Internet and Communication
Americans are spending increasing amounts of time hanging around virtual worlds in the forms of cartoon-like avatars that change appearances according to users' wills, fly through floating cities in the clouds and teleport instantly to glowing crystal canyons and starlit desert landscapes.
Simply fun and games divorced from reality, right?
A (fairly) new journal dedicated to Web-based research. Oh, and it's free.
Watch the first film here: www.collidingparticles.com
Scientific American begged us to join the "community". When we did, they shut it down.
he growth of shared Wi-Fi and other wireless computer networks has increased the risk of eavesdropping on Internet communications, but researchers have devised a low-cost system that can thwart these "Man-in-the-Middle" (MitM) attacks.
A time-and-money-saving question shared by commuters in their cars and networks sharing ever-changing Internet resources is: “What’s the best way to get from here to there?” A new algorithm developed by computer scientists at the University of California, San Diego helps answer that question, at least for computer networks, and it promises to significantly boost the efficiency of network routing.
The Viterbi Algorithm, the elegant 41-year-old logical tool for rapidly eliminating dead end possibilities in data transmission, has a new application to go alongside its ubiquitous daily use in cell phone communications, bioinformatics, speech recognition and many other areas of information technology.
A couple reviewers of a recent paper of mine distrust Web-based experiments. Do you? And why?
Today the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) launched the Office of Technology Assessment Archive, http://fas.org/ota. It includes information about the history of the office and features over 720 reports and documents that were produced by OTA during its 23 year history. In the video section there is a new interview with Congressman Rush Holt, who explains why he has been leading the effort to revive OTA. He also describes some current policy issues that OTA could address.
More than 75 percent of the bank Web sites surveyed in a University of Michigan study had at least one design flaw that could make customers vulnerable to cyber thieves after their money or even their identity.
A couple months ago, I talked about the slow rate of publication. I find the sloth-speed process irritating not so much because I am impatient -- though I am -- but because I would like to release the results of studies to my participants while they still remember they were in the study.
For your entertainment and edification, I thought I would outline the chronology of my upcoming paper in PLoS One.
It's a long way from the dull hums of the amorous midshipman fish to the strains of a Puccini aria – or, alas, even to the simplest Celine Dion melody. But the neural circuitry that led to the human love song – not to mention birdsongs, frog thrums and mating calls of all manner of vertebrates – was likely laid down hundreds of millions of years ago with the hums and grunts of the homely piscine.
Doing psycholinguistics can get you on Google's bad side.
Everyone who has an e-mail account has probably received a forwarded chain letter promising good luck if the message is forwarded on to others--or terrible misfortune if it isn't. The sheer volume of forwarded messages such as chain letters, online petitions, jokes and other materials leads to a simple question--how do these messages reach so many people so quickly?
Peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing services, which connect individual users for simultaneous uploads and downloads directly rather than through a central server, are reported to account for as much as 70 percent of Internet traffic worldwide.
