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| The Waverider, a.k.a. the X-51, is illustrated here in flight. The experimental aircraft is designed to fly more than six times faster than the speed of sound on ordinary jet fuel. View related photos Boeing |
Hypersonic ‘WaveRider’ poised for test flight
Can women managers reduce your business risk?
By Jane Merriman
LONDON (Reuters) - Would the world economy have got into such a mess if more women had been in charge - is a difficult question to answer.
The economic crisis, though, could put a spotlight on what women offer as leaders who could help repair the damage.
"We'd love to think it would make a difference," said Ruth Sealy, deputy director of the International Center for Women Leaders at Cranfield University.
Sealy said the crisis is bringing to light academic research, which includes studies showing that mixed management teams make better decisions and are more innovative.
Goal-driven (mostly male) management teams in the financial services industry have been blamed for a culture of excessive risk-taking that has crippled the global banking system.
"Would greater gender balance in decision-making have produced a different outcome? Probably," said Alice Eagly, Professor and Chair of Pyschology at Northwestern University.
"Psychological research suggests that women are somewhat less willing than men to take extreme risks."
In management-speak, men's leadership style is known as "transactional" which is basically carrot and stick.
This approach is considered old-fashioned in some academic circles and deemed ill-suited to cutting-edge companies, where management structures are flatter and less hierarchical.
Women's management style is characterized as more relationship-based that aims to encourage and empower.
Putting the two together provides a more balanced mix.
Research from London Business School supports the fact that an equal male/female split in a management team is best for promoting innovation in teams, said Elisabeth Kelan, who helped set up the Center for Women in Business at the School.
Women executives say having to handle a family as well as a career gives them skills which can be useful in management.
"The differences between female and male leaders from my perspective are that women leaders usually have more emotional intelligence, teamwork and interpersonal skills," said Dora Liu, a partner in financial services at Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu, based in Shanghai.
"Usually they have a more balanced work/life style which is why women tend to have more emphasis on "We" versus "Me.""
But it's hard to change attitudes and overcome stereotypes.
"It's still 'Think manager, think male,'" said Sealy.
Men are often seen as being good at taking charge, strong at delegating and problem solving.
"Because these latter qualities are more closely associated with effective leadership, the perception can be that women leaders just don't measure up to men," said Josefine van Zanten, global head of diversity and inclusion at oil company Shell, which has programs to attract, develop and promote women.
"There is much more to be done to ensure that corporations, which were designed by Western, white men for Western white men, offer more flexibility to ensure everyone is able to contribute to their highest potential."
Big international companies already make efforts to try to promote diversity in terms of race and gender.
But the economic crisis has put traditional leadership qualities under greater scrutiny.
"I think there is room, now that the old management style is in question, for new ways of managing," said Kelan, who is also a lecturer in work and organizations at King's College London.
"Regardless of women bringing certain specific skills to leadership, other styles of leading will become more accepted which is a good thing for women."
(Editing by Paul Casciato)
T-Mobile sales of G1 hit 1 million in first two quarters
But sales of the Android-based smartphone are far behind the iPhone
April 24, 2009 (Computerworld) T-Mobile USA sold 1 million G1 smartphones in the first six months since it went on the market, about one-third the number of Apple Inc. iPhones that sold in its first two quarters.
The G1, based on the Android platform, went on sale in October 2008. The sales figure was included in a first-quarter financial report from T-Mobile's parent company Deutsche Telekom released earlier this week.
AT&T Inc. and Apple sold 3.7 million iPhones in the first two quarters after the device first went on sale on June 29, 2007, according to several reports. Apple also indicated it sold its first million iPhones in 74 days. For the most recent quarter, Apple reported iPhone sales of 3.79 million.
Bloggers have attempted to account for the disparity between the G1 and iPhone sales, with one noting that T-Mobile is smaller than AT&T and T-Mobile has a 3G network still in its early development. T-Mobile is expected to double the reach of its 3G network in 2009, Deutsche Telekom reported.
Sean Ryan, an analyst at research firm IDC, said T-Mobile's smaller size has made a difference. "I don't think anyone expected the G1 debut to match that of the iPhone," Ryan said, "Still, 1 million units for the fourth-largest U.S. carrier, compared with Apple's 3.7 million for the largest carrier, is respectable. Also, this does set a bar for the Palm Pre debut on Sprint."
In comparison, Nokia and Research in Motion Ltd. ship many more phones by working with multiple carriers, Ryan said. Nokia shipped 13.7 million smartphones worldwide in the first quarter, while RIM shipped 7.9 million BlackBerry devices worldwide in the first quarter, he said.
Why do people write viruses?
# Date : April 24th, 2009
# Author : Chad Perrin
# Category : Cybercrime, Malware, Security, Virus
The image of virus writers as intelligent kids with too much time on their hands resorting to digital vandalism to entertain themselves persists. Years ago, making such a guess about why people write viruses might have been accurate most of the time, but the world has moved on. The writers of viruses and other mobile malicious code are many and varied, and their reasons are as wide-ranging as they are, themselves.
The forms of replicating mobile malicious code are multifarious, too. The most common forms are viruses, worms, and trojans, though non-replicating equivalents are gaining prominence as well. Cross-site scripting is an example of non-replicating code that serves much the same purpose as self replicating malicious code; it can affect millions without having to actually “infect” the victim’s computer at all.
I can’t claim to know why everybody who writes malicious code does so. I haven’t met them all. I can make some generalizations about reasons people might do so, though.
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Anger Issues: There are those who, for whatever reason, just do destructive things for the sake of their destructiveness. They may be malicious narcissists, psychopaths, or just so self-centered in their impression that the whole world is against them that they will blindly lash out at anyone and everyone when they get the chance. For such people, who I believe are a thankfully rare breed, the harm they cause others has no point beyond the harm itself. They are unreasoningly destructive, and that’s pretty much all there is to it. They might think they’re misunderstood, and want to communicate with the world by harming it in some way — and maybe they’re right, that people just don’t understand them deep down. When they react to this state of affairs by maliciously setting out to harm anonymous strangers, however, I don’t think I want to understand them beyond the minimum required to track them down and put a stop to their antisocial behavior. Your mileage may vary, especially if you’re a criminal psychologist.
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Do It For The Lulz: Some still do it for the “fun” of destruction. They may get a thrill out of reading news items about their work causing people trouble, or they may just take a fire-and-forget approach, creating destructive, self replicating programs for the joy of it without much caring whether they ever see the consequences themselves. Mostly, I’m sure they find it funny to read about people being inconvenienced by what they’ve done. In short, some people write mobile malicious code for the same reasons vandals break windows and spray paint garage doors that belong to people they don’t even know.
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Espionage: I’m not talking about sabotage here; I’ll address that later. By “espionage”, I mean attempts to gather information through underhanded means for reasons other than identity fraud and other directly, criminally profitable purposes. Viruses, worms, trojans, and even backdoors and other malicious code slipped into your software by the vendor may serve the purposes of espionage. People worry about the potential for Chinese manufactured computers having some kind of hardware backdoor built into them, conspiracy theories about commercial software vendors being required to provide backdoor access to the NSA run rampant, the government of India famously demanded that Blackberry provide universal decryption keys for all Blackberry devices sold in the country, and the NSA’s Dual_EC_DRBG NIST encryption standard may itself include a backdoor of sorts as I mentioned in What my grandmother taught me about IT security.
Considering the fiasco of federal warrantless wiretapping violations of the law during the Bush Administration’s tenure, and the worse violations hinted at by several officials’ carefully phrased testimony that such worse violations weren’t a part of this particular program, it would be foolish to assume that government agencies never spy on people via software. How many of you remember ECHELON?
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Online Gangs: It probably sounds like something out of a 1980s vintage techno-thriller like Bruce Sterling’s Islands in the Net, but it is disturbingly becoming a reality — there are actual “gangs” of angry, or just plain ignorant, kids who engage in digital vandalism as part of a misdirected urge to enhance group identity and personal pride in a fractious, underground community. Such groups may target each other or, more often, some third party whose troubles at the hands of such a gang of vandals will be easily noticed and identified. With dramatic names like “Team Holocaust” and “Phalcon SKISMs“, such “cybergangs” may occasionally claim a higher purpose (like YAM), but may also have no pretentions of purpose other than claiming a strong group identity — like being a Denver Broncos fan, except they mark their territory with digital vandalism instead of by painting their torsos orange and waving giant foam fingers in the air.
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The Hacker Instinct: Keep in mind the difference between a hacker and a security cracker. With that in mind, people with a hacker mindset usually find themselves eventually drawn to specific fields of interest. In some cases, that interest might revolve around understanding self replicating mobile malicious code. Sometimes, the best way to understand something is to experiment with different ways to create examples of it. Sometimes, the best way to test something you’ve created is to see it operating under real world conditions. Some immoral or amoral hackers with an interest in self replicating mobile malicious code may test their creations by releasing them into the wild and seeing how they do.
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Money Money Money: Most writers of malicious code in the wild these days seem to fall into this category; people who are in it for the filthy lucre. Viruses and worms often carry payloads that open up avenues of intrusion into a system, providing a means for either security crackers or their automated tools to slip past the system’s defenses. Such automated tools can harvest authentication information and other sensitive data (such as for reasons of identity fraud), set themselves up as automated spam generators, or contact a centralized control mechanism of some sort such as an IRC chatroom to create a botnet of thousands, or even millions, of unwitting users’ computers, all of which can be controlled simultaneously by a single security cracker. It is increasingly common for botnets to be offered for rent, for any of a vast number of reasons.
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Political Agitation: Sometimes, digital vandalism — whether accomplished by a virus, a worm, a DDoS attack, or some other means — can be accomplished for the purpose of making a statement. Whether the reason for something like that is directly political in the sense of addressing matters related to government or more indirectly political such as unignorably interfering with certain types of Websites and other operations of some class of people with whom one disagrees somehow, the point is sometimes to make people who aren’t directly responsible for whatever’s being targeted aware of one’s own disapproval of those targets. DDoS and other attacks against Microsoft or Yahoo! might fall into this category.
Depending on their specific choices of targets and their motivating issues, some such political agitators (as in the case of those targeting, and protesting, Chinese and Australian national firewall policies) might even be admirable for their principles and the courage of their convictions to some degree. In extreme cases on the other hand, such as where large numbers of innocent bystanders are materially harmed (having their checking accounts wiped out to make a political statement, perhaps), action taken on behalf of this kind of motivation might reasonably be called “terrorism”.
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Romance And Drama: Some may be drawn in by the perceived romance and drama of a criminal life itself. Just as some people may start out seduced to a life of crime by the power they perceive in street pushers in their neighborhoods, the exploits of cat burglars in movies, or the rare reports of some criminals who always seem to get away with their criminal acts in the news, the artificial mystique manufactured by the media around “Computer Hackers” can inspire the aspirations of the amoral youth with technical talents. Because of the character of certain online communities, it can be much easier sometimes to feed one’s own delusions of the romance and drama of being a “Computer Hacker” for a long time than in most other criminal enterprises where the physically gritty, and petty, reality of what they do becomes quickly inescapable. Once fully absorbed within such an insulated, self-reinforcing fantasy life, I don’t know how easy it is to overcome the illusion and realize that one has become nothing but a criminal security cracker, that being a real hacker is about skill and not 1337 h4xx0r nicknames, without being forcibly disillusioned by getting caught, prosecuted, and imprisoned for one’s crimes.
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Sabotage: Sometimes the purpose of malicious code might be directly targeted at disrupting the operations of some class of people one doesn’t like. While this sort of behavior might seem superficially similar to that of “terrorism” as described in the Political Agitation paragraph above, or to vandalism as described above, it’s not terrorism, and it’s more personal than typical vandalism. It is a simple criminal act, aimed at a specific target, more akin to assault. People with business interests may do this not for profit or for political purposes, but to damage other businesses’ ability to compete, at least temporarily. Government agencies may do so to try to bully another government into doing something it doesn’t want to do, as appears to have been the case in the Estonian “cyberwar”. The motivation to sabotage may even be based on something as petty as personal revenge.
If I had to guess, I’d say that the most common reasons by far these days are at least somewhat profit-motivated. The I Love You email virus was kind of a watershed incident, in that it was the point where a lot of people really started noticing the growing trend in profit generating mobile malicious code.
Any attempt to explain away all virus, worm, and other malicious code writing using a single generalization is unreasonably simplistic, though. Virus writers are people, too — at least in that they may have any of millions of different motivations for what they do — even if they’re often subhuman in some respects as well (notably their ethical development). Most are probably motivated by some combination of more than one of the above suggestions, in fact, and perhaps by other reasons as well.
Real robots rock!
Posted: Thursday, April 23, 2009 6:33 PM by Alan Boyle
The Robot Hall of Fame may sound like a science-fiction museum, but the latest inductees actually include more real robots than fictional ones. Among the stars of the show are a couple of contraptions that have surpassed science-fiction expectations: NASA's twin Mars rovers.
The other robots on the honor roll are also worthy of recognition:
* iRobot's Roomba floor-cleaning machine, arguably the first robot to do useful work in the living room (and pay off on the technological promise of "The Jetsons").
* Intuitive Surgical's da Vinci Surgical System, which helps doctors do precision surgery in operating rooms (including prostate gland removal ... yow!).
* Huey, Dewey and Louie, the cute robotic gardeners from the classic 1972 environmental sci-fi movie "Silent Running" (just in time for Earth Day).
* The T-800 Terminator, the killer robot from the future that was featured in the 1984 movie "The Terminator" (a role that arguably boosted Arnold Schwarzenegger's career as California's "Governator").
But could any of those other honorees work on the radiation-blasted surface of another planet, sending back science for more than five years without a single service call? I didn't think so!
The "Class of 2010" inductees were announced on Tuesday in Pittsburgh by the Carnegie Science Center and Carnegie Mellon University, during a preview of the science center's Roboworld exhibition. Starting in June, Roboworld will serve as the permanent home for the Robot Hall of Fame.
The Hall of Fame was created in 2003 to pay tribute to the fictional and real robots that have "inspired and embodied breakthrough accomplishments in robotics." Inductees are selected by a jury of scholars, researchers, writers, designers and entrepreneurs. The latest batch of robots will officially take their place next year.
Matt Mason, director of Carnegie Mellon's Robotics Institute, noted that the real robots outnumbered the fictional creations for the second time in a row. "We in the robotics field believe this is the beginning of a trend, as robots such as Spirit and Opportunity, Roomba and da Vinci are approaching or even exceeding performance levels that once were only imagined," he said in the university's news release.
The Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, are all about "exceeding performance levels": NASA's original mission plan called for the six-wheeled, golf-cart-sized probes to last 90 days on the Martian surface - but they're still in business more than five years after they bounced to their landings on opposite sides of the planet.
It hasn't always been easy. In fact, as the years went on, the two rovers have developed different "personalities" in the minds of their controllers back here on Earth.
Cornell astronomer Steve Squyres, who heads up the rover science team, has often called Opportunity "Little Miss Perfect": Sure, she sometimes gets into scrapes, like the time she was hung up on a Martian sand dune, but overall she's had an easy time of it and tends to grab the headlines.
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| This is a T-800 Terminator model used in Terminator 3: Rise Of The Machine |
Spirit, on the other hand, is like the heroine in one of those dark Dickensian novels. "Spirit had to work for everything - literally had to climb a mountain on Mars," Squyres once said. You might say she's been working her fingers to the bone ... if she had fingers, that is. As it is, she's got one wheel out of commission and has to drag it behind her, rolling backwards over rough terrain. Lately, she's also been suffering recurring bouts of amnesia.
But Spirit is still on the march, investigating an intriguing plateau named "Home Plate" (the name refers to the rock formation's resemblance to a baseball diamond's home plate). Opportunity, meanwhile, is breezing along on its way to its next big photo op: the 13.7-mile-wide (22-kilometer-wide) Endeavour Crater.
The other robots have their emotional appeal as well: To the outside world, Roombas may be nothing more than faceless floor-cleaning machines - but some owners have been known to give nicknames to their gizmos, erect Web sites in their honor and trade Roomba tips on online discussion groups.
As for da Vinci ... well, how can you not invest some emotional capital in the device that's doing the cutting during your hysterectomy, prostatectomy, heart-valve repair or weight-loss surgery?
When it comes to fictional robots, the Terminator has already gained immortality in the Library of Congress' National Film Registry, and the T-800's Hall of Fame status only adds to its status as a robo-icon.
"The Terminator represents humankind's greatest fear of robots: that they may one day turn on us, their creators, and seek to exterminate the human race," Don Marinelli, executive producer of Carnegie Mellon's Entertainment Technology Center, said in Tuesday's news release. The worry about a robot "nerdocalypse" has long been a part of the debate over the coming singularity.
Huey, Dewey and Louie are robots of a different color: In "Silent Running," they're the ones who help preserve Earth's species - even after the humans decide they're no longer worth preserving.
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Space oasis crewman Freeman Lowell (Bruce Dern) teaches gardening skills to the robots Huey and Dewey in the movie "Silent Running" |
If that sounds familiar, that may be because Carnegie Mellon's Robotics Institute is involved in a $10 million Agriculture Department program that uses autonomous robotic vehicles to help tend apple orchards and orange groves. Or it may be because the "Silent Running" storyline resonates in a more recent robot movie, "WALL-E."
Speaking of "WALL-E," I'd have to say that the movie's cute robot star should be on the list for a future spot in the Hall of Fame (even though some still debate whether WALL-E was a rip-off of Johnny 5 in "Short Circuit"). Every time the Robot Hall of Fame comes up for discussion, I like to open up the nominations for our "Robot People's Choice" award. So now is the perfect time to nominate your favorite yet-to-be-honored robot - or take issue with the selections so far.
To refresh your memory, here's the list of past Hall of Fame inductees. These robots and the newly named Class of 2010 are ineligible for the "People's Choice" prize:
* 2003: HAL 9000, Mars Pathfinder Sojourner rover, R2-D2, Unimate.
* 2004: ASIMO, Shakey, Astro Boy, Robby the Robot, C-3PO.
* 2006: AIBO, SCARA, David (from "A.I."), Maria (from "Metropolis"), Gort (from "The Day the Earth Stood Still").
* 2008: Raibert Hopper, NavLab 5, LEGO Mindstorms, Lt. Cmdr. Data (from the "Star Trek" saga).
I'll run through the comments you leave below, get a sense of the leading candidate and post the People's Choice as an addendum to this item. In case you're wondering, previous People's Choice winners have included Robby the Robot (2003), NASA's Spirit and Opportunity rovers (2004), B9 from "Lost in Space" (2006) and the NASA rovers again in 2007-2008.
Update for 11:55 a.m. ET April 24: John Callas, project manager for the rover team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, says engineers are trying to help the Spirit rover cope with computer glitches. "The natural question is, 'Is this an age-related effect?' And it could be," he told me Thursday.
However, the team still doesn't yet have enough information to track down the factors behind a recent string of unexpected reboots, he said. Whether the problem is age or something else, the rover team might just have to find ways to work around the glitches. "It's reasonable to expect that this may be another quirky behavior for the rover," Callas said.
Spirit's handlers are pressing on with their plan to send Spirit southward, from Home Plate to a couple of new sites nicknamed Goddard and Von Braun. Those sites may exhibit further evidence of hydrothermal activity during the region's ancient past, Callas said.
Late Thursday, at the end of Spirit's 1,886th Martian day (or "sol") of surface operations, Callas had some good news to report:
"Spirit successfully drove today on Sol 1886. Approximately 1.7 meters of progress was made in difficult, high-slip terrain. The drive sequence ran to completion without error. No faults or warnings were reported. Spirit is power positive, thermally stable and responsive to communication. Solar array energy production improved by more than 10 percent from a dust cleaning event on Sol 1881. The Sol 1887 plan will conduct science remote sensing. Near-normal tactical operations planning will continue for the period ahead and will include enhanced rover telemetry collection techniques to watch for any future anomalous behavior. There is still no explanation for these anomalies. The project is continuing the investigation."
Callas told me he was gratified to hear that the rovers have received new honors. He noted that "Spirit and Opportunity are in that elite vanguard that probably only Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 now share." They've outlived not only their expected life spans, but their originally planned missions as well. Each new turn of the wheel brings the rovers to unexplored frontiers - whether that's Goddard for Spirit, or Endeavour Crater for Opportunity.
"The objectives have not diminished for these two rovers after five years," Callas said, "and perhaps our greatest discoveries are still ahead of us."
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