Gordon Bitko

The U. S. Global Positioning System (GPS), now the world's preeminent pointing, navigation, and tracking (PNT) system, will in the not too distant future be joined by the European Union's Galileo, a PNT system planned to be similar to GPS in function and performance. Will the two systems cooperate, providing users with the benefits of both, or will they compete? The authors assess the economic impact of competition and how the United States can address that competition, especially as it affects U. S. economic interests.

Describes a case study of six enterprises concerning their policies for collecting, retaining, and using personally identifiable records obtained by sensing access cards that contain radio frequency identification tags. Describes a case study of six enterprises that use Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags to control access in the workplace to understand their policies about personally identifiable records obtained by sensing RFID-based access cards. These policies have a number of common features, but the policies are neither documented nor shared with employees. While employees ought to be informed about uses of access control system records, implementing traditional fair information practices for such records would be impractical in some situations.

Is U. S. high-technology manufacturing at risk? In response to the concern that an increasing amount of high-technology manufacturing formerly performed in the United States is now being done overseas, the Office of Science and Technology Policy asked the Rand Corporation to provide analytic support to the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. The support included a description of past and current trends of U. S. high-tech manufacturing, a theoretical and empirical economic analysis of traditional and high-tech manufacturing, and an analysis of U. S. research and development statistics and of trends in choices of academic disciplines.