Education and SPAM may defy logic

The following "Northshore Citizen" column appeared in the Bothell/Kenmore Reporter newspaper edition of June 16, 2004.

Noted educator Robert M. Hutchins once reminded us that the “object of education is to prepare the young how to educate themselves throughout their lives”.

Our area’s three primary service clubs have followed that path over these past 20 years since the 1984 organization of the Northshore Scholarship Foundation.

At the Foundation’s anniversary recognition breakfast last month, 74 graduates of Northshore schools and four students at the University of Washington-Bothell received scholarships valued at a total of $109,755, the most ever in a single year. Of the total, $30,500 came directly from fund-raising efforts of the service clubs that sponsor the Foundation – the founding Northshore Rotary Club ($9,000), the Kiwanis Club of Northshore ($6,000) and the Woodinville Rotary Club ($15,500). The balance came from earnings of the Foundation’s present asset base of nearly $850,000. The combined earnings and contributions over the years have permitted this substantial accumulation as well as granting $840,000 in scholarships.

Each club has been raising funds for years in support of Northshore graduates who seek careers in such diverse fields as neuroscience to the fine arts, motorcycle mechanics to nursing or music to psychology. This year a greater number of scholarships will be renewable. For example, Mary Davies of Inglemoor High School received a $2,200 scholarship from the Janet and Gordon Livengood endowment for each of four years. Hers was one of four given in 2004 in memory of the Livengoods, the other three being for one year and also valued at $2,200. Next year two Livengood scholarships will be renewable over four years, and so on until all four are renewable each year.

Woodinville High School’s Emilie Sutton, undeterred by blindness, plans to attend Edmonds Community College with help from the first $1,000 Franklin Adams Ability Award. Nicole Landreth of Bothell High School is the first recipient of a $1,000 health services scholarship given in memory of Dr. John Stoutenburg of Bothell.

This is just a sampling of the recipients – selected by the 29 committees that program coordinator Joanne (“Mom”) Harkonen so admirably guides through the difficult process of matching candidates with the many family and service club representatives who each year undertake the daunting decision-making task.

Each service club is already at work laying groundwork for fund-raising auctions this coming fall, so they’ll be able to match their scholarship giving in 2005 when the Foundation anticipates providing nearly $125,000 in scholarship money to as many as 90 recipients. The Foundation anticipates a major bequest later this year which will increase the endowed asset base to near the $1 million mark and provide between four to six new scholarships a year at Woodinville High School.

In case you get asked to attend or donate an item or an intriguing experience for any one of the club auctions, the dates are Oct. 2 (Woodinville Rotary’s Havana Nights auction), Oct. 16 (Northshore Rotary) and Nov. 20 (Kiwanis).

No logic to SPAM?

It is reassuring to know that researchers at Microsoft are making an effort to free the present day 500 million accounts using the Internet of that unwanted electronic mail commonly known as SPAM. My friend Roy is on the team at Microsoft whose boss named Bill has committed the company to “solving SPAM over the next two years.”

Roy made a presentation the other day on the subject of SPAM. The techie world describes SPAM as “endless repetition of worthless text.” I was able to understood those opening remarks and the fact that those attacking SPAM at its source are considering the need for developing new technology, proposals to somehow raising the cost to the ‘Spammer” or devising some method of digital signatures as a means of identifying senders.

It was interesting to learn that as many as nine per cent of those of us receiving email will accept and open SPAM messages which offer the gambit of lower mortgage rates, discount prescriptions or those “unmentionables” guaranteed to improve one’s outlook on life (and we’re not talking vitamins here). Roy said the Spammer’s efforts are profitable if only 5 per cent open those messages, giving support to the idea that Spammers worldwide won’t succumb easily to serious efforts to curtail these uninvited emails.

From that point on it got pretty technical for me as to the nature of Roy’s pending U.S. patents designed to block SPAM.

But, in conclusion, Roy related that the key to Bill’s outfit “solving SPAM” will be the ability of firms like Microsoft to find methods to reduce the anonymity of the sender – to thwart the anonymous ability to send email. This will require “fuzzy logic”, he explained, to analyze the content of email.

This won’t be the first time fuzzy logic will be required to attack centuries-old problems in the world of unwanted communication.

To find other Northshore Citizen columns for 2004 and 2005

The
Northshore
Citizen
newspaper would have been
100 years old in 2003
Over the years
it covered events in Bothell,
Kenmore and Woodinville

The weekly
Citizen
gave way in January 2002
to the
Bothell/Kenmore
Reporter,
now mailed free to homes
in both communities

Past '03 columns...

July 16
August 6
August 21
September 4
September 18
October 1
October 15
November 5
November 19

December 3

with the late Peg Phillips

John B. Hughes
was editor and
publisher of the
Citizen Newspapers from
1961-1988
and now writes
a column for the
Reporter under
the title of
Northshore
Citizen

Hughes serves
as grand marshal
under the name of
Hugo B. Jonsen
of Grace and is in
charge of the town's parades, special events
and celebrations.
For some odd reason, most of the town's planned events have been cancelled of late.

Hugo and
Mayor-for-Life
Terry Jarvis
co-publish
The Greater
Grace
Daily OnLine
Gazette
from new offices in
Grace Town Hall
P.O. Box 967
Grace, Wa 98072

(425) 482-4076