6A = THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
NEWS
FRIDAY.MARCH 14.2003
Professor's technology may violate personal freedoms
By Amy Potter
apotter@kansan.com
Kansan staff writer
Dan Nelson/Kansan
Jerome Dobson's computer displays a map demonstrating the concept of geoslavery. Dobson, a research professor for the Kansas Biological Survey, has studied the dangers of personal tracking devices being used to control the wearer's movements.
Think back to high school English class and remember life in George Orwell's classic novel 1984. It was a world where Big Brother was always watching and people felt controlled.
Flash forward to 2003 when a real form of control could take place, a form of control called geoslvery.
"This technology makes Orwell's vision look amateurish," said Jerome Dobson, research professor for Kansas Applied Remote Sensing.
A form of technology Dobson helped pioneer, known as geographic information systems, could assist a person in coercively monitoring and controlling the physical location of another individual—also known as geoslavery.
GIS can be used by governments to predict populations at risk for terrorism and natural disasters through satellites and other technologies. When GIS technology is combined with a global positioning system, a radio transmitter and receiver, it becomes easy for someone to monitor a person's movements. Transponders
can be added, in the form of a chip or a bracelet, to control an individual's movements through burns or electric shocks. Dobson said.
Geoslavery can pose serious threats to the safety of children and women in abusive relationships, Dobson said.
Some forms of the technology are commercially available. Dobson said parents had already purchased devices in the form of bracelets to deter kidnapping, and some parents in Great Britain have had chips implanted in their children.
Parents have good intentions when purchasing the device, but it could prove harmful for the child.
"Think about a kidnapper," Dobson said. "They're going to keep cutting until they find it."
Dobson also posed the scenario of the woman in an abusive relationship and unable to make arrangements to escape because her every move is monitored.
Sarah Terwelp, executive director of Women's Transitional Care Services, said her center had dealt with various forms of control of women for a long time. Women can already be tracked
through social security numbers and credit information, she said
"Obviously our biggest concern would be there are already so many barriers to a woman who wants to leave an abusive relationship. This would actually put those in physical terms," Terwelp said.
Geoslavery also threatens people in countries with limited personal freedoms, Dobson said. He is not as concerned with countries like the United States, which has a strong stance on freedom; more so, he wonders about other countries.
"Iimagine what's going to happen in countries where there is not tradition of personal freedom," Dobson said. "It will become a tool of repression like we've never seen before."
Xingong Li, assistant professor of geography, teaches principles of GIS. He said he had not really addressed the idea of geoslavery but will in his last lecture of the year.
"The only thing I can do is let them know about this technology and tell them the technology is used for both good and bad," Li said. "I can show them their responsibility as to how to use this technology."
Michael Bellmyer, Olathe junior, is a student in the field of GIS. He said in the future, as an expert in the field, he would hold greater responsibility especially with a
technology that could potentially be dangerous.
"With any kind of knowledge and field you'll have certain responsibilities to take on," Bellmyer said. "I think that's kind of universal that the things you are responsible for are the things you have to safeguard."
Revision of current laws and regulations are needed to protect individuals, Dobson said, but stalking laws offer some means of protection.
Terwelp said legislative representatives must be more informed of the problem so they could start to make decisions to protect individual freedoms.
"If the technology is available and out there we can't necessarily take it away. It's just how we can mold the use of it," Terwelp said.
With this new technology, geography is becoming a discipline that is essential to understand, Dobson said.
"Geography through GIS has the greatest potential for good of any discipline today," Dobson said. "It's also become the most dangerous of disciplines in terms of needing responsible, thoughtful development."
Shulenburger: Credit funding to research center
Edited by Todd Rapp
By JJ Hensley
jhensley@kansan.com
Kansan staff writer
Since 1996, research expenditures at the University of Kansas have increased by more than $120 million, essentially doubling the University's commitment to research.
Even as other programs, such as the Kansas University Endowment Association, have experienced diminished returns in recent years because of the sour economy, the University's research expenditures have increased by at least $20 million in each of the last three years.
Provost David Shulenburger said much of the credit for those ever-increasing coffers should go to the KU Center for Research.
First it allowed the University to free itself from the state restrictions on spending research money that were in place on top of the federal restrictions.
The KU Center for Research was created in 1996, shortly after the arrival of Chancellor Robert Hemenway, and reflects the chancellor's commitment to making the University one of the country's top-25 research universities, Shulenburger said. The creation of the center encouraged the University to make three key improvements in research, he said.
Second, such federally funded
research generates overhead, Shulenburger said. Before 1996 that money generated by research was used to cover costs in any number of programs outside research.
"In '96 we decided to use all of that research overhead money to reinvest in research," Shulen-burger said. "We were able to buy new equipment and provide matching funds for research, and that really made a big difference."
Finally, the creation of the center gave faculty members an increased incentive to work through one of the on-campus research centers. Before 1996 faculty members could do research for one of the campus centers, like the Institute for Lifespan Studies, but their schools would receive no compensation for the overhead their research generated. Now the center ensures the appropriate colleges get their fare share of that money.
"All three of those things taken together really make the difference," Shulenburger said. "That's the story: we've got a great faculty to whom we've given even greater incentives."
The bulk of those increasing incentives have come from the U.S. government. The University has been increasing federal funding by about $20 million per year, Shulenburger said. Typically those funds come through organizations like the National Institute of Health or the National Endowment for the Humanities.
TOTAL RESEARCH EXPENDITURES
Research funding at the University has almost doubled since 1996.
Fiscal Year Dollars*
1995 $124
1996 $124
1997 $134
1998 $147
1999 $168
2000 $193
2001 $224
2002 $243
*in millions
Source: KU Center for Research
As director and founding father of the center, it's part of Robert E. Barnhill's job to maintain lines of communication with such organizations. When Barnhill got his job in 1996, the chancellor and the provost charged him with expanding external funding. His first task was to look at the University's research efforts to find pockets of excellence. At KU, those are life sciences and information technology.
"Once we found what we were good at, we focused on those," Barnhill said. "Since then we've encouraged our faculty to work bigger, not harder. And to collaborate on projects that involve
many students."
The state's other research universities, Kansas State and Wichita State, each concentrate their research on agriculture and aviation, respectively.
"Life sciences and information technology, those are sort of our mega-themes," Barnhill said. "We have a thousand other flowers blooming though, and we want them all to get attention, too."
Life sciences receives almost $60 million a year in federal funding, Shulenburger said. But within that field there are a number of subheadings, including work done at University of Kansas Medical Center, the pharmacy program, the biodiversity research center, and the Institute for Lifespan Studies. Even though the Institute for Lifespan Studies is a social sciences program, it receives money from the National Institute of Health and is the largest externally funded program, Barnhill said.
Among those blooming flowers are a handful of programs that have little to do with the life sciences at first glance, including the Hall Center for the Humanities, which receives most of its funding from the National Endowment of the Humanities. In addition to hosting interdisciplinary seminars throughout the semester, the Hall Center provides Humanities and other liberal arts students an
avenue to funding.
The main mission of the Hall Center has always been to help faculty develop in terms of research publication, said Hall Center Director and Professor of History Victor Bailey.
"We don't see ourselves as a teaching institute," Bailey said. "We see ourselves as a research institute."
But with that statement Bailey typifies the most predominate argument against the University's transition into a top-25 research University: The increased focus on research produces professors who don't have time to focus their energies on teaching.
Such arguments don't make much sense to people like the provost though. In the last 10 years the proportion of classroom teaching done by teaching assistants has dropped by more than 10 percent, Shulenburger said.
"It's the people who are really skilled at research who can prepare our students to step into jobs or graduate school," he said.
"We are a research university and we aren't simply teaching in the classroom using other people's work," Bailey said. "We're teaching using our own work, and it's very important that we have faculty who are teaching and publishing at the same time."
—Edited by Christy Dendurent
Court dismisses suit challenging Bush
BOSTON — A federal appeals court yesterday upheld a judge's decision to throw out a lawsuit challenging President Bush's authority to attack Iraq, dismissing arguments that Congress has unconstitutionally left the decision to Bush.
The 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said it had no business intervening without clear conflict between the legislative and executive branches.
The court did not address the plaintiffs' argument that a congressional resolution authorized war with Iraq only with United Nations approval, saying the claim could not be evaluated because war has not started
Last month, six Democratic congressmen, three unnamed servicemen and their families filed suit alleging that although Congress authorized a war with Iraq in an October resolution, it has not specifically declared war as required by the Constitution. The lawsuit contends Congress improperly gave Bush the authority to declare war.
The Associated Press
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