Social Informatics: Overview,
Principles and Opportunities
File Sharers Anonymous:
Building a Net That's Private
Despite the Supreme Court's recent ruling that publishers
of peer-to-peer (P2P) software are legally liable for
copyright infringement committed by customers, technologists
are developing ways to preserve anonymity on the Internet. Ian
Clarke said the goal of such systems and methodologies is to
...
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SIGGRAPH 2005 Fires Up
High-Tech Weapons
ACM's SIGGRAPH coference attracts people in the visual
effects and animation industry who are under the gun to
produce work of higher quality with less time and money, and
effects pros are especially drawn to the event's show floor
where the latest technologies are spotlighted. Many animation
and ...
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New Software Can Help
People Make Better Decisions in Time-Stressed
Situations
Penn State researchers have developed a software system
that can help teams of people arrive at decisions more
accurately and more rapidly in time-stressed situations. The
results of the R-CAST system's first test are detailed in the
paper, "Extending the Recognition-Primed Decision Model ...
[read more]
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Router Flaw Is a Ticking
Bomb
Former Internet Security Systems (ISS) researcher Mike Lynn
was so perturbed about a flaw in Cisco Systems' Cisco IOS that
he defied mandates from Cisco and his employer to keep it
secret and disclosed the vulnerability at last week's Black
Hat conference. The significance of the ...
[read more]
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Perfect Storms,
Competitiveness, and the 'Gretzky Rule'
The United States still occupies the top spots on the list
of the 500 most powerful supercomputers, but it is a tenuous
lead that could be surpassed by foreign competition if
government, academia, and private industry do not recommit to
innovation and research, writes UCSD computer science
professor ...
[read more]
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Living Book Makes Learning
Easier
The IST-funded Trial-Solution project has developed a suite
of tools designed to re-work online learning and teaching
material on the spur of the moment in order to fulfill
individual students and educators' requirements. "Students or
lecturers can use the online platform to select ...
[read more]
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A Brain Trust in
Bangalore
India's mix of talented, English-speaking engineers and low
labor costs is proving irresistible for Sarnoff, IBM,
Microsoft, and other Western high-tech companies eager to set
up Indian research operations in the hope of gaining an edge
over the competition. Sarnoff CEO Satyam Cherukuri ...
[read more]
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Take Browsers to the Limit:
Google
Developers need to incorporate next-generation technologies
into Web browsers to really transform the desktop experience
for computer users, says Google Maps project lead engineer
Lars Rasmussen. At a recent Web engineering conference in
Sydney, Rasmussen cited the Extensible Stylesheet ...
[read more]
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Coming Soon...a Single,
Global, Collaborative Virtual IT World
(Phew!)
Collaboration without boundaries will define the changing
face of the IT community, said AT&T's Hossein Eslambolchi
at the recent Supernova conference, which examined the
decentralizing currents in IT and simultaneously identified
them both as challenges and opportunities. ...
[read more]
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U.N. Not Seeking to Govern
Net
A recently released report by the U.N. Working Group on
Internet Governance has sparked debate on whether oversight of
the domain-name system for addresses should be shifted from
ICANN to an international organization, as the report
recommends. Clarifying the report at a meeting at Syracuse ...
[read more]
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Soft
Cash
The popularity of electronic currency, smart cards, and
other technologies would seem to indicate that hard currency's
days as viable legal tender are numbered, but cash has proved
remarkably resilient because most people think it is still
more convenient than digital money. Merchants must be ...
[read more]
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China's High-Tech
Challenge
China's commitment to become a technology--and
economic--powerhouse is illustrated by the more than 100
percent increase in China's R&D budget in the past 10
years, the wild growth of Chinese high-tech exports, and the
rising number of Chinese science and engineering doctorates
awarded, which ...
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In Search of
Talent
The IT labor market is showing some promising signs of
resurgence, though improvement is by no means across the
board; senior executives are particularly in demand, as
signified by the high-profile competition between Google and
Microsoft for researcher Kai-Fu Lee. A recent survey ...
[read more]
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Stuck in Traffic? IT Can
Ease the Commute
Technology offers an alternative to expensive road projects
as a solution to worsening traffic congestion. Researchers at
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute are involved in an effort to
outfit nearly 200 cars with wireless GPS and pocket PC
devices, which would be tracked by a central server at ...
[read more]
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Coder Be Agile, Coder Be
Quick
IT industry veteran and journalist Mark Willoughby writes
that agile development has the potential to change everything
about software development and make it more intuitive, if it
fulfills proponents' expectations. In an agile methodology,
programmers write fragments of ...
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USB Devices Can Crack
Windows
By exploiting buffer-overflow vulnerabilities in USB
drivers, hackers are gaining administrative access to 32-bit
computers by programming a USB device to use the machine's
vulnerable drive; although SPI Dynamics researchers tested
Microsoft Windows environments, the vulnerability is ...
[read more]
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Hard Work, Good
Pay
Network World's 2005 Salary Survey finds significant salary
increases for network professionals, although this translates
into longer working hours. Increases in total compensation for
workers in the highest and lowest job tiers is particularly
high, with CIO-level respondents reporting gains of ...
[read more]
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Work Without
Wires
A modest but growing percentage of businesses are
constructing massive wireless networks as a low-cost,
space-saving measure for boosting the efficiency and job
satisfaction of workers and partners. This trend is partly
driven by the proliferation of Wi-Fi in public areas, which
has made ...
[read more]
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Social Informatics:
Overview, Principles and Opportunities
Professor Steve Sawyer with Pennsylvania State University's
School of Information Sciences & Technology expects
computerization's continued penetration into society to
increase the importance of social informatics, which he
describes as the study of information and communication ...
[read more]
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