Salon.com > Randy Dotinga

Stalker tech

Tue, 11 Jun 2002 19:30:00 +0000

It's 11 p.m. Do you know where your boyfriend is? If he attends the University of California at San Diego, finding him may be as easy as turning on a PDA.

The university is equipping hundreds of students with personal digital assistants that allow them to track each other's location from parking lot to lecture hall to cafeteria. The technology is sophisticated enough to pinpoint where a person is in a building -- say, a dorm -- within a margin of error of one floor.

No one is forcing students to use the $549 Hewlett-Packard Jordana PDAs, which are provided for free, or requiring them to allow their buddies to watch them wander across campus on a zoomable map. But students still worry about protecting themselves from stalkers, university administrators, FBI agents and nosy parkers.

"I don't necessarily want even my friends knowing where I am," says Ben Shapiro, a 22-year-old senior who is designing the project's privacy rules. "Maybe students aren't out of the closet and don't want people to know they're going to the Gay & Lesbian Resource Center. Maybe you're cheating on your girlfriend and you don't want her to know you're in somebody else's dorm room. It's creepy Big Brother."

Small airports, big problem?

Tue, 08 Jan 2002 09:00:00 +0000

Got a pair of wire cutters? That may be more than you need to steal a small plane and fly it off a runway. Thousands of private planes are sitting ducks at the nation's airports, armed with fewer security features than a typical Toyota pickup.

Even after the attacks of Sept. 11, many pilots trust their Cessnas to combination locks or bike chains, while small airports themselves are lucky to be protected by a chain-link fence. "At most little airports, you could drive down the runway at night and nobody would stop you," said Rod Propst, manager of the Fullerton Municipal Airport in Southern California.

Small planes remain a weak link in the nation's aviation security system, as last Saturday's airborne attack on a Florida skyscraper revealed. The alleged suicide pilot, 15-year-old Charles J. Bishop, didn't even have to break into a plane. A flight instructor reportedly left him alone to do a preflight check on a Cessna 172 at St. Petersburg-Clearwater International Airport.

Bishop was too young to have a student pilot's license, the rough equivalent of a driver's training permit, which would have allowed him to fly solo during training. While anyone can take flying lessons, the licenses are issued only to those 16 and older.

The tooth will out

Mon, 06 Nov 2000 20:30:00 +0000

Paul Connett, a chemistry professor at New York's St. Lawrence University, always makes sure to pick up a few tubes of fluoride-free toothpaste when he visits his home country of England. He just can't stomach the idea of putting fluoride on his teeth by using a brand like Crest or Colgate.

But if the idea of brushing with fluoride makes Connett queasy, the thought of drinking it makes him sick. It is, he says, a dangerous substance that doesn't belong in the human body. "It makes as much sense to swallow fluoride as it does to swallow nail varnish," Connett said.

Unfortunately for Connett and those who think like him, fluoride-free drinking water in the U.S. is becoming almost as hard to find as fluoride-free toothpaste. Fluoridated water flows out of most taps in the country, including those of the great majority of the country's largest cities. Connett, a leader of America's fluoride-is-poison crowd, wants to clear the waters. He and his supporters will have their biggest opportunity in memory on Election Day, when water supplies serving more than 3.8 million Americans will be at stake.

Out on a limb

Tue, 29 Aug 2000 19:00:00 +0000

For just about everyone, losing a limb is a fate too horrible to imagine. But for New York psychoanalyst Gregg Furth, the amputation of his right leg would be a dream come true.

Not that there's anything wrong with his leg. It works properly and he walks like anyone else. It's his brain that's broken.

Furth suffers from an extremely rare disorder whose victims are obsessed with the amputation of their own healthy limbs. For decades, he has tried to find a doctor willing to take up a knife and chop off his right leg so he can feel, for the first time, like an intact person. "It's about becoming whole, not becoming disabled," he said. "You have this foreign body, and you want to get rid of it."

Last year his quest led him to Scotland to see Dr. Robert Smith, a surgeon who has performed two amputations on healthy limbs. Smith agreed to operate on him after three psychologists reviewed Furth's case, and the two wrote a book about the disorder.

But Furth's luck ran out. The public hospital where Smith performed the earlier operations backed out amid bad publicity. Then on Aug. 25, a private Scottish facility rejected Smith's request that he be allowed to perform operations there.