Saturday, October 08, 2005

Iran's Stocks Plunge After Vote for U.N. Review of Nuclear Program. The country's stock prices began to decline after a nuclear agency passed a resolution referring Iran to the U.N. Security Council for violating its nuclear obligations. By NAZILA FATHI. [NYT > Business] 10:54:16 PM    comment []

An Algorithm as a Pickax. As databases grow richer, even the I.R.S. and the local grocery store are becoming miners. By WILLIAM J. HOLSTEIN. [NYT > Business] 10:54:09 PM    comment []

In a Grueling Desert Race, a Winner, but Not a Driver. The Grand Challenge was a Pentagon project meant to spur development of technologies for 21st-century automated warfare. By JOHN MARKOFF. [NYT > Business] 10:52:35 PM    comment []

With Marymount Set to Close, Students Ponder Next Step. No sooner had the school year started at the century-old Roman Catholic women's college than students received word Thursday that their college was closing. By MAREK FUCHS. [NYT > Education] 3:51:04 PM    comment []

China's netizens. "Lu Li, a 23-year-old working with a foreign firm in East China's Shanghai, has found surfing online indispensable in her daily life since she first accessed to the Internet seven years ago,"this Xinhua article says. "It has unfolded a new chapter in my life," she says, adding that she can hardly imagine living without the Internet. Lu is one of the new generation emerging in the country in the past ten years, who are learning, entertaining and shopping all electronically. A report released by the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) in July indicates that China has 103 million netizens, or Internet users, like Lu Li. That means one out of 13 Chinese uses the Internet. Ten years ago, there were barely 50,000 Internet accounts throughout China. A survey on some 2,400 people in five Chinese cities show that an average netizen spends 2.73 hours online daily, reading news, sending or receiving emails, playing games, downloading music, gathering background materials or chatting". Internet becoming part of life for Chinese [Smart Mobs] 3:50:46 PM    comment []

"WHAT THE HACK" SUBMISSION DEADLINE APPROACHES. "What The Hack" is this year's international hacker get-together taking place in the Netherlands. Planning for the outdoor conference, scheduled for July 28-31, is well underway. The deadline for talk proposals is this coming Sunday, May 1st. [2600: The Hacker Quarterly] 3:37:09 PM    comment []

Young blog their way to a publishing revolution. Millions of young people who have grown up with the internet and mobile phones are no longer content with the one-way traffic of traditional media and are publishing and aggregating their own content, according to a British survey of The Guardian of those aged between 14 and 21. A generation has grown up using the internet as its primary means of communication, thanks to an early grasp of online communities and messaging services as well as simple technology allowing web users to launch a personal weblog, or blog, without any specialist technical knowledge. On average, people between 14 and 21 spend almost eight hours a week online, but it is far from a solitary activity. There are signs of a significant generation gap, and rather than using the internet as their parents do - as an information source, to shop or to read newspapers online - most young people are using it to communicate with one another. [Smart Mobs] 3:37:01 PM    comment []

MIT World » : Why So Slow? The Advancement of Women [del.icio.us]. Why do so few women occupy positions of power and prestige in every field? To achieve parity we have to know what the problems are as well as what the problems are not. The data show that there has been progress but that a stubborn problem remains: advancement is slower for women than for men in every profession. That stubborn problem is not (or not solely) due to too few women in the pipeline, inequitable childcare arrangements, or women's "choosing" to leave the professions. Rather, the ubiquity of women's slow advancement requires a general explanation through the concepts of gender schemas and the accumulation of advantage. Gender schemas lead both men and women to see men as more competent and able than women, to respond more favorably to male than female leaders, and to attend and defer more to men than to women. Many of the cases in which a woman is disadvantaged are of small scale. The notion of the accumulation of advantage demonstrates how even small-scale disadvantages can mount up over time. The gender schemas analysis allows us to devise appropriate remedies at the institutional level and at more individual levels. ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Virginia Valian is Professor of Psychology and Linguistics at Hunter College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). She is a cognitive scientist whose research focuses on language acquisition in two-year-olds, second language acquisition, and sex differences in cognition. Dr. Valian's interest in sex differences led her to write Why So Slow? The Advancement of Women (MIT Press, 1998; paperback, 1999). Dr. Valian asks why so few women are at the top of their profession, whether the profession be science, law, medicine, college teaching, industry, or business. To provide an answer, Dr. Valian integrates research from psychology, sociology, economics, and neuropsychology. More on Virginia Valian NOTES ON THE VIDEO (Time Index): Video length is 1:31:19. Tom Magnanti, MIT Institute Professor and Dean of Engineering introduces Virginia Valian. Valian begins at 2:00. Q&A begins at 1:07:00. Note: Audio level is low during introduction but improves dramatically when Valian begins her presentation. [jill/txt] 3:35:53 PM    comment []

Markoff: Robotic Vehicles Contend for the Battlefield. Fifteen robotic vehicles sprinted through the Nevada desert Saturday afternoon, closing in on a $2 million prize from the Pentagon. By JOHN MARKOFF. [NYT > Technology] And, Wes: The DARPA Grand Challenge is running and the Web site has pretty good live coverage. My only complaint is that the course map is unreadable, especially since there are no direction indicators. [Hack the Planet] 3:34:59 PM    comment []