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Though I recently expressed excitement at the prospect of electronic parking meters in San Francisco because they would allow people to pay with their smart phones, I recognize how careful we have to be when using computer systems to control vital infrastructure. The difficulties of protecting such technology from outside attack is difficult, but keeping an eye on those who are supposed to be managing it is equally important. Another story from San Francisco illustrates this point quite well:

Terry Childs, 43, is accused of locking out the city from its FiberWAN network containing city e-mails, payroll, police records and information on jail inmates. He was arrested Sunday after refusing to hand over passwords to the Wide Area Network system he is accused of taking control of.

Thus, as we rightly go about using technology to make our lives more efficient, we also need to make sure we maintain security and accountability in the use of these new technologies.

But not all problems necessarily require new technologies to solve them. How can people get around now that gas is so expensive? Perhaps by going the decidedly low-tech route of using one's own two feet. As I've long supposed, higher gas prices may actually be helping us fight our national obesity epidemic:

Keeping gas in the family truckster is slimming more than wallets these days and could have Americans tightening their belts -- literally. According to Charles Courtemanche, an assistant economics professor at the University of North Carolina in Greensboro, rising fuel prices are the ultimate crash diet for a nation that grew fat on cheap gas.

Courtemanche says a $1 increase in the price of gasoline could cut the obesity rate by 10 percent, saving 16,000 lives and $17 billion in health care costs each year. He makes the case in "A Silver Lining? The Connection Between Gasoline Prices and Obesity," his doctoral dissertation in health economics. The paper, currently being peer-reviewed, can be summed up in the simple idea that people walk more, bike more and dine out less when gas prices rise.

In other news relating to increasing transportation costs, some engineers are advocating growing food within major cities:

What if "eating local" in Shanghai or New York meant getting your fresh produce from five blocks away? And what if skyscrapers grew off the grid, as verdant, self-sustaining towers where city slickers cultivated their own food?

Dr. Dickson Despommier, a professor of public health at Columbia University, hopes to make these zucchini-in-the-sky visions a reality. Despommier's pet project is the "vertical farm," a concept he created in 1999 with graduate students in his class on medical ecology, the study of how the environment and human health interact.

(Via Boing Boing.)

Finally, Reason's Matt Welch encourages everyone to take a deep breath and realize that people have been selling papers by proclaiming the coming apocalypse for quite some time--and of course they've been wrong thus far and will likely continue to be:

For the record, as someone who both predicted the dollar collapse and believed fervently in the Y2K bug, I think that things will continue to get worse, especially as the housing mess continues to unwind (not soon enough for renters like me and Paul Thornton!) and entitlements continue to swell larger than Al Gore's neck. But I can't help wonder if that's more about a juvenile fondness for train wrecks than a sober assessment of an economy that, despite its many flaws, has consistently outpaced the doomsayers for what, a quarter century now?

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