Editor's Corner

Looking ahead
It's always interesting to look to the future. Right now it seems that the U.S. is consumed with which 65 teams will make the NCAA basketball tournament. You can pick your brackets, but the selection committee will work without your input. Technology prediction is like that, too. Take Real ID, one of the initiatives to flow from the response to 9/11. Nearly everyone would have bet that RFID would be part of the requirements, but the final proposal leans on a bar code--and not even the most information-dense version--for encoding information.

I think leaving RFID out was the right decision for now. There are still too many issues with security remaining to be addressed for RFID to be the right technology for this particular application. In too many cases we believe that our current challenge has never been faced, in any form, by anyone before. Responding to the challenge must, therefore, require the newest technology. New technology may help, but understanding the nature of the challenge, designing the process to respond, then picking a technology that's best suited for implementing the process will take us farther in more safety than looking at the technology first. -Curtis