National Geographic January-December 2006. (nem teljes évfolyam) [antikvár]

BY FRANK VTVTANO PHOTOGRAPHS BY ED KASHI ,1 AhA t 10 a.m. on a sweltering Tuesday morning, ^ our death sentence was delivered by telephone. Photographer Ed Kashi and I had made the 50-mile trip from Erbil, the Iraqi Kurds' regional capital, to Kirkuk early that morning. Two Northern Oil Company officials accompanied us to the crest of a low hill. An iron red sun hung over the ancient city that Kurds call "our Jerusalem," floating in a thick haze of dust and refinery fumes. Swarms of flies rose from pungent clots of slick, stagnant water. Nearly nine billion barrels of crude lay below us. Suddenly the cell phones of both officials rang simultaneously. As they listened silently to the calls, I watched their faces tighten, noticed their eyes sweep across Ed's and fix briefly on mine. Without a word, one of them jumped into his pickup truck with a pair of their four bodyguards and sped away. The second official remained only ALERT FOR DANGER, Kurdish police search a car at a checkpoint near Erbil as the Arab driver—casting a shadow—stands aside. Though intense security has made the Kurds' territory safer than the rest of Iraq, several suicide bombers have slipped through in the past year. 4 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC . JANUARY 2006 I 4 the science of things Who Knew? technology The Radio Age RFID tags are tracking everything—even you Imagine you're looking for romance at a party full of strangers. You're nervous. Who are these people? How do you strike up a conversation? Fortunately, you're wired for social success: You've got a gizmo that beams energy at microchips in everyone's name tag. The chips beam back name, occupation, your own skin. Passive RFID tags have a tiny antenna, but no internal energy source—batteries are not included because they're not even needed. The energy comes from the reader, a scanning device, that sends a pulse of electromagnetic energy (for example, radio waves) that briefly activates the tag. Unlike a traditional bar code label, a tag carries information specific to that object, and the data can be updated. Already, RFID technology is used by highway toll plazas, libraries, retailers tracking inventory, and it might hobbies, obsessions, phobias, favorite Seinfeld episode, availability for a date this Friday night —whatever. Dating made simple. This hasn't quite happened in real life. But the world is already undergoing a revolution involving RFID—radio firequency identification. An RFID tag with a microchip can be embedded in a product, under your pet's skin, even under ILLUSTRATION BY SAM HUNDLEY appear in your passport. Doctors can implant a silicon chip under the skin that will help locate and retrieve a patient's medical records. Coroners are using the chips to keep track of Hurricane Katrina victims. At a nightclub in Barcelona—and at its counterpart in Rotterdam—the same implant gets you into the VIP lounge and pays for a cocktail with the wave of an arm. Take a step back: If you were a science reporter 10 or 12 years ago, you would have heard about the coming era of ubiquitous computing (ubicomp). One example always seemed to surface: Your refrigerator would know when you needed to buy more milk. The central conceit of ubicomp was that computer chips could be embedded everywhere and could transmit information in a smart-gadget network that would make ordinary life simpler (because gosh knows, we are desperate for help when it comes to buying milk). Ubiquitous computing is now commonly called pervasive computing. RFID tags are a small part of this phenomenon. "The world is going to be a loosely coupled set of individual small devices, connected wirelessly," predicts Jim Reich of the Palo Alto Research Center. Privacy advocates are nervous about the Orwellian possibilities of such technology. Tracking schoolkids through radio tags is draconian, they say. We imagine a world in which a beer company could find out not only when you bought a beer but also when you drank it. And how many beers. Accompanied by how many pretzels. The larger lesson is that the spectrum—electromagnetic energy—is the information superhighway you've been hearing about for years. Marconi thought the radio would be used for ship-to-shore communication, not for pop music. Who knows how RFID and related technologies will be used in the future. Here's a wild guess: Not for buying milk. —Joel Achenbach WASHINGTON POST STAFF WRITER NATIONAl. GEOGRAPHIC • JANUARY 2006