Voice activated badges – those space-aged communication devices once only seen on Star Trek – are the newest accessory for the doctors, nurses and staff at the Royal Cornwall Hospitals NHS Trust in Truro.

With a quick press of a button, a doctor can say the name of a colleague or department and speak with the appropriate person as they would on a telephone. Operating on a BT wireless network, the badges are about the size and shape of an iPod nano and can be worn around the neck or pinned to a lapel.

Royal Cornwall is the first in the UK to introduce the BT Managed Vocera system, though it is already used in some UK hospitals. The hospital is only experimenting with the badges at this time, but the trust hopes to roll the devices out to all staff starting in April, according to The Register.

In an environment where people need to be reached urgently and are not often at a desk phone, the wearable badges will improve communications in the hospital. Staff won’t need to remember telephone numbers or carry lists, or even stop what they are doing to consult with colleagues on the opposite end of the building.

Simon Goodwin, director of IT for the Cornwall NHS Community, said: “The new system is simple to use and will allow us to respond more quickly to our patients’ needs.”

The hopsital could replace walkie-talkies, pagers and mobile phones with the wearable badges if they are found to be more efficient.

The Vocera system is based on a BT wireless local area network and uses mobile Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) technology to convert voice into IP packets which can be transmitted over the network and reassembled into voice at the receiving device, according to BT.

All Scottish students will be issued an identity number in an effort to streamline student information sharing and improve child protection strategies, according to the Scottish Executive.

The unique pupil ID numbers, known as Scottish Candidate Number (SCN), will allow pupil records containing key information to be quickly shared between schools and councils.

When students transfer between schools, this will ensure their records go with them so their progress can be properly monitored. The system will also eliminate confusion over children with the same name.

The identity numbers will also aid child protection services. Of the thousands of children that change schools every year, some do not make it to their new school, according to The Scotsman. The identity numbers will help trace the children that go missing.

ID numbers were originally given to pupils in third year of secondary as a unique identifier for exams, but will now be given to all new pupils starting primary one or entering into the Scottish education system from the summer of this year. This scheme does not apply to private schools.

Thames Online launched today, providing high-speed wireless internet access along the river Thames. The Register reported that the network stretches runs for 12km, “from Westminster to Greenwich”, which makes it the UK’s largest wireless network to date. The Thames Online site is more coy, and does not provide full details of its coverage area.

Not only is it the biggest network, but it’s one of the most affordable. T-Mobile’s hotspots in this country require users to pay a £23.50 monthly subscription rate before they use them; BT Openzone charge £40 for a month’s unlimited access. By contrast, Thames Online comes in at a very respectable £9.99 a month. Obviously the Thames network is operating over a more limited area, but it’s good to see a provider pricing wireless access not as a luxury, but as a commodity.

And there’s an added bonus for early adopters: Thames Online is entirely free until the 1st of April - time enough to find out just how far the network extends, and how quick it really is. It’s great to see an affordable public wireless network being launched on this scale in the UK. If more locations in towns and cities follow suit, it won’t be long before wireless is a standard part of urban infrastructure, just like street lighting before it.

Gerry Adam’s presidential address is now available as an MP3 file to download. This feat of up-to-the-minute use of technology was announced by Sinn Fein’s press department as a really rather radical podcast.

They have also enabled those who weren’t able to be present on the day the option of watching a video stream of the event. Unfortunately, this file is not downloadable so you may have to find an hour in your day when your broadband connection isn’t busy downloading anything else.

A recent article in the Independent on Sunday reported on insecurities with the popular Oyster card. The article suggests that anyone can find the details of every journey made in the past ten weeks with the card - as long as they either have the card itself, or its serial number.

Quite a security risk, from the sounds of things. And the Independent leaps on what they feel to be the most serious risk to personal security that this presents: the chance of being caught cheating on your partner. Not stalking, not terrorism; just good-old infidelity.

The article goes on to examine other ways technology can catch cheating husbands - monitoring text messages, or even the precise location of a mobile phone. But it’s all a little sensationalist. Yes, it probably ought to be more difficult to retrieve data from the cards, but it’s important that that data exist. It’s a very useful tool for the police, for instance; The Register point this (and other pearls of common-sense) out in their considered response to the original article. The article taps into a common modern neurosis - the idea that “everything we do” is monitored. It’s integral to the nature of these services that they are monitored. The Oyster card gives Transport for London useful market research, for instance. Mobile phones can’t function without knowing which “cell” they’re in. Credit card bills have long been tell-tales of infidelity, but we’d all still rather know where the charges on them came from, for our own piece of mind.

We all give off data about ourselves like exhaust-fumes, every day, everywhere we go - and we have been doing so for decades. The only change new technology brings is the speed that data can be acquired, and the level of detail within it. So if you are looking to cheat on your partner - something we on the NMA blog would never condone - you’re best off taking the low tech route: leave your mobile at home, get a taxi, and always, always, pay with cash.

Clean, friendly and very roomy, Polizia di Stato is reportedly Europe’s first virtual police station. It was launched on Sunday by the Italian interior minister, Giuseppe Pisanu, who called it “the latest achievement in close-up policing”.

The service aims to enable internet users to report online crime, get advice, and turn cyber grass by registering a nickname and passing on tips anonymously.

When Apple announced that it would start using Intel processors across its whole range of computer products, users immediately asked about the transferability of PC and Apple software onto the two types of hardware. Unwilling to authorise the use of its own software on anything other than Apple hardware the corporation installed a security chip, also known as a Trusted Platform Module (TMP). The TMP is supposed to lock Apple software to Apple Mac machines. Invariably loving a challenge, online users were determined to get round this and thus the Osx86 Project was born with users from across the world sharing thoughts, tips and theories on how to circumvent the software.

Last week reports spread across the internet that Apple had gagged the discussion by invoking the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). The application of the DMCA in this instance raised questions about freedom of speech and expression and angered some users who believe that corporations like Apple create a monopoly by locking their software to their own hardware. It is generally understood in online communities that the DMCA does not cover theoretical discussion of circumvention techniques.

The problem in this instance was that Osx86 Project had provided links to a certain a hackers site thereby actively engaging in DMCA violation. The links have now been removed and the discussion is back up and running. In any case, Apple seems to have acknowledged that the hardcore users will always find ways to get round this type of technology and has engaged in some light hearted exchange with them, leaving an encrypted poetic message which hacker Maxxuss found:

“Your karma check for today:
There once was a user that whined,
His existing OS was so blind,
He’d do better to pirate,
An OS that ran great,
But found his hardware declined.
Please don’t steal Mac OS! Really, that’s way uncool.
(C) Apple Computer, Inc.”

Not to be outdone the a hacker replied:

“Rime of the Ancient Hacker:
There once was a hacker named Maxxuss,
Who Steve did not think was a genius
But Steve pondered awhile,
Grabbed the phone with a smile,
And said “Bill, there’s a thing to discuss…”

WriteToThem, a project set up by mySociety to enable citizens to contact their Councillors, MP, MEPs, MSPs, or Welsh and London Assembly Members for free, has released it’s first set of data showing responses by elected representatives to emails sent via the service.

Anyone looking at the overview will immediately see that those who really should pick their socks up include Respect, Sinn Fein and members of the Scottish Parliament. Interestingly the three top places in the MPs league table are all taken by Conservatives, with a 100 per cent response rate.

The European Parliament is planning to launch a web TV channel next year. Currently plenary sittings of the European Parliament can be seen live via the main European Parliament website, however, it is expected that when the TV web channel is launched much more will be available. It is expected that live coverage of full sessions of Parliament and Committee meetings as well as educational and historical documentaries will all be on offer.

The European Parliament web TV channel is likely to be modelled on the Scottish Parliament’s web channel. Certainly there are many advantages to broadcasting on the web not only is it cost effective as compared with standard digital or analogue broadcasting but it also offers the possibility of multi-channel broadcasting.

“Web TV offers better opportunities than conventional broadcasting when dealing with the problem of multilingualism, a main constraint of the European Parliament which operates in 20 languages.” Simon Duffin, Head of Press at the European Parliament UK Office explains.

The move to a web TV channel also enables the European Parliament an opportunity to address the criticism of being too far removed from European Citizens and enables it to be more transparent in its activities.

Simon Duffin has told us: “we are persuaded that TV-over-internet is a promising technology which will become extremely common in the future, reaching a broad cross-section of society especially as broadband penetration expands. This technology is appropriate for the sort of “sit-forward” viewer we expect to reach.”

The precise cost of the European Parliament’s plans is yet to be revealed, however, it is expected that this is a big move in attempting to bring the European Parliament closer to the people is serves.

Whether it will increase voter participation and interest in the work the European Parliament is yet to be seen.

You may remember a weblog entry from last year by Tom on the decision by the Venezuelan government to move government IT systems to open-source software. It would now seem that South Korea is to follow suit.

Back in January six South Korean government agencies held a meeting in response to Microsoft’s decision to stop issuing security patches for Windows 98, a decision which may well leave many South Korean users of the outdated Windows operating system vulnerable to threats of hacking. It was reported in EFYTimes.com that at the meeting the Ministry of Information and Communication urged the other agencies to replace Windows 98 with open source software.

Today, the Korean Times reports plans by the South Korean government to select a city and a university to be predominantly operated on open source software like the Linux operating system. The project, which costs 4.1 billion won for the first year alone, is a bid to prompt other cities and universities to also take up open source software.

Given that the Ministry of Planning and Budget plans to spend 80 billion won this year on 37 Linux projects, it seems that South Korea’s future state IT systems will mainly be open source. The director of the Ministry of Information and Communication, Lee Do-kyu, practically confirmed this when he told the Korean Times that “the Linux city and university project will be leading the way in bringing software flexibility to the whole country at a lower cost to the public.”