But the irony is that tomorrow will be `dress down Friday’ for many places so those protesters are likely to stick out like a store thumb.”. ALL STAFF using computers should now assume that they are being monitored, a London conference on electronics and privacy was told yesterday. Workplace surveillance techniques are on the increase, said Michael Ford, a barrister and visiting fellow at the London School of Economics.
Some employers use closed-circuit television, drug testing, interception of private mail and psychometric questionnaires, Mr Ford told the conference, organised by the research group Income Data Services (IDS).In Britain, staff at telephone call centres were the subject of most scrutiny. In America, some firms tested potential employees for genetic defects which might predispose them to illnesses affecting their work.Mr Ford said there was no fundamental right to privacy, but bosses must beware divulging confidential information.Robert Pullen of IDS warned office workers to beware cracking jokes or making derogatory comments via internal e-mail.Office humorists can infringe sex and race discrimination laws or find themselves accused of libel, he said.

In one recent case the financial group Norwich Union paid pounds 450,000 to a rival firm because of allegedly defamatory internal e-mails.Mr Pullen also gave warning that Internet users were increasingly open to litigation.. BRITISH SCIENTISTS have devised a new breed of slower tennis balls which could turn the men’s game at Wimbledon from a demonstration of high-speed serving back into a battle of skill. Developed and tested at Sheffield University with help from the US space agency Nasa, the new balls, which are seven per cent wider, but no heavier, than standard balls, would slow serves by about 10 per cent. Tennis’s governing body will vote next month on whether to introduce them to the game’s top levels.
That would eventually offer receivers the crucial few hundredths of a second they need to react in the face of 140mph rockets such as those sent down by Britain’s Greg Rusedski. On fast surfaces like grass, few points last more than three shots – serve, return and winning volley.Interest in men’s tennis has waned in the past few years as the prevalence of fast surfaces and space-age rackets in the hands of highly trained athletes has turned matches into shootouts far removed from the rallying epics of the 1970s and early 1980s involving players like Bjorn Borg, Jimmy Connors and John McEnroe.Increasingly, tiebreaks at six-all are the only way to resolve sets which could otherwise go on for ever: last year almost a fifth of the sets in men’s matches at Wimbledon were resolved by a tiebreak. When the tiebreak was introduced in 1968, only about 10 per cent of sets required it.The International Tennis Federation (ITF) will vote in three weeks’ time on a plan to introduce the slower balls in junior tournaments around the world, as a test of their effectiveness. If successful, they could then be used in senior professional tournaments.”The larger ball does look just that bit bigger, though it weighs the same,” said Dr Steve Haake who led the research at the University of Sheffield’s sports engineering group.

“The result is that they have more air resistance, so they drop more steeply to the ground and bounce higher.” That means receivers get about three-hundredths of a second extra to react to the ball, enough to increase the chances of a successful return.Other versions of the balls, devised by three postgraduate students led by Dr Haake, would speed up play on slower surfaces such as clay, used at the French Open in Paris.The new balls could solve the problem which has troubled the ITF for the whole decade. Previous suggestions included a serving line behind the baseline, forcing servers to stay on the floor, banning graphite rackets and cutting the number of serves from two to one. All were deemed unsuitable because they would introduce artificial differences in rules between amateur and professional games.t The Mayan people of Mexico were making elastic bands and solid rubber “superballs” for games almost 3,500 years before modern rubber production, scientists have discovered.Centuries before the accidental discovery of the vulcanisation process made rubber commercially widespread, the Mayans were mixing latex rubber from a native tree with a vine extract to produce solid balls, rubber bands able to hold axe heads on hafts, and solid and hollow human figurines, according to a report in the journal Science. Excavations at a site in Veracruz in Mexico have uncovered balls ranging from 13 to 30 centimetres (5-12 inches) in diameter, and weighing from 0.5 to 7 kilograms.. SOLDIERS WHO became ill after serving in the Gulf War may have a genetic trait which makes them more vulnerable to certain poisonous chemicals.Experts believe that this could account for some becoming very ill while others remain healthy. Research published this week, from the UT Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, reveals that some veterans of the Gulf War may have suffered from certain chemical exposures while others did not because of variations in a gene known to produce an enzyme which destroys the damaging chemicals.
Gulf War syndrome, which has symptoms ranging from fatigue, double vision and headaches to severe urinary and sexual problems, has caused a lot of controversy with ex-soldiers accusing the Government of hiding evidence and ignoring their suffering.The existence of Gulf War syndrome was disputed earlier this year when British researchers found that although troops who had served in the Gulf had three times more illnesses compared with troops who had served in Bosnia, there was no single cause or illness that could be identified.