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D. Murali

IT is not really an equal opportunity provider, says this report. Some sections of society have a readymade launch pad.

RANJANA Agarwal, a Delhi-based researcher, has written a paper titled, Equal opportunity in the information technology sector, reality or myth: a case study, downloadable from www.ssrn.com.

"The database consists of 252 respondents, consisting of 125 women and 127 men," she explains. The sample had 99.6 per cent from the general category, and all respondents from urban regions.

"Thus, it is seen that majority of respondents entering the IT industry belong to the upper caste and urban areas who had access to higher education related to newer technologies," is a quick finding from Agarwal.

Another observation is that the IT industry is limited to only "certain sections of the population who have entered this industry at a relatively young age". She also found that 94 per cent women and 64 per cent men in the sample of computer professionals drawn have studied in English medium schools. "The IT sector provides opportunity only to a certain class of people. It is not an equal opportunity provider," concludes Agarwal. "If adequate steps are not taken to provide IT access to all, the potential benefits of this sector will remain grossly unutilised. The fruits of development will not reach the masses. Suitable policies need to be formulated to remove this unequal access to IT."

Just the stuff politicians may find useful, if IT firms don't pay attention to the issues raised in the paper.

E in evidence

One of the most pressing issues raised by the IT revolution is how one can prove the existence and reality of cyberspace in a court of law, points out Charles Aeng Cheng Lim in Information Technology and the Law of Evidence - Recent Legislative Initiatives, an April 2005 paper. Disappointingly, the paper has no download on the SSRN site. Yet, I wander into the Singapore Academy of Law Journal's homepage given as a hyperlink, and chance upon many other catchy titles. Such as, Nathan K G Lau's Registration of Olfactory Marks as Trade Marks: Insurmountable Problems?

The teaser reads: "In view of the impending amendment to the Singapore Trade Marks Act removing the requirement that signs have to be visually perceptible to be registrable, this article discusses the difficulties that proprietors will encounter in attempting to register scents as trade marks." What about the other three senses, viz. tactile, auditory and gustatory?

Taxi transactions

Not 40 million, but only a small fraction of the nearly 14 million credit card accounts at MasterCard has got exposed to possible fraud, according a report on www.banktech.com.

As you are probably aware, CardSystems Solutions was where the mega problem started. But I'm more interested in another story on the site, that `even taxi cabs are worried about consumer data security'.

When merchants enter a request for a card authorisation, it's transmitted over a wireless network such as Cingular or Verizon to Synapse, which transports the request over a landline to a payment processor, explains Steven Marlin.

"After the transaction is authorised, the approval is sent back via Synapse to the wireless network and on to the merchant."

Transaction Network Services, the company that provides network services to payment processors, encrypts personal-account and credit-card information sent across the Synapse.

At the user end are "merchants that use wireless devices, including taxi and limousine companies, towing services, arts and crafts shows, and mobile concession and souvenir stands."

Synapse means the junction across which a nerve impulse passes from an axon terminal to a neuron, muscle cell, or gland cell, explains www.answers.com.

"Crossing a gap of less than a millionth of an inch (the synaptic cleft), the neurotransmitter contacts the adjacent muscle, gland, or nerve cell or its branch receptor sites, called dendrites," you'd know if you were to lapse further into the synapse entry.

Heroes for the year

In a communiqué dated June 7, Computerworld has announced the recipients of its 21st Century Achievement Awards for 2005. Winners are: Acxiom Corporation for Customer Information Infrastructure; Australian Government, Department of Defense for Learning Management System; Broward County Environmental Protection Department, Florida, for Creation of a New Mobile Inspection and Monitoring System; Sprint for Industry Solutions; Aidmatrix for Global Relief Network; Cambium Forstbetriebe for Log Tracking System; Turner Broadcasting System, Inc for Optimising Digital Media; Northern Lights Health Region for Health Care `Anytime, Anywhere'; European Southern Observatory for Data Flow System of the European Southern Observatory; and OnStar for Advanced Automatic Crash Notification (AACN).

No names from closer home; however, for the keen, the site to check is www.cwheroes.org, "where the entire collection is available to scholars, researchers and the general public."

Software projects and options

Chee-Wee, Tany of the Sauder School of Business, University of British Columbia, Veikko Thielez of the School of Business and Economics, Humboldt-University at Berlin, and Eric Tze-Kuan, Limx of the School of Computing, National University of Singapore have written a paper titled, Escalation and de-escalation of software projects: an options analytical perspective.

It is about "exploration of common cognitive dissonance theories adopted for the explanation of unwarranted escalation behaviours from an agency perspective using options analysis", I gather from the abstract.

"The proposed research area will likely translate to a pertinent contribution in shedding light to an otherwise highly controversial and obscure topic," promise the authors. "By modelling IT implementations as staged investments that are analogous to compounded European options, we argue that software projects are characterised by a sequence of decisional points at which the agent must decide on whether to exercise the option to continue or abandon the investment in light of the current realised project value and the stream of future expenditures." A paper for the math-savvy.

Three utilities

Robert Plotkin, a lecturer at Boston University School of Law asks Software Patentability and Practical Utility: What's the Use? in a paper published by the International Review of Law Computers & Technology.

The European Patent Convention excludes software programs from patent protection unless they have a `technical effect', while the US law requires that a software program have a `practical utility' to constitute patentable subject matter, points out the author.

"Both such requirements fail to provide clear guidance in hard cases because they merely beg the question of what constitutes a `technical' effect or a `practical' utility," he comments.

What is the alternative? Plotkin recommends that software patent claims should be evaluated in terms of three kinds of utility or effects: One, physical utility, or "the direct physical effects of an invention, such as the movement of gears and levers in a mechanical cash register"; two, logical utility, that is, "the information processing tasks performed by an invention, such as the mathematical operations performed by a cash register"; and three, application utility, "the usefulness of the invention to the end user, such as the increased accuracy and reduced calculation time made possible by a cash register". A suggestion of practical utility!

ITworks@TheHindu.co.in

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