The 20th annual Ig Nobel Prizes were awarded Thursday night for "achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think." Organized by the same people who produce Annals of Improbable http://improbable.com/ Research, the prizes commemorate the world's funniest research, and sometimes the world's biggest villains (BP is a winner this year). Here's a list of the 2010 prizes, with text from the official award announcements.
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This article is part of our special report on the 20th anniversary of the H-1B visa, which also includes first-person accounts from five IT workers who have been directly affected by the H-1B program and visual and interactive tools to help you analyze H-1B visa data.
The annual RSA Conference, now in its 20th year, will be rocking this month as the security industry gathers in the weeklong extravaganza of product introductions and security experts arguing cloud and mobile computing security issues.
Analysts are mixed on whether Nortel, the disintegrating telecom titan, will survive in some form or die off, becoming a distant memory of a bygone era and century.
Well, that didn't take long. My post earlier this week ("Does Obama want to tap your computer?") generated a swarm of responses, some of them calling for my head. Whenever you take on folks like Glenn Beck and Fox News, that's pretty much what you're in for.
Apple this week announced that the fabled white iPhone 4 has been delayed yet again, now until spring 2011. The news brought to mind how a classic American novel might be updated for the 21st century….(You can find the full text of "Moby Dick" online.)
The Department of Energy has called the U.S. electrical power grid the largest machine on Earth. It has over 9,200 generating units that produce more than 1 million megawatts of electricity. And they're connected to a network with more than 300,000 miles of transmission lines. In 2003, the National Academy of Engineering identified electrification, made possible by the national power grid, as "the most significant engineering achievement of the 20th century."
The late 18th century was a dangerous time on the high seas. Power vacuums in the Mediterranean and the Caribbean had created the perfect breeding ground for bands of pirates to operate without any real opposition. The success of the newly-formed United States of America relied upon its ability to build and maintain business relationships around the world, and these pirates were a direct threat to the success of the American experiment in democracy.
President-elect Barack Obama recently announced that he will appoint the very first national Chief Technology Officer as a part of his administration. It seems a good idea: the yet-to-be-named CTO will be charged with ensuring that the government and all its agencies have the right infrastructure, policies and services in place for the 21st century. Unfortunately, a CTO might not be the best resource to solve the most pressing issue for the Federal IT infrastructure. The problem is not so much a lack of vi
The Internet Society, which oversees operation of the .org registry and sponsors standards development work, is celebrating its 20th anniversary with a gala event in Geneva next month.
If you follow NCAA college football, you're probably aware that Penn State's head coach, Joe Paterno, has been in that job seemingly forever. When he was named head coach, it was the same year Bob Metcalfe invented Ethernet (1973)! And Paterno had already been an assistant there for 16 years, starting in the PSU coaching staff in 1957 (the year FORTRAN was created). There are many who believe his coaching methods and style are mired in the mid-nineteenth century.
Share, the independent IBM user group, holds its winter get-together in Tampa, Fla., this week. The event has been held for more than half a century and is aimed at giving IBM customers access to Big Blue engineers, partners, as well as fellow IBM customers to get an in-depth look at the technology that IBM is offering and how it can fit into their data centers.
I have two quotes for you: “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” (Who will watch the watchers?), from Juvenal, a Roman poet (late first century B.C. to early second century B.C.), and “All power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely,” from Lord Acton, a British historian (1834 to 1902).
TriCipher’s Ravi Ganesan (he founded the company back at the turn of the century) and the other fine folks at the company recently sponsored a survey conducted by Javelin Strategy & Research, which does research for the payment and financial services industries. The survey was on consumer online banking and the results were published last week, along with the results of follow-up studies.
The great thing about tracking the telcos is that if you wait long enough, they're guaranteed to pull some really dumb stunts. This week's cases in point: Verizon and BellSouth.
How does “Windows Server 2008” sound? Yeah, it sounds pretty bland to me, also. But it’s now official; Bill Gates himself declared that to be the shipping name for what we’ve been calling Longhorn for what seems like decades but, in reality, barely goes back to the last century.
At the end of the last century, I touted a new technology niche: “e-provisionware.” That name didn’t stick, but the concept of electronic provisioning did, creating the revolution in enterprise identity management that dominates today’s infrastructure platform.
The 21st century has been, so far, a prosperous one for China. The country has become enriched by its powerful manufacturing industry, which offers low operational costs and a seemingly unending supply of cheap labor to companies across the U.S. and Europe.
The chief security officer is a fairly new position. We first saw it emerge in larger corporations in the late 1990s; these days, it’s standard in most organizations. The CSO’s role varies, but typically it combines risk management, policy development and investment in security technologies.
It is often said that the weakest link in the IT security chain is the human being. In our technological age it is inconceivable to travel without network tethers such as a laptop PC, mobile telephone or e-mail PDA. The road warrior is connected 24/7 to his home, corporate office/clients/partners and the Internet. What has occurred in the 21st century is that all of this technology is taken for granted, and security is never a primary issue or concern.
"The Hobbit," J.R.R. Tolkien's famous story of which the movie version opens Dec. 14, was first published in 1937. The world of Middle Earth was set in an indeterminate time, but looked remarkably like an idealized early 19th-century England, though well-stocked with wizards, dwarfs, elves, dragons, trolls, goblins and of course hobbits. But techwise, it was, and is, the Stone Age of Middle Dearth.
My friend Marcus Lasance, a senior consultant with Siemens and formerly with MaXware, had promised to send me a report on another European identity conference (see this issue from late May with details about a conference held in Munich), the 20th annual EEMA conference in Paris. (EEMA is the European Association for e-Identity and Security, formerly the European Electronic Messaging Association.) Here’s what Lasance had to say:
This week marks Network World's 20th anniversary, and we’re taking the opportunity to reflect on 20 years of networking. The package of stories is pretty cool, and LANs of course feature prominently.