Rugged 3U compact PCI single board computer

(www.ferret.com.au)

SBS Technologies’ new rugged 3U Compact PCI Single Board Computer is designed for harsh environments, making it ideal for demanding military and industrial applications.

The convection- or conduction-cooled CR4 Intel Pentium M processor-based SBC packs high-performance computing power in a small 3U package making it a tailored fit for many military applications.

Available from Metromatics Pty Ltd, the CR4 gives engineers abundant I/O to work with by providing two Gigabit Ethernet ports, two 32-bit 33/66MHz PCI bus interfaces, an RS-232 and an RS-422/485 serial I/O ports and ten general-purpose I/O lines to the backplane with separate interrupts and interrupt masking capability.

This SBC also incorporates the Intel 855GME chipset, which includes the Intel 855GME Graphics Memory Controller Hub (GMCH) and Intel 6300ESB I/O Controller Hub (ICH).

The CR4's PLX PCI 6254 PCI/PCI bridge handles 32-bit data transfers to and from the CompactPCI backplane and through the bridge's dual mode capability, the CR4 can operate as a system controller or peripheral processor card eliminating the need to stock multiple configurations.

The CR4 supports various operating systems as well as the SBS Ready Driver interoperability program.

Features include:

* Intel Pentium M 1.4GHz low voltage processor

* 3U CompactPCI form factor

* Ruggedised convection or conduction-cooled versions

* System controller or peripheral mode operation

* Type I CompactFlash module on daughter card 143.tiff.

Microsoft Confirms Work On New Handheld Device

(www.informationweek.com)

The company will update its 'Origami Project' site later this week with more details, but it's still a ways off from product availability.

Microsoft Corp. on Monday confirmed that it is working with manufacturers on the concept for a new personalized handheld device under the name Origami Project.

News of the device started circulating on the Web after Microsoft put up a cryptic Web site that hinted at a Thursday announcement, but gave no details.

The site generated so much buzz among bloggers that a Microsoft technical evangelist on Monday tried to temper expectations that the company was ready to release a product.

Soon after discovery of the Origami Project Web site, a video apparently of the device started circulating the Internet.

The video, which was found on the site of production firm Digital Kitchen, shows people using a handheld computer with a touch screen that's being used to watch video, access the Web, send pictures and instant messages and play videogames.

The machine appears to have a wireless connection.

"While Origami is a concept we've been working on with partners, please know that the video seen on Digital Kitchen's web site is a year old and represents our initial exploration into this form factor, including possible uses and scenarios," Microsoft said in an emailed statement.

"However, we are excited to share more details about the evolution of the Origami concept with you in the coming weeks, so stay tuned!"

A company spokesman told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer newspaper that no announcement was planned for Thursday. Instead, the Origami Project site would be updated with more details.
Indeed, Robert Scoble, tech evangelist and Microsoft blogger, warned that speculation on the Web may have gone too far in building expectations for a product release.

"Seriously, let's keep our hype in check, OK?" Scoble wrote.

Sam Bhavnani, analyst for Current Analysis, said it is unlikely Microsoft is working on a branded product. With the exception of the Xbox, keyboards and mice, the Redmond, Wash., software maker manufactures very little hardware, so not to compete with partners that build computers and devices running its software.

The Digital Kitchen video appears to be a prototype of a device that Microsoft circulated among its manufacturing partners, Bhavnani said.

"Microsoft comes out with the concept and that drives the industry forward," Bhavnani said.

"They sell more software, and manufacturers have something very useful for the end user."

The secretive Origami Project site, however, is unusual for Microsoft, which is apparently trying its hand at viral marketing, a tactic in which marketers use mystery or humor to generate a buzz on the Web.

"Microsoft typically doesn't put up sites that don't tell you much, but pique your interest," Byhavnani said.

Study: Offshoring of Software Work Can Help U.S.

(www.insideindianabusiness.com)

A study released by the Association for Computing Machinery finds that the offshoring of software development and research to other countries actually offers benefits for the United States' software industry and consumers.

The Indiana University School of Informatics offered input for the study. It found that offshoring can harm those who lose their jobs and affect their communities. However, it also finds that new jobs can be created in the U.S. when American companies are made more productive and competitive by offshoring. Source: Inside INdiana Business

Press Release

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. – While the shift of computer software development and research to other countries has increased and poses challenges to the United States, the offshoring of such work also has reaped benefits for our nation’s software industry and consumers.

That is one of the conclusions of a study released today by the Association for Computing Machinery, a report that had input from experts with the Indiana University School of Informatics. The report, The Globalization and Offshoring of Software, was designed to examine the issues surrounding the migration of jobs within the computing and information technology field and industry.

“Offshoring can be harmful to individuals who lose their jobs and the local communities they live in, but what often is neglected in the discussion is that when American companies are made more productive and competitive by offshoring – and this can create new jobs here at home,” says William Aspray, Rudy Professor of Informatics and an executive consultant and editor of the study.

The report also finds that concern about projected U.S. job losses to low-wage, high-education countries such as China and India are overblown. It predicts the most likely scenario is that up to 3 percent of the country’s IT work would go overseas over the next decade.

“It is true that jobs in the software industry are among the very best jobs available in India, and software services there represent the country’s largest export,” says Aspray, an expert in the historical, political, and socioeconomic aspects of information technology. Aspray is the co-author of The Supply of Information Technology Workers in the United States (Computing Research Association, 1999), an acclaimed study that probed the supply of and demand for information technology workers and related issues in the United States.On the upside, Aspray notes that the U.S. IT industry has reaped favorably.

He points out the industry has found new markets for its software products, which are bought by software companies in India and elsewhere, it has lowered prices on American products, and has speeded the products to the marketplace.Despite widespread perceptions that IT jobs have rapidly dried up in the United States – particularly in the wake of the so-called Dot-Com boom-to-bust era (1999-2003) – the reality is that the number of jobs actually increased significantly during that period, the report says. And that came at a time when offshoring was intense and on the upswing.

The report found that workers and students can improve their chances of long-term employment in IT occupations by acquiring a strong educational foundation, learning the technologies used in global software, and keeping skills up to date throughout their careers“Some of the recommendations of this report fit well with the School of Informatics and its objectives,” Aspray says. “For example, it takes an interdisciplinary approach to an IT education, coupling core technical knowledge with other specialty knowledge.

Students and young researchers learn the values of teamwork and communication, and they get to learn about other cultures, which really is a strength of the School and Indiana University as a whole.

”Other IU people had a role in the ACM report. L. Jean Camp, associate professor of informatics, was a contributing writer to a chapter about the risks and exposures to intellectual property, privacy and security by offshoring. Matthew Hottell, lecturer in informatics, and Alla Genkina, a former IU graduate student now pursuing a doctorate in California, also provided research support for the study.

To read the report’s full text, go to:

www.acm.org/globalizationreport/index.htm.

U. of I. computer takes quantum leap and works when it's asleep

(www.chicagotribune.com)

In the bizarre realm of quantum mechanics-- the physics theory that stumped even Albert Einstein--tiny things like electrons and packets of light often seem to be in two places at once, in total violation of common sense.

Now a University of Illinois physics team has taken that principle and built something harder to fathom: a quantum-based computer that can be awake and asleep at the same time, and spit out answers even if its program is never triggered.

It's plenty strange, but some experts say such real-world spinoffs of eerie quantum effects are growing so common that it's our understanding of "strange" that needs to change."This is the way nature is," said Charles Bennett, an IBM researcher who dreamed up some of the new uses of quantum physics. "We should be learning how to get used to that.

"Quantum mechanics is the theory physicists use to understand events at the atomic level, which works far differently than the large-scale world that people inhabit. The theory states that it's impossible to gain complete knowledge about any subatomic particle, and its location and other traits often exist only as probabilities.That maddening, fuzzy quality is fueling creative ideas about how to put quantum effects to work. The U. of I. experiment, published Thursday in the journal Nature, could help refine the young field of quantum computing.

In theory, computers based on quantum effects could race through calculations that would take an ordinary computer billions of years to complete. Applications of such computers could include precise simulations of how proteins work in the human body.Recent research also has raised the prospect of unbreakable quantum codes, a commercial opportunity that some companies already are vying to exploit.

Bennett and others have pioneered a form of "quantum teleportation" that can replicate the characteristics of light particles more than a mile away--though nobody expects to be able to beam people around.The not-quite-technical term many physicists use for such effects is "quantum weirdness."

Although quantum theory has proved one of the most successful and accurate ideas in science since Max Planck laid its foundations a century ago, most great physicists have pronounced the theory nearly impossible to reconcile with common sense. Einstein could not accept the theory's glorification of probability, complaining, "God does not play dice with the universe."U. of I. physics professor Paul Kwiat, co-author of the new quantum computing study, said one of his favorite quotes on the subject is by Nobel laureate Murray Gell-Mann, who once said: "We know how to use [quantum mechanics] and how to apply it to problems; and so we have learned to live with the fact that nobody can understand it."A really weird computerKwiat said he and his team don't need to understand what quantum theory ultimately means for philosophical notions of reality.

But they do know that quantum effects allowed them to dream up one really weird computer.Like a frantic one-man band, a quantum computer gets its unique power by trying to do many things at the same time.Such devices are far different from the digital computers everyone uses, which can process just one "bit" of electronic information at a time, in a stately procession of 0s and 1s.

The uncanny gift of quantum mechanics is that it could permit computers that calculate many possibilities simultaneously, because their bits can be 0 and 1 at the same time. Such computers exploit the properties of light packets called photons or other particles that seem to exist in more than one physical state at once.As the number of quantum bits increases, the computer can consider many more combinations of data at a single stroke.

That could open the door to a "quantum genie," Kwiat said, offering answers to otherwise impossible problems.One use of such power may be to find all the possible factors of very large numbers--which unfortunately is just what code-breakers would need to crack the tightest modern security codes.

A typical code used in banking transactions would take 100 million personal computers a thousand years to decipher. A sufficiently powerful quantum computer might be able to do that job in minutes.On the bright side, quantum effects might also make it possible to make tamper-proof codes that no computer--quantum or otherwise--could ever break.U. of I. graduate student Onur Hosten, who co-wrote the Nature paper with Kwiat, said he has always been fascinated by ways of seeing quantum weirdness in the ordinary world."I spend a lot of time thinking about how far we can push these effects," Hosten said.

So Hosten wanted to see if he could get accurate information from a quantum computer even if its program never runs. It turned out he could.That's not as crazy as it sounds, if you try to use what Bennett calls "quantum intuition."Twinning effectHosten and Kwiat knew the same physical laws that allow quantum bits to be 0 and 1 at the same time ought to let them make a quantum computer that is both running and not running at once.

That twinning effect is called superposition, and it's at the heart of theories about the world of the very small.The quantum computer they built is set up to run a simple program using one photon of light at a time. The light goes through a series of lenses and mirrors that give an "answer" by directing the photon to one of many light detectors.But what if the setup allowed the photon in some cases to be reflected away from the computer before it arrived there? In those cases you would not expect to be able to get any information from the computer.

Yet Hosten and Kwiat were able to learn something about the photon's potential interaction with the computer even if final measurements showed the photon never took that route.That's because according to quantum mechanics, the photon actually exists in two conditions at once--one in which it went through the computer, and another in which it was bounced away.The two alternate paths even affect one another, and the interaction can influence which light detector is triggered.

That, in turn, provides information about what the computer would have found, even if measurements show the program never actually ran. Specifically, it can exclude one possible answer."What gives us the answer is the possibility of the computer running," Hosten said.Based on that idea, Hosten imagined an even more complicated setup, using still more optical devices to shoot the photon through a figure-eight circuit buzzing with possible outcomes.

Such a device, he showed, could narrow the possibilities to just one answer, even if the photon never actually went through the program.

Such implications of quantum theory may always seem too strange to handle. But Bennett said he hopes that today's youth one day will take quantum weirdness for granted, in a way that Einstein's generation never could."They didn't have as many decades to get used to the idea," Bennett said.

HCL forays into laptop market

(www.business-standard.com)

HCL Infosystems today announced its foray into manufacturing of mobile computers and launch of 11 segment-specific range of laptops.

“We will now start manufacturing laptops at our existing plant at Pondicherry,” said George Paul, executive vice-president of the company.

The company, which recently increased capacity at its Pondicherry facility from 6,00,000 units to 1 million units per year has added two new lines at its existing plant.

“The company has added two new lines in the plant which will be dedicated to laptop manufacturing,” added Paul.

The notebook computer market in the country is expected to grow 50 per cent in 2005-06 from 4.75 lakh units sold last year.

The company further said that its latest foray is unlikely to effect its existing relationship with Toshiba, whose notebooks are distributed through the company.

“We have a separate business division marketing Toshiba notebooks. There would be no clash of interest between our own brand and Toshiba,” Paul said.

The products, which are priced at Rs 27,490 onwards, will be aimed at different segments including doctors, lawyers, women and CEOs.

It has also introduced hardy notebooks starting at Rs 1 lakh, designed for work in rough conditions and meant for defence personnel. Apart from normal computing functionalities, the notebooks will have software package specified for each target group.

The company will offer the laptops at an equal monthly installment of Rs 699 for three years. It has also introduced insurance coverage for theft, accidental damage, breakage and liquid spill.

Study Plays Down Export of Computer Jobs

(www.nytimes.com)

The movement of computing work abroad represents an economic and scientific challenge, but the fears of job migration far outweigh the reality so far, according to a new study by the Association for Computing Machinery.

The lengthy report, to be released today, is the result of a yearlong project by the professional organization to assess the impact and implications of the outsourcing of software development and research.

The study concluded that dire predictions of job losses from shifting high-technology work to low-wage nations with strong education systems, like India and China, were greatly exaggerated.

Though international in perspective, the study group found that the most likely prognosis for the United States would be that 2 percent to 3 percent of the jobs in information technology would go offshore annually over the next decade or so.

But more jobs will be created than are lost in the future, they said, as long as the industry in America moves up the economic ladder to do higher-value work — typically, applying information technology to other fields, like biology and business. They noted that employment in the information technology industry was higher today than it was at the peak of the dot-com bubble, despite the growth of offshore outsourcing in the last few years.

"The global competition has gotten tougher and we have to run faster," said Moshe Y. Vardi, co-chair of the study group and a computer scientist at Rice University. "But the notion that information technology jobs are disappearing is just nonsense. The data don't bear that out."

Yet the view that job opportunities in computing are dwindling fast is both common and potentially damaging to America's competitive prowess, according to David A. Patterson, president of the Association for Computing Machinery.

He pointed to the declining interest in computer science as a major among American college students, based on a survey last year of the intentions of students entering college. The results suggested that only 1 in 75 students would major in computer science, compared with 1 in 30 in 2000.

"The perception among high school students and their parents is that the game is over — that all computing jobs are going overseas," observed Mr. Patterson, who is a computer science professor at the University of California, Berkeley. "It's an extraordinarily widely held misperception."

The concern, he said, is that misplaced pessimism will deter bright young people from pursuing careers in computing. That, in turn, would erode the skills in a field that is crucial to the nation's economic competitiveness.

In the recent debate on outsourcing, software has been considered one of the industries most susceptible to rapid job migration because code can be easily shipped over the Internet anywhere in the world. So the report's generally reassuring outlook is significant.

Still, offshore outsourcing raises some serious issues, the report noted. The benefits and pain of the globalization of technical work are unevenly spread. "It may be good for the economy, but it may not be good for you" if you lose your job, said Mr. Vardi of Rice University.

Federal job retraining programs, the report said, are currently focused on the manufacturing industry instead of high-technology services. The report also calls for changes in computing education.

"This is a huge challenge to education," Mr. Vardi said, "to try to determine what is the right mix of skills as we try to move up the economic ladder." Ronil Hira, an assistant professor of public policy at the Rochester Institute of Technology, was one of the experts consulted by the computing association's study group. Mr. Hira, coauthor of "Outsourcing America," said the report took "a feel-good" stance on the outlook for jobs.

Computer scientist fights spam on two fronts

www.currents.ucsc.edu

A "do-not-spam" registry developed as a student project at UCSC has now been implemented in two states as part of child protection legislation. Designed to shield minors from e-mails with adult content, the registries established in Utah and Michigan are the first of their kind in the country.

Another recent anti-spam project involving UCSC researchers is designed to thwart the "harvesters" who trawl the Internet for e-mail addresses to add to their spam mailing lists.

"These are big steps in the war against spam," said Arthur Keller, a research associate in the technology and information management program of UCSC's Baskin School of Engineering, who supervised the student project and collaborated on the development of the state registries.

Recently enacted anti-spam legislation in Utah and Michigan paved the way for the child protection registries. The new state laws require companies sending e-mails with adult content to have their mailing lists "scrubbed" of all registered e-mail addresses of minors.

For each prohibited message that a company sends to a registered e-mail address, it will face damages of $1,000 in Utah and $5,000 in Michigan.

The registries are based on a prototype do-not-spam registry developed between 2002 and 2003 by a team of UCSC engineering students under the direction of Keller. The students--Lee Holloway, John Rodrigues, Dat Huu Nguyen, and Thomas Belote--have all since graduated with degrees in computer science or computer engineering.

In 2003, UCSC licensed the registry prototype to Unspam, a company that offers anti-spam software and services, after a fortuitous meeting between Keller and Unspam CEO Matthew Prince at a Federal Trade Commission workshop. Keller and Holloway have both continued to work with Unspam on anti-spam strategies.

"I was lucky to find the right partner," Keller said. "We were both on the same track, but Matthew knew a lot more than me about getting the anti-spam legislation adopted."

In the model developed by Unspam, companies pay less than one cent to check each address in their mailing lists against a state registry. The revenue is divided between Unspam and the state. There is no charge to register a minor's e-mail address.

Although the successful implementation of the child protection registry is a promising start in the battle against spam, a nationwide do-not-spam registry faces obstacles. First, the child protection registry itself has come under legal attack.

The Free Speech Coalition, a trade association of the adult entertainment industry, has launched a federal lawsuit challenging Utah's anti-spam law on constitutional grounds. If the lawsuit succeeds, the state's registry would have to be dismantled. But Keller predicts the lawsuit will fail.

"The child protection registry is not a violation of first amendment rights," he said. "The spammer's right to send something does not override my child's right to be left alone."

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) published a report in 2004 skeptical of the do-not-spam registry concept. It said such a registry would fail to reduce the burden of spam, since no reliable mechanism exists to identify violators. Further, it warned that spammers could break into the registry to steal e-mail addresses.

Keller, however, cited several safety features in the Unspam system that addressed the FTC's concerns. "It is absolutely hack-proof," he said.

Keller said the successful implementation of the child protection registries could eventually lead to a nationwide do-not-spam registry that protects both minors and adults from all types of spam.

"The FTC took 10 years to create a do-not-call registry for telemarketers from the time it was authorized," he said. "I won't be surprised if a do-not-spam registry takes equally long."

In the meantime, Keller, Holloway and Prince have launched another anti-spam initiative, dubbed Project Honey Pot, designed to catch spammers in the act of "harvesting" e-mail addresses from the Internet. E-mail harvesting is illegal in the United States under the CAN-SPAM act of 2003, but until recently no mechanism existed to catch harvesters red-handed, Keller said.

Spammers typically find the e-mail addresses of their victims with automated programs called robots, which ceaselessly scour the billions of web pages on the Internet. Most robot traffic on the Internet is from legitimate companies like Yahoo and Google, but about 5 percent comes from harvesters.

To trap harvesters, Project Honey Pot has salted the Internet with a network of over 250,000 web sites containing bogus "spam trap" e-mail addresses. These "honey pot" sites can be visually identified by a legal disclaimer forbidding the harvesting of the addresses they carry.

Accessible only via special links from about 5,000 participating web sites worldwide, the honey pot sites are visible to robots, but not to humans. Each time a robot follows one of the links to a honey pot site, identifying information (such as the robot's IP address) is instantly recorded.

If an e-mail address on the honey pot site receives a spam message later, it is easy to identify the culprit, Keller said.

"Gathering these IP addresses is like finding fingerprints at a crime scene," he said. "It provides evidence essential for prosecuting anyone involved in the spam industry."

According to Keller, harvesters come in two flavors: hucksters, who sell an actual product, and fraudsters, who engage in "phishing" and other scams. Hucksters usually take over a month to send their first spam message to a newly harvested address, but then follow it up with many more. Fraudsters, in contrast, typically send a spam message within a day, but rarely send any more.

"Nearly 30 percent of the messages received by Project Honey Pot appear to be related to some sort of phish scheme, advanced fee fraud, or banking scam," Keller said.

Harvesting by fraudsters can usually be blocked by slightly modifying the way e-mail addresses are written on a web page, Keller said. Known as address "munging," this is often done by writing out "at" and "dot" in place of the corresponding symbols in an e-mail address.

Hucksters tend to use more advanced harvesting programs, Keller said, and are not deterred by simple address munging. Their sophistication, however, could become their Achilles heel.

Several harvesters of the huckster class have modified their programs to avoid honey pot sites -- even the mention of the words "spam trap" or "honey pot" on a site can deter them.

So even regular web sites could include these words to scare harvesters away, Keller said.

The next generation of harvesters may include mechanisms to tell real honey pots from the fakes, but Keller believes Project Honey Pot is a step ahead.

"As spammers adapt to avoid honey pots, we can exploit their adaptations to protect regular web sites," Keller said. "While this is yet another arms race, this time the anti-spam forces are in a position of strength."

Leader at Media Lab seeks smarter future

www.iht.com

BOSTON Frank Moss is relying on old-fashioned common sense to chart the future as he steps into his new role as director of the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

He says technology should be smarter about anticipating human needs and should do more than make life convenient.

At the same time, he also needs to keep persuading big companies to look upon the Media Lab as an incubator of ideas. MIT, whose Media Lab relies heavily on corporate sponsors to keep it running on an annual budget of $32 million, appointed Moss last week to succeed Nicholas Negroponte, the Media Lab co-founder and chairman, who is stepping down to focus on One Laptop per Child, a nonprofit organization he started last year to create and provide $100 laptop computers to children.

In his new role, Moss said, he wanted companies to be enticed, as he was, by the concept of cellphones that silenced themselves upon entering a theater, or phones that conveyed the urgency of a call from an elderly parent at an unusual time of day.

The Media Lab has been exploring such intersections of technology and society since 1985. Some of its innovations include digital ink, wearable computers and advanced prostheses. Thirty faculty members and 250 students work in a series of laboratories littered with robot parts, flat-screen monitors and bright plastic furniture.

Moss, 56, said he expected that technology would change society more profoundly in the coming decades than in the past 20 years. Technology will do more than facilitate easy communication, helping to ease the burden of aging and improving health care and education worldwide, he said.

"My job is to live in the future 20 years from today," Moss said during an interview in his corner office on the fourth floor of a building designed by the architect I.M. Pei.


Moss has spent most of his career starting computer and software companies like Stellar Computer and Bowstreet. In his most recent venture, he founded Infinity Pharmaceuticals, a company that combines technology with the sciences to seek new cancer treatments.

He led Tivoli Systems as chief executive and chairman from the company's founding in 1991 until its merger with International Business Machines in 1996. A childhood fascination with the space program led to an undergraduate degree in aerospace and mechanical sciences from Princeton. Moss went on to complete a doctorate degree at MIT in aeronautics and astronautics in 1977.

When Moss turned 50, he said, he re- evaluated his life's work. His three children, now 30, 24, and 16, thought he should do something to give back to humanity. "They were not particularly impressed by selling systems and network software," he said.

Moss was impressed with the way his children used technology - he refers to them as "digital natives," though they are not technologists - and it altered his view of where cutting-edge ingenuity originates. As the young population adapts technology to suit its needs, Moss said, "that's going to be the source and the force of innovation, and that's going to come from the bottom up."

Give Yourself a Password Makeover

www.abcnews.go.com

You have your ATM pin number, your Internet account password, your Web mail password, and your eBay, Paypal, online banking, work network and work e-mail passwords.

Then there are the travel sites that make you log in, the news services, the online groups.

Some password generators mandate numbers. Some want numbers and letters. Some want characters, uppercase letters AND numbers.

To make matters worse, each site or account requires a different format for your user name: Some want your e-mail address. Others are so popular you have to make up strange versions of your usual log-on name.

Bottom line: It's a nightmare keeping track of your logons and passwords.

Say No to Post-it Notes

Don't resort to the obvious solution — a yellow post-it note with your info posted to the side of your computer monitor.

Instead create three tiers of accounts — high, medium and low security.

Access your high-security passwords only from home or on trusted computers, never on a public computer that might contain a key-logger. Key-loggers are software programs that record every stroke typed on the computer including every user name and password you enter.

Low security passwords can be used on any public account. So someone gets access to your New York Times log-in? That's not a big deal.

Use your medium security passwords based on your own judgment. In an Eastern European Internet café? Not a good idea. In your university's computer lab? Might be a better risk.

Here's How to Get Started with Your Password Makeover

Commit to writing down all the Web sites or networks where you use a password. Only write down the name of the site and your user name, NOT your passwords. A master list of passwords is an open invitation for someone to access your accounts — roommate, co-worker, burglar, kids.

Once that list is done, divide the sites into the three categories — high security, medium security and low security.

High-security log-ons should include anything associated with money or sensitive personal information — financial brokerages, online banking, Paypal, travel sites that store your credit card numbers, any site that has your Social Security number (school site, medical insurance site, tax site), and your work network.

Medium-security log-ons should include anything of a personal nature — your email accounts, your ISP account at home, your alumni network or instant messaging log-ons.

Low security log-ons can consist of e-mail groups, news sites that require a log-on, or random sites that require you provide a password.

Assign a Password to Each Group

To cover the requirements for all sign-ons, make your passwords 8 characters long and a combination of numbers, letters (including at least one uppercase letter) and a symbol, like an *, % or #. One tip for creating a memorable password is to script it like a vanity license plate:

Pr3t3nd$ (Pretends), W8ing4U2 (waiting for you two).

If you only have to remember 3 passwords, you can make them secure and complicated. Studies have shown security is tighter with a few good passwords than with lots of simple passwords.

Change Your Passwords

Now go through your list of sites and networks and change the passwords of your accounts. All your high-security accounts will have the same password, the mediums will be the same, and the low-security sites will have the same password. You should now only need to remember 3 passwords.

On your master list of accounts and user names, instead of writing the password next to the account, just indicate which security class it's in — high, medium, or low. You know those three passwords by heart (This is the challenge here: You have to memorize those three passwords).

If anyone finds your master list, they still don't know your passwords. As you acquire more sites and networks that require a password, fit them into your existing high, medium, and low scheme, and continue to add the user names into your master list.

Good luck, stay safe, and hopefully you'll never be locked out of your own accounts again.

Computer analysts

www.timesonline.co.uk

The NHS is set to approve online therapy for a range of emotional problems. Will it work, asks John Naish

Therapist’s couch or your computer mouse? Only a few years ago the idea of soothing your psyche with the help of a home PC would have been laughably futuristic, but there is now a fast-proliferating range of high-tech head therapies on offer, and next week the Government’s own treatment watchdog is set to give crucial backing to this approach.

Internet sites and CD-Roms offer lifestyle support for everything from diets to life coaching and hypnotherapy. And for serious psychological conditions such as anxiety and depression, the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) is expected to declare on Wednesday that two computerised cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) packages, Beating the Blues and FearFighter, are proved by research to be effective and efficient enough to be prescribed routinely by GPs.

CBT helps people who have developed bad or destructive thinking and behavioural habits by teaching them healthier ways of being and thinking. Trials indicate that nearly half of patients show significant improvements, similar to the rates achieved with antidepressants. And this approach can be computerised with relative ease because it is short, highly structured and focuses on specific practical problems.

The NICE decision is the latest advance for computer-delivered CBT. Last year, Swedish researchers reported in the British Journal of Psychiatry how their study of 117 volunteers with mild to moderate depression found that computerised CBT can be as effective as face-to-face sessions for treating the condition. It doesn’t seem to work for technophobes, though — a third of the patients withdrew from the programme. Their main reason was that it was “too demanding ”.

But if you can bear on-screen psyche treatment, it could mean getting help much faster: the mental health charity Mind says a shortage of trained CBT therapists means that people can sometimes wait up to a year for treatment.

Stuart Toole, the managing director of FearFighter, claims that half a million people are using his system. Users can log on to it from a computer anywhere. Typically, a patient will get started with a 15-minute introduction given by a practice nurse in a GP clinic. They are given a log-on ID number and then can go off and complete the online course themselves, often in libraries or at home.

“We sell the package to primary care trusts and license it to hospital trusts,” says Toole. “We think it is four times cheaper than face-to-face therapy; with high usage, it works out at less than £100 per patient.” He emphasises, however, that it won’t replace face-to-face therapy completely, not just because of some patients’ technophobia but also because many will want to talk about their past and their personal problems in longer-term psychotherapy.

“It’s one piece of the therapeutic jigsaw,” Toole says. “But because many doctors’ current response to patients’ phobias is to do nothing, it is a big step forward for these patients.”
Beating the Blues, meanwhile, is expected to win NICE backing for use with patients with mild and moderate depression. It was developed by the computer software company Ultrasis and psychiatrists at King’s College London.

Beating the Blues consists of an introductory video and eight 50-minute interactive CBT sessions, along with five video case studies.

All the sessions are held at the patient’s GP surgery. “Currently Beating the Blues is used in 250 GP surgeries and primary care trusts, and that number is growing,” says Charlie Martin, an executive director at Ultrasis. “We expect each place to put about 40 patients a year through the system, which works out at about £60 a patient. Beat the Blues is competitive with face-to-face therapy and more cost-effective than drug therapies, which tend to cost about £180 per course.”

Online therapies aren’t just about mental health, though. Life coaches, dietitians and alternative therapists are increasingly selling their services online. They don’t benefit from government kitemarks and, as our venture into the virtual world has discovered, their quality and approach can vary greatly. In that respect, the internet is no different from the high street.

Fighting anxiety online

FearFighter is a ten-session, self-help treatment system that helps patients suffering from panic, anxiety or phobias to identify what sparks their attacks and to develop realistic treatment goals. These involve “exposure therapy”, where patients are encouraged to face their fears for long enough to get used to them. FearFighter asks patients to return every week to report how they’ve been doing and can plot their progress on graphs.

Brunel Study Shows Positive Role of Computer Games

Learn as you play...

www.entertainmentwise.com

As the average gamer spends as much time on gaming as on homework, study reveals how online gaming is a training ground for work.

Brunel academics today unveil the results of a three-year study into online gaming communities, which defies the traditional educationalists' negative perception of gaming.

The academics believe that computer games have a central role to play in the education and development of young people, contributing to the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority's strategy of work related learning, which helps children make an effective transition from school to work.

The study, which took the form of qualitative research into a community of players of the online game Runescape, shows that gaming is far from being a frivolous diversion from homework. The online worlds created by the gamers mirror many aspects of material society.

For example, gamers are invited to join 'Klans' - highly disciplined co-operatives in which they share a common set of goals, they adopt identities such as merchant or warrior and they divide their time online between work and leisure.

Most importantly, skills are learnt which are highly valued, with experienced players tailoring their 'training' to acquire the 'desirable' skills - a clear example of 'work related learning'.

Comments Nic Crowe from the Centre for Youth Work Studies in the School of Sport and Education at West London's Brunel University, who carried out the research in conjunction with Dr Simon Bradford: "A recent survey showed that most young people spend as much time on computer games as they do on their homework - three hours a day.

This is the kind of information to strike fear into the hearts of concerned parents and educationalists alike, as they perceive it as idle 'downtime'. However, this is far too simplistic a view.

"Our study shows that the online gaming communities are complex and highly developed, acting as 'training grounds' for the transition from school to work" Nic continues: "When playing, gamers are undergoing a complex process of 'work related learning' - learning how to cope with work scenarios - which is far removed from the traditionally held negative view of gaming.

Put simply, these games have a central - and positive - role to play in the development and education of young people."

The 'UK Children Go Online Survey', by Sonia Livingstone, Magdalena Bober, April 2005 shows that:

* The average gamer spends as much time on gaming as on homework.

* 82% of children own at least one games console.

* 70% of children play online.The study forms a chapter of a book, 'Youth Cultures: Scenes, Subcultures and Tribes'. Watch out for it if you would like to read the entire study!

Add Summarize! to your computer to help cut through textual clutter

www.bocaratonnews.com

Computers are supposed to make our lives easier -- and in many ways they do. Yet there are studies suggesting that's really not the case. For the most part, I tend to disagree with most of those studies except when it comes to one thing and that's reading. Have you ever thought about how much more reading you do now that you have a computer sitting on your desk? I'd be willing to bet there's a good chance that much of your profession requires you to do a lot of reading.

Take email for example. Even with all the junk email filters running at full tilt, most of us acknowledge that reading just the valid emails can really eat into your day. And that's just email. What with all kinds of documents, news items, reports, contracts, brochures and sundry other items your job says you have to read, it's amazing that we get anything done. And if you're a student, you know all about the pain and suffering when it comes to those numerous books you have to get through in a limited amount of time. But there is a way to cut through all the textual clutter and strangely enough, it's your computer that may be able to help you after all.

"Summarize!" is an application from Corpora Software that helps you do what its name says. Using some very sophisticated techniques, Corpora says that its Summarize uses linguistic and statistical analysis algorithms that extract and determine how relevant each sentence in a document is to the key themes running throughout its content. The program then creates a readable summary to reflect the dominant themes. That summary is a lot shorter than the document itself which translates into a lot less reading which means you are going to save a lot of time.

Right out of the box, Summarize does a pretty good job of highlighting what is important. But as with anything that's making a kind of judgment for you, it requires some fine-tuning.

Fortunately, Summarize allows you to tweak and adjust how it does its work. You can, for example, tailor what you believe to be the more important themes for which you are looking and Summarize will endeavor to highlight anything that corresponds. The way this works is that you tell it what key words fall within your area of interest. Obviously, the more you use it, the more tailored your summaries will become. You can also determine the lengths of the summaries. This can be particularly effective because too much trimming may hinder your efforts in gleaning out the most significant information.

Summarize works with most of the more popular word-intensive applications such as Microsoft's Outlook, Word and PowerPoint. Summarize also works with PDF files and HTML so that it's great for scanning Web sites and the text within them. You can even scan an email and all of its attached documents with just one click of the mouse.

Corpora has a special server edition, which you can incorporate, directly into your company's Web site and into document management systems such as Microsoft SharePoint. With this configuration, it will automatically extract summaries and key words from your documents so as to improve document searches and categorization. Check with Corpora for more details on their Enterprise versions of their Summary products.

Being able to significantly reduce what you have to read while maintaining a statistically same level of understanding will more than likely make Summarize pay for itself in just the time you save from having to read every single word. You just may find yourself becoming more productive at work or accelerating your studies at school. Obviously, the product's effectiveness and value to you can really only be determined if you give it a try yourself. You can do so by visiting the Corpora Web site and buying a copy of Summarize! 2.0 for $49.

Craig Crossman is a national newspaper columnist writing about computers and technology. The Palm Beach resident also hosts the number one daily national computer radio talk show, Computer America, heard on both the Business TalkRadio Network and the Lifestyle TalkRadio Network Monday through Friday, 10 p.m. to midnight ET. For more information, visit his Web site at www.computeramerica.com.

Copy protection threatens viewing of next-gen DVDs

www.mobilemag.com

The bitter fight for the next-generation DVD market is having ever wider consequences. Even if you don't know your Blu-ray from your HD DVD, you can appreciate the fact that copy-protection safeguards and top-quality video viewing are potentially not compatible.

One worst-case scenario has consumers buying new PCs in order to view the new DVDs.Why is this happening? For two reasons: Hollywood studios want to stamp out piracy, and electronics manufacturers are scrambling to catch up.First of all, the digital piracy is a huge drain on profits for the major movie studios.

With the propensity of broadband and other high-speed Internet connections, potential digital pirates have found it all the easier to "borrow" movies, TV, and other forms of digital video for their own purposes. As a result, more and more pirated videos are flooding the market and less and less money is making its way into the coffers of Hollywood studios.One result of all this is a stringent approach toward digital ownership.

The next generation of DVDs will include specifically narrow digital rights management controls.

Unfortunately for a great many viewers, these "protective" procedures won't play nice with much of today's PC protocols, resulting in not-so-high quality viewing. (It should be noted here that standalone DVD players and HDTVs will have preinstalled plugs and protocols that will work with these new DRM controls.

Your average PC user, however, might be in trouble.

Most computer-to-monitor plugs are analog, which doesn't support copy protection. So, that shiny new DVD that you buy later this year will appear as not-so-shiny if you hook up your PC to a TV.

Some computers include a digital visual interface (DVI) plug, which allows digital transfer of images from PC to monitor.

But Hollywood studios, aware of this, have lashed out against the DVI, leveraging its influence into making Microsoft to include in the upcoming Vista OS a shutdown feature that prevents DVI connections altogether (unless, of course, you have preinstalled High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection, which isn't at all standard in the garden-variety PC or OS).

But even HDCP depends on chipmakers and OS manufacturers like Microsoft, which have varying degrees of "catchup" in their release strategies.

If this all sounds confusing, it certainly is. We've descended into anagram mania here. The bottom line is that you should know what kind of video hookup capability your PC has before you go out and spend lavish amounts of money on next-gen DVDs, be they Blu-ray or HD DVD.

Computer games 'good for learning'

www.computeractive.co.uk

Skills learned in virtual world can help kids in real life, says study

Computer games can be good for children, according a three-year study unveiled today by researchers at Brunel University.

They focused on the online game Runescape and concluded that, far from being a frivolous diversion from homework, it taught many valuable skills because the virtual worlds created by the gamers mirrored many aspects of the real world.

Gamers are invited to join highly disciplined co-operatives called Klans in which they share a common set of goals, adopt identities such as merchant or warrior and divide their time online between work and leisure.

Recent research has shown most children spend as much time on computer games as on their homework, says Nic Crowe, of Brunel's Centre for Youth Work Studies in the School of Sport and Education, who co-authored the report.

'This is the kind of information to strike fear into the hearts of concerned parents and educationalists alike, as they perceive it as idle 'downtime'. However, this is far too simplistic a view,' he said.

'Our study shows that the online gaming communities are complex and highly developed, acting as 'training grounds' for the transition from school to work.

'When playing, gamers are undergoing a complex process of 'work related learning' - learning how to cope with work scenarios - which is far removed from the traditionally held negative view of gaming.'

The study forms a chapter of a book, Youth Cultures: Scenes, Subcultures and Tribes, published by Routledge.

It is not the only sign that educationalists are taking computer games more seriously.

Professor David Buckingham, of London University's Institute for Education, said last month that computer games should be taught at school because they are as much a part of modern literacy as reading and writing.

Losing your hearing? Don't worry. A new computer program offers intriguing solutions.

www.sfgate.com

When the Grateful Dead called him to consult, Robert Sweetow, director of audiology for the UCSF Medical Center, wasn't prepared for the level of technical expertise he'd encounter in the world of rock 'n' roll.

"It blows away my equipment," Sweetow says of his first visit to Ultrasound, the band's sound company. "We think we have state of the art equipment, but our equipment is archaic compared to the equipment these guys are working with. And what was amazing was the knowledge.

You know, I have a Ph.D. in audiology, and the knowledge these guys have about sound is better than mine, I thought."

This unlikely marriage of rock and science led to the creation of a computer program that can help people cope with diminished hearing. LACE, for Listening and Communication Enhancement, is based on the notion that even though hearing loss can never be reversed, listening skills can be improved.

All of this came about because Sweetow connected with the Dead in the '90s.

In 2002, Sweetow ran across a former Dead audio engineer turned software designer and entrepreneur named Gerry Kearby, who had started the first Internet music distribution system with a digital rights management component, Liquid Audio. Kearby, who suffers from tinnitus -- a constant ringing in the ears that can be caused by too much exposure to loud music -- was looking at a business plan from some doctors who thought they could develop a cure for his condition. Sweetow had an idea of his own that intrigued Kearby.

"We have this cadre of people we know who have been on the leading edge of audio technology for 30 years," Kearby says, "and ... we're approaching the downward slide of our physical skills.

I said, 'Look, I'm going to gather up the troops ... and I'm going to see if we can build some medical software using the technology we built to make recording studios and equipment for rock 'n' roll bands.' It was a perfect combination. They have the brains and we have the brawn, so to speak."

Millions of Baby Boomers approaching senior citizenship are realizing that years spent listening to loud rock music in youth have exacted a toll. Noise-related hearing loss doesn't typically show up until middle age. Its onset is also so slow and insidious that other people usually notice it first ("Are you going deaf?").

More than 31 million people in the United States suffer from hearing loss, according to Kearby, but Sweetow says only around 20 percent will ever wear hearing aids.

"I've been fitting hearing aids on people for 30 years," Sweetow says. "The technological advances in the fidelity of the sound produced by hearing aids has improved significantly over the years. It has a broader bandwidth, less distortion."

But both Sweetow and Kearby say that hearing aids can only do part of the job. "You put on the best hearing aid in the world on people and they still come back and say, 'Yeah, but it doesn't help me with noise,' " Sweetow says.

"You put on your glasses, you get your full bandwidth back," Kearby says, referring to a popular style of hearing aid. "First time I put on a hearing aid, I was shocked. I'm an audio guy. I thought 'I'll get my hearing back.' No. It's not that way at all. It's not what you get at all. You get this artificial thing."

Before the advent of transistors in the 1950s, audiologists tried to rehabilitate patients with hearing loss. Once they could be fitted with miniature hearing aids, patients were simply sent back out in the world.

"Think about what happens when you have your leg amputated and you get a prosthetic limb," Sweetow says. "They don't say 'OK, you've got your limb, hop on out of here and you're done.' They say you've got to have physical therapy. But in our field, nobody provides any kind of therapy after."

Working with research audiologist Jennifer Henderson Sabes and Kearby's team of software designers, Sweetow developed LACE; he shares the patent with the university. Built to run on personal computers, the program features an Internet link that allows an audiologist to monitor each patient's progress. LACE users progress through 20 half-hour sessions. Mixing different tasks -- speech in noise, competing voices, rapid speech, word memory -- the program challenges users further as they get better.

LACE trains the brain and promotes successful communication, whether or not the patient wears a hearing aid. A short blurb last November in the AARP newsletter, for people over 50, prompted more than 15,000 downloads of the rather unwieldy 30 megabyte demonstration version from the company's Web site, neurotone.com.

"We all know people who have normal hearing who are lousy listeners," Sweetow says. "And, conversely, I know people who are hearing impaired who are great listeners.

The difference being hearing is access to acoustic information; listening is using acoustic information and focusing on it with intention and attention. That is further enhanced by cognitive skills and then, finally, by communication strategies. The goal of any audiologist is not to restore somebody's hearing. The goal is to restore somebody's communication skills.

"I had been thinking about this for five years," Sweetow says, "and I had started giving talks about the need for an interactive, adaptive therapy. Then along comes Jen (Sabes), who starts putting in my mind the proper terminology about how the cognitive neural science ties in to what I had been thinking and talking about in probably a more basic manner. She helps to refine this. Then along comes Gerry, who says, 'Oh, we can do this. And not only can we do this, but we can do it in this manner and we can throw this into the picture and that into picture.'

And all of a sudden, before we know it, this becomes a viable product that patients can actually use."
LACE works not only through repetitive tasks that increase motor skills, but also by blazing new neural pathways in the brain. In addition, the text content of the exercises provides further positive reinforcement. LACE comes at learning from all directions.

"Jen and I went through tons and tons of literature on learning theory to see how do people learn," Sweetow says. "And we know that you need repetition. You need to get feedback in terms of 'Am I doing this right or wrong?' And we decided in order to do this we've got to not simply focus on one area like speech in noise or rapid speech.

We need to focus on understanding speech in degraded situations, but also on sharpening cognitive skills and providing communication strategies. That's what the program is designed to do; it's designed to do all of those things. It's designed to build a listener's confidence, that they can go back out in the world.

You don't have to have perfect hearing. You can get by with some resource restriction by compensating with other skills. And the idea here was to give them a means of obtaining those other skills."

While audiologists have worked in laboratories and hospitals, audio engineers in the music world have been trying to solve some of the same problems from the opposite end. The kind of acoustic research conducted by people building loudspeakers, such as Don Pearson of Ultrasound, who worked with Kearby and the Dead, or John Meyer of Berkeley's Meyer Sound Labs, made scientists out of guys who started out hot-rodding guitar amplifiers.

"With the Dead in the early days, we spent a lot of time thinking about how do we improve intelligibility," Kearby says. "It was Pearson and John Meyer who said we do it by making everything correct in phase and correct in time. And then we could actually be less loud and get information farther back."

Sweetow wants to go a step further and train patients to understand what they don't hear as well as what they do.

"We want to give the patient the ability to extract whatever cues work for them to allow them to make this connection between what was said and what they perceived. If you perceive the 'S' sound as being a gzhzzz, but then you know that every time you hear gzhzzz, that means 'S,' well, then you start to make that association. It's all about the brain. It's not about the ears."

Keyboard Power: Using Your Computer Even if Your Mouse “Dies”

www.dailyindia.com

There are various accessories that could help operating a computer easier. The mouse is just an example of an accessory which makes navigation simple with just one click. However, most of these accessories have short “lifespan” and can be considered disposable. This is when the accessories can become bothersome.

What are you to do, when in the middle of an important document, your mouse decides to “die”? Would you worry? Would you panic and run to the nearest store? What if it’s night time and the stores are closed and you are rushing up your work?

On your keyboard, immediately press CTRL + S simultaneously to save whatever it is you’re doing. That way, you don’t lose your work. This is a common and one of the most familiar tasks without using the mouse. If the mouse is not functioning and you need to do something important but you don’t have the time to repair the mouse or change it, you can actually still do your work even with just the keyboard around.

Here are some key combinations you need to navigate your way through your PC sans the mouse:

Ctrl + O – to open a file or document

Ctrl + B – to use the “Bold” feature of fonts

Ctrl + I – to italize fonts

Ctrl + U – to underline texts in a document

Ctrl + X – to cut texts, cells, or icons from files

Ctrl + W – to close existing windows

Ctrl + R – to align document to the right

Ctrl + L – to align document to the left

Ctrl + E – to align document to the center (especially in Word Documents)

Ctrl + Z – to undo last action done in a document

Ctrl + Y – to redo last action done in a document

Shift F7 – to prompt the Thesaurus tool in a document

F7 – to prompt the spelling and grammar check tool in a document

F12 – or save as, to save same document with another filename or to another drive

Windows + D - shows desktop

Alt + Tab – switches you from one window to another

F5 – refreshes your browser when it seems to have stopped moving (when you are using the Internet)

Ctrl + Esc – prompts the “Start Menu” when you are using the old 101-key keyboard without

the Windows keys on it.

F6 – enables you to change the URL on the address field when you are using the Internet.

Shift + Tab – when you need to go back to a previous cell (in a spreadsheet) or entry in a form

(in the Internet)

Ctrl + V or Shift + Insert – to paste copied text to another document

Windows + F – when you need to find and open a file recently saved

Windows + Pause/Break – to directly open and view your system properties without going

through the control panel windows

Windows + E – to directly open and view Windows Explorer without going though the Start

Menu

Alt + F4 – to prompt shut down menu

When you get used to using these shortcuts, you will certainly be able to finish the task you are doing even without the mouse. And this ability will make you look like a computer whiz.

The writer, Ismael D. Tabije, runs the website, http://www.bestlaptopnotebookdeal.com, where one can buy cheap laptop and notebook computers of top brands like Acer, Apple, Compaq, Dell, HP, IBM, Sony and Toshiba. The site also offers tips on buying laptops, ink cartridges, computer rentals, choosing PDAs, and care of your laptop batteries.

EYE ON WEB USE

Workplace cyberslackers cause concern for employers?

www.montereyherald.com

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. - E-mailing, Web surfing and online journaling have advanced the workplace in countless ways. They've also created a new breed of employee: the cyberslacker.
When boredom, procrastination or pressing personal business strike at work, the cyberslacker goes online to shop, play games, pay bills, view pornography, download music, communicate with friends, maybe even look for another job.

"I've seen problems at all levels, from entry-level employees to presidents," said N.E. Sam Sargent, president of Human Resource Asset Management Systems Ltd., a local human-resource consulting firm.

Eighty to 85 percent of employees who use computers to do their jobs also regularly use them for personal tasks or fun -- as much as 3.7 hours per week, according to the National Technology Readiness Survey by the University of Maryland. Another study by BIGresearch, an Ohio-based market analyst, found that 37 percent of last year's holiday shoppers said they would use Internet access at work to browse or buy gifts online.

Problems arise when personal activity on the work computer affects employee productivity.

Websense Inc., a San Diego-based seller of Internet-filtering software, estimates that Internet misuse in the workplace costs American companies more than $178 billion annually in lost productivity. That translates to more than $5,000 per employee each year.

"People want to reach out and connect, and they'll do it however they can," Sargent said. "We used to worry about hanging around the water cooler taking too much time."

Employers also are concerned about employees inadvertently breaching corporate security or privacy through personal computer usage.

Web sites and pop-up ads may have spyware that can infiltrate a company's computer network, with corporate espionage in mind. Spam, or unsolicited e-mails, can carry computer viruses or worms that also paralyze networks.

As a result, many employers establish computer-usage policies that range from strict to lenient.

"Policies are good if they're fair and enforceable," said Sargent, who founded the Colorado Springs Society for Human Resource Management. "Many are driven by privacy and security issues for the company. They want to protect their intellectual property."

"It is a big problem," says Jacqueline McManus, an employment and labor law specialist with Fenton & Keller in Monterey, "especially when what they're doing on the Internet is viewing pornography, which is a lot more common than we'd like to believe."

Nearly all of her clients have computer use policies, she said, and it's the rare employer these days that hasn't done some tracking or spot checking.

It's a two-pronged issue, and those prongs -- the issues of productivity and sexual harassment -- can be pretty sharp.

She knows of several cases where employees have sued their employers for exposure of what they seen, generally not by choice, on someone else's computer, and she's handled such cases firsthand.

"It's something we deal with at least every week, if not every day."

While some employers are a bit more lenient on personal e-mails than others, the trend is for stricter controls on personal Web use.

The bottom line, says McManus, is that clear policies are vital these days.

"It warns the employee that their computer use at work is not private, and they're going to access it."

PC People co-owner Richard Allen, whose Monterey company has been serving individual computers and company networks since 1987, calls it a "well acknowledged fact" that employees use those office computers for stuff other than work.

Business owners don't often bring it Internet access as an issue, says Allen, but that's not to say bosses don't care about it.

Allen, whose clients range from "onesies and twosies," as he calls them, to companies with hundreds of users, said it varies by client.

"Some places totally restrict access, some do logging to see where people have been," said Allen. "That in itself is pretty intimidating" for employees.

The downside for those clients, he said, is that there tends to be more administrative work and more maintenance involved.

He thinks most employers would rather hold their workers accountable for productivity rather than for each keystroke they make.

"Some of the employers are reluctant to play that role, to be the bad guy," says Allen, "but it's getting to a point that it's becoming more of a concern."

And the worst abusers often give themselves away, since the more surfing one does, the more vulnerable they can be to snarling their desktop with viruses and worms.

Companies usually consider computer misuse as grounds for termination.

Half of nearly 300 employers responding to a recent Society for Human Resources Management survey said they've fired or disciplined employees for Internet use unrelated to job duties.

To ensure proper usage and have documented proof of employee actions, many companies monitor computer activity with applications and devices that flag suspicious e-mails, chat-room conversations and Internet browsing. Some filtering software prevents employees from accessing certain Web sites, such as those deemed pornographic.

Some employers disclose the extent of such policing and others do not.

Whether they rely on monitoring programs or their own staff, most companies keep tabs on what their employees are up to.

A 2001 American Management Association survey found that 36 percent of employers review files on work computers, 47 percent read e-mails and 63 percent check Internet connections.

Scientists in California work on ultra-thin cells that could make solar power cheaper

www.newenergyreport.org

Highlight:Experts have been saying for a while now that the rising prices of fossil fuels are increasing the demand for alternative energy sources, so researchers at the University of California-Berkeley and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory are working on a very thin but durable solar cell that will generate more energy than traditional solar panels, but at a reduced cost.
Original source:http://www.voanews.com/english/2005-12-27-voa47.cfm

Summary:

- Scientists in California are working on a new solar power cell they hope will provide energy at a lower cost than conventional solar panels.

- Scientists in California have developed an ultra-thin, solar cell.

- The manufacturing process is currently long and complicated.

- But with the tremendous growth of solar power in the United States, it will probably be worth the effort.

- In 2004 half a million dollars worth of solar cells and modules were shipped every week inside the United States.

- And with the prices of fossil fuels on the rise, demand for alternative energy sources is likely to increase.

- So researchers at the University of California-Berkeley and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory are trying to make a very thin but durable solar cell that will have more applications and generate more energy than the bulky solar panels now in use.

- Ilan Gur Scientist Ilan Gur Ilan Gur is one of the scientists involved.

- "The thickness of the film of nanocrystals is really important because that is our active layer, that is our active material in the solar cell.

- And obviously we are making a solar cell, we need to absorb all of the sunlight."

- The result: something similar to material used in computer chips in DVDs and CD players.

- The resulting solar cell is then tested to see how well it would work if it were on a rooftop.

- Paul Alivisatos Paul Alivisatos Paul Alivisatos is a scientist and professor of chemistry involved with the project.

- He says the cells are manufactured similarly to photographic film, which could be a great advantage.

- He says if every roof in the country was covered with solar cells, sunlight could supply three-quarters of the electricity needed in the U.S.

- See more articles and news on solar cellTrack news on solar power at SolarFactor.com.Track news on solar panels at SolarFactor.com.

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Gates calls for better computer security

www.sanjose.bizjournals.com

Microsoft Corp. founder Bill Gates called Tuesday for the creation of a trustworthy environment to enable the development of the digital lifestyle and predicted that new technologies soon will replace the lowly password.

Speaking Tuesday in San Jose to the world's largest gathering of computer security experts and engineers, Gates said, "We need to make sure that security is not the thing that holds us back."
Gates, the chairman and chief software architect at Redmond, Wash.,-based Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT), said that to be effective security "has to be designed so that you don't have to pay a lot of attention to it."

There was irony in Gates' call for greater security. The design of Microsoft software has often been blamed for enabling many of the computer attacks that have shaken confidence in online activities. But Gates went even further, saying that every piece of software should be engineered for security.

"We need to be thinking of these things from the beginning," he said, adding, "This has been a big shift for Microsoft."

Gates said that what he calls "the Trust Ecosystem has to have a very rich design," meaning that every corner of the computer and the Web should have safety and security woven through and through.

Microsoft is pushing the Identity Metasystem, an industrywide approach to identity verification that uses a series of questions instead of a traditional password to allow a computer user to make sensitive transactions on the Web. Among the innovations announced by Microsoft today was a virtual InfoCard, a feature of Microsoft Windows operating system, that matches the sensitivity of a transaction with the amount or type of information needed to verify the identity of the user.

Microsoft is trying to drum up interest among companies that do business on the Web and to make the Metasystem widely accepted.

"If we all work together to reduce identity fraud, it will be very beneficial to all, Richard Turner, program Manager for Web Services Strategy, said in an interview.

Gates also predicted that electronic Smart Cards will replace the use of passwords over the next three to four years.

In a reference to the recent hunting accident in which U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney shot and wounded a member of the hunting party, Gates said he was very glad to be in San Jose. "My other invitation was to go quail hunting with Dick Cheney."

Multiple iPods and computers

www.macworld.com

Apple has made it pretty easy to sync an iPod with a computer, but what happens when things get a bit more complicated? You may have an entire family fighting to synchronize several iPods with one Mac. Or you may need to share sync duties between your home Mac and a Windows PC at work. If you have more music players or more computers than you know how to deal with, the following tips and tools can help.

Multiple iPods on the same Mac

Apple includes a unique identifier in each iPod, so iTunes can easily differentiate between multiple iPods and manage settings for all of them. When you use multiple iPods with one computer, assigning each a unique name will help avoid confusion. If you need to change an iPod’s name, double-click on that name in the Source menu and enter a new one.

With multiple iPods, iTunes can load each player with the same collection or sync each device with its own customized playlist(s). By default, iTunes is set to Automatically Update All Songs And Playlists.

If you want manual control, or if you’re connecting an iPod that’s synced with one computer to another system and don’t want to overwrite all the music on it, you’ll want to switch to manual mode. Connect the iPod, click on the No button if iTunes asks whether you want to link that iPod to the new library (you’ll be asked only if the iPod has been previously linked to another computer), click on the iPod icon near the bottom right-hand corner of the iTunes window, and select Manually Manage Songs And Playlists in the resulting window (see “Let Me Decide”).

Since each person sharing the computer may prefer to maintain unique iTunes settings, you can set up multiple OS X user accounts, each with its own iTunes library and settings. A downside of this approach is that, by default, iTunes stores its music in each user’s Home folder, which means that duplicate copies of shared songs will be maintained for each person.

To avoid having duplicate files, consider setting iTunes to store its Music folder in a location that each user can access, such as a FireWire drive, a network drive, or a part of a local hard drive accessible to all users. To relocate the folder, find its current location by looking at the General tab of iTunes’ Advanced preference pane.

Quit iTunes and move (or copy) the iTunes Music folder you just found to a new location. Relaunch iTunes, and specify your folder’s new location by clicking on the Change button and pointing iTunes to the folder (also under the General tab of iTunes’ Advanced pane). Repeat this process for other user accounts on the same computer, and you’re set.

If you don’t have multiple OS X user accounts, another solution is Doug Adams’s $5 iTunes Library Manager 4.2.5, which lets you create multiple iTunes library and preference configurations without duplicating files. Once this AppleScript applet is installed, you run it by choosing it from the Scripts menu in iTunes’ menu bar. The first time you launch the applet, it will prompt you to save the current library. You then create as many configurations as you need, and you can load each one as necessary. A similar program, Steve Roy’s $10 Libra 2.0.4, also works with Windows.

Multiple computers

When connecting an iPod to more than one computer, you may want to have all the same music and associated ratings available on each system. There are several ways to do this.

Networked Computers Synchronizing iTunes manually between computers can be a laborious task. Oligrob Software’s free syncOtunes 0.95 () can ease this chore. It’s designed to sync libraries and settings, provided that the computers involved can communicate directly over a network.

After installing syncOtunes, select your local iTunes Music Library.xml file, and then select the same file on the remote computer across the network. Click on the Compare Libraries button to display the number of songs needing synchronization and to select which songs and artists to copy (see “It’s All the Same”).

Clicking on the Copy Music Files button will then copy the appropriate files into the iTunes Music folder on each computer, which may take quite a while depending on the speed of your network. Once the files have been copied, click on the Import Into iTunes button to open iTunes on the local computer and begin the import process. Then you’ll need to run the import manually in iTunes on the remote computer.

Non-Networked Computers For syncing

between distant computers—say, a home system and an office computer behind a firewall—using an iPod for transporting files can be more convenient. Because iTunes is set by default to autosync with iPods, be sure to switch to manual mode to avoid losing files.

To prevent the pirating of copyrighted files, Apple designed the iTunes synchronization process to work only in one direction—moving files from a computer to an iPod. While Apple doesn’t let you move files off of the iPod the same way you put them on, there are easy ways to do so. Whitney Young’s free Senuti 0.31 () lets you copy single songs, songs grouped by artist or album, or entire playlists from an iPod into iTunes.

One downside of Senuti is its lack of support for copying metadata such as ratings and play counts. Fortunately, many additional synchronization utilities are available to fill the gap. Two that stand out from the crowd are Sci-Fi Hi-Fi’s $8 PodWorks 2.8.5 and crispSofties’ $35 iPod.iTunes 3.0.3. Both programs can transfer metadata along with songs and playlists, but iPod.iTunes has the added feature of avoiding duplicate files by checking for files already in iTunes before synchronization.

Another option is a new service called MP3tunes, which provides syncing tools and unlimited online storage space for all your music files for $40 a year. Remember that you can authorize only five computers at once to play songs purchased from the iTunes Music Store.

Syncing across Platforms Syncing iPods between different operating systems can be more complex. Officially, Apple doesn’t support using a Mac-formatted iPod on a Windows PC. However, cross-platform syncing is possible.

Windows-formatted iPods make for the easiest cross-platform syncing: Macs are natively capable of accessing the FAT32 standard used on Windows iPods, so a Windows-formatted iPod will appear in iTunes on a Mac and can be accessed seamlessly (though transfer speed is likely to be slower than it would be with a Mac-formatted iPod).

Windows does not natively support Mac-formatted iPods, so syncing a Mac-formatted iPod to a Windows PC requires a third-party utility such as Mediafour’s $30 XPlay 2.2. In addition to its own Windows-to-iPod syncing capabilities, XPlay 2.2 can be used in conjunction with iTunes. The program also lets you move files from an iPod to a PC.

Using the restore feature provided by Apple’s iPod Updater, you can convert an iPod from Mac to Windows and vice versa. But all data is erased from the device during the restore process, so use one of the methods mentioned earlier to back up any data unique to the iPod before you attempt a conversion.

With a little patience and the right settings and tools, even the most complicated group of iPods, Macs, and Windows PCs can make beautiful music together.

IBM hones its blade line with speedy servers

www.financialexpress.com

Four years ago, as legend has it, an IBM engineering team loaded its product prototype into a pickup truck and took off on a road trip to the company’s headquarters in New York.
The goal was to get executives in Armonk excited about their idea and what it could do for the technology industry.

Turns out they had a winner. Today, IBM's blade computer products generate $1 billion in annual sales. The Research Triangle Park, N.C., staff devoted to them has expanded from fewer than 100 to more than 1,000 people working in engineering, marketing, finance and manufacturing.

“It's great proof of IBM's innovation,” said Doug Balog, vice-president and head of IBM's BladeCenter division. Other research teams work on the BladeCenter in New York, on the West Coast and around the world.

Blade computer servers are modular, allowing companies to add or subtract capacity. The blades are thin computers that slide into a high-tech frame much like books on a bookshelf. The system is flexible, compact and simple to manage, he said.

“A computer room that used to have racks and racks of computers can collapse all that into a much smaller space and save money when running their systems,” Balog said.

Last week, after two years of work by teams in RTP and elsewhere, the company announced its third line of BladeCenter products. The new frame, BladeCenter H, works up to 10 times faster than any previous blade server system. It's designed for customers such as Wall Street analysts and digital movie animators, who need access to lots of data at once.

The BladeCenter H frame will start at $3,849 when it hits the market in March. Two new blade computer models will start at $1,749 and $2,499.

Servers can often be a bottleneck in a computer network, so faster is better, Roger Kay, president of Endpoint Technologies Associates, said.

“There's no amount of speed they could have that wouldn't be useful,” Kay said.

And it looks as if IBM plans to continue the trend. Last week, the company announced that it expects to release the fastest processor ever for servers in 2007.

The high density of computers in a blade server means it consumes a lot of electricity and produces a lot of heat, Kay said. In addition to a new power-conserving blade model, IBM says the BladeCenter H frame lets customers manage power requirements and keep the servers cool.
When IBM sold its PC division to Lenovo Group last spring, the company made it clear that it would be focusing on its other strengths. Blade servers are one of them, Kay said.

Shortly after entering the market in 2002, IBM took over as No. 1, and now holds a 42% market share, Balog said. Hewlett-Packard is second with 32%, and Dell is a distant third with less than 10%. The market, predicted to exceed $3 billion this year, could hit $10 billion in a few years, he said.

IBM is trying to increase market penetration by collaborating with partners and customers to understand what they need, Balog said. In addition to sharing ideas, partners such as telecommunications gear-maker Nortel Networks are helping market BladeCenters and related products in their industries.

The Armonk road-trip story has become company lore, but there's an element of truth to it, Balog said. The Triangle team was ‘pretty jazzed’ about the BladeCenter introduction, Balog said, and he wouldn't be surprised if they're already back at work today figuring out the next improvement.

“The division in RTP is really the heart and soul of this announcement in terms of the creative energy,” Balog said. “There are a lot of people who spend their waking energy focusing on IBM's continued success in this market.”

PlayStation chip shows serious side

www.theage.com.au

An IBM microchip widely known as the heart of a video-game system is finding a home in a new line of computers intended to handle complex graphics and number-crunching.

Server computers coming this year with the "Cell" chip can be used for applications ranging from video entertainment and architectural design to military mapping and 3-D medical imagery.

"Think of using a joystick and flying through the body and looking for parasites, cancers, tumours," says Jeff Benck, vice-president of development for IBM's BladeCenter server products. "That's the kind of new application this thing is going to unlock."

Sony and Toshiba co-designed the Cell chip, which is to run the upcoming Sony PlayStation 3 video-game system and high-definition televisions from both companies.

Mr Benck says the chip was not designed just for gaming, and that it is a natural evolution to start with gaming to increase the volume of chips and lower the cost.

For IBM's first Cell product, the chips are slated to appear in this year's third quarter in "blade" servers, thin computer systems that work in groups and are pulled in and out of a chassis like books on a shelf.

The Cell-based servers would perform a variety of tasks. Mercury Computer Systems is using Cell technology in applications including radar, sonar, telecommunications and seismic sensors.

IBM touts Cell as a "supercomputer on a chip", with 10 times as much computing power as traditional chips in handling some applications.

Computer and Internet Technology Energy Solutions

www.software.newsforge.com

Anonymous Reader writes "Use computer technology such as the Internet, VPNs, USB-keys, sneaker-netting, live CDs, and so forth to help to reduce dependency on oil and to reduce air pollution. MozillaQuest Magazine reports: "Today, in 'Part 2' of this 'Solutions for the Energy Crises' . . . article, we look at telecommuting as an alternative to burning gas and diesel fuel.

We also look at some of the computer tools that help people to do these things . . . If one's work is done on a computer, that person is a perfect candidate for working from home -- telecommuting" Telecommuting offers at least two contributions to solving the energy crises. It keeps commuters off the road and thus directly reduces oil-based fuels consumption and demand. Additionally, telecommuting also takes traffic off the roadways during the rush hour traffic jams and bottlenecks, thus reducing the severity of the traffic jams.

That reduces waste and therefore reduces consumption and demand of oil-based fuels wasted in slow moving and stalled traffic.

The technology for telecommuting is here now. And it is getting better all the time. Businesses, industries, organizations, institutions, and government offices can and should start implementing telecommuting programs now.

Many already are implementing telecommuting programs now. But there is much room to expand telecommuting programs.

This article is a must read for anyone interested in solving the gas, oil, and energy crises.

Investigate state's computer snafus

www.madison.com

Before Wisconsin spent $35.6 million to upgrade the Department of Motor Vehicles' computerized registration and titling system, it took motorists up to four weeks to get license plates and vehicle titles.

Now, after the costly upgrade, the wait time is -- 12 weeks.

If you're seeing red over spending $35.6 million of taxpayers' money on a project that made things worse, you ain't seen nuthin' yet.

All over state government at the Department of Revenue, UW, Department of Corrections and Elections Board efforts to install new computerized systems and upgrade existing ones have gone awry at taxpayers' expense.

Thankfully, lawmakers are paying attention. Leaders of the Legislature's Joint Audit Committee, Sen. Carol Roessler, R-Oshkosh, and Rep. Suzanne Jeskewitz, R-Menomonee Falls, along with Sen. Robert Cowles, R-Green Bay, plan to request an audit to find out what's going wrong.

Their effort deserves all lawmakers' support.

Anyone who has come in contact with computers learns to cringe at words like "upgrade" and "new installation." Something always goes wrong. The difference in the state's situation is that the projects involve many millions of dollars, and things are going wrong repeatedly in ways that cost residents, businesses and other government units time and money.

We need to know who is screwing up and why. Then we need to make corrections so that it stops happening. A legislative review should ask:

• Is there a common theme to the snafus?

• Has the state been contracting with incompetent businesses to do the computer projects?

• Were the state's project goals realistic?

• Did the state fail to provide the contractors with the support and resources they need or were the state's preparations for computer changes inadequate?

• Does the state have the expertise to direct and oversee the contractors?

• Were the state's contracts for the work faulty?

Currently, it is difficult to pinpoint a villain. The state agencies involved are as frustrated as anyone and are forthrightly apologizing. In at least one case the contractor is attempting to fix the problems for free.

But that does not excuse the delays and errors. Take the Revenue Department's system for calculating the share of sales and use tax collections owed to counties and special districts.
The 4-year-old, $37-million system still can't get its job right. It underpaid 33 counties a total of $1.8 million and overpaid 25 counties and two professional sports districts by $2.8 million.

Those kinds of mistakes are simply intolerable. Lawmakers should proceed full speed ahead with an investigation.

Computer downtime rising up to work on world's problems

www.tmcnet.com

(San Antonio Express-News (KRT) Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge)

People donating their spare computing power to the World Community Grid are helping to find solutions to some of the world's most vexing problems, such as discovering new drugs to combat AIDS.

More than a quarter of a million PCs worldwide have joined the nonprofit network, letting researchers crunch data faster and more cheaply."The World Community Grid takes research projects that were unimaginable by researchers before and makes them possible," said Viktors Berstis, 57, a master inventor at IBM who has led development of the philanthropic project, which his company sponsors.

The grid encourages people, businesses and other organizations around the world with PCs to download software enabling them to donate computer downtime to researchers to solve problems that require supercomputing power.

Organizations partnering with the World Community Grid in donating their idle computing time include Coastal Federal Credit Union, based in Raleigh, N.C., the United Way, the Semiconductor Industry Association and the University of Kentucky.Grid computing involves linking large numbers of computers together to harness their collective power to solve complex problems.

Most grid projects focus on drug development, but other industries ranging from financial services to manufacturing have begun using grid computing in their businesses, according to United Devices, an Austin-based company that created the software behind the project.The first World Community Grid project, the Human Proteome Folding Project, was launched in November 2004. Researchers created a database that describes the structure of about 120,000 protein domains, spanning 90 complete genomes, that could not be described using traditional approaches.

The database could ultimately help scientists find cures to diseases such as cancer and malaria."If the World Community Grid didn't exist, I would probably be doing this for E. coli and tuberculosis and just a few other pathogens," said Richard Bonneau, assistant professor of biology and computer science at New York University and the principal investigator on the Human Proteome Folding Project.

Bonneau and researchers at the Institute for Systems Biology, where the project took place, estimate that it would have taken 100 years to crunch the data to outline the protein structures using only the supercomputers at its center."What the grid has allowed me to do is make this more widely accessible," Bonneau said.

"In the end, the World Community Grid will have enabled the adoption of a new technology by the biomedical community that is important. If I didn't have the grid, I would have to buy as large a computer as I or my institution could afford." A supercomputer can cost tens of millions of dollars initially and half a million dollars a year or more to operate, Bonneau said.

Instead of spending money on computing power, the researchers are able to spend money on advancing the science and solving complex problems, he said.The latest World Community Grid project is focused on developing better treatments for those infected with HIV in the face of its evolving drug resistance.

It's called the FightAIDS@Home project. The Olson Laboratory project at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, Calif., is heading the study.The project lets researchers run millions of computations to test chemical compounds against proteins found in HIV to find what compounds prevent it from reproducing, said Dr. William Lindstrom, research associate in professor Art Olson's laboratory at the Scripps institute."The World Community Grid has allowed us to ask questions we really wouldn't have been able to ask without it," Lindstrom said.

The donation of computer time also means a lot to researchers, he said.

"For us, it's really nice to feel like people are participating in our research." Future projects could focus on climate change, pandemic outbreaks, natural disaster predictions and more.

The system can tackle all kinds of things impossible today for researchers who don't have access to supercomputing systems, said IBM's Berstis.As of last week, more than 263,000 PCs in 157 countries are running the World Community Grid. That computation power makes the grid one of the top five supercomputers in the world, Berstis said.

Berstis, who has been with IBM for 28 years, has received 105 patents from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and has 100 more pending. Last year he received 15 patents, and he has several patents and patents pending on grid computing.

"You often are annoyed by something," Berstis said. "You have an annoyance. You think of it as an opportunity. Once in a while something pops up in the back of your head as a solution.

" Berstis started inventing at age 4, when he made crystal radios. He said he has been making electronic "doodads" and studying chemistry, physics and math for years."You never know where the latest idea might come from," he said. "You think about the ridiculous and then fix all the problems. You sort of get an idea about what makes sense.

" The World Community Grid made sense to Berstis."Grid computing is bringing a new level of computing power to bear," he said.

MSU professors to design computer safety curriculum with research grant from Microsoft

(www.newsroom.msu.edu).- EAST LANSING, Mich. – Think MP3 downloads, online shopping and online communities – today’s teens know all about these Internet possibilities. But do they know how to protect themselves from everyday online threats such as identity theft, spyware, scams and fraud?

Through a new research grant, Michigan State University researchers from several departments in the College of Communication Arts & Sciences and the College of Engineering are on a mission to make teens – and the Internet – safer.

Microsoft Research has provided a $50,000 grant to study local high schoolers’ computer safety and to create and evaluate curriculum to improve online safety for teens and first-year college students.

Professors Nora Rifon, an expert in the area of human behavior and decision-making in the Department of Advertising, Public Relations and Retailing, and Robert LaRose, an expert in the social effects of the Internet from the Department of Telecommunication, Information Studies and Media, are the lead investigators of the project.

Rifon credits her relationship with the state of Michigan, particularly the Attorney General's Office, for bringing the idea to fruition. She has worked with the Attorney General's Office since 2000. In addition to working on informational security and privacy issues, Rifon has served as an expert witness for the Attorney General's Consumer Protection Division.

“My work with the state showed a need for more information and policy on online privacy. Computer safety is a serious issue today and tomorrow. Today’s teens are tomorrow’s adults and we need to understand how they use and perceive online environments to help protect themselves now and as adults. A well-developed high school curriculum is the first step to help our youth protect themselves,” Rifon said.

Michigan Attorney General Mike Cox says this work is extremely valuable.

"My ID theft team, like professor Rifon and Marty Pohl at Holt High School, recognized that teens are particularly vulnerable to losing control of their personal information as they prepare to graduate and leave their families to live on their own," Cox said.

"Requests for personal information will bombard every young adult, so it's essential that they know how they can reduce the risk of having their information misused. It is very important for young adults to both learn and adopt safe information practices."

Working directly with the Holt School District and freshmen classes at Michigan State University, the project will involve finding out what young people think about their risks and abilities to protect themselves online. MSU researchers will examine factors that help determine their knowledge, confidence and behaviors related to computer safety.

Rifon and co-principal investigator LaRose will use their i-safety model to create online courseware based on the information they gather and offer prototypes to use in Holt computer classes and on MSU’s campus.

Their model was developed and tested with funding from a grant from the National Science Foundation and the curriculum is a direct extension of that work. Richard Enbody of the College of Engineering will develop interactive software that will make it possible to tailor the online lessons to individual students based on their safety needs and abilities.

The researchers will study the impacts of the prototype being used in the classroom.

“The prototype will directly affect one local school district, but the curriculum will soon be available to all districts interested in computer safety,” Rifon said.

LaRose stresses that the project fits into a long-term goal for the college.

“The MSU component will be our contribution to a growing national movement to improve the information and communication technology literacy of college students,” LaRose said.

The proposal was subjected to a rigorous peer-review process by Microsoft security experts and was one of 15 selected from 114 submissions for funding in the Microsoft Research External Research & Programs, Trustworthy Computing Curriculum 2006 Request for Proposals.

“Microsoft is committed to investing in innovative research throughout the academic community to advance the state-of-the-art in computing,” said John Spencer, Microsoft program manager.

“Our goal in funding projects such as the computer safety course at Michigan State University is to continue to drive innovation and to create a safer computing environment for everyone,” he said.

Computer to help hospitals in emergencies

(www.upi.com).- ITHACA, N.Y.- Cornell University is joining the Lockheed Martin Corp. in developing a computerized system for hospitals to plan and deal with mass casualty events.

Weill Cornell Medical College and Lockheed Martin will develop the system to assist the nation's hospitals in handling mass casualties from disasters such as hurricanes, pandemics and bioterrorism. The system will be able to create disaster simulations for testing purposes and act as a decision-making support system in a real disaster.

The system, for which Lockheed is providing the research funding, will be an extension of a prototype developed at Cornell. It will combine Cornell's computer models with command-and-control systems Lockheed developed for medical services in the military. Other technology companies will be invited to work on the project.

"In light of the 9-11 attacks, Hurricane Katrina and the persistent threat of terrorism, we believe there is an urgent need to develop logistics solutions for planning and response in the face of mass casualty events," said Jack Muckstadt, professor of operations research and industrial engineering.

The goal is to create a distributed communications system that would coordinate the work of emergency responders, hospital managers and local and regional officials.

Computer Aided Technology, Inc. Earns Top SolidWorks North American Subscription Service Award

(www10.mcadcafe.com).- Buffalo Grove - Computer Aided Technology, Inc. (CATI) received the Top SolidWorks Subscription Award for Resellers in North America at the SolidWorks World International User Conference and Exposition held in Las Vegas, NV.

A top reseller of SolidWorks ® software, CATI supports customers in Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Upper Michigan and Wisconsin. SolidWorks Corporation also recognized CATI as a Charter Reseller of SolidWorks software, the company being one of a small group of resellers that joined the network before the first production release of SolidWorks.

CATI strives to continuously improve its services to the community by offering online customer support, technical webcasts and informative events on an ongoing basis."CATI has always worked closely with its customers and the technical staff is committed to making sure engineers and designers get the most out of their investment in SolidWorks," commented Richard Werneth, president, CATI.

“Recent improvements, such as our online customer support and expanded facility in Buffalo Grove, reflect CATI’s dedication to the SolidWorks community. As one of the original resellers of SolidWorks software, we look forward to a continued partnership that will provide engineers with the most powerful technology solutions available.”

“CATI was one of the first resellers in the world to partner with SolidWorks Corporation,” said Bertrand Sicot, vice president North American sales, SolidWorks Corporation. “From the beginning, CATI’s focus was to deliver the highest level of customer support and continued innovation to SolidWorks users – that mission continues in their work today.

When SolidWorks Corporation was founded, one of its key goals was to build a first-class reseller channel and CATI represents one of the best within that community.” About CATIComputer Aided Technology, Inc. (CATI), headquartered in Buffalo Grove, IL, provides the Midwest with six full-service facilities, supporting Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan and Wisconsin. CATI creates competitive advantage for manufacturing clients by leveraging an industry-experienced team and leading technology solutions.

CATI is the Nation’s original SolidWorks Reseller and a Top Reseller of SolidWorks in the Midwest. CATI is dedicated to providing comprehensive solutions to engineering, manufacturing, and educational sectors and offers a full suite of SolidWorks Solution Partner technologies including CAD, CAE, CAID, CAM, ECAD, and PDM solutions.

For the latest news from CATI, visit the company’s website at www.cati.com or contact a representative at 888-308-2284. About SolidWorks CorporationSolidWorks Corporation, a Dassault Systèmes S.A. (Nasdaq: DASTY, Euronext Paris: #13065, DSY.PA) company, develops and markets software for design, analysis, and product data management.

It is the leading supplier of CAD software, helping hundreds of thousands of users speed next-generation products to market around the world.

With SolidWorks software, designers excel at their jobs and make their companies more successful by bringing designs to life. For the latest news, information, or an online demonstration, visit the company's Web site ( www.solidworks.com )