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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.

Paul Thompson of Michigan State asks and answers the question "Is the GMO Controversy Relevant to Computer Ethics?" Our associate editor Arun Tripathi writes, "Dr. Thompson, who is a self-made pragmatist like Paul Durbin, argues that my kind of pragmatism is particularly relevant with respect to problems in which technological artifacts, technically complex machinery or systems, and scientifically advanced forms of expertise figure prominently. Dr. Thompson is the PI on a National Science Foundation project to examine ethical issues associated with the development of nanotechnologies in agriculture and food."

Serial Port Data Communication using MODBUS Protocol
Serial communication is the process of sending data sequentially one bit at a time, over a communication channel or computer bus. RS-232 is a standard for serial binary data transfer between a data terminal equipment (DTE) and a data circuit-terminating equipment (DCE), commonly used in computer serial ports. In this week’s Ubiquity, S. Naskar, K. Basuli, and S.S. Sarma of the the Department of Computer Science and Engineering of the University of Calcutta offer a basic technical discussion of serial port data communication using the MODBUS protocol.

John Stuckey, Ubiquity’s ace correspondent in Egypt, has written us two letters, and grapples with two of the most important questions we can think of:
1. Is Phil Yaffe right about English as a common language?
    Read John's thoughts in About English: On the Other Hand
2. How many Americans does it take to change a light bulb?

End Laptop Serfdom
Ubiquity associate editor and champion of computing sanity, Espen Andersen, beseeches us all to end laptop serfdom. It seems like a reasonable request, so let's do what he says.

Understanding Software Testing Concepts
Goutam Kumar Saha offers a brief primer on a huge topic: software testing.

* Whatever Happened to Cybernetics?
Ross Gagliano and John Gehl wonder whatever happened to Cybernetics.
* Renovation of Minimum Spanning Tree Algorithms of Weighted Graph
Sanjay Kumar Pal provides a technical analysis of the renovation of minimum spanning tree algorithms.
* Collective Intelligence - Include the Disabled for Success
Bill Tifton of Hewlett-Packard Services urges that we include the disabled to achieve success in building information systems.

* information Enframing
Rafael Capurro, Professor Information Management at Stuttgart Media University, says that "the key issue in today's knowledge society is our relation to what we do not know in and through what we believe we know."
* Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)
Sanjay Kumar Pal discusses some of the criteria that allow us to identify and select the solution that will meet these expectations.
* Linear Responsibility Chart
Consultant/strategist Tom Clark of ProjectSuccessInc discusses project operating procedures for multiple organization projects.

* "Is a worldwide common language just over the horizon?"
Phil Yaffe who meditates on this question.
* Mind Map and Ontology Building Tools for Knowledge Management
Biplab Sarker and colleagues Peter Wallace and Will Gill examine.
* "Why Track Actual Costs and Resource Usage on Projects?"
Consultant and author Tom Clark asks and answers the question.

* Use of Genetic Algorithms for Indian Music Mixing
Preeti Bhargava and her colleagues at Delhi College of Engineering in India offer a very interesting article on music mixing and show how to use the power of genetic algorithms to simulate creativity and learn to personalize music in different ways.
* Generation of a Random Simple Graph And Its Graphical Presentation
Saptarshi Naskar and Krishendu Basuli of the University of Calcutta will show you how to generate a random simple graph and its graphical presentation.

* Arrogance or Efficiency? A Discussion of the Microsoft Office Fluent User Interface
Ubiquity associate editor M.E. Kabay examines this question.
* Centers of Excellence (CoE)
Sunil Tadwalkar of Satyam Corp. explains the concepts of this approach.

* Outsourcing and Offshoring
Sunil Tadwalkar, a principal consultant with the Satyam Corporation in India, gives his thoughts and discusses the problems & opportunities.
* Visual Aids Need To Be Less Visual
Marketing communications consultant Phil Yaffe gives us a lesson that Web page designers may want to think about.

* Time to get serious about the paperless office
Espen Andersen, associate professor of strategy at the Norwegian School of Management, and the European research director of BSG Concours Group says it's time to get serious about the paperless office.
* "Resource Overloads"
Tom Clark focuses on the resource that is of greatest concern to most organizations – personnel.
* Avoiding Disaster When Your Hard Drive Fails
Donna Barron writes a short and practical article on how to avoid disaster when your hard drive fails.

* Smart Phones: A Tutorial
Ramesh Singh of the National Informatics Center in New Delhi with his colleagues Preeti Bhargava and Samta Kain from the Delhi College of Engineering have prepared a generic but highly useful tutorial on smart phones, platforms used, architectural frameworks employed for smart phone applications and some selected smart phones applications.
* The Rise and Fall of a Good Programmer
Suthikshn Kumar of MCNC, Department of ISE in Bangalore, offers us a very interesting article providing answers to such questions as who are good programmers, what are their characteristics, and how can all programmers become good.

* Knowledge Mechanics and Its Temporal Nature
Ramesh Singh, Senior Technical Director of India's National Informatics Center in Delhi, with student colleague Sharad Jain, have been studying the differences between explicit knowledge, which has been or can be articulated, codified and stored in certain media, and tacit knowledge.
* Are you using slides the way you should?
Our old friend Phil Yaffe, one of our most popular authors, explains how to use presentation slides to best effect.
* A Fuzzy Modeling Approach to Evaluate Faculty Performance
One of our wonderful associate editors, Goutam Kumar Saha, was able to find this fine paper by A.Neogi, A.C. Mondal, and S.K. Mandal, and it's really good.

* Employee Retention: By Way of Management Control Systems
Drs. Vinay K Srivastava and Shailesh Rastogi provide us with a vision for using management control systems (MCS) to improve employee retention in large corporations.
* On Degree Sequence
In a technical paper called "On Degree Sequence," authors S. Naskar, K. Basuli, S.S. Sarma, and K.N. Dey of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Calcutta, give us a chance to refresh our mathematical and programming skills so that we'll continue to be relevant in the 21st Century.

* Triple Level Data Security
Swarnendu Mukerjee, Swarnendu Bhattacharya, and Amlan Chaudhury of the Heritage Institute of Technology in Kolkata, India propose an algorithmic approach to data security in which. along with the combination of cryptography and steganography (taken as security layers), an extra layer of security is imposed in between them to obtain a completely secured data transmission scheme.

* Software - Implemented Fault Detection Approaches
Goutam Kumar Saha talks about software­implemented fault detection approaches.
* A Prototype Design for DRM based Credit Card Transaction in E-Commerce
Sanjay Banerjee and Sunil Karforma describe a prototype design for DRM-based credit card transactions in E-Commerce.
* New Technique for Fixing an Ethernet IPv6 Address Using the Fedoracore Operating System
A.AAroud and colleagues A. Jamali and N. Najib explain a new technique for fixing an Ethernet IPv6 address using the Fedoracore operating system.

* The Non-Autonomy of the Virtual: Philosophical Reflections on Contemporary Virtuality
Jeff Malpas does a reality check (a philosophical and virtual reality check, to boot) on the concept of virtual worlds.
* Ubiquity Associate Editor Arun Tripathi’s insightful Preface
The Malpas piece is accompanied by Ubiquity Associate Editor Arun Tripathi’s insightful Preface.
* What can a bumbling, inarticulate Los Angeles cop teach us about effective communication?
Philip Yaffe asks this about the old TV detective-show Columbo. Well, that cop can teach us plenty. If you give presentations or write proposals, this little article is something you need to read.

* "Elliptic Curve Cryptography"
Ramesh Singh and his colleagues Vivek Kapoor and Vivek Sonny Abraham explain the suitablity of elliptic curve cryptography for smart cards.
* Book Reviews
Ubiquity Associate Editor Ross Gagliano gives a lively review of four useful books on different software issues.

* Scarce Resources in Computing
Ubiquity Associate Editor Espen Andersen sees the future and assures all of us knowledge-workers that information scarcity will be with us for a long time to come.
* Jabberwocky
Phil Yaffe gives us a new look at Lewis Carroll's wonderful concoction of nonsense, mathematics, language and logic.
* SC08 Broader Engagement Offers Mentoring and Travel Assistance Grants
Kathryn Kelly of the Ohio Supercomputer Center reaches out for new participants interested in assistance getting to this important event.
* Giving a wake-up call to American K-12 educators
M.O. Thirunarayanan urges technology-based outsourcing of U.S. math and science teaching for primary and secondary students.

* Information Technology as an Ethical Challenge
Dr. Rafael Capurro's paper tries to provide us the answer to the question of how can we ensure that the benefits of information technology are not only distributed equitably, but that they can also be used by people to shape their own lives.
* Critical Theory: Ideology Critique and the Myths of E-Learning
Dr. Norm Friesen argues in his paper that critical theory designates a philosophy and a research methodology that focuses on the interrelated issues of technology, politics and social change.
* Dimension of the Philosophy of Technologies: Critical Theory and Democratization of Technology
Ubiquity Associate Editor Arun Tripathi complements the Friesen paper with this piece.

* Software-based Fault Tolerance: Concept Map -based Learning
Goutam Kumar Saha has devised an ingenious concept-learning map to guide persons interested in software fault tolerance.
* Transcending from Virtual Reality into TELE-IMMERSIVE Technologies and Applications – A Perspective
Ramesh Singh presents a very interesting paper on tele-emersion and some notable application.

* CMOS RF Down-Conversion Mixer Design for Low-Power Wireless Communications
A valuable paper by K. Faitah, A. El Oualkadi, and A. Ait Ouahman of the Laboratoire de Microinformatique, Systèmes Embarqués et Systèmes sur Puces Université.
* 21st Century Information Yechnology Revolution
Sanjay Kumar Pal, who lectures on computer science and applications at the NSHM Business School in Kolkata, India, offers his reflections.
* Mathematics
A Short Piece on Mathematics by Jannat

* A Farewell Message from Ubiquity Editor in Chief John Gehl

* Can Learning Languages Help You Better Understand Science and Technology?
We present Yaffe's insightful paper which suggests, among other things, that "contrary to the common belief, science is not about certainty but rather uncertainty" - an insight that information technologists ignore at their, and our, peril.

* Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence
Dr. Andy Clark, a Professor of Philosophy and Chair in Logic and Metaphysics at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, gives us this remarkable essay.

* Thoughts on the Nature of the Virtual
Charalambos Tsekeris, whose research interests include understanding the complex relationships between technoscience, cyberculture and democratic politics, demonstrates the sociological and philosophical perspectives of the nature of the virtual world.

* The Technological Transformation of Human Experience
Our own resourceful and creative associate editor Arun Kumar Tripathi presents a paper complementing Andy Clark's previous cyborg piece.

* wot do U tink?" (What Do You Think?)
Out of sheer curiosity M.O. Thirunarayanan used a website that allowed him to translate text from English to the language used by those who send and receive text messages. The second part of this article contains a copy of the entire text that was thus translated.)

* Emergence of the Academic Computing Clouds
In this paper, Kemal A. Delic and Martin Anthony Walker of Hewlett-Packard first briefly outline the architecture, technologies and standards of computational grids. They then point at some of notable examples of academic use of grids and sketch the future of research in grids. In the third section, they draw some architectural lines of cloud computing, hint at the design and technology choices and indicate some future challenges. In conclusion, they claim that academic computing clouds might appear soon, supporting the emergence of Science 2.0 activities, some of which we list shortly.

* Content – Based Image Retrieval System
The term CBIR seems to have originated in 1992, when it was describe experiments into automatic retrieval of images from a database, based on the colors and shapes present. Since then, the term has been used to describe the process of retrieving desired images from a large collection on the basis of syntactical image features. The techniques, tools and algorithms that are used originate from fields such as statistics, pattern recognition, signal processing, and VLSI design. Thus an effective image retrieval system should make use of both text and image data, by integrating text-based and content-based image retrieval techniques. We propose to integrate the text-based and content-based techniques into one system.

* Information, DNA, and Change through the Prism of a Great City
After retiring from a career in academic/IT management at Carnegie-Mellon, Northeastern, and Washington and Lee Universities, John Stuckey is serving as Acting Chief Technology Officer at the American University in Cairo. This is the third of his reports to Ubiquity from Egypt.

* My Problem with Design
Chauncey Bell is a business management consultant, designer, author, and inventor. He has found many people are concerned about design: design of business practices, design of innovations, design of products, design of software, design of marketing networks, and more. He discovers many misconceptions in his clients' answers to his simple question, "What do you mean when you say you are designing something?" To help them understand design better, and improve their skill at design, he wrote this essay. These distinctions work!

* The Three Acid Tests of Persuasive Writing
For people engaged in science, both pure and applied, communication with the general public is no longer an option; it is a requirement. Unfortunately, scientists (like most other people) write poorly, because they have never been taught any better. While schools emphasize creative writing (literature), they give short shrift to expository writing, i.e. effectively conveying ideas and information.

* Mirrorware
As we use and design computing systems, Michael Schrage asks us to reflect on what these systems reveal of ourselves and not just what they reveal to others. We may find many surprises about design and privacy.

In 1892, the newspapers published a series of editorials of leading thinkers about what the world would be like in 1992. (See Dave Walter, TODAY THEN, Am Geographical Union, 1992.) Collectively, they were almost 100% wrong. Their reflections revealed more about how they saw themselves than about the future. This is exactly what Michael Schrage is warning us about.

* Presidential Politics and Internet Issues in the 2000 Election
As with the US election of 2000, the US election of 2008 features two slates and four new faces running for the top offices. While many of the issues concerning the electorate are different in 2008 than in 2000, remarkably some issues are the same. We thought you might be amused at Doug Isenberg's resurrected reflections on the 2000 election. You can see what has changed and what has not.

* Why Does Time Go Faster As We Get Older?
Persons in every age group wonder why time seems to move so much faster than it did in their pasts. It seems as if there is never enough time to get everything done and that the situation only gets worse. Many explanations have been offered for this, but few seem to hit the target as well as Phil Yaffe's explanation. We hope you enjoy and find it provocative.

* The Power of Dispositions
When we refer to dispositions, we are not simply describing attitudes, world views or even propensities to act in particular ways. Instead, we approach the term as a critical and analytic term which draws together three notions: Gilbert Ryle's notion of contingency and context, Michael Polanyi's idea of the tacit dimension (more specifically, what Polanyi described as "attending from" and "attending to"), and John Dewey's understanding of inquiry.

* Long Live the .250 Hitter
Elena Strange observes that the solid, utility hitters (and players) are the backbone of every baseball team. In playing on her computing teams she has no aspirations for MVP awards and strives for personal excellence in the things she does. She asks her male colleagues to value her as a .250 hitter without holding her to the standard of a .314 hitter. This simple change could open the gates to a flood of women in computing.