BIKES AGAINST BUSH SITE HELPS MAN EARN MASTER'S

Bikes Against Bush site helps man earn master's
NEW YORK -- Joshua Kinberg spent a year turning his bicycle into a mobile protest machine ready to take on the Republican National Convention -- and got a master's degree in the process.
Part of the former bike messenger's thesis at Parsons School of Design was bikesagainstbush.com, a Web site that will invite visitors to contribute 150-character-or-less thoughts about President George Bush.
Kinberg, 25, will receive the thoughts as SMS messages on a cell phone mounted on his bike's handlebars. The phone is connected to a chalk printer on the bike that sprays letters that look like the sidewalk version of skywriting.
As rider and moderator, Kinberg will pick the messages that meet his criteria and spray them on the streets during the Aug. 30-Sept. 3 convention. A webcam and GPS on the bike will record each message and its coordinates and relay them back to the Web.
Bikes Against Bush is really one Bike Against Bush, since Kinberg has only one printer-enabled bike. He says his protest is not graffiti, since the chalk is biodegradable.
Although Kinberg says he expects to receive a wide range of messages and each message will be archived on his site, he will not be printing any pro-Bush messages. "It's Bikes Against Bush," he says. "It has a point of view. And it's my bike."
Zigbee wireless deviceto see high sales in future
NEW YORK -- Technology watchers expect big things from a low-power, low-speed wireless standard known as Zigbee, which is designed to relay simple bits of information from machine to machine. Think of municipal light posts telling city computers when it's time to change bulbs, or tiny sensors passing along word to soldiers about approaching enemies.
Now comes further evidence that Zigbee is about to take off.
A new report from ABI Research predicts that only 1 million Zigbee devices will be sold next year, but by 2006 that figure will jump to 80 million. The reasons for optimism: broader standards for the technology, plus new efforts to sell it in Asia, according to analyst Chris Lopez.
With Zigbee, data moves at speeds as low as 20 kilobits per second, but that's good enough for devices that have simple things to relay. Zigbee backers say the technology could lead to new kinds of automated sensors, home devices and industrial equipment.
Another analyst firm, In-Stat/MDR, said last year that worldwide sales of Zigbee chipsets could reach 160 million by 2008.
Low replacement outlook hurts number of IT jobs
WASHINGTON --The Bureau of Labor Statistics is pessimistic about information technology jobs.
The latest version of its Occupational Outlook Handbook, which estimates how many jobs will open due to industry growth and retirements each year between 2002 and 2012, ranks the replacement needs for each job title in IT as "low" or "very low."
The specifics: 45,000 computer and information systems managers will be needed each year during the period, according to the handbook. That's 19,000 database administrators, 4,000 computer and information scientists and 45,000 software engineers.
The Bureau makes its estimates by comparing five-year averages of people leaving a profession versus those entering the profession. As a result, the outlook for young would-be techies may be even worse than it would seem at first glance. "During periods of employment decline, displaced workers are available to re-enter the occupation later and thus may reduce the need to train additional workers," the handbook says.
If there's one comfort, it's that unusual employer behavior in the past, such as the boom-and-bust cycle tech workers are still recovering from, may not predict the future. The method used for making predictions, "is an occupation-specific replacement rate that captures the impact of demographic, but not behavioral, changes," the handbook says.
Associated Press
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