Winner: New technology allows doctors to monitor their heart patients using wireless Internet hookups, as reported this week in this newspaper. Think of the implications of this as technology improves and more people get broadband connections in their homes. Forget about long afternoons in waiting rooms where you might catch some strange disease from another patient. Just stick a wireless thermometer in your mouth or a wireless blood-pressure cuff on your arm and let the doctor figure things out from afar. In return, the doctor could e-mail you some old magazines to read while you wait for the diagnosis.
Loser: It's bad enough that about 15,000 Utah Valley State College students and teachers had their Social Security numbers available through Yahoo!'s search engine for about a month, but it's unconscionable that Yahoo isn't in full emergency mode to reassure people and fix the problem.
School officials won't say how Yahoo! got the information, other than that the search engine uses unique technology to scour Web sites for information. But Yahoo! was slow to respond to the problem, which left the information available for a time, and the company has been equally slow to respond to questions from this newspaper.