THURSDAY,MAY1,2003
NEWS
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN = 3A
Omniscient Internet, where do babies come from?
Growing up, our minds are sponges waiting to soak up every minute detail of our lives.
Why is the sky blue? How are babies made? These questions sound cliché, but the inquisitiveness behind them is genuine.
We can still find the answers to questions that we all want to know, but only a child would dare ask. Web sites like howstuffworks.com and about.com offer simple explanations of complex concepts such as the mechanics of car washes and fireworks.
So hop online and ask away. As teachers have long told us, there is no such thing as a stupid question.
Here are some burning questions that many of us have once pondered:
undetected?
How do pickpockets strike
According to howstuff works.com, opportunists will target anyone from someone standing on a crowded bus to someone sleeping on a beach. A common target are students who are not keeping eyes on open book bags.
The major method used by pick-pockets is distraction. The site likens a pickpocket to a magician, and some will even use an "assistant" to distract you while they slip into your back pocket.
First, there's the sandwich technique. One person bumps into you from the front, and while he apologizes, the person behind robs you blind. Another scenario is when someone pretends to drop something, and while you are helping him, someone else
Nicole Roche nroche@kansan.com
will snatch your wallet.
Howstuffworks.com suggests using distractions of your own to halt pickpockets, such as keeping a decoy wallet in your back pocket so they'll never come after your real one. But who would ever be that obsessive—most of us poor college students barely have a dollar in our wallets anyway, right?
How do Breathalyzers work?
According to howstuff works, we can thank Robert Borkenstein of the Indiana State
Police for inventing the Breathalyzer test in 1954.
The site explains that alcohol is not absorbed in the bloodstream. So, as the blood goes through the lungs, some of the alcohol moves across the membranes of the lung's air sacs, or alveoli. As the alveolar air is exhaled, the alcohol can be detected by the Breathalyzer. The ratio of breath alcohol to blood alcohol is 2,100 to 1, the site explains, so 2,100 milliliters of alveolar air will contain the same amount of alcohol as 1 milliliter of blood.
By testing a driver's breath on the spot, officers can avoid the impracticality of on-the-spot blood or urine tests. What's the deal with hiccups?
What's the deal with hiccups?
The medical term for hiccups is
singultus, which is derived from the Latin word singult, according to about.com. Singult translates as "the act of catching one's breath while sobbing."
A "bout" is defined as hiccupping that lasts more than a few minutes, although some can last for days or weeks. The longest recorded attack was six decades, the site said.
According to howstuff works.com, our respiratory centers go temporarily awry and send extra impulses to the diaphragm. These impulses cause the unwanted contractions we know as hiccups.
This question might be the epitome of clueless childhood ponderings. But I doubt your parents ever told you the real reason
So. why is the sky blue?
unless, of course, they were meteorology or science majors.
Rayleigh scattering is a phenomenon that causes light to scatter when it passes through particles, according to howstuffworks.com. Sunlight consists of all colors of light, but because of the elemental makeup of the atmosphere, blue is scattered more efficiently than other colors.
The blue sky is all of the atoms in the atmosphere scattering blue light toward you.
Interestingly, neither of these sites describes exactly how babies are made. You'll have to save that one for your parents.
Nicole Roché is a Wichita senior in journalism. Each week she covers a different consumer issue.
Students receive Internet warnings for illegal file-sharing
By Lauren Airire lairey@kansn.com lairey staff writer
The Recording Industry Association of America started sending warning messages directly to millions of users of popular file-sharing programs like KaZaA, this week.
The messages will be a part of the education effort by the association aimed at stopping illegal trading of copyrighted music files.
The association will use a program that scans databases of material that individuals make available through KaZaA and Grokster. The program looks for names of artists and titles of popular songs and then uses the built-in instant messaging features of these programs to send warnings.
The warnings read, "Distributing or downloading copyrighted
music on the Internet without permission from the copyright owner is ILLEGAL. It hurts song-writers who create and musicians who perform the music you love, and all the other people who bring you music."
The message will also remind people they are not anonymous online and can be identified and prosecuted. The RIAA could not be reached for comment.
According to www.musicunited.net, where users are referred in the message sent by RIAA, more than 2.6 billion illegal files are download each month.
The site also gives a rundown of what is illegal and what isn't. It says it's OK to download music from sites authorized by the owners of the copyrighted music but it's never OK to download unauthorized music from pirate sites or peer-to-peer sys-
teams, such as KaZaA Grokster, LimeWire, Morpheus and Gnutella.
College students, as heavy users of the file-sharing programs, could receive many of the million such messages the recording industry plans to send every week.
"If you consider the average age of an undergraduate student and you consider all the technology that came out in their formative years, they are the most techsavvy generation ever," said Allison Rose Lopez, director of external relations of Information Services for the University of Kansas.
The new educational campaign comes less than a week after a Los Angeles judge said the Grokster and Morpheus networks couldn't be sued by the recording industry. The judge argued Grokster and Morpheus
were unable to control how people used their software, which could also have had legitimate applications. He cited the Sony Betamax case of 1984, when the Hollywood studios tried to outlaw VCRs. The Supreme Court ruled that the use of new technology to infringe copyrights did not justify an outright ban on that technology.
Campus technology directors across the country are struggling to comply with copyright laws and respond to complaints from outside organizations, such as the RIAA and Universal Studios.
sity's network.
It's important that the University complies with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998, said Jenny Mehmedovic, assistant to the vice provost for information services. The act requires repeat offenders to be permanently removed from the Univer-
"At the University of Kansas, that means three times you're out," Mehmedovic said. "In addition, it's illegal, which means you could be liable for having those files on your computer."
Four students at three universities have recently been taken to court for distributing files on such a large scale that the recording association didn't contact the institutions before they filed.
"We don't know how much more of that we're going to see," Mehmedovic said. "But KU is not proactively involved in finding out what students are doing with their connection. But we are required to respond to complaints."
Since January, Mehmedovic had received more than 230 individual complaints, which is double the number from the fall
semester. Once the office receives a complaint, it researches the IP address and send an e-mail notification to delete the illegal material within 24 hours. About 30 students have reached their second complaint, which moves them into the second disciplinary stage offenders are required to attend an educational meeting to explain the consequences of the law.
Mehmedovic said each complaint filed required five different people's time to investigate and rectify.
"If we get 40 to 60 notices, each one takes no less than half an hour for each of those people to touch it," she said. "That's a substantial investment on the part of the University to comply with the law."
Edited by Todd Rapp
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