Montclair State University in Cincinnati implemented a mandatory cell phone rule in which school authorities can locate their students on and off campus. This may easily be seen as an invasion of privacy in that the university is granted the authority to track down their students, thus hampering the students' freedom to go wherever and whenever one wants.

Ron Chicken, a student in the said university, used to hate the idea of him being tracked down by the university administration. But according to him, as time passed, more and more students became used to the idea and even favored its implementation because it also provides them with security. According to the university, nine out of ten of their students carry cellphones and rarely, or no longer, use landline phones. This means that school authorities would have to adapt to this technological development and use it to maintain lines of communication with their students.

However, the Montclair State University made it clear that the tracking program for their students is voluntary, and that even if the students do decide to avail of the service, they can deactivate it any time of the day. Students can activate what they call the "Guardian" service if ever they feel threatened on campus. The said university came up with a voluntary program that offers freshmen a free mobile phone, but the students would have to pay for the services they would avail of. Montclair partnered with Rave Wireless Inc. to develop the software applications for their students' cell phones. Sprint Nextel Corp. provided the handsets as well as the wireless services.

More and more universities are pondering on whether they should drop the traditional use of landline phones to contact their students especially in emergency cases, and move on to tapping into the cellphone as a medium for maintaining communication lines with their students. While email and landline phones still prove to be useful in contacting the students, it is ultimately the cellphone that every student carries with him constantly. The Morrisville State College in New York has also implemented mandatory school-issued cellphone handsets as a replacement for landlines in its dorms.

However, some schools and universities remain ambivalent about the issue because of lawsuits that may ensue if the traditionally reliable landline services are removed from the dormitories. Austin College in Texas is keeping the dorm landlines for safety reasons but will ultimately rely on email to keep in touch with its students.

The cellphone tracking program can prove to be a very useful tool for universities and schools to communicate with their students and guarantee their safety especially within the campus. The important thing perhaps is that the students are given a choice on the issue and are consulted before universities implement such programs.

First it was the talking pen/calculator, now this? Reading about the Merriam Webster USB Dictionary and Thesaurus only makes me think of one question - "Where was this when I was doing my thesis?". Doing my thesis was an ultimate test of your vocabulary - you wouldn't want repeating the same terms over and over again, so you'd have to think of synonyms or other terms. The annoying part is that most of the time, the terms are right on the tip of your tongue, you just can't remember it. This is where this contraption is going to be really handy.

So you need not carry a bulky dictionary/thesaurus with you all the time, because you have the Franklin distributed Merriam Webster USB Dictionary and Thesaurus. This one is a 256MB flash drive that contains the Webster's digital dictionary with 300,000 words and an accompanying thesaurus with 500,000 words.

A portion of the drive is also allocated for other pre-loaded software programs such as phonetic spell correction, a grammar guide and confusable function alerts - a facility by which the software will alert the user if he might have mistaken similar sounding words (e.g bore and boar). The remaining memory can be used for normal data storage - the specification doesn't say how much of the memory is left, though. Will work well with people who misspell words a lot. Priced at roughly $50 bucks.

Don't be surprised if your cellphone call is interrupted by important announcements coming from no less than the US government. Warnings of natural disasters, terrorists attacks and national emergencies will soon be sent to wireless phones, websites, and handheld computers. The new system is an update of the planned emergency alerts during the Cold War.

The system was initially designed to warn Americans of a nuclear attack, but President Bush ordered Homeland Security to extend the alert "for situations of war, terrorist attack, natural disaster or other hazards to public safety and well-being."

Peter P. Swire, chief privacy counselor during the Clinton administration, said that some people who don't want to be alerted might consider the system a "spam" or a "telemarketing call", but that's really a non-issue as consumers can opt-out of the alerts.

Currently in its pilot stages, the system is being demonstrated at a public television station in suburban Virginia. The Homeland Security Department, through the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), expects to roll out the system at the end of 2007, beginning in the Gulf Coast states that were hit by hurricanes in 2005.