China Dominates NSA-Backed Computer Coding Contest

"With about 4,200 people participating in a US National Security Agency-supported international competition on everything from writing algorithms to designing components, 20 of the 70 finalists were from China, 10 from Russia, and 2 from the US. China's showing in the finals was helped by its large number of entrants, 894. India followed at 705, but none of its programmers was a finalist. Russia had 380 participants; the United States, 234; Poland, 214; Egypt, 145; and Ukraine, 128. Participants in the TopCoder Open was open to anyone, from student to professional; the contest proceeded through rounds of elimination that finished this month in Las Vegas. Rob Hughes, president and COO of TopCoder, says the strong finish by programmers from China, Russia, Eastern Europe and elsewhere is indicative of the importance those countries put on mathematics and science education. '

"We do the same thing with athletics here that they do with mathematics and science there..."

Read more of this story at Slashdot

95 percent of blogs being abandoned...

"Douglas Quenqua reports in the NY Times that according to a 2008 survey only 7.4 million out of the 133 million blogs the company tracks had been updated in the past 120 days meaning that "95 percent of blogs being essentially abandoned, left to lie fallow on the Web, where they become public remnants of a dream — or at least an ambition — unfulfilled." Richard Jalichandra, chief executive of Technorati, said that at any given time there are 7 million to 10 million active blogs on the Internet, but it's probably between 50,000 and 100,000 blogs that are generating most of the page views. "There's a joke within the blogging community that most blogs have an audience of one." Many people who think blogging is a fast path to financial independence also find themselves discouraged. "I did some Craigslist postings to advertise it, and I very quickly got an audience of about 50,000 viewers a month," says Matt Goodman, an advertising executive in Atlanta who had no trouble attracting an audience to his site, Things My Dog Ate, leading to some small advertising deals. "I think I made about $20 from readers clicking on the ads."

Read more at slashdot

Generation Y Explained....

Bruce Schneier - cloud computing is nothing new

IT is because Bruce 'knows' IT
...cloud computing is nothing new . It's the modern version of the timesharing model from the 1960s, which was eventually killed by the rise of the personal computer. It's what Hotmail and Gmail have been doing all these years, and it's social networking sites, remote backup companies, and remote email filtering companies such as MessageLabs. Any IT outsourcing -- network infrastructure, security monitoring, remote hosting -- is a form of cloud computing.

The old timesharing model arose because computers were expensive and hard to maintain. Modern computers and networks are drastically cheaper, but they're still hard to maintain. As networks have become faster, it is again easier to have someone else do the hard work. Computing has become more of a utility; users are more concerned with results than technical details, so the tech fades into the background.

You don't want your critical data to be on some cloud computer that abruptly disappears because its owner goes bankrupt . You don't want the company you're using to be sold to your direct competitor. You don't want the company to cut corners, without warning, because times are tight. Or raise its prices and then refuse to let you have your data back. These things can happen with software vendors, but the results aren't as drastic.

Trust is a concept as old as humanity, and the solutions are the same as they have always been. Be careful who you trust, be careful what you trust them with, and be careful how much you trust them. Outsourcing is the future of computing. Eventually we'll get this right, but you don't want to be a casualty along the way.

This essay originally appeared in The Guardian.

FBI - CAN YOU CRACK A CODE?

From www.fbi.gov
Try Your Hand at Cryptanalysis... to unravel a code and reveal its secret message, just like the “cryptanalysts” in our FBI Laboratory.

This time we've used a different set of characters entirely—ancient runes that are sometimes used by criminals to code their communications. Give it a try!



Good luck!

Note: sorry, but cracking this code doesn't guarantee you a job with the FBI! But do check out careers with us at FBIJobs.gov.

'crack cocaine of the gaming world'

"My name is Ian, and I am a recovering MMO addict."
The entire experience feels not too different from wasting away in front of a big screen TV for 16 hours a day with your shirt stained orange with cheetos as your body curses you for treating it so poorly.

It's no big secret that MMORPGs are intensely addictive. MMORPGs have been called the 'crack cocaine of the gaming world' by report in Sweden backed by the Swedish National Institute of Public Health after a 15-year old boy collapsed and went into convulsions after playing World of Warcraft, an MMORPG, for a 24-hour stretch of time.

With regards to MMORPGs, the organization added, "There is no known medical diagnosis of conditions brought on by excessive game-playing, but it is clear they have a very powerful addictive hold over many people who use them."

It was a terrible realization that besides the addictive gameplay mechanics, the one other thing that was keeping me from leaving was my guild, or the fellows with whom I enjoyed playing. It was simple: I had managed to become hooked by the game's subtle and sinister social mechanics.

Being not a slave to anything or anyone but myself, I took a step back and decided there and then to stop playing. It was an easy decision to make, but it was one which took me way longer than it should have to discover.

All in all, you'd be better off doing something else than playing an MMORPG.

Read full From The Human Cost of MMORPGs

A darker view of technology's future

Yesterday's Tomorrows: Past Visions of the American Future

"There are so many things you can't anticipate when you create a new technology," he says. "Who would have predicted that the Internet would be taking down shopping malls and wiping out newspapers?''

"Even then, people had a misplaced faith in the power of inventions to make life easier, Americans' faith in the power of technology to reshape the future is due in part to their history. Americans have never accepted a radical political transformation that would change their future. They prefer technology, not radical politics, to propel social change."

"At some point, you can't expect a miracle to come in the form of technology to save us, the miracle has to come from a change in attitude and a new outlook."

 

Read full via CNN 

 

Secrets in the TCP - code, messages and more...

Web, file transfer, email and peer-to-peer networks all use TCP, which ensures that data packets are received securely by making the sender wait until the receiver returns a 'got it' message. If no such acknowledgment arrives (on average 1 in 1000 packets gets lost or corrupted), the sender's computer sends the packet again in a system known as TCP's retransmission mechanism. The new steganographic system, dubbed retransmission steganography (RSTEG), relies on the sender and receiver using software that deliberately asks for retransmission even when email data packets are received successfully (PDF). 'The receiver intentionally signals that a loss has occurred,'  'The sender then retransmits the packet but with some secret data inserted in it.' Could a careful eavesdropper spot that RSTEG is being used because the first sent packet is different from the one containing the secret message?

As long as the system is not over-used, apparently not, because if a packet is corrupted, the original packet and the retransmitted one will differ from each other anyway, masking the use of RSTEG."  It's out there... now read more at slashdot

Stats on the MAlWar

The May edition of the MessageLabs Intelligence monthly provided this information regarding the ongoing fight against viruses, spam and other unwelcome content.

    Report Highlights:
        * Spam - 90.4% in May (an increase of 5.1% since April)
        * Viruses - One in 317.8 emails in May contained malware (a decrease of 0.01% since April)
        * Phishing - One in 404.7 emails comprised a phishing attack (an increase of 0.11% since April)
        * Malicious websites - 1,149 new sites blocked per day (a decrease of 67.7% since April)
        * Spammers continue to abuse reputable domains and web-based malware more likely to be found on older domains
        * Geographic location determines at what time of day you receive spam
        * “Russian” spam squarely rooted in Cutwail botnet

Read full paper from source: Symantec

Why we are technically discontent and disconnected...

Technology is 'The knack of so arranging a world that we need not
experience it' - Max Frisch

Sony CEO: "Nothing good from the Internet, period."

From the boingboing  visionary statement from one of our would-be masters of technology:

"I'm a guy who doesn't see anything good having come from the Internet," said Sony Pictures Entertainment chief executive officer Michael Lynton. "Period." , Lynton wasn't just trying for a laugh: He complained the Internet has "created this notion that anyone can have whatever they want at any given time. It's as if the stores on Madison Avenue were open 24 hours a day. They feel entitled. They say, 'Give it to me now,' and if you don't give it to them for free, they'll steal it." – Read more here

The rise of American Idiot...

What we have created with our advanced IT systems cold fusion, stopped hunger, cured cancer?

Nope we twitter away our day to expand the new idiots.

Charles Pierce -   The rise of Idiot America, though, is essentially a war on expertise.
It's not so much antimodernism or the distrust of the intellectual elites that Richard Hofstader teased out of the national DNA, although both of these things are part of it. The rise of Idiot America today reflects — for profit, mainly, but also and more cynically, for political advantage and in the pursuit of power — the breakdown of the consensus that the pursuit of knowledge is a good. It also represents the ascendancy of the notion that the people we should trust the least are the people who know the best what they're talking about. In the new media age, everybody is a historian, or a scientist, or a preacher, or a sage. And if everyone is an expert, then nobody is, and the worst thing you can be in a society where everybody is an expert is, well, an actual expert.

   This is how Idiot America engages itself. It decides, en masse, with a million keystrokes and clicks of the remote control, that because there are two sides to every question, they both must be right, or at least not wrong. And the words of an obscure biologist carry no more weight on the subject of biology than do the thunderations of some turkeyneck preacher out of Christ's Own Parking Structure in DeLand, Florida. Less weight, in fact, because our scientist is an "expert" and therefore, an "elitist." Nobody buys his books. Nobody puts him on cable.    

He's brilliant, surely, but no different from the rest of us, poor fool...

Hidden valuable natural resource is being exploited...

From newscientist

 

Click image to see spectrum

Google is backing a political campaign to force the US government to release full details of how one of our most valuable natural resources is being exploited - radio communications spectrum.

 

A post on Google's policy blog lauds a bill being introduced to Congress that would require the Federal Communications Commission to "take a full inventory of our nation's spectrum resources between the 300 MHz and 3.5 GHz bands."

You can already see a representation of how the spectrum is divided in the graphic above, or in pdf form here. But the bill would make available full details of who is using which chunks of spectrum for what, and how efficiently. As the Google post puts it, "is a sizable portion of useful spectrum simply lying fallow?"

 

The internet giant was one of many that lobbied sucessfully to get spectrum freed up by the demise of analogue TV signals allocated to new kinds of mobile devices. That will supposedly allow the development of technology dubbed "Wi-Fi on steroids" by its proponents, and shape our technological future - allowing faster portable connections and high-speed broadband in remote areas, for example.

 

Similarly, making it publicly known how the rest of the radio spectrum is being used, and what is left, could change how we communicate for years to come.

 

The only secure PC, a book...

See more awesome illustrations of 'pop up book PC'

The SUM of my Substance...

Warrantless Tracking Is Legal, Says Wisconsin Court

Slashdot - A Wisconsin appeals court ruled Thursday that police can attach GPS trackers to cars to secretly track anybody's movements without obtaining search warrants. As the law currently stands, the court said police can mount GPS on cars to track people without violating their constitutional rights — even if the drivers aren't suspects. Officers do not need to get warrants beforehand because GPS tracking does not involve a search or a seizure, wrote Madison Judge Paul Lundsten."

Windows 7 ready?

When the internet went... to hell

Mathematical Illiteracy

This may be the stupidest example of risk assessment I've ever seen. It's a video clip from a recent Daily Show, about he dangers of the Large Hadron Collider. The segment starts off slow, but then there's an exchange with high school science teacher Walter L. Wagner, who insists the device has a 50-50 chance of destroying the world:

"If you have something that can happen, and something that won't necessarily happen, it's going to either happen or it's going to not happen, and so the best guess is 1 in 2."

"I'm not sure that's how probability works, Walter."

This is followed by clips of news shows taking the guy seriously.

Read full by schneier

IT... bored is part of innovation

Live beta - Google sorry were down but for a

Why I love google - They are NOT scared to beta test live... it is evolution we need.

If you did a Google search between 6:30 a.m. PST and 7:25 a.m. PST this morning, you likely saw that the message "This site may harm your computer" accompanied each and every search result. This was clearly an error, and we are very sorry for the inconvenience caused to our users.

What happened? Very simply, human error. Google flags search results with the message "This site may harm your computer" if the site is known to install malicious software in the background or otherwise surreptitiously. We do this to protect our users against visiting sites that could harm their computers. We maintain a list of such sites through both manual and automated methods. We work with a non-profit called StopBadware.org to come up with criteria for maintaining this list, and to provide simple processes for webmasters to remove their site from the list.

We periodically update that list and released one such update to the site this morning. 

IT is not as pretty as IT was

slashdot tell us that new research is suggesting as many as a quarter of all IT staff in small to medium businesses have suffered some sort of abuse and are looking for careers elsewhere [PDF]. "The study also found that over a third have suffered from sleepless nights or headaches as a result of IT problems at work, while 59 per cent spend between one and 10 hours a week working on IT systems outside normal hours. [...] The biggest cause of stress among IT staff is problems arising from operational day-to-day tasks, the survey found. Another major cause came from loss of critical data, according to Connect."

 

The End of Individual Genius?

An anonymous reader writes "A recent study suggests the downfall of individual researchers, who are being rapidly replaced by enormous research groups. Quoting: '... in recent decades — especially since the Soviet success in launching the Sputnik satellite in 1957 — the trend has been to create massive institutions that foster more collaboration and garner big chunks of funding. And it is harder now to achieve scientific greatness. A study of Nobel Prize winners in 2005 found that the accumulation of knowledge over time has forced great minds to toil longer before they can make breakthroughs. The age at which thinkers produce significant innovations increased about six years during the 20th century.'" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

 

Class of 76 'cleverer' than kids of today

Clever teenagers of today are not as bright as kids in the class of 1976, according to researchers.

The intellect of even the brainiest 14-year-olds has deteriorated dramatically over the decades despite an increase in the number of pupils achieving top grades in exams.

Their cognitive abilities are level with those of 12-year-olds in 1976, the study found.

The tests - designed to assess grasp of abstract scientific concepts such as volume, density, quantity and weight - found far fewer youngsters hit top scores than in 1976.

Professor Michael Shayer, who led the study, said the brainpower slump may be down to over-testing in schools.

He said: "The moment you introduce targets, people will find the most economical strategies to achieve them.

In previous research, Professor Shayer concluded that the cognitive abilities of 11-year-olds were up to three years behind where they were in 1975.

Your brain on the web... evolution?

Is technology changing our brains?

"Perhaps not since early man first discovered how to use a tool has the human brain been affected so quickly and so dramatically," he writes. "As the brain evolves and shifts its focus towards new technological skills, it drifts away from fundamental social skills."

 

The impact of technology on our circuitry should not come as a surprise.  Professional musicians have more gray matter in brain regions responsible for planning finger movements. And athletes' brains are bulkier in areas that control hand-eye coordination. That's because the more time you devote to a specific activity, the stronger the neural pathways responsible for executing that activity become. So it makes sense that people who process a constant stream of digital information would have more neurons dedicated to filtering that information. Still, that's not the same thing as evolution.

 

To see how the Internet might be rewiring us, Small and colleagues monitored the brains of 24 adults as they performed a simulated Web search, and again as they read a page of text. During the Web search, those who reported using the Internet regularly in their everyday lives showed twice as much signaling in brain regions responsible for decision-making and complex reasoning, compared with those who had limited Internet exposure. The findings, to be published in the American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry, suggest that Internet use enhances the brain's capacity to be stimulated, and that Internet reading activates more brain regions than printed words. The research adds to previous studies that have shown that the tech-savvy among us possess greater working memory (meaning they can store and retrieve more bits of information in the short term), are more adept at perceptual learning (that is, adjusting their perception of the world in response to changing information), and have better motor skills.

 

Small says these differences are likely to be even more profound across generations, because younger people are exposed to more technology from an earlier age than older people. He refers to this as the brain gap.

 

Read full at newsweek

Listen to Yourself

From xkcd.com

 

State Of The Blogosphere: Get To 100K Uniques, Make $75K/year

Technorati, the blog search engine, put out Part I of its sporadic (now-annual?) State of the Blogosphere report this week. This year, it conducted a random survey of 1,079 random bloggers (a statistically significant sample) to paint a more detailed picture of just who exactly is out there blogging. Technorati has indexed a total of 133 million blogs since 2002. In terms of how many are active, 7.5 million blogs have added a new post during the last four months, and 1.5 million have been updated during the last week.

And the average blog that runs ads, according to Technorati, is actually making money:

Among those with advertising, the mean annual investment in their blog is $1,800, but it’s paying off. The mean annual revenue is $6,000 with $75K+ in revenue for those with 100,000 or more unique visitors per month.

The $6,000 a year I can believe. The $75,000 figure is harder to swallow, especially with only 100,000 visitors a month. But directionally there is no doubt that blogs are bringing in more cash.

Who are these bloggers? Technorati breaks that down as well. The vast majority of all bloggers (79 percent) write about their personal interests. No surprise there.
But more than half of all bloggers also write about business. While only 12 percent identify themselves as official “corporate bloggers,” a full 46 percent consider themselves “professional bloggers” (meaning that they write about their industries, but not in an official capacity).

Blogs are also mostly a male affair: 57 percent in the U.S. are written by men, 42 percent went to graduate school, and 50 percent earn more than $75,000 a year, and 58 percent are over 35 years old. (Someone call the diversity police).

More than half have a separate full time job. More than half of survey respondents have been blogging for more than two years.Geographically, North America dominates, with 48 percent of respondents living here. San Francisco and the Bay Area has the most bloggers in the U.S., with New York City, Chicago, and LA also having a strong showing. Although, as the map below shows, the geographic distribution is actually pretty wide.

And blogs continue to be read: blogs in the aggregate now attract 77.7 million unique U.S. visitors per month according to Comscore, nearly double the number of people who visit Facebook.

This is just the first day of the report, so get ready for a lot of data over the next four days. Read full By Erick Schonfeld on Technorati

Stanford offers free CS, robotics courses

Stanford University has launched a series of 10 free, online computer science (CS) and electrical engineering courses. The courses span an introduction to computer science and an introduction to artificial intelligence and robotics, among other topics.

The free courses are being offered “to students and educators around the world” under the auspices of Stanford Engineering Everywhere (SEE). Each course comprises downloadable video lectures, handouts, assignments, exams, and transcripts.

The courses are nearly identical to what’s offered to enrolled Stanford students, according to the University. However, those taking courses through SEE are not eligible to receive Stanford credit for them.

Course participants do not register, and have no direct contact with Stanford instructors or professors. They do, however, have the ability to communicate online with other SEE students. A detailed SEE FAQ is available here.

The University says SEE’s initial courses include “one of Stanford’s most popular engineering sequences: the three-course Introduction to Computer Science taken by the majority of Stanford undergraduates, and seven more advanced courses in artificial intelligence and electrical engineering.”

Specifically, SEE’s first 10 courses are…

• Introduction to Computer Science:
  • Programming Methodology — CS106A
  • Programming Abstractions — CS106B
  • Programming Paradigms — CS107
• Artificial Intelligence:
  • Introduction to Robotics — CS223A
  • Natural Language Processing — CS224N
  • Machine Learning — CS229
• Linear Systems and Optimization:
  • The Fourier Transform and its Applications — EE261
  • Introduction to Linear Dynamical Systems — EE263
  • Convex Optimization I — EE364A
  • Convex Optimization II — EE364B

Source: deviceguru.com

Will Collider Startup Turn Earth Into a Black Hole?

Will particle physics research lead to humankind's destruction? "That question has been raised by the impending startup of the Large Hadron Collider. It starts smashing protons together this summer at the European Center for Nuclear Research, or Cern, outside Geneva, in hopes of grabbing a piece of the primordial fire, forces and particles that may have existed a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang. Critics have contended that the machine could produce a black hole that could eat the Earth or something equally catastrophic. To most physicists, this fear is more science fiction than science fact. At a recent open house weekend, 73,000 visitors, without pitchforks or torches, toured the collider without incident." Dennis Overbye's essay appears in the New York Times April 15, 2008.

 

GOD has given society the conscience to "create and destroy" all the things of this earth … what we do with that will be the determination of our judgment. 
 
It is always easier to destroy than create... 

When was your vote counted.

The Dumbing Down Of America

The Chronicle Of Higher Education has a commentary on the sorry state of ignorance that exists in American Universities, noting "Today's college students have tuned out the world, and it's partly our fault". One more example of what Hunter S Thompson called "The Dumbing Down Of America" - So Much for the Information Age. In recent years I have administered a dumbed-down quiz on current events and history early in each semester to get a sense of what my students know and don't know. Initially I worried that its simplicity would insult them, but my fears were unfounded. The results have been, well, horrifying.

Last fall only one in 21 students could name the U.S. secretary of defense. Given a list of four countries — China, Cuba, India, and Japan — not one of those same 21 students could identify India and Japan as democracies. Their grasp of history was little better. The question of when the Civil War was fought invited an array of responses — half a dozen were off by a decade or more. Some students thought that Islam was the principal religion of South America, that Roe v. Wade was about slavery, that 50 justices sit on the U.S. Supreme Court, that the atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima in 1975. You get the picture, and it isn't pretty. Read more here by By Big Gav peakenergy

Techno Crutches make you dumber than a POTHEAD

. . . A study carried out at the British Institute of Psychiatry . . found that excessive use of technology reduced workers' intelligence and that those distracted by incoming e-mail and phone calls saw a ten-point fall in their IQ, over twice the impact of smoking or marijuana use. . .

Programmers [for example ] know that task switches take a long time. It is easier to keep going once you're at full steam . . . than to stop work and finish later. That last hour might take three hours, since you have to retrieve all of the background info from long-term memory and bring it back to the front of your mind.

Studies report that the American worker wastes 2.1 hours per day due to multitasking. When distracted while performing a task, it takes a certain amount of time to begin the new task, complete the new task and get back on track with the original task. Microsoft employees had their computers log their work for a period and found that simply dealing with an e-mail message took an average of 15 minutes and often lead to subsequent distractions, which lead to the employee taking up to an hour to get back to their original task.

The bottom line is that multitasking has been proven to make us less effective, not more. Although our digital assistants can be time savers, they can also be time wasters, if we allow them to break our focus. So for all of you who trouble getting things done . . . turn off your chat, RSS feeds, Google Desktop, Outlook alerts and whatever else keeps distracting you, and see what it would it would be like to simply focus on [ the task at hand ].

The Great Firewall of China

China's Great Firewall is crude, slapdash, and surprisingly easy to breach. Here's why it's so effective anyway.

Illustration by John Ritter
Interview: "Penetrating the Great Firewall"
James Fallows explains how he was able to probe the taboo subject of Chinese Internet censorship.

Depending on how you look at it, the Chinese government's attempt to rein in the Internet is crude and slapdash or ingenious and well crafted. When American technologists write about the control system, they tend to emphasize its limits. When Chinese citizens discuss it—at least with me—they tend to emphasize its strength. All of them are right, which makes the government's approach to the Internet a nice proxy for its larger attempt to control people's daily lives.

Disappointingly, "Great Firewall" is not really the right term for the Chinese government's overall control strategy. China has indeed erected a firewall—a barrier to keep its Internet users from dealing easily with the outside world—but that is only one part of a larger, complex structure of monitoring and censorship. The official name for the entire approach, which is ostensibly a way to keep hackers and other rogue elements from harming Chinese Internet users, is the "Golden Shield Project." Since that term is too creepy to bear repeating, I'll use "the control system" for the overall strategy, which includes the "Great Firewall of China," or GFW, as the means of screening contact with other countries.

Breaking it:

A VPN, or virtual private network, is a faster, fancier, and more elegant way to achieve the same result. Essentially a VPN creates your own private, encrypted channel that runs alongside the normal Internet. From within China, a VPN connects you with an Internet server somewhere else. You pass your browsing and downloading requests to that American or Finnish or Japanese server, and it finds and sends back what you're looking for. The GFW doesn't stop you, because it can't read the encrypted messages you're sending. Every foreign business operating in China uses such a network. VPNs are freely advertised in China, so individuals can sign up, too. I use one that costs $40 per year. (An expat in China thinks: that's a little over a dime a day. A Chinese factory worker thinks: it's a week's take-home pay. Even for a young academic, it's a couple days' work.)

As a technical matter, China could crack down on the proxies and VPNs whenever it pleased. Today the policy is: if a message comes through that the surveillance system cannot read because it's encrypted, let's wave it on through! Obviously the system's behavior could be reversed. But everyone I spoke with said that China could simply not afford to crack down that way. "Every bank, every foreign manufacturing company, every retailer, every software vendor needs VPNs to exist," a Chinese professor told me. "They would have to shut down the next day if asked to send their commercial information through the regular Chinese Internet and the Great Firewall." Closing down the free, easy-to-use proxy servers would create a milder version of the same problem. Encrypted e-mail, too, passes through the GFW without scrutiny, and users of many Web-based mail systems can establish a secure session simply by typing "https:" rather than the usual "http:" in a site's address—for instance, https://mail.yahoo.com. To keep China in business, then, the government has to allow some exceptions to its control efforts—even knowing that many Chinese citizens will exploit the resulting loopholes.

Because the Chinese government can't plug every gap in the Great Firewall, many American observers have concluded that its larger efforts to control electronic discussion, and the democratization and grass-roots organizing it might nurture, are ultimately doomed. A recent item on an influential American tech Web site had the headline "Chinese National Firewall Isn't All That Effective." In October, Wired ran a story under the headline "The Great Firewall: China's Misguided—and Futile—Attempt to Control What Happens Online."

Let's not stop to discuss why the vision of democracy-through-communications-technology is so convincing to so many Americans. (Samizdat, fax machines, and the Voice of America eventually helped bring down the Soviet system. Therefore proxy servers and online chat rooms must erode the power of the Chinese state. Right?) Instead, let me emphasize how unconvincing this vision is to most people who deal with China's system of extensive, if imperfect, Internet controls.

Think again of the real importance of the Great Firewall. Does the Chinese government really care if a citizen can look up the Tiananmen Square entry on Wikipedia? Of course not. Anyone who wants that information will get it—by using a proxy server or VPN, by e-mailing to a friend overseas, even by looking at the surprisingly broad array of foreign magazines that arrive, uncensored, in Chinese public libraries.

What the government cares about is making the quest for information just enough of a nuisance that people generally won't bother. Most Chinese people, like most Americans, are interested mainly in their own country. All around them is more information about China and things Chinese than they could possibly take in. The newsstands are bulging with papers and countless glossy magazines. The bookstores are big, well stocked, and full of patrons, and so are the public libraries. Video stores, with pirated versions of anything. Lots of TV channels. And of course the Internet, where sites in Chinese and about China constantly proliferate. When this much is available inside the Great Firewall, why go to the expense and bother, or incur the possible risk, of trying to look outside?

Read more from theatlantic.com

If Darwin and Einstein Had A Web Browser, they would have never achieved there goals...

How can today's wired, multitasking scientists ever compete with the great scientists of the past? One feature of Darwin's work as a scientist was that it proceeded slowly, very, very slowly. He wrote massive groundbreaking books, compiled huge amounts of data on orchids, barnacles, and Galapagos animals, but all over a long period of time. Scientists in Darwin's day had hours to kill on long voyages, took long walks out in the field, and waited while their scientific correspondence leisurely wended its way across oceans or continents.

Even in the first half of the 20th century, great scientists are famous for what they accomplished on long walks, hiking trips, and train rides. Niels Bohr would walk for hours around Copenhagen and come up with groundbreaking ideas, while Werner Heisenberg spent weeks every year hiking in the mountains. Even Richard Feynman, working in our more modern (but still pre-internet) era, insisted on long blocks of time to concentrate; he likened his thought process to building a house of cards, easily toppled by distraction and difficult to put back together.

Does that mean the kind of science we do in our overscheduled, multitasking world will never be the same as it was in the past? Certainly in one sense it won't - earlier generations of scientists had one distinct advantage we don't have today: Servants.

What kind of research is getting done in this kind of world? Surely some really, really great stuff; OK I agree that more good science is being published than ever before. But much of it also follows two trends: big-team science, solving big problems by brute force; and detail-filling science, not especially innovative, but usually useful. Where does this leave the kinds of deep breakthroughs, that in the past have always arisen in the minds of very focused individuals? A new, conceptually difficult and immature field like systems biology, desperately in need of some really good, new ideas, seems to be suffering from this scientific climate.

Read more from  if_darwin_had_a_web_browser_he_would_never_have_written_the_origin

The Dumbing of America

The zombie hordes are outside my window, ho hum, maybe I'll write a piece for the Washington Post.

Via: Washington Post:

"The mind of this country, taught to aim at low objects, eats upon itself." Ralph Waldo Emerson offered that observation in 1837, but his words echo with painful prescience in today's very different United States. Americans are in serious intellectual trouble — in danger of losing our hard-won cultural capital to a virulent mixture of anti-intellectualism, anti-rationalism and low expectations.

… source cryptogon

Online Parent-Child Gap Widens

...there is an enormous gap between what parents think their children are doing online and what is really happening. 'The data tell us that parents don't know what their kids are doing,' says Lemish. The study found that 30% of children between the ages of 9 and 18 delete the search history from their browsers in an attempt to protect their privacy from their parents, that 73% of the children reported giving out personal information online while the parents of the same children believed that only 4% of their children did so, and that 36% of the children admitted to meeting with a stranger they had met online while fewer than 9% of the parents knew that their children had been engaging in such risky behavior. Lemish advises that parents should give their children the tools to be literate Internet users and most importantly, to talk to their children. 'The child needs similar tools that teach them to be [wary] of dangers in the park, the mall or wherever. The same rules in the real world apply online as well.'" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Linux Has Better Windows Compatibility Than Vista

Slashdot...being so frustrated with gaming on Windows Vista that he tried comparing gaming on Vista to that on Linux using Wine, with surprising results. "This post is clearly a bit biased. What shocked me though was how easy it was to find games that didn't run under Vista but did in Linux by using Wine or DOSBox. I'm not a huge gamer, so I don't have a huge collection of games to try out, but even still with just a few hours of frustrating work, I have been able to show that not only is Linux a reasonable alternative to Vista for gaming (XP is still king though), but also that Linux handles application failures more gracefully than Vista. Every game but Blackthorne crashed my Vista box, this didn't happen a single time under Linux."

Multitasking Makes You Stupid, Slow and ADHD

The Atlantic: Neuroscience is confirming what we all suspect: Multitasking is dumbing us down and driving us crazy.

 

"Multitasking messes with the brain in several ways. At the most basic level, the mental balancing acts that it requires — the constant switching and pivoting — energize regions of the brain that specialize in visual processing and physical coordination and simultaneously appear to shortchange some of the higher areas related to memory and learning. We concentrate on the act of concentration at the expense of whatever it is that we're supposed to be concentrating on... studies find that multitasking boosts the level of stress-related hormones such as cortisol and adrenaline and wears down our systems through biochemical friction, prematurely aging us. In the short term, the confusion, fatigue, and chaos merely hamper our ability to focus and analyze, but in the long term, they may cause it to atrophy."

 

Our freedom to stay busy at all hours, at the task—and then the many tasks, and ultimately the multitask—of trying to be free.

 

VIA slashdot.org

Why The Web Tells Us What We Already Know

The Internet is not the font of all knowledge, despite the plethora of information available at your fingertips.

 

"Even if people read the right material, they are stubborn to changing their views," said one of the authors, UNSW Professor Enrico Coiera. "This means that providing people with the right information on its own may not be enough."

 

"Our research shows that, even if search engines do find the 'right' information, people may still draw the wrong conclusions -- in other words, their conclusions are biased."

 

Read full VIA sciencedaily

'dumbing down programs, hoping to make them more accessible and popular.

"A prior article on the damage Java does to CS education was discussed here recently. There was substantial feedback and the mailbox of one of the authors, Prof Dewar, also has been filled with mainly positive responses. In this follow-up to the article, Prof. Dewer clarifies his position on Java. In his view the core of the problem is universities 'dumbing down programs, hoping to make them more accessible and popular. Aspects of curriculum that are too demanding, or perceived as tedious, are downplayed in favor of simplified material that attracts a larger enrollment.'"  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"most people" they usually mean "most of the two dozen sophomores who filled out a questionnaire for beer money.

Many of these moralizations, like the assault on smoking, may be understood as practical tactics to reduce some recently identified harm. But whether an activity flips our mental switches to the "moral" setting isn't just a matter of how much harm it does. We don't show contempt to the man who fails to change the batteries in his smoke alarms or takes his family on a driving vacation, both of which multiply the risk they will die in an accident. Driving a gas-guzzling Hummer is reprehensible, but driving a gas-guzzling old Volvo is not; eating a Big Mac is unconscionable, but not imported cheese or crème brûlée. The reason for these double standards is obvious: people tend to align their moralization with their own lifestyles. Read more of the "The Moral Instinct"  From NYTimes

"Enjoy the war. Peace is going to be terrible."

The 700 lb gorilla our 2008 presidential candidates are "tip toeing around"

 

RE: Current Credit Crisis may make 1929 look a 'walk in the park'

 

A tidbit from article:

Citigroup, Merrill Lynch, UBS, HSBC and others have stepped forward to reveal their losses. At some point, enough of the dirty linen will be on the line to let markets discern the shape of the debacle. We are not there yet. Goldman Sachs caused shock last month when it predicted that total crunch losses would reach $500bn, leading to a $2 trillion contraction in lending as bank multiples kick into reverse.

"Our counterparties are telling us that losses may reach $700bn," says Rob McAdie, head of credit at Barclays Capital.

 

When we fall, we all fall down alone...

'don't put this in writing but ... ' Deleteing inappropriate e-mail can establish motive

Ever send an e-mail on your corporate account that you regret sending?

Ever think that deleting it from your local folder or from the server will save you from Legal's wrath?

 

Don't.

 

Several software packages that can detect several layers of deletion, which is worse than you might think. Let's say I send an e-mail to Char saying "You're dumb and no one likes you." Then I write another e-mail saying "You smell funny," but don't actually send it; it just stays on my computer in the draft folder. Then I delete it. Well, Johnny Law will see that I wrote it, then deleted it. They'll see my thought process, then throw my in prison for harassing Peter.

 

E-mails, text messages, BlackBerry communications all are potential time bombs if not worded thoughtfully and with discipline. "It just creates the potential for a permanent record for all this type of stuff," Clarke said. "People don't realize that to some degree, if it's in an e-mail, it's analogous to etching it in stone."

 

"My biggest fear with e-mails is not that it can be used against you in some way, but that the assumption is it's telling the whole story, and it's not," said Meece. "It may be the truth but not the whole truth, and there may be some silly stuff in there that's not 'nothing but the truth.'"

 

And above all, said Clarke, never say anything in an e-mail that you wouldn't want to see displayed on a giant screen in a court room in front of a judge and jury even years from now. Because that is exactly where it might end up.

 

Read more from this article: GCs to Employees: Think Before You Send [Law.com via crunchgear.com]

 

 

Buying "another" guilt offset will not make you "happy" with yourself...

FROM NATIONAL PRESS

Happiness Comes Cheap -- Even For Millionaires
In a study commissioned by the National Lottery, Dr Richard Tunney of the University's School of Psychology found that it's the simple things in life that impact most positively on our sense of well being.

 

"It appears that spending time relaxing is the secret to a happy life. Cost-free pleasures are the ones that make the difference — even when you can afford anything that you want."

 

Dr Tunney said: "Modern-day pressures take their toll on everyday happiness. As a result we try to make ourselves feel better and happier through personal rewards and treats. We've all heard the saying 'a little bit of what you fancy does you good', and treating yourself is the ideal way to keep spirits lifted when you're down in the dumps.

 

The research found that happy people — whether lottery jackpot winners or not — liked long baths, going swimming, playing games and enjoying their hobby.
Those who described themselves as less happy didn't choose the cost-free indulgences.

"... there are small lessons we can learn from society's happiest people to help improve our quality of life," Dr Tunney added.

 

Read full via sciencedaily.com

 

 

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HAASE: My suggestion for the holidays, enjoy time and cost-free indulgences life offers all.

Cheap electronics, hybrids and meals out are not going to make you happy... "buying + consuming less = more happiness"

 

And if you are lucky enough to have quality time, love and health in your life... rejouce!

QWERTY is slow, gives you RSI!

Dvorak convert and he tried to bring me over to the side of sweet reason more than once, without success, I'm afraid. Maybe it's time to try again. Link (VIA Boing2)

GOOGLER AS PATIENT

THE GOOGLER AS PATIENT
TIME - Every doctor knows patients like this. They're called "brainsuckers." By the time they come in, they've visited many other docs already — somehow unable to stick with any of them. They have many complaints, which rarely translate to hard findings on any objective tests. They talk a lot. I often wonder, while waiting for them to pause, if there are patients like this in poor, war-torn countries where the need for doctors is more dire. . .

Susan had neither the trust of a nurse nor the teachability of an engineer. She would ignore no theory of any culture or any quack, regarding her very common brand of knee pain. On and on she went as I retreated further within. I marveled, sitting there silenced by her diatribe. Hers was such a fully orbed and vigorous self-concern that it possessed virtue in its own right. Her complete and utter selfishness was nearly a thing of beauty. . .

I knew Susan was a Googler — queen, perhaps, of all Googlers. But I couldn't dance with this one. I couldn't even get a word in edgewise.

"The web is better when it's social." - Google (who needs information ;-)

 

Your Iphone DOES NOT affect the quality of your image.

"Your equipment DOES NOT affect the quality of your image. The less time and effort you spend worrying about your equipment the more time and effort you can spend creating great images. The right equipment just makes it easier, faster or more convenient for you to get the results you need." Ken Rockwell

US Consumers Clueless About Online Tracking

"A study on consumer perceptions about online privacy, undertaken by the Samuelson Clinic at the University of California and the Annenberg Public Policy Center, found that the average American consumer is largely unaware that every move they make online can be, and often is, tracked by online marketers and advertising networks. Those surveyed showed little knowledge on the extent to which online tracking is happening or how the information obtained can be used. More than half of those surveyed — about 55 percent — falsely assumed that a company's privacy polices prohibited it from sharing their addresses and purchases with affiliated companies. Nearly four out of 10 online shoppers falsely believed that a company's privacy policy prohibits it from using information to analyze an individuals' activities online. And a similar number assumed that an online privacy policy meant that a company they're doing business with wouldn't collect data on their online activities and combine it with other information to create a behavioral profile."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Parkinson's Law - Why people work till 5.

Just because you push all the work until the end of the day and that spills until the end of the week.... does not mean that the guys who start at 4 a.m. need to stay and wipe your nose or clean up your mistakes.

 

"work will fill the time available for its completion."

The Greening of the CIO

The notion of a corporate chief information officer is fairly new -- less than thirty years old -- but the CIO's role has grown in lockstep with the strategic importance of information and knowledge management inside companies. Their ability to think strategically about information technology can help a company innovate, grow markets, streamline operations, cut costs, and generally improve competitiveness.

Now, the CIO is poised to help companies be greener, too.

The energy use of computers and such is just the beginning. It seems there are other potentially powerful ways in which chief information officers can play a role in the greening of companies

I'm guessing that very few companies are thinking of their CIOs as strategic players on the green scene -- that most companies assume, as I did, that aside from the energy consumption of IT equipment, there aren't many other CIO linkages with their company's environmental performance. That's simply wrong -- and a lost opportunity. As environmental challenges and opportunities continue to spread across company functions -- well beyond traditional environmental departments to include every nook and cranny of business operations -- the information needs and capabilities will loom large. Along the way, CIOs will stand to become key players in the growing world of green business.

And maybe make their companies' sales team a little happier along the way.

Read more By joelmakower

Zombies live and 78% of them report having a social networking profile

"It won't make you dinner or rub your feet, but nearly one in four Americans say that the Internet can serve as a substitute for a significant other for some period of time, according to a new poll released today by 463 Communications and Zogby International. The poll examined views of what role the Internet plays in people's lives and whether government should play a greater role in regulating it. The online survey was conducted Oct. 4-8, 2007, included 9,743 adult respondents nationwide, and carries a margin of error of +/- 1.0 percentage point. From the results blog post: 'More than half of Americans believe that Internet content such as video should be controlled in some way by the government. Only 33% of 18 to 24 year-olds supported government stepping in on content, while 72% of those over 70 years of age support government regulation and ratings. More than one in four Americans has a social networking profile such as MySpace or Facebook. Among 18-24 year-olds, it's almost mandatory - 78% of them report having a social networking profile. Americans may love the Internet, but most are not prepared to implant it into their brain, even if it was safe. Only 11% of respondents said they be willing to safely implant a device that enabled them to use their mind to access the Internet.'"

The 40:60 Rule ;-)

Is creativecommunication.com interested in Dave Wacker?

According to a recent google cached search... they are.

 

A Referrer Search: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=dave+wacker&btnG=Google+Search

 

On Mon, 15 Oct 2007  (11:38:57)

 

From: 206.176.211.29  (Owned by Creative Communication & Design)

Using Client:Mac OS X  / Safari 4.19

 

When I noticed this floating in the "invisible web".... I wondered.

What's the connection? and why are they using Safari?

Creative Communication & Design of Wausau, WI is a solid NET company that has been around for nearly a decade.

I think Dave would do well working with them.

 

 

Good luck gentlemen.

Lesson: use www.mozilla.org and proxy browser with firewall.

Three Degrees Of IT's Environmental Impact

Businesses need to focus less on how IT contributes to their environmental impact and more on how IT can help lessen the environmental impact of business operations and the supply chain or that of enterprise products and services, according to Gartner Inc.

Analysts warned that although making IT more green must remain a concern, there are areas where deploying more IT can significantly contribute to making an organization more environmentally sustainable.

Chief information officers need to be aware of what constitutes the environmental impact of the whole organization and to what extent IT can be a liability or an asset in this respect. In order to do so they should consider the three degrees of IT's environmental impact.

First Degree Impact - Gartner defines this as the impact of IT itself which includes electronic waste and asset disposition; consumption of non-renewable resources such as energy in the data centre for desktop computers, printers and networking gear; the energy embodied in the full life cycle of each asset; and user behavior.

Second Degree Impact - This is the impact of IT on business operations and the supply chain, regardless of whether the end result is a product, service or combination of the two. This includes the environmental effects of material and energy consumption; emissions or waste from manufacturing and all operational processes; paper consumption for
administrative purposes; lighting, heating, and cooling for buildings; workforce commuting and mobility; vehicle fleets; supply chain impact; waste disposal and so forth. The energy component of this becomes part of the 'embodied energy' in a product or service - that is the total energy used in its manufacture and distribution.

Third Degree Impact - This is the environmental impact in the 'in use' phase or delivery phase of the enterprise's products and services - that is, the direct impacts of procurement and use of products and services.

Different industries will experience the degrees of impact in different ways and this will impact how an organization defines the environmental value of IT. For a car manufacturer, the energy that goes into assembling cars, manufacturing components by its supply chain and having them shipped, performing R&D and testing is all part of the second degree of impact. The fuel used for the cars and their carbon dioxide emissions are part of the third degree of impact and the IT that runs the factory, as well as all other processes constitutes the first degree of impact.

MAC - PC Quote of the week

"This is why I think my next machine is going to be a mac. I'm just tired of having to do all this stuff for myself all the time. "

Learn to use your computer and you won't have to get a Fisher-Price equivalent to do magical stuff.

 

The key to staying productive

Efficiently manage your energy, not your time.... By removing distractions and focusing on our physical well-being, we'd get a lot more work done and we'd feel better about it too.

 

Ironic that I learn this while I should be doing some work ;-)

IT directors losing influence

Fears that IT is no longer being taken seriously are spawning high levels of churn among chief information officers. A survey of over 650 UK CIOs has shown a 15 per cent drop in the number who believe that their boards see IT as a key strategic function, and 58 per cent are planning to move jobs in the next two years. John Whiting, managing director of IT recruitment consultant firm Harvey Nash, said: "It is a concern that the strategic influence of CIOs has eroded in recent years, but even more worrying is the restlessness this creates in the sector. "The most effective and satisfied CIOs are those who are embraced by main boards, and in environments which fully comprehend the critical influence of IT on a company's success. "In return, senior IT professionals clearly have to continue to prove that their contribution is intrinsic to success and growth." Fewer than half of chief financial officers see the CIO role as more than a support function and not worthy of a seat on the board. Over a quarter of the CIOs surveyed would leave to find a role with more involvement in the strategic side of the business, and 27 per cent are actively looking for such a job.   > Read the full article

Anonymous web service that provides you with a temporary email address

GuerrillaMail is an anonymous web service that provides you with a temporary email address—perfect for web sites that you don't want to communicate with you but require email registration. Generate an email address and reload the home page to view any incoming messages. The 15-minute timer displays the amount of time you have remaining until your email address expires, but you can extend your time if necessary.  Whatever service you choose, temporary email addresses can really keep your regular inbox spam-free. Read more at GuerrillaMail

How to downgrade Vista Business/Ultimate to XP Pro? Follow the step by step guide below.

1. Install the Machine with XP PRO Media and get any valid XP Product Key.

2. After finishing the installation, there will be 2 options for you to pick for the Windows Activation. Activate online or activate through Phone Call. Pick activate through Phone Call.

3. The system will show a series of Installation ID for activation.

4. Send an email to SEAPART@microsoft.com, and include all the information below: 1. XP PRO Product Key and COA installed to the machine 2. Vista Business/Ultimate Product Key and COA if possible 3. XP Installation ID that shown in the system 4. Customer information

5. Microsoft will verify the information and respond within 24 hours. (Common case is about 5-6 hours) 6. You will received an email from SEAPA, with the activation key. Key in the activation key.

IT'S THE PARENTS, NOT THEIR CHILDREN, WHO ARE OUT OF CONTROL

MIKE MALES IN NY TIMES - A spate of news reports have breathlessly announced that science can explain why adults have such trouble dealing with teenagers: adolescents possess "immature," "undeveloped" brains that drive them to risky, obnoxious, parent-vexing behaviors. The latest example is a study out of Temple University that found that the "temporal gap between puberty, which impels adolescents toward thrill seeking, and the slow maturation of the cognitive-control system, which regulates these impulses, makes adolescence a time of heightened vulnerability for risky behavior."

We know the rest of the script: Commentators brand teenagers as stupid, crazy, reckless, immature, irrational and even alien, then advocate tough curbs on youthful freedoms. . .

Why do many pundits and policy makers rush to denigrate adolescents as brainless? One troubling possibility: youths are being maligned to draw attention from the reality that it's actually middle-aged adults - the parents -whose behavior has worsened.

Our most reliable measures show Americans ages 35 to 54 are suffering ballooning crises:

- 18,249 deaths from overdoses of illicit drugs in 2004, up 550 percent per capita since 1975, according to data from the National Center for Health Statistics.

- 46,925 fatal accidents and suicides in 2004, leaving today's middle-agers 30 percent more at risk for such deaths than people aged 15 to 19, according to the national center.

- More than four million arrests in 2005, including one million for violent crimes, 500,000 for drugs and 650,000 for drinking-related offenses, according to the F.B.I. All told, this represented a 200 percent leap per capita in major index felonies since 1975.

- 630,000 middle-agers in prison in 2005, up 600 percent since 1977, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

- 21 million binge drinkers (those downing five or more drinks on one occasion in the previous month), double the number among teenagers and college students combined, according to the government's National Household Survey on Drug Use and Health.

- 370,000 people treated in hospital emergency rooms for abusing illegal drugs in 2005, with overdose rates for heroin, cocaine, pharmaceuticals and drugs mixed with alcohol far higher than among teenagers.

- More than half of all new H.I.V./AIDS diagnoses in 2005 were given to middle-aged Americans, up from less than one-third a decade ago, according to the Centers for Disease Control. . .

It's true that 30 years ago, the riskiest age group for violent death was 15 to 24. But those same boomers continue to suffer high rates of addiction and other ills throughout middle age, while later generations of teenagers are better behaved. Today, the age group most at risk for violent death is 40 to 49, including illegal-drug death rates five times higher than for teenagers.

Social networks... more Harm or hurtful than helpful?

What is your take on social counter cultures?

The Cult of Us - What MySpace living is doing to our minds (from http://www.newscientisttech.com)

For millions of people, especially among the under-25s, online culture is becoming the only culture that matters. Take the plunge, and the world becomes one massive network in which users band together to share just about everything. Chatrooms and newsgroups have evolved into social networking websites such as MySpace and Facebook. Whatever your interest, from biology to extreme sports, there's a website where you can share your thoughts with the like-minded.

But what is the culture really about? Where will it end up? Too early to say, perhaps,

I'll have to ask my friends – Instant messaging, Wi-Fi and cellphones allow us to be constantly plugged into our social networks. Sociologist Sherry Turkle worries this is transforming human psychology

The end of privacy? – You wouldn't tell a stranger on the bus about your sexual habits, so why do people reveal this stuff on websites available to everyone? Will their openness return to haunt them?

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by Google – A short story by Bruce Sterling

The internet could be so much better – Social networking websites like MySpace or YouTube owe everything to the genius of Ted Nelson, who invented hypertext in the 1960s

Chris (WI)  comments:

Social update: While I think the web is a great place for media, data & connecting... it is by design a "anit-social" network. Only on the web will someone have a two hour talk on myspace to a "fictional" person... these social networks will be the erosion of our youth communication & social skills.   Furthermore the web has "dissolved" the need for general knowledge... if someone is not sure or doesn't know... they "google" it with no learning or cognitive thought involved. In the 90's most if the net was "solid" information... now social networks & (unqualified) mass media have fluffed and dumbdown the web to the point of less than 5% is new or relevant information.    I often get "cut n paste" ideas, answers, resume, replies and comments with no thought or creative conscience involved.   As you do in the "online game arena", I meet real people with real names on the science networks, that makes it still a good place to connect with people in a semi social way.    While I grew up on the internet & TV... but, was raised to turn them off and learn. Computers are tools created to enrich life not erode it.

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Chris (ATL)  comments:

Personally, I think that social networks are helpful.  But, there should be limits.  I have joined several groups both for business and pleasure, and they are really only worth what you are willing to put into them.  Age is a factor that scares me about things like MySpace where kids of any age can interact with anyone.  I have a son... , so the internet makes me nervous.  Just knowing that he could possibly hop onto one of the sites while I have my back turned is scary.  One of my co-workers has 2 teenage daughters, and she got a program that records EVERYTHING that happens on her daughter's computers.  She can then see what is happening and talk to her kids.  I think that any parent out there that doesn't have such an animal is just asking for trouble.

 

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Be the part of something bigger than ego's or economics.

"Tap The Glass" The real deal from industry leading scientists & professionals.

 

"Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter."   Martin Luther King Jr.

 

 

Yahoo! HackDay

AMERICA IS THE 'NO VACATION NATION'

REUTERS - As Europe's workers take a few weeks of holiday this summer, their American colleagues will be lucky to get a few days off work, says a report published by the European Trade Union Institute. Finland, followed by France, offers working people the most statutory vacation, at more than six weeks per year, the report, an international snapshot of how much paid leave people get by law and in practice in 21 countries, says. The United States is the only country where employees have no statutory leave, and they get about half as much time off in reality as Europeans get, according to the report, compiled by the Washington-based Centre for Economic Policy Research. "The United States is in a class of its own," the report says. "It is the no-vacation nation."

"In other words, they combined a lousy performance with a high sense of self-esteem,"

A quarter of a century later, a comprehensive new study released last February from San Diego State University maintains that too much self-regard has resulted in college campuses full of narcissists. In 2006, researchers said, two-thirds of the students had above-average scores on the Narcissistic Personality Inventory evaluation, 30 percent more than when the test was first administered in 1982.

 

...a yawning gap in self-perception between East and West. Asian students outperformed their American counterparts, but when they were asked to evaluate their performances, American students evaluated themselves significantly higher than those from Asia. What's Happening in the States", in an essay called "The Self Esteem Fraud."

 

Since the 80s, self-esteem has become a movement widely practiced in public schools, based on the belief that academic achievements come with higher self-confidence. Shokraii disputes that self-esteem is necessary for academic success. "For all of its current popularity, however, self-esteem theory threatens to deny children the tools they will need in order to experience true success in school and as adults," writes Shokraii.