Most federal Web sites do not meet the commercial standards for Internet privacy set by the Federal Trade Commission, including the FTC’s own site, a study by the General Accounting Office has found. The GAO measured the sites against four federal standards for Internet privacy: that they disclose their information practices before personal data is […]
Robert Fox
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Computer science departments at U.S. colleges and universities are facing a depleted teaching staff as more professors test the entrepreneurial waters, reports the New York Times. While the hot economy has created a fair amount of turnover, observers say the current brain drain has not reached a crisis point. Many institutions are feeling the pinch […]
An increasing number of companies are creating a new position—”chief privacy officer”—to prevent legal or marketing disasters and help gain the trust of online customers, reports the San Jose Mercury News. Government scrutiny is a major factor in companies creating the post—the Federal Trade Commission recently filed a lawsuit to block the bankrupt Toysmart.com from […]
A human-image animation system that manipulates stored images of a person’s facial movements in response to phonemes (the smallest units of speech) and can then replicate voice and image in a realistic video duplicate has been developed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the California Institute of Technology. The technology, called Digital Personnel, is voice-driven […]
The U.S. agriculture industry has been one of the slowest to embrace the Internet age, with farmers, who tend to be fiercely loyal to local merchants and banks, wary of e-commerce, reports BusinessWeek. But such a link is as inevitable as spring planting: of 2.1 million farmers in the U.S., the 380,000 largest ones produce […]
The tradition-bound institution may be late to the e-vironment, but many legal scholars are still stunned to learn the highest court in the U.S. opened its own Web site in mid-April (www.supremecourstus.gov). Many of the court’s written decisions will be posted online, as well as upcoming cases, opinions, orders, and arguments. The site makes it […]
Engineers in Japan are developing trains that can “fly,” reports New Scientist. Using the “wing-in-ground” (WIG) effect, in which a high-pressure cushion of air forms beneath flying objects as they approach the ground, they believe they can create trains that use only a quarter of the power required for magnetically levitated (maglev) trains. The WIG […]
Bank mergers dominated 1998; 1999 was the year of the telecommunications merger. And this could be the year of Internet mergers. Experts expect the record-setting $166 billion merger of AOL and Time Warner may be the beginning of a wave of Net mergers and acquisitions. Analyst Jim Breyer of Accel Partners, Palo Alto, says the […]
A growing circle of space and tourism industry veterans say leisure trips to the cosmos are just a few years away. More than a dozen startup companies, encouraged by the traveling public’s desire for new experiences and the technology needed to make space travel possible, are working to build rockets safe enough to carry paying […]
Professionals looking for IT-related jobs in the U.S. can expect starting salaries this year to increase an average of 6.8% over their 1999 levels, according to RHI Consulting, Menlo Park, Calif. Those specializing in systems integration will see the sharpest rise in base compensation, with starting salaries projected to increase more than 17% over 1999. […]
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