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What if the Experts are Wrong?
In her important new book, Intervention: Confronting the Real Risks of Genetic Engineering and Life on a Biotech Planet, Caruso takes a critical look at the risks to society presented by innovation and technology. Commenting on this work, Peter G. Neumann recently wrote in RISKS DIGEST: “Although Denise's book might seem to be less computer related than many other topics discussed in RISKS, I think there are many problems and lessons to be learned from what we have in common. It is important for everyone to see that these problems are generic and relevant to essentially all technologies, not just computer systems.” A well-known figure in computer circles, Denise Caruso is a seasoned technology analyst and journalist, and was the Digital Commerce columnist for the New York Times before cofounding and serving as executive director for the Hybrid Vigor Institute, a not-for-profit research and consulting practice. One focus of the Institute is the development of new methods for assessing the risks of innovations in science and technology.

Publish and Perish
Authors Fabio Casati, Fausto Giunchiglia, and Maurizio Marchese of the University of Trento explain how the current publication and review model "is killing research and wasting your money."

A Microwave Paradigm
Claiming that the superiority of the microwave technology has demonstrated its power and commercial values in telecommunications and computer networks, . Joseph Bih offers a quick primer on the basic principles involved. Since completing his graduate studies as the University of North Texas, his research interests have focused on secure networks, information systems management and new technology applications.

Degrees that Expire
M.O. Thirunarayanan suggests that by granting degrees that will expire (and thus need be renewed), institutions of higher learning can not only assure their own health but also the continued value of the people who have attended attend. Thirunarayanan is an associate professor of learning technologies in the College of Education and also a Fellow of the Honors College at Florida International University, in Miami, Florida. He earned his doctoral degree in 1990 from Arizona State University, in Tempe, Arizona.

Security in Electronic Voting
Abhishek Parakh and Subhash Kak of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Louisiana State University consider the issues involved in making electronic voting secure.

CyberspaceE, Cosmology and the Meaning of Life
Albert Borgmann, who has been described as as the most rigorous and original philosopher of technology in the world, says: "The world no longer has a central point, neither on this planet nor in the cosmos. Everyday life and especially festive occasions on earth still reveal traces and recollections of focal points, of the college we attended, the place we got married, the capital where a new president is installed. It¹s the universe that impresses radical pointlessness on us." And where do we go from there? We go to his fascinating article, "Cyberspace, Cosmology and the Meaning of Life".

UBIQUITY ALERT: Business Decision Making, Management and Information Technology
V.Lalith Kumar, in the graduated program at ICFAI Business School in Bangalore, India, has crafted, with his coauthors, this interesting discussion of the relationship between business decision making and information technology. "The possibilities of IT in facilitating problem solving creativity are an important issue in itself; here the technology has some proven points ­ idea generation, exchange and testing mechanisms; growing sophistication of work styles; support of teamwork and communication."

Pfeiffer on the "Media Cloud"
The always-interesting Andreas Pfeiffer, who publishes the acclaimed THE PFEIFFER REPORT TREND ALERT, says: "Ever since digital media and the Internet have begun to challenge conventional media, the impending demise of the latter has been predicted by industry observers and casual on-lookers alike. But today's media reality is beginning to look somewhat different."

Bernhardt Irrgang on Visions of Technology
The distinguished philogopher Bernhadt Irrgang of Technology University, Dresdent, Germany, emphasizes the ethical underpinnings of any valid vision of technology.

Self-Healing Software
Goutam Kumar Saha explains: “Self-healing systems represent a very new area of research that deals with fault tolerance for dynamic systems. Self-healing deals with imprecise specification, uncontrolled environment, and reconfiguration of systems according to their dynamics. The term “elf-healing” denotes the capability of a software system in dealing with bugs. Fault Tolerance for dependable computing is about providing the specified service through rigorous design whereas self-healing is about run-time issues. Software which is capable of detecting and reacting to its malfunctions, is called self-healing software.”

Data and reality: a plea for management realism and data modesty
University of Amsterdam professor Rik Maes pleads for "management realism and data modesty," and says that organizations "are operating in an environment where their customers know more about them then they do themselves, no matter how sophisticated their information systems are. They desperately need involved managers really understanding the world instead of blaming their fail­ing information systems."

Business Process Management and Service Oriented Architecture
Faouzi Kamoun of the College of Information Technology at the University of Dubai offers a clear roadmap of the convergence of Business Process Management and Service Oriented Architecture and concludes: "The BPM-SOA combination allows services to be used as reusable components that can be orchestrated to support the needs of dynamic business processes. The combination enables businesses to iteratively design and optimize business processes that are based on services that can be changed quickly, instead of being 'hard-wired'. This has the potential to lead to increased agility, more transparency, lower development and maintenance costs and a better alignment between business and IT.

The Phenomenology of Slowly-Loading Webpages
Robert Rosenberger, a philosopher of technology at SUNY-Stony Brook, offers a reflection on how phenomenology can be used to talk about our bodily relations to computers. He writes in a style accessible to non-philosophers, and he told Ubiquity associate editor Arun Tripathis that he hopes this short paper can be used to "introduce concepts from phenomenology of technology to students and others new to these ideas."

Software Fault Tolerant Computing: Needs and Prospects
Durgesh Pant and K.C. Joshi say that the central requirement for building trustworthy software is software fault tolerant techniques. In this brief paper they discuss their views on the needs and prospects of software fault tolerant computing." Pant is head of the department of computer science at SSJ Campas Kumaun University in India, and Joshi is at M.J.P Rohilkhand University in India.

Alwattari on Innovation DNA
Dr. Ali Alwattari, Innovation practitioner and author, is currently Principal Scientist in R&D at the P&G corporation. He says, " Innovation DNA integrates the human aspects of innovation with the technical tasks of innovation to get a more whole representation of innovation reality...
In its simplest form, innovation is something that happens when creative people try to convert new ideas into reality and solve the problems that come up along the way. To reliably and sustainably do this, however, it is important understand what things you are good at, what things you are not good at, and how these factors affect your performance ­ namely, your Innovation DNA."

The Knowledge Economy and Higher Education
Ubiquity has received permission to publish an excerpt from a new book by Michael A. Peters, professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the University of Glasgow. The book is titlted "Knowledge Economy, Development and the Future of Higher Education," and Ubiquity associate editor A. Triptahi writes of it: "Prophetically, almost thirty years ago Jean-François Lyotard forecast the end of the modern research university based on Enlightenment principles. He envisaged the emergence of technical institutes in the service of the information-rich global multinationals." The excerpted material is Chapter 11 of Professor Peters's book. Though not extremely short, it is well worth reading by information and computer professionals.

Code and Composition
Luke Fernandez's "Code and Composition" compares the activity of programming computers with the activity of writing. The essay delineates the commonalities and differences in these activities in the context of larger technical and literary divisions that exist within the university. Fernandez is at Weber State University, where he manages technology studies.

What Will Replace the Audio CD?
Analysis and prediction by Andreas Pfeiffer -- principal of Pfeiffer Consulting, an independent technology research institute and consulting operation focused on the needs of publishing, digital content production, and new media professionals. Pfeiffer says that the opportunity now is to provide customers with what they are really looking for:

Rely on Math Rather than Luck to Plan Your Career
Consultant and policy analyst Ed Chang offers some career advice for college students, and suggests five math courses that will make an important difference in their careers.

Replicated Instruction Based Fault Tolerant Computing
Associate Editor Gutam Kumar Saha describes the general outline of a scheme for tolerating various operational faults during processing or during execution of an application through error detection and tolerating memory and register bit errors. He says, "An application system can be made a robust one with this software approach by establishing transient fault tolerance at a very low cost. We do not intend to tolerate software design bugs here. Rather we aim to tolerate any kind of fault that might appear due to environmental changes during the program execution time."

Rfaouzi Kamoun on BPM & SOA
In this piece, Dr. Faouzi Kamoun (College of Information Technology in the University of Dubai ) returns to Ubiquity to sketch a roadmap toward the converage of Business Process Management (BPM) and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). He looks at the BPM-SOA convergence trend as a journey rather than a destination, and explores the challenges facing the broad adoption of converged BPM-SOA initiatives.

Business Intelligence
Business Intelligence (BI) -- an interdisciplinary research topic that incorporates analytical technology to produce forecasts and identify causes and effects relationships corresponding to particular business scenarios -- involves the utilization of data mining. Here, Goutam Saha aims surveys various critical aspects of business intelligence computing.

Cellphone Cloning
In this technical (but very accessible) paper, Ramesh Singh of the National Informatics Center in New Delhi, India, and students Preeti Bhargava and Samta Kain offer an interesting discussion of cellphone cloning. Their topics include: 1. What is cellphone cloning? 2. How is a phone cloned? 3. Global Service for Mobile Communications (GSM). 4. Architecture of the GSM Network. 5. Cryptography Fundamentals. 6. Cryptography in GSM. 7. Breaking the Algorithms. 8. 3rd Generation Partnership (3GPP).

Software Evolution Pattern Recognition
In a little paper called 'Situated Design and Universal Maintenance," authors Yuwei Lin and Enrica Zini describe a software evolution pattern recognition that was inspired by the Free/Libre Open Source Software Development.Lin and Zinie are associated with ESRC National Centre for E-Social Science, University ofManchester and Debian GNU/Linux.
They write:
"While reusing and recyling software code and tools gradually becomes a common practice and understanding, the discussion on SDUM raises many key research questions in software development mainly on how to facilitate cross-boundary collaboration between diverse actors."

The Mathematics of Persuasive Communication
Writing from Brussels, Belgium, author Philp Yaffee writes: “The success of an oral presentation depends on the precision of its structure. Mathematics is all about precision. It is therefore not so odd to think that applying some of the concepts of mathematics to oral presentations could make them substantially more effective.” And that insight provides the inspiration of an interesting, insightful, and useful paper. Is all about precision. It is therefore not so odd to think that applying some of the concepts of mathematics to oral presentations could make them substantially more effective.” And that insight provides the inspiration of an interesting, insightful, and useful paper.

Single Version Fault Tolerant Web Services
This short paper explains how to design a fault tolerant web service application that relies on an affordable redundancy in data and function using Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP). The proposed approach relies on a Single-Version Scheme (SVS) of a fault tolerance model without using multiple versions or the N-Version fault tolerance model.

Offshore Outsourcing
K.V.K.K. Prasad offers an Indian perspective on “the Good, the Bad and the Ugly” of Offshore Outsourcing. Prasad is a Ph.D. from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur. He has been with the IT industry for the last 20 years and worked on many international projects for clients in the US, Europe and South Asia. A Senior Member of the ACM, he is the author of books on embedded systems, computer networks and software testing.

The Changing Paradigm of Newspaper Publishing
The Internet and 'Web 2.0' technologies are shifting the newspaper publishing paradigm. Mohan Babu K. explains: "The current paradigm is being extended into a two-way communication, primarily by tech-savvy readers who are using Web 2.0 technologies: blogs, wikis, online discussion boards and forums. Readers are re-broadcasting the editorials and articles by superimposing their viewpoints and observations along with the original. If you were to think about it is a good thing: Real people with real perspectives, some of them shaped by an editorial."

Computer in Higher Education
Just why the heck does Higher Ed need Chief Information/Technology officers? Ubiquity Associate Editor John Stuckey, who was one of those people at Michigan, Carnegie-Mellon, Northeastern, and Washington and Lee and at the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin, reveals all.

Writing to Make Sense of What You Know
Clear, concise, persuasive writing is a fundamental skill needed by every educated person whatever his or her profession. Unfortunately, very few people ever truly master it. Not because it is so difficult, but because schools seldom teach its true essence. IT people, perhaps more than most, know the importance of understanding the fundamentals of a discipline (e.g. mathematics) before it can effectively be put to use. Although a professional writer, Philip Yaffe has degrees in mathematics and physics from the University of California. His articles on persuasive communication (writing & speaking) reflect this background by going straight to the essence of the matter. His article in this issue of Ubiquity, How to Improve Your Writing by Standing on Your Head, should be read together with his previous article The Mathematics of Persuasive Communication (http://www.acm.org/ubiquity/views/pf/v8i28_persuasive.pdf).

Web Ontology and the Semantic Web
G.K. Saha explains that Tim Berners-Lee’s design for the Semantic Web “will enable automatic collection and correlation of various parts of information about an object, available at various different web resources. The Semantic Web will save the valuable time we spend on navigating from one web resource to another in order to obtain meaningful information on a particular object. We would be happy then on finding out, for example, our old friend’s complete information on giving partial hints on the fly without the need of our manually visiting various related web pages!” But wait, there’s more!!! Go to http://www.acm.org/ubiquity.

Language Is Not Just For Linguists
In this age of globalization of business and communication, it is increasingly necessary for scientists and technologists to know more than one language. Of course, learning a new language is easier said than done. Philip Yaffe returns again to Ubiquity to show us new ways to think about all this. See http://www.acm.org/ubiquity.

Technology as Politics
Charalambos Tsekeris writes: "More activist approaches to technology are indeed more productive and useful than any pessimistic (technophobic) diagnosis reducing it to a mere instrument of domination and oppression. The "it could be otherwise" clause of liberal intellectual inquiry must remain central to our current critical theoretical efforts." (Tsekeris graduated from Brunel University and earned his doctoral degree in Sociology from Athens Panteion University. He is a member of the Greek scientific group Intellectum and a researcher on the complex relationships between technoscience, culture and politics.)

Applications of Mobile Research in Japan
This Ubiquity article outlines representative applications of mobile research in Japan from various perspectives including engineering, cognitive science, and education. Its distinguished authors are associated with top Japanese educational and research institutions.

Economic Recognition of Innovation
Balkrishna C. Rao or Purdue University's School of Industrial Engineer writes in this week's Ubiquity about the economic recognition of innovation against the backdrop of globalization. Though it's a bit on the technical side, it's well worth your perusal.

RKPianGraphSort: A Graph Based Sorting Algorith
Sorting means arranging a set of records (or a list of keys) in some (increasing or decreasing) order. Professor Rajat K. Pal of the University of Calcutta's Department of Computer Science and Engineering proposes a graph based comparison sorting algorithm, designated as RKPianGraphSort, that takes time θ(n 2) in the worst-case, where n is the number of records in the given list to be sorted. An interesting article.

Image Interpolation Algorithms
Professors Tinku Acharya (Avisere Inc and Aritzona State University) and Ping-Sing Tsai (University of Texas, Pan American) explain that interpolation algorithms can be grouped into two categories, adaptive or non-adaptive "The computational logic of an adaptive image interpolation technique is mostly dependent upon the intrinsic image features and contents of the input image whereas computational logic of a non-adaptive image interpolation technique is fixed irrespective of the input image features". They discuss the progress of both non-adaptive and adaptive image interpolation techniques, propose a new algorithm for image interpolation in a discrete wavelet transform domain, describe the underlying computational foundations of all these algorithms and their implementation techniques, and show the impact of these algorithms in terms of image quality metrics and computational requirements for implementation.

When it Comes to E-learning
Joseph Bih, who authored numerous computer-related publications, and written an analysis of e-Learning. If you want to be current on the subject, you need to read it.

Dependable Computing
G.K. Saha's new paper aims to visually describe the important concepts of a dependable computing system and the relationships between the concepts. The concept map here for dependable computing system concepts would help us for easier and meaningful understanding of this emerging important research topic of computer science and engineering. Readers here won’t feel tired of reading long text horizontally lines after lines for conceptualizing this much research and interesting topic. Saha is an Associate Editor of ACM Ubiquity.

Philosophy, Activisim, and Computing
Associate Editor Arun Tripathi has brought to us this interesting and provocative essay by Dr. Paul T. Durbin entitled "Philosophy, Activism, and Computer and Information Specialists." Arun hopes that the ACM community will find the article useful. Dr. Durbin is emeritus professor of philosophy and environmental policy, retired from the University of Delaware and currently living in Spain.

Microchip Antennas For Mobile Communications
A. Latif, R. Hillal, and A. Ait. Ouahman examine the miniature patch antenna fed by a coaxial line and do a design comparison of two methods: Transmission Line Model (TLM) and the G-L-C Parallel Circuit Model.

A Guide for Project-Based Manufacturers and Secrets For Software Buyers
Sanjay Kumar Pal writes: "Designing and building complex products to exact customer specifications frequently involves long lead times and heavy engineering content. To win business, you must provide accurate estimates and quotations to a demanding customer base. Unlike the majority of manufacturers, capital equipment manufacturers typically purchase material to a specific project or job. You need to do progress billing and collect actual costs to projects. Often, you will not receive payment for a project until it is installed and operating at a customer¹s site. So, cash management is of vital importance. And after the sale, you need to track warranty information and provide aftermarket services, including the sale of spare parts that may constitute a significant share of your company¹s business."

Technology Transfer and Modernization: What Can Philosophers of Technology Contribute?
Professor Bernhard Irrgang, professor of the philosophy of technology at Technological Institute-Dresden, writes: "Traditional individual enterprises have ecological damages as consequences. So technology transfer should be oriented not on the needs of western industrial countries, but on the needs of the developing countries: new information technology, and renewable energy."

Techniques of Persuasive Communication: Old Wisdom in a New Package
Information science and technology professionals should be familiar with all the important laws of communication, and our old friend Phil Yaffe has devised an important new one which he modestly calls Yaffe's Law: "If you give people what they want first, then they are likely to accept anything else you want them to have. If you give them what you want first, chances are they won¹t accept anything at all."

Phil Yaffe, one of our most popular authors, writes Should English Be Declared the World’s Official Common Language? This is in effect a follow-up to his Fast-tracking Foreign Languages: How to Meet the Linguistic Challenges of Working Abroad.

Professors Sanjay Kumar Pal (NSHM Business School, India) and Anindya Jyoti Pal (Heritage Institute of Technology, India) say that no two plans for evaluating an Enterprise Resource Planning System (ERP) will be the same but that all will share the same basic concepts. They strongly recommend that you develop such a plan for your organization.