative, a multi-million-euro project intended to establish a pan-European information exchange for local and regional government, according to a report in the E-Government Bulletin. The EUR3 million EUSlanD (European system for local authorities' networking domain) project was launched in January 2000 by a consortium of public and private sector organisations in France, Belgium, Denmark, Italy and Poland. The aim was to create a multilingual index of information sources and case studies, so that local authorities could share their experiences with each other. The plug was pulled on the project because it failed to produce a working prototype within a period of time acceptable to the European Commission.
A multi-billion-dollar federal program aimed at encouraging schools and libraries to go on-line has been slammed as "honeycombed with fraud and financial shenanigans" in a report by the Center for Public Integrity in the US. E-Rate, the six-year-old USD2.25 billion program in question, gives schools and libraries discounts of up to 90 percent on investments in Internet and telecoms infrastructure. The non-profit Center for Public Integrity said the program was in "financial disarray" and had problems ranging from "simple paperwork and reporting errors to false billing and other fraud potentially involving hundreds of millions of dollars." The report also raised concerns that the competitive bidding procedures required under the program were not being adhered to properly.
Washington State's Department of Information Services (DIS) has incorporated "Ask Jeeves" technology into its Access Washington portal in order to help site visitors find the information they require. The JeevesOne technology, a natural language search program, has been customised so that site visitors seeking government-related information can now "Ask George," a George Washington character who presides over the search engine's query box. George has been programmed to search most Web sites that are administered by Washington State government agencies, and it can find some content on city and county sites. Ask George is entirely hosted by Jeeves Solutions, which means minimal technical supervision by the DIS.
Quelle: electricnews.net
