Microsoft’s Zune aims to be social butterfly | CNET News.com

On November 14, 2006, Microsoft launched its highly anticipated alternative to Apple’s iPod: the Zune. The device, which has a 30GB hard drive, FM tuner, 3-inch screen and USB 2.0, was the “talk of the web” as technology enthusiasts anxiously awaited an announcement of its official […]

The Trading Agent Competition is a multiple auction-type game competition held every year. A trading agent is a computer program that tries to satisfy the preferences of its client(s) by attempting to assemble a variety of travel packets through different types of auctions and competitions. The agent who fulfills his client’s preferences best wins.
This creates […]

In the February 07 edition of their magazine, View, PriceWaterhouseCoopers (PWC) addresses social networks from a business’ point of view. Three articles touch on social networks; the first concerns consumers and the following two discuss employee networks.
View calls this new type of consumer, the socially networked consumer, a powerful force in the marketplace that CEOs […]

A recent paper by Ross Anderson and Tyler Moore, “The Economics of Information Security: A Survey and Open Questions,” brings together the seemingly disparate fields of security and economics to discuss the reasoning behind security decisions. They provide examples such as why individual PC owners choose to install anti-virus software and why large banks choose […]

http://www.codeproject.com/csharp/Neural_Network_OCR.asp
(Note: Knowledge of C# / Java / C++ is recommended.) 
The beauty of neural networks is that they’re inherently generalized with respect to inputs and outputs.  Simply put, there is no type of neural network dedicated to one particular task.  While there are many implementations and algorithms that can be used to create a neural network, they can […]

http://www.siliconvalleywatcher.com/mt/archives/2006/10/cisco_telepresc.php
 
Cisco has recently started to move away from their main business of routers and switches and more into facilitating the building of human networks. One of their newest technologies is Teleprescence. This is a $300,000 system that comes with three 65in high definition TVs. What this allows is next generation video conferencing. The fault with […]

A group of researchers have developed a system to make accurate predictions on the network performance between two arbitrary computers on the Internet. In the paper (Google HTML version), they define iPlane, a system that, in addition to doing simple tests on round-trip latency and throughput, accounts for the actual network topology. Such […]

http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117959179.html?categoryid=2450&cs=1
The article “Technology hasn’t killed the collective viewing just yet” by Susanne Ault is about the social network Second Life (http://secondlife.com). Second Life is a free online community program created by Linden Lab that currently has 4.2 million registered users. In October of 2005, they had 600,000 members. This social network differs from the likes […]

Some of the links in this post are very cool graphs. Definitely worth checking out!
Summary: Given a graph, finding an important node can sometimes be very intuitive. For example, finding a ‘bridge’ between two separate social groups might be very obvious if the graph is drawn properly. However, converting a set of […]

Natasha Collins graduated Cornell in 2005. She was accepted to Yale medical school and planned to attend after spending time in Qatar to teach chemistry to college students, but was diagnosed with leukemia during the summer of 2006. Natasha has been bravely fighting the disease ever since with the support of her friends […]