KRT Wire writes that infectious diseases like SARS may be hear to stay.

The nation's top scientists say that environmental, economic, social and scientific changes have helped to trigger an unprecedented explosion of more than 35 new infectious diseases that have burst upon the world in the past 30 years. The U.S. death rate from infectious disease, which dropped in the first part of the 20th century and then stabilized, is now double what it was in 1980.

The Institute of Medicine convened a panel of top U.S. researchers. They attributed the surge in new diseases to 13 specific changes in the world and the way we live.

Those 13 factors are microbial adaptation and change; human susceptibility to infection; climate and weather; changing ecosystems; human demographics and behavior; economic development and land use; international travel and commerce; technology and industry; breakdown of public health measures; poverty and social inequality; war and famine; lack of political will; and bioterrorism.

"It's a confluence of many factors," said Dr. Fred Sparling, a medical and microbiology professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a co-author of the IOM report. "We have more people in mega-cities, which increases the risk for dissemination, more people moving into habitat that is used by animals as vectors for (disease) transmission, more international travel and commerce, which disseminates (germs) once they have arisen. And more poverty and social inequalities, which clearly add to it."

Jon Udell writes about proxying SOAP traffic providing other analogies:

Service-oriented architectures (SOA) will exploit another kind of openness: the ability to inject proxies into communication paths. HTTP and SMTP are inherently capable of proxying. We're familiar with server-side proxies that cache Web pages, monitor access, and rewrite mail messages. Less familiar but equally powerful are the client-side versions of these proxies. For years, I've used a local Web proxy called Proxomitron to monitor and filter my connections to Web sites. I've also experimented with Zoe, a local e-mail proxy that creates a searchable index of your e-mail and builds categorized views.

SOA vendors emphasize the notion of proxying SOAP traffic. But when push comes to shove, they'll work with what you've got. The first version of Confluent Software's Core -- a Web services monitoring and management platform -- enforced security policies and guaranteed service levels only for services that presented SOAP interfaces. The new Version 3.0 is more promiscuous. Now, even if your legacy system uses FTP to ship data, you can still use Confluent's overlay network to declare that transmitted files must use WS-Security encryption, and that transmissions must meet a service-level agreement.

A LazyWeb session at Emerging Technologies Conference saw a number of cool ideas come up. People were given 60 seconds to suggest a problem for which a tech solution was needed. A few interesting ones:

. "super-proxy": 2nd level news "filtering" via reputation or other peer-group filtering (which 10 blogs out of my 120 ones subscribed to should I read now)

. private email ISP without using permanent email address

. private weblog tool

. personalized blogdex

Writes NYTimes:

The industry, according to Irving Wladawsky-Berger, a strategy executive at I.B.M., has entered "the post-technology era." It is not that technology itself no longer matters, he explained. Instead, he said, the steady advances in chips, disk storage and software mean that the focus is no longer on the technology itself - with its arcane language of processing speeds and gigabytes - but on what people and companies can do with it.

As a result, industry executives and analysts say, the balance of power is shifting away from technology suppliers and toward their corporate customers. At the same time, the use of lower-cost building blocks of computer hardware and software is spreading, making it easier for companies and individuals to share data and work together using industry standards rather than remain dependent on one or two main suppliers.

Doc Searls writes: "Companies like Google and Overture are blowing away everything the old advertising business holds dear. Beautiful images. Attention-grabbing graphics. Awards. Strategy. Even old conventions like branding--a term Procter & Gamble borrowed from the cattle industry, back when they created mass media advertising in the dawn of commercial radio more than 70 years ago. They're blowing it away by connecting users and advertisers and helping both offer something valuable to each other."

He gives an example of what Google is doing:

Last month Google added Content Targeting, which puts text ads in banner spaces, replacing graphical annoyances with text-based relevancies. One good thing about this model is it gives sites a monetization model where there was none before. Richard Holden of Google explains, "A lot of independent content on the Web kind of died simply because there wasn't a monetization model behind it. We're able to help people to monetize, from a publishing model, content that wasn't monetizable before."

Content Targeting is what produces text ads in the banners of BlogSpot sites. I have one friend, who recently decided not to upgrade to the ad-free Pro version of Blogger (which Google owns, by the way), because she liked the advertising in her banner. That means Google has achieved, at least in her case, something of a holy grail: advertising people actually want rather than endure.

CIO Magazine shows how smart cards are embedding themselves in our lives, by taking an example from Paris, following a fictional character around in a day, demonstrating seven smart card applications.

Write Randall Packer and Ken Jordan in their introduction to Vannevar Bush’s paper in their book “Multimedia: From Wagner to Reality”:

Vannevar Bush rose to prominence during World War II as chief scientific advisor to Franklin Roosevelt and director of the government’s Office of Scientific Research and Development, where he supervised the research that led to the creation of the atomic bomb and other military technologies. By orchestrating this ambitious collaboration between the military, scientific, and academic communities, Bush is considered the founder of what came to be known as the military-industrial complex. His contribution to the evolution of the computer ranges far and wide: from the invention in 1930 of the Differential Analyzer, one of the first automatic electronic computers, to his concept of the “memex”, the prototypical hypermedia machine.

Bush’s immense administrative burden – the daily strain of sorting, allocating, researching, analyzing, synthesizing, crosslinking, and filing – spurred his idea for an invention that would perform this work for people. Bush popularized the idea that machines could solve the problem of information overload.

Bush wondered whether all the sprigs of scientific wisdom, if not somehow preserved, would fall from the tree of knowledge. Information must somehow by connected to be relevant, lest it become forgotten. Knowledge accumulated and stored in massive filing cabinets under lock and key would languish. An idea developed today might not be relevant until some point in the future. What happens, though, if it is forgotten? Application of all new knowledge would require some means of keeping it available, accessible, and relevant.

Bush saw purposeful communication and feedback as a means to fight entropy. Information that is unused and unorganized will disperse into the known. Bush wanted to liberate information from its Byzantine card catalogs, musty libraries, and research facilities. He wanted specialists to draw connections between their work and that of others in different disciplines. He wanted them to forge new alloys in science, mixing engineering with the abstract powers of mathematics, the solutions of chemistry, the vitalism of biology. Scientists weren’t the only ones suffering under the burden of specialization and information overload. So were lawyers, historians, businesspeople, and administrators. The world, this “greatest of apparatus men” proclaimed, is becoming increasingly complex.

Tomorrow: …and the Memex