Nexus - 0506 - New Times Magazine-pages

Page Content (OCR)

LY DD © oF VEN? DIGITAL TV WATCHES YOU WATCHING TV lhe launch of BSkyB digital satellite television will give Rupert Murdoch's company unprecedented power to access subscribers’ televisions and record their viewing habits. The technology is in place for Sky to find out whether vicars are watching naughty sex movies, if old ladies are obsessed by crime and violence, or whether the man next door is more interested in soap operas or gardening pro- grams. It is all possible because digital satellite TV will be interactive. The little black box that will be positioned on top of your televi- sion set will have a two-way communications channel. Digital televi- sion engineers say that the black box will store information on viewers' program preferences, which Sky can then upload at its convenience. The information is commercial gold- dust. Under data protection laws, viewers would have to be told that their names were being passed on—but not necessarily that the information was being gathered in the first place. The BSkyB set-top boxes, which the company says will be on sale from | October, will not include the software to monitor viewers’ program choices. In HUMANS AND DOLPHINS » HAVE SIMILAR GENETICS F° years, marine biologists have told us that dolphins and humans share many traits including intelligence and friendliness. "The extent of the genetic simi- larity came as a real surprise to us," said David Busbee of Texas A&M University, who published his results in Cytogenetics and Cell Genetics. Researchers at Texas A&M University applied ‘paints’, or fluo- rescently labelled human chromo- somes, to dolphin chromosomes and found that 13 of 22 dolphin chromosomes are exactly the same as human chromosomes. Of the remaining nine dolphin chromo- somes, many were found to be com- binations or rearrangements of their human counterparts. The researchers also identi- fied three dolphin genes that are similar to human genes. "Dolphins are marine mammals that swim in the ocean, and it was astonishing to learn that we have more in common with the dolphin than with land mammals," commented Horst Hameister, Professor of Medical Genetics at the University of Ulm in Germany. (Source: Seema Kumar, Discovery Channel Online News, www.discovery.com) practice, though, BSkyB could at any time beam new software into set-top boxes directly from its satellite. Viewers who fear they're being ‘watched’ by their television should note that there is a way of switching off Mr Murdoch. With each interactive set-top box, Sky wants to install a phone line beside the TV set. This connection allows the two-way conversation between the box and Sky's headquarters. Viewers could unplug it and still receive all of Sky's digi- tal channels, without being interactive. (Source: Jane Robins, The Independent, UK, 21 August 1998) ADVERSE DRUG REACTIONS KILL 100,000+ AMERICANS Acorns to a report published in a recent Journal of the American Medical Association, more than 100,000 Americans are killed every year by pre- scription and over-the-counter medicines, and a further 2.1 million are seriously injured. The report found that such reac- tions (which do not include prescribing errors or drug abuse) rank at least sixth among causes of death in the United States—behind heart disease, cancer, lung dist , strokes and accidents. Researchers at the University of Toronto estimated that an average of 106,000 deaths occur annually at US hospitals due to bad reactions to drugs. "Serious adverse drug reactions are fre- quent...more so than generally recog- nised," the researchers noted. (Source: CNN via Internet website, hittp://cnn.com/HEALTH/9804/14/drug. reaction/index.html) 6 = NEXUS OCTOBER - NOVEMBER 1998