Advertising Advertising as referred to in most economic books is part of the marketing mix. Therefore advertising usually is closely associated with the aim of selling products and services. Still, developments like "branding" show a tendency towards the marketing of not only products and services, but of ideas and values. While advertising activities are also pursued by political parties, politicians and governmental as well as non-governmental organizations, most of the money flowing into the advertising industry comes from corporations. Although these clients come from such diverse fields, their intentions hardly differ. Attempting to influence the public, their main goal is to sell: Products, services, ideas, values and (political) ideology.

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Gait recognition The fact that an individual's identity is expressed not only by the way he/she looks or sounds, but also by the manner of walking is a relatively new discovery of in biometrics. Unlike the more fully developed biometric technologies whose scrutiny is directed at stationary parts of the body, gait recognition has the added difficulty of having to sample and identify movement. Scientists at the University of Southampton, UK (http://www.isis.ecs.soton.ac.uk/research/gait/) have developed a model which likens the movement of legs to those of a pendulum and uses hip inclination as a variable. Another model considers the shape and length of legs as well as the velocity of joint movements. The objective is to combine both models into one, which would make gait recognition a fully applicable biometric technology. Given that gait recognition is applied to "moving preambulatory subjects" it is a particularly interesting technology for surveillance. People can no longer hide their identity by covering themselves or moving. Female shop lifters who pretend pregnancy will be detected because they walk differently than those who are really pregnant. Potential wrongdoers might resort walking techniques as developed in Monty Pythons legendary "Ministry of Silly Walks" (http://www.stone-dead.asn.au/sketches/sillwalk.htm)

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Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz b. July 1, 1646, Leipzig d. November 14, 1716, Hannover, Hanover German philosopher, mathematician, and political adviser, important both as a metaphysician and as a logician and distinguished also for his independent invention of the differential and integral calculus. 1661, he entered the University of Leipzig as a law student; there he came into contact with the thought of men who had revolutionized science and philosophy--men such as Galileo, Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, and René Descartes. In 1666 he wrote De Arte Combinatoria ("On the Art of Combination"), in which he formulated a model that is the theoretical ancestor of some modern computers.

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Sputnik At the beginning of the story of today's global data networks is the story of the development of satellite communication. In 1955 President Eisenhower announced the USA's intention to launch a satellite. But it was the Soviet Union, which launched the first satellite in 1957: Sputnik I. After Sputnik's launch it became evident that the Cold War was also a race for leadership in the application of state-of-the-art technology to defence. As the US Department of Defence encouraged the formation of high-tech companies, it laid the ground to Silicon Valley, the hot spot of the world's computer industry. In the same year the USA launched their first satellite - Explorer I - data were transmitted over regular phone circuits for the first time, thus laying the ground for today's global data networks. Today's satellites may record weather data, scan the planet with powerful cameras, offer global positioning and monitoring services, and relay high-speed data transmissions. But up to now, most satellites are designed for military purposes such as reconnaissance.

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