Doctors attack law as banning most second-term abortions: "Government lawyers say the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act prohibits an 'inhumane and gruesome procedure' that causes pain to the fetus and is never necessary to protect the health of a woman because there are proven and safe alternatives.

"The government maintains that the ban would affect as few as several thousand abortions annually, while lawyers for plaintiffs say 130,000 of the 1.3 million abortions performed annually in the United States may be affected."

Cellphones offer way to track the kids: "A cellphone may be the fashion and lifestyle accessory youths clamor for today. But what happens when it morphs into an electronic ankle bracelet that can be monitored by Mom and Dad?

"It's a scenario that's rapidly approaching, as wireless carriers sell more and more phones with embedded Global Positioning System receivers that can show the location of a phone to within 10 or 20 yards, as long as the phone is turned on."

Costco's love of labor: Employees' well-being key to its success: "You've got to want to get the very best people that you can and you want to be able to keep them and provide some job security for them. That's not just altruism. In the final analysis, it's good business."

Flextime: Not a bad stretch: "Working 9 to 5, what an outdated way to make a living! This is the age of flextime, when government employees set their own schedules.

"Tasked with building a top-notch, diverse workforce, the Office of Personnel Management offers alternative work schedules as a way for federal agencies to increase productivity, lure talent away from the private sector and keep workers happy."

A tough loss for left in abortion war: "These days the most intense political battles over abortion are being fought on the periphery of the issue. There are no attempts at the moment to ban abortion by constitutional amendment or to overturn Roe v. Wade and send the matter back to the states. Rather, the current debates are about a ban on some late-term abortion procedures, which is now being challenged in court, and about a federal law making it a crime to cause the death of a fetus during an attack on a pregnant woman, which was passed by Congress last week.

In the debate over the Unborn Victims of Violence Act, which the Senate passed, 61-38, on Thursday, the prochoice side not only lost but also suffered some harm to its image. The law, which makes the fetus a separate crime victim, applies only to federal crimes and is thus unlikely to result in many actual prosecutions, but it has great symbolic significance to both sides: for the first time, federal law gives the fetus the full legal status of a person."

Before the vote on final passage, Senator Feinstein offered an amendment in the nature of a substitute (change the bill entirely) that would have gutted the critical intent of Congress to grant full legal status as a person to unborn babies. Her amendment was defeated by a narrow vote of 49-50. That's the real vote of record on this bill.

Reverse mentoring: When juniors know more than the boss: "When young executives have to learn in an organisation they look up to their senior managers. But how do CEOs learn?"

NASA's experimental plane breaks world speed record: "A 12-foot experimental plane equipped with a special jet engine streaked across the Pacific Ocean at more than seven times the speed of sound Saturday, shattering a world speed record and brightening future prospects for super-fast airline flights."

Tell the kids to go fly a kite—on the National Mall: "More than 100 kites will compete for awards on the National Mall this weekend, and most anything goes. The kites will range in size from less than 3 inches to more than 20 feet, and they will be crafted from materials that might range from ground cover to wrapping paper.

"The Smithsonian Kite Festival, sponsored by the Smithsonian Associates, is in its 38th year. The contest originated in 1966 as the brainchild of aviation pioneer Paul E. Garber, who once worked with the National Air and Space Museum.

"All kite entries must be hand-made by the flier, except in the case of young children who may need the help of an adult. Awards will be given in four age categories: younger than 11; 12-15; 16-59; and senior.

"Kite enthusiast John Burkhardt heads the Maryland Kite Society and will be the head judge for this year's festival."

Sky watchers could not 'planet' any better: "An after-dinner dessert now awaits sky watchers as five planets make appearances in the early evening sky.

"For the rest of the month, Jupiter, Saturn, Mars, Venus and Mercury are visible at night without a telescope, astronomers say."

In Pledge Case, Passing the Test (washingtonpost.com): "Any doubts about whether California atheist Michael A. Newdow made a mistake by arguing his own case against the phrase 'under God' in the Pledge of Allegiance evaporated about midway through his performance at the Supreme Court yesterday."

New speech technologies making noise: "A key standard for building speech-based telephony applications, VoiceXML 2.0, has received a final nod of approval from the World Wide Web Consortium.

"The standard's official graduation comes just days before Microsoft is expected to formally launch its Speech Server products—which adhere to a competing standards effort—at the SpeechTEK conference in San Francisco."

Copyrights and Wrongs: Damming the Flow of 'Free' Information: "If, as the old New Economy shibboleth goes, information wants to be free, why is it everywhere in chains?"

"And why does Congress now enjoy the effective power to renew copyrights in perpetuity—even though no less an authority than the U.S. Constitution states flatly that such congressional grants can exist only 'for limited Times'?"

'Good death' a topic that is alive and kicking: "Euthanasia has been in the news this week—and not just because nurse Lesley Martin is on trial in Wanganui, facing two counts of attempted murder of her mother."

Love Affair With Google: "The prospects of a huge initial public offering and the launch of innovative new services on news, shopping and local search are fueling a media infatuation with search-engine giant Google.

"Case in point is the cover of this week's Newsweek, which pictures Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page under the headline, 'The New Age of Google.'"

The Next Frontiers: Google: "Sergey Brin, the cofounder of Internet- based search engine Google, tells Newsweek that he isn't worried about the brewing 'Search Wars,' as companies like Microsoft scramble to catch-up to the success of his multibillion-dollar phenomenon. 'I've seen companies obsessed with competition, say, with Microsoft, that keep looking in their rearview mirror and crash into a tree head-on because they're so distracted.'"

WTOPNEWS.com: "A massive celebration on the National Mall is being planned in concert with the dedication of the World War Two Memorial in May.

"The World War Two Reunion will resemble the Smithsonian's annual Folk Life Festival. A spokesman says it could be the single largest gathering of World War Two veterans in one place since the war ended."

U.S. Delta 2 Rocket Launches 50th GPS Satellite: "The 50th U.S. Global Positioning Satellite lifted off aboard a Boeing Delta 2 rocket on Saturday.

"The $45 million satellite, with the words 'Lighthouse in the Sky' painted on its side, was built by Lockheed Martin Space Systems for the U.S. Air Force Space Command."

Tax Refunds: some are spending, others are getting out of debt.

Model Hacker Behavior: "Forget about patches. Researchers at the Florida Institute of Technology are looking for ways to fight hackers by modeling their methods, or 'exploits.' The research could eventually lead to new types of security tools capable of stopping attacks that hackers haven't even invented yet."

The other side of D.C.: "Beyond the monuments and memorials on the National Mall is a city of historic neighbourhoods that are little known to most visitors to Washington. These are the neighbourhoods the locals call 'home,' and they offer fascinating experiences for tourists."

Europe Considers Harsh Piracy Law: "The European Parliament approved a controversial piracy law that would allow local police to raid the homes and offices of suspected intellectual-property pirates, search their financial records and even freeze suspects' bank accounts."

"The European Union's directive covers selling everything from pirated CDs and counterfeit toys to fake Chanel and Viagra."

Google chief forecasts future of search: "Personalisation has become an ever more important part of search, as a means to deliver more accurate results to users, Eric Schmidt, Google's chief executive officer, said on Tuesday."

Best of the Best in Washington, D.C. for the Family: "You could spend an entire lifetime discovering the wonders of Washington, D.C. But you probably have other things to do as well, like working, eating, and paying bills. So be realistic and scale down your expectations. It's better to spend quality time on a few attractions than to dash through a multitude."

Gov't Pushing for Research on Robotics: "The success of unmanned drones that have proven their mettle in combat since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks has prompted an unprecedented push for new research at universities with advanced robotics laboratories.

"Robotics and mechanical engineering departments report an influx of cash from the Department of Defense to build land vehicles, boats and aircraft that don't need soldiers, sailors or pilots to operate them.

"The vehicles being developed now would not even need a human to control them remotely."

In Searching We Trust: "'In one sense, with Google, everything is knowable now,' said Esther Dyson, who publishes Release 1.0, a technology-industry newsletter. 'We were much more passive about information in the past. We would go to the library or the phone book, and if it wasn't there, we didn't worry about it. Now, people can't as easily drift from your life. We can't pretend to be ignorant.' But the flood of unedited information, she said, demands that users sharpen critical thinking skills, to filter the results. 'Google,' she said, 'forces us to ask, "What do we really want to know?"'"

For family, space center is home: "The KSC work force has been 50 years in the making. From Mercury capsules to space shuttles, center workers have fueled the rockets and pressed the buttons that sent astronauts into space."

SEO 101—Link Popularity and Link Building
Good advice to link from your site. CNET thinks so, too.

How Google Is Revolutionizing the Ad Game: "The difference between how Google and everybody else approaches advertising is clear, and it flows directly from the user-centric culture that founders Sergei Brin and Larry Page inculcated in the company. 'From the beginning we had the approach that the user's success drives the success of the ads,' says Armstrong, 'and that could not have been a more foreign concept to the advertising community.'

"Most advertisers seek to stimulate demand by reaching a certain group of people with their message. In order to do so, they figure out which demographic segments are likely to respond to their messages and craft the ads accordingly. Google throws this model out the door. For Google, the key to an ad's success is not reaching the right demographic, but understanding the attributes of the product itself. When you can properly identify those attributes, you can buy links to keywords that describe or relate to them. The 'demographic' is self-selecting."

Google Rolls Out Local Search System: "Search engine leader Google has launched a beta version of a new system designed to make it easier for people to find things closer to their homes."

This recent graduate of Google Labs is a huge improvement over its predecessor which originally was little more than a public version of the code that won Google's original programming contest.

What's really ingenious is the results page one gets from clicking on one of the results on the first page. Google then precisely presents reference information at the top including the full name, address and phone number, a very simple driving directions form, and a surprisingly effortlessly ready map that puts it all in perspective.

The related links below this information get even more interesting. They're now all related to that specific location of your institution of choice! This gives uncanny added insight for the search.

The genius here is that they tied in the local phone listings information to the local search to produce the added value of the related links—they're the result of the user's original search with the address or phone number added.

And all the user has to do is click on a location close to him! Overall, this is probably one of the best returns from a click on all the Internet.

While on the Google topic, there's a very handy javascript link available that allows anyone to see and keep using Google's new look.

Scientists try to take 'BOOM' out of supersonic flight: "The sonic boom is a menace to flight. It tips off enemies to fighter jets flying miles above. It prevented the Concorde from making cross-continental flights. It's one reason it takes so long to fly from New York to Los Angeles.

"NASA Langley Research Center is trying to change all that, thanks to a sonic boom partnership with Northrop Grumman and the Defense Advance Projects Research Agency, which falls under the Department of Defense."

"To make a sonic boom quieter, you have to change the shape of the sound waves created by a plane moving at supersonic speeds. To do that, you change the shape of the plane."

NASA, military to work closely on space effort: "NASA and military officials told Congress on Thursday that they expect to work closely on President Bush's moon and Mars exploration strategy, but without crossing their traditional divide.

"That means NASA might elect to launch space hardware and explorers on the powerful new Lockheed Martin Atlas V and Boeing Delta IV rockets developed by the Pentagon to lift spy, navigation and communications satellites.

"It also means the military will not be establishing bases on the moon. 'It's NASA's job to go to Mars and go to the moon,' Robert Dickman, the deputy for military space for the Pentagon's Secretary of the Air Force, told the House Science Committee's space panel. 'So, while we will assist as best we can from the launch end, there will be no military base on the moon.'"

"While eager to save money through a closer relationship between NASA and the Department of Defense, panel members warned of pitfalls.

"During the 1980s and early 1990s, NASA and the military failed to follow through on collaborations to develop the technically challenging National Aerospace Plane and the proposed Advanced Launch System. The aerospace plane was to be a high-speed transport that could fly passengers from New York City to Tokyo in two hours. The launch system was to be a new family of rockets.

"'Let's face it, both agencies' approach to developing space transportation is derived from very different cultures and philosophies,' said committee chairman Dana Rohrabacher, R-Cal. 'Bridging the gap between them is going to take strong leadership and a lot of congressional involvement.'"

Webcasters to Report and Pay: "In a move welcomed by the recording industry—and less warmly received by webcasters—the federal government will require Internet radio stations to record their playlists and make royalty payments to artists and labels.

"The new rules, announced last week by the Copyright Office of the U.S. Library of Congress, are the culmination of more than two years of discussions between the government, music labels, and satellite and Internet radio stations over royalty payments. The rulemaking resolves one of the main points of contention: how much data stations must provide about the music they play."

Christian radio, NPR battle for signals: "NPR and religious broadcasters, some of whom believe the public radio promotes a liberal agenda, are competitors for the relatively small number of noncommercial FM frequencies between 88.1 and 91.9 megahertz. College radio stations, the other sizable group of not-for-profit broadcasters, typically lack funds to fight aggressively for licenses.

"'As the media markets have grown, the competition for those frequencies has increased and those licenses represented by space on the broadcast dial are becoming more and more valuable,' said the Rev. Frank Wright, president of the National Religious Broadcasters, a 1,700-member association in Manassas, Va.

"NPR spokeswoman Jenny Lawhorn said the competition has prompted initiatives by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and its supporters to help public broadcasters acquire frequencies and expand their offerings. She denied the liberal-bias charge.

"Religious broadcasters have led in station numbers since a 1990s growth spurt, with more than 1,800 AM and FM outlets compared with 772 mostly FM National Public Radio stations, according to Arbitron and NPR.

"But NPR has become a more aggressive bidder for licenses since 2001, when the federally funded Corporation for Public Broadcasting helped establish an organization to broker and finance station acquisitions."

Witnesses Ask US Senate for Research into Side Effects of Abortion on Women: "A medical researcher from the University of Michigan Medical School told the US Senate last week that 'abortion increases rates of breast cancer, placenta previa, pre-term births, and maternal suicide.' Dr. Elizabeth Shadigian, testifying before the Senate Sub-Committee on Science, Technology, and Space, said that 'statistically, all types of deaths are higher with women who have had induced abortions.'

"According to sub-committee chairman Senator Sam Brownback (R-Kansas), the hearing was the first of its kind to look into the physical and psychological effects of abortion on women. As expected, the hearing was not without controversy."

GOP Lawmakers Ask Ginsburg to Withdraw from Abortion Cases: "Thirteen Republican members of Congress on Thursday asked Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg to withdraw from all future cases having to do with abortion because of her affiliation with the NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund."

INDIA: Retail magnet?: "Indian workers have been getting U.S. jobs. Now U.S. retailers want to get their money.

"'Because of India's status as a good IT hub for outsourcing by U.S. companies, young Indians between 20 to 24 years old, who ordinarily wouldn't be able to find work easily, are finding jobs with call centers straight out of college. This is a consumer base that typically lives at home, with the family. Now they have disposable income that's totally discretionary and about 20 to 30 percent higher than prevailing wages,' said Manisha Juneja, analyst with Indian retail consultancy KPA-Techpak.

"'What are they spending it on? Food, books, music, cell phones and brand-name clothes. Who's taking note of this? Companies like Tommy Hilfiger,' Juneja said."

IT lawyers create cyberlaw site: "IT law firm Buys Inc has launched a cyberlaw Web site offering legal information in five languages."

Open-Source Fight Flares At Pentagon: "Microsoft Corp. is aggressively lobbying the Pentagon to squelch its growing use of freely distributed computer software and switch to proprietary systems such as those sold by the software giant, according to officials familiar with the campaign."

How to Make Your Own Eye-Popping 3-D Pictures: "Since settling in on the red planet, the Mars Exploration Rovers Spirit and Opportunity have sent back a number of 3-D postcards to countless fans outfitted in red- and blue-tinted spectacles. To some, the realistic pictures of the rocky martian terrain may seem magical, but the concept behind the illusion is in fact quite simple."

NASA Creates Portrait Of Life And Death In The Universe: "In a small galaxy lies a luminous cloud of gas and dust, called a nebula, which houses a family of newborn stars."

"The nebula, Henize 206, and the remnants of the exploding star that created it, are pictured in superb detail in a new image from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. Henize 206 sits just outside our own galaxy, the Milky Way, in a satellite galaxy 163,000 light-years away called the Large Magellanic Cloud."

US Sets Up Panel to Prevent Biotech Abuse: "Experts have long warned that vaccine development, genetic engineering and other legitimate areas of research could be easily turned to biological warfare. For instance, the study of influenza to make a better vaccine could also lead to new super-strains of the virus that would kill millions.

"This carries the innocuous-sounding name of 'dual use' research."

Cherry Blossom Forecast Announced: "Washington's vaunted Yoshino cherry trees likely will be in full bloom this year when the 92nd annual festival in their honor opens March 27, a National Park Service spokesman said yesterday."

Students build satellites: "Arizona State University Professor Helen Reed's students have taken the 'my science project' concept about as far as it can be taken. Right into outer space.

"Reed, who teaches aerospace engineering, has worked with more than 600 students who have conceptualized, designed, assembled, tested and helped launch one satellite into Earth orbit. Three more satellites are completed and due to go up in July, and another is in the works."

Warning: Blogs Can Be Infectious: "The most-read webloggers aren't necessarily the ones with the most original ideas, say researchers at Hewlett-Packard Labs.

"Using newly developed techniques for graphing the flow of information between blogs, the researchers have discovered that authors of popular blog sites regularly borrow topics from lesser-known bloggers—and they often do so without attribution.

"These findings are important to sociologists who are interested in learning how ideas grow from isolated topics into full-blown epidemics that 'infect' large populations. Such an understanding is also important to marketers, who hope to be able to pitch products and ideas directly to the most influential people in a given group.

"'There is a lot of speculation that really important people are highly connected, but really, we wonder if the highly connected people just listen to the important people,' said Lada Adamic, one of the four researchers working on the project."

Ham Radio Connects Michigan, Ohio Youngsters with ISS: "Youngsters at schools in Michigan and Ohio were the latest to have an opportunity to interview International Space Station Expedition 8 Commander Mike Foale, KB5UAC, via Amateur Radio. The contacts March 1 with Armstrong Middle School in Flint, Michigan, and February 20 with Glenwood Elementary School in Perrysburg, Ohio, were arranged via the Amateur Radio on the International Space Station (ARISS) program."

"Foale said that during his spare time, he enjoys using the NA1SS station for casual contacts, and he likes taking pictures of Earth—so he'll have something to remember his ISS experience."

NASA faces rush of retirees: "A pipeline once filled with American science and engineering graduates is shrinking. Students no longer see the aerospace industry as a choice career path. Higher-paying private sector jobs are alluring, and interest in federal service is declining.

"Together, those factors raise serious questions about NASA's ability to recruit and retain a new generation of scientists, engineers and technologists needed to send astronauts back to the moon by 2020 and then on to Mars years after that."

"Nearly 40 percent of the 18,146 people at NASA are age 50 or older. Those with 20 years government service now are eligible for early retirement. Twenty-two percent of NASA workers are age 55 or older. Those with 30 years service now are eligible for full retirement benefits. NASA employees over 60 outnumber those under 30 by a ratio of about 3 to 1. A scant 4 percent of workers are under 30."

To the ramparts, gadget brigade: It's Format War: "I'll try not to be an alarmist about this, friends and neighbors, but here's the deal: While America slept, the suits and ties in the recording, film, television and software industries launched an attack against our gadgets."

Mining the Tagged Web: "Several years ago, researchers at the IBM Almaden Research Center in San Jose, Calif., began an effort to study the Web as a mathematical graph—a collection of nodes (representing Web pages) and lines (representing hyperlinks). They were interested in studying various properties of this graph, including its diameter and connectedness, to obtain insights into algorithms for crawling and searching the Web and to characterize the Web's sociological evolution.

"To obtain data, the researchers conducted Web crawls that encompassed 200 million pages and 1.5 billion hyperlinks. They confirmed that the distribution of pages and link number follows a simple mathematical relationship known as a power law. In essence, most pages incorporate just a few outgoing links, whereas a few pages have a huge number."

"'In a sense, the Web is much like a complicated organism, in which the local structure on a microscopic scale looks very regular (like a biological cell), but the global structure exhibits interesting morphological structures (body and limbs) that are not obviously evident in the local structure,' Ravi Kumar of IBM and his coworkers concluded in a paper presented in 2000 at the Ninth World Wide Web Conference.

"The effort to amass data about the structure and content of the rapidly growing Web didn't end there. It continued and now encompasses about half of the Web and includes much "informal" communication, such as Web logs, newsgroups, and chat rooms. The resulting panoply of data has become the basis of an ambitious commercial service that IBM recently launched called WebFountain."

"Both Google and WebFountain stemmed from academic research about text mining and the insight that the best way to find information is to focus on the biggest and most popular sites and Web pages. WebFountain goes one step further in trying to make sense of the pages themselves by tagging the information in a clear, consistent way. Any data miner that comes along now has a vast playing field on which to test its skill and prove its value."

Bears, Redskins are on vastly different paths: "Already, the Bears-Redskins game provides a classic study in conflicting ways to build a team."

"The Redskins and Bears are old-time rivals and the contrast between their ways of doing business would make a good thesis as well as interesting TV.

"The Redskins rehired their three-time Super Bowl-winning coach, Joe Gibbs. The Bears hired Lovie Smith to his first head coaching job. Rehiring Mike Ditka wasn't even in the uttermost recesses of their minds."

Kofi Annan Calls Abortion Group “Shining Example” for World: "At a gala event held in January, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan received an award from the International Women’s Health Coalition, a group working for worldwide abortion on demand for women and girls. Annan’s enthusiastic acceptance of the award raises renewed questions about the objectivity of Annan, and the UN secretariat in general, which is responsible for organizing major conferences on international social policy."

Bush Advances Gay Rights: "President Bush's endorsement of a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage could prove to be a great moment for gay rights."

Cell phone firms struggle to catch up with Verizon's success: "When Bell Atlantic combined its wireless properties with PrimeCo, AirTouch and GTE to create the nation's largest cellular-phone company, experts said Verizon Wireless might lead the industry in size but little else."

"In the last 3 1/2 years, however, Verizon Wireless has outclassed its rivals on a host of performance measures, an analysis of corporate financial statements from the last three years shows. Of America's six national cellular-phone companies, it has most consistently increased profits, lured new subscribers and invested in its network."

Network Investment
"AT&T Wireless has kept up to a degree. It invested $5 billion in both 2002 and 2001, but cut capital expenditures to $2.7 billion last year after it completed a major network upgrade. Verizon has invested $4.5 billion to $5 billion a year for the last four years." Or as Verizon Wireless likes to put it: a billion dollars into their network every 90 days.

($1 billion = $1,000,000,000) ... every 90 days. Do the annual math on the $5 billion and that's $13.6 million every day ($13,600,000/day).

Subscriber Growth
"A $40-a-month national Verizon Wireless plan includes 400 anytime minutes. AT&T Wireless and T-Mobile give 600 minutes for the same price. Sprint offers 500 minutes for $45. But in 2003, Verizon added 5 million customers to the three rivals' combined 5.4 million."

Tower Locations
"The company's network was one of the oldest in the nation, because it included Bell Atlantic, GTE and AirTouch. The companies had been in the wireless business since 1983 when the Federal Communications Commission gave out the first cellular licenses.

"'Coverage is about actually getting the (cellular) towers built,' said James Murray, author of 'Wireless Nation,' a history of the cellular industry. 'People with the earliest networks had the best towers in the best locations.'

"In recent years, local governments have gotten tougher on granting zoning and other permits for cellular towers. Murray said this has hurt newer phone companies that didn't get towers constructed in the 1980s and early 1990s."

Sears CIO Gerald F. Kelly, Jr.: Transforming I.T.: "Gerald F. Kelly, Jr. is senior vice president and CIO of Sears, Roebuck and Co., a US$41.1 billion retailer of clothing, automotive and home products, and services. The Sears nationwide retail network includes approximately 870 full-line stores and more than 1,300 specialty stores, as well as Sears.com and Landsend.com."

"CIO Today: Which enterprise component or technology will be growing most in terms of its slice of your company's budget pie in the next 12 months?

"Kelly: There are two. The renovation of our selling systems for retail, online and product repair into the enterprise selling system, and replacing our systems for merchandizing, planning, distribution and replenishment. Those applications lie at the core of what we are as a retail company. They either directly affect the customer at the transaction level, or they affect the customer at the product level."

Vericenter Hosting NASA Mars Content: "Managed hosting provider Vericenter announced on Wednesday that its managed Web hosting services were responsible for providing 100 percent Web site availability for the 35 million visitors that have logged on to the NASA portal seeking information about the recent Mars rover mission."

Mars Rover Finds Signs of Ancient Water: "NASA scientists said yesterday that the robot explorer Opportunity has discovered evidence that liquid water once soaked part of Mars for some period of time."

12 Best Walking Cities in the U.S.:
Northeast: Jersey City, NJ; New York, NY; Philadelphia, PA
South: El Paso, TX; San Antonio, TX; Washington, DC
Midwest: Chicago, IL; Madison, WI; St. Louis, MO
West: Honolulu, HI; San Diego, CA; San Francisco, CA

Geospatial One-Stop Portal Expands: "The Geospatial One-Stop initiative's portal GeoData.gov expanded its resources to include a Lewis and Clark Bicentennial channel that contains valuable data, maps, satellite images, and other information."

Verizon Wireless: in-flight calling with your number: "Verizon Wireless frequent flyers can stay connected while in flight for just 10 cents-a-minute when they sign up for the new Airfone Service for Verizon Wireless $10 monthly subscription plan."

Netting extra profits: "Way Station Books & Stuff is one of the growing number of brick-and-mortar retail stores boosting their bottom lines by selling on Web sites, particularly online auction houses such as eBay, Amazon, liquidators.com and alibris.com."