Data

Dennis Smith of Nottingham says he's noticed 6- and 8-foot wave heights listed below for Ocean City and Assateague. He's spent many summers body-surfing out there and says, "The chance of seeing waves that size is almost non-existent. ... What's up?" Our data providers can't afford to post spotters on the beach with rulers and cell phones, so they use an offshore data buoy 26 nautical miles southeast of Cape May (Buoy 44009 at www.ndbc.noaa.gov). It's rougher out there.

LOS ANGELES -- Last June, California Assemblyman Kevin Murray was on his way to celebrate his victory in a state Senate primary race when his car was pulled over by a Beverly Hills police officer.Though he can't prove it and the police department denies it, Murray believes he was stopped for being black.For years, many law-abiding minority motorists, particularly African-American and Hispanic men, contend they have been stopped by police who demand to know what they are doing in a particular neighborhood, where they are coming from and how they acquired their vehicles.

AT NOON TODAY, people anywhere on the planet with access to the Internet will be able to look at the 1999 results of the Maryland School Performance Assessment Program (MSPAP) in more depth than would have been dreamed possible only a few years ago.They can learn all the major demographic and educational data for any public school in Maryland: enrollment, MSPAP test scores for seven years running, number of children receiving free lunches (a measure of poverty), student mobility rates, dropout rates, number of boys and number of girls, racial statistics, test results by race and gender -- and that's only a part of it.Thanks to computers and the Internet, interested parties can do some sophisticated comparisons.

LOS ANGELES -- Last June, California Assemblyman Kevin Murray was on his way to celebrate his victory in a state Senate primary race when his car was pulled over by a Beverly Hills police officer.Though he can't prove it and the police department denies it, Murray believes he was stopped for being black.For years, many law-abiding minority motorists, particularly African-American and Hispanic men, contend they have been stopped by police who demand to know what they are doing in a particular neighborhood, where they are coming from and how they acquired their vehicles.

The Clinton administration is circulating proposed legislation on Capitol Hill that would, for the first time, impose strict controls on the manufacture and use of technology that scrambles electronic data for privacy reasons.The proposal would prohibit the manufacture, sale, import or distribution within the United States of any such technology unless it contained a feature for immediate decoding of any message by law-enforcement officials with a wiretap order from a court, known as a trapdoor feature.

Psychiatrists, psychologists, medical groups and consumers urged the House Environmental Matters Committee yesterday to protect confidentiality by requiring patient consent before the state collects data on medical treatments and their costs.The collectors of the information, however, said patients could not be identified from the database, and that it was a valuable tool in monitoring health care affordability and access.Some committee members expressed skepticism about a consent requirement.

The state's health data collectors are prepared to adopt new measures designed to improve confidentiality of records -- in effect, obeying a state law which was never passed. But critics say the new steps are still too little to protect patient privacy.The staff of the Health Care Access and Cost Commission will ask the commission tomorrow to approve new guidelines that include: Reaffirmation that the state will not collect data from patients who choose to pay for their care themselves rather than having an insurance company pay.Records in the commission's database will include the month and year of the patient's birth, but not the day.The patient's identification number -- already changed by the insurance company with a code unknown to the state -- will go through a second encoding once the state has the record.

The Health Care Access and Cost Commission developed a fact sheet on its data collection efforts, which it distributed to state legislators. The Maryland Psychiatric Society prepared a response to the fact sheet which rebuts arguments made by HCACC and its chair, Donald E. Wilson. Here are excerpts from the MPS response:Why is the HCACC collecting information about medical expenditures?While the data base initiative has arisen from a well-motivated desire to improve health care, the probable value of the effort is extremely doubtful either for health care planning or consumer protection purposes.

The state's hospital rate-setting commission approved new regulations yesterday allowing collection of detailed outpatient data.The regulations include some confidentiality safeguards, after opponents worried that patient privacy might be compromised. Still, opponents said they would continue to battle for protection, perhaps through legislation in next year's General Assembly session.The additional safeguards "are a step in the right direction, appreciating our concern that the information can be personally identifiable.

IT IS A FAMILIAR but sad refrain. Within days after becoming Baltimore's real estate officer, former Councilman Anthony J. Ambridge discovered inadequate or non-existant data bases, big gaps in essential information, computers that cannot handle the work they are supposed to perform.Earlier this year, M. Jay Brodie, the new head of Baltimore Development Corp., made a similar discovery in his agency. No wonder Baltimore City, which often compares itself to a $3.2 billion corporation, is in such dismal shape.

In a video on YouTube, an explosion in a trash can, which appears to be wirelessly triggered by a passport equipped with a computer chip, blows away a dummy. Two caveats: That's not a real passport, and even Kevin Mahaffey, the Los Angeles security consultant who made the video, calls it "a far-out scenario." It is unlikely that terrorists or others could steal your identity or attack you through the new computer chips in U.S. passports, many experts say. But that hasn't stopped the rumors from ricocheting around the Internet.

Dennis Smith of Nottingham says he's noticed 6- and 8-foot wave heights listed below for Ocean City and Assateague. He's spent many summers body-surfing out there and says, "The chance of seeing waves that size is almost non-existent. ... What's up?" Our data providers can't afford to post spotters on the beach with rulers and cell phones, so they use an offshore data buoy 26 nautical miles southeast of Cape May (Buoy 44009 at www.ndbc.noaa.gov). It's rougher out there.

Backing up computer files is important. Most of us will face a computer crisis of some type sooner or later. Putting it off can have disastrous consequences for business owners. Damaged or lost data files often cost small or home-based businesses weeks, months or even years of work. It can happen at any time for many reasons. Having backup files available in the event of trouble could be the difference between staying open or shutting down. There are several ways to back up your business files.

WASHINGTON -- The FBI cast a much wider net in its terrorism investigations than it has previously acknowledged by relying on telecommunications companies to analyze phone-call and e-mail patterns of the associates of Americans who had come under suspicion, according to newly obtained bureau records. The documents indicate that the FBI used secret demands for records to obtain data not only on individuals it saw as targets but also details on their "community of interest" -- the network of people that the target in turn was in contact with.

Vincent Vizachero just moved to Baltimore from Houston, where he relied on a Harris County Web site for interactive rainfall maps. "It is handy in storms, of course, but also for gardening," he says. "Do you know of anything like this for Baltimore?" Nothing as detailed as Harris County's, but the NWS has rain data maps at www.erh.noaa.gov/lwx/hydro/precip/There is similar data, from the River Forecast Center, at www.erh.noaa.gov/marfc/Maps/precip.html# daily Better still, spring for a rain gauge.

Steve Awalt writes from Baltimore seeking weather data for a thunderstorm on the Magothy River May 27. "The worst conditions I have ever experienced. I later read where a boater was lost for a short time," he said. Emergency crews searched overnight for the boater whose day sailor capsized. He turned up safe ashore. Anyone can find hour-by-hour weather data from 16 stations at MarylandWeather.com. Look in the bottom left corner of the main page for "Archived Daily Weather Data." Some BWI numbers go back to 1949.

LONDON --Amid growing concern that handovers of confidential banking data to U.S. counterterrorism investigators may violate European privacy laws, officials from around the Continent met yesterday in Brussels, Belgium, to consider legal options for probing the data transfers. Representatives from European privacy commissions considered complaints that sharing data on thousands of international wire transfers with U.S. law enforcement to help track terrorist financing could open the door to inappropriate uses of information that is protected by European laws.

Working to keep pace with their fast-growing populations, planners in Harford and Carroll counties can add a new weapon to their arsenals -- yearly reports from the U.S. Census Bureau that promise to make it easier to track local demographics. The reports, which are compilations of data from the American Community Survey, include demographic and social information such as race, Hispanic origin, age, education, marital status, grandparents as caregivers, veterans, disability status and U.S. citizenship.

The revelation yesterday that the National Security Agency in Fort Meade might have built a database from the telephone records of tens of millions of Americans again raises the question: Does anyone have any privacy left? Government, corporations and Internet providers are all tapping vast reservoirs of data on the daily lives of ordinary people. Businesses, in particular, increasingly scrutinize what Americans eat, wear, watch and read. Now, according to USA Today, the National Security Agency, the world's largest spy agency, wants everyone's phone records.

Avi Rubin is known for annoying large companies and important people. Two years ago, the Johns Hopkins University professor first alerted the country to troubling vulnerabilities in electronic voting, much to the consternation of election officials and machine-maker Diebold Election Systems. Then earlier this year, Texas Instruments similarly was none too pleased when Rubin's team of what he calls "super geniuses" broke the encryption on its wireless gas payment cards and car keys - a potential threat to millions of consumers.