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 ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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. ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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