Be sure to check out the reader's comments. Online education is best known for serving older, nontraditional students who can not travel to colleges because of jobs and family. But the same technologies of "distance learning" are now finding their way onto brick-and-mortar campuses, especially public institutions hit hard by declining state funds.

Good discussion of different types of card used throughout the world."Cards containing chips, called smart cards, simply cannot match something that's supposedly dumb and has been around since the 1970s: ordinary credit cards with magnetic stripes running across their backs. The dumb cards don't need a brain of their own: the network supplies the necessary smarts."

A Nicaraguan troop commander blamed bad border denotations on Google Maps for an incursion into Costa Rica last week.

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Thorough, easy to read explanation of how public data on the Internet can cause serious problems for job-seekers and, by extension, anyone else.

It is labor revolt by text message and video upload, underwritten by the Chinese government.

Facebook has dozens of toggles for privacy settings on its service, and a privacy policy longer than the US Constitution. And while many users of the service know that they're sharing information with their friends and associates, they may be surprised to find out just exactly what they're sharing, and with what groups of people. New programs that offer to tie social media integration into outside web sites offer an ever-more social experience, but they also expose even more of your online activities to social media service providers and advertisers. Is it getting too hard to keep hold of our privacy online?

" a new paradigm in humanitarian work. The old paradigm was one-to-many: foreign journalists and aid workers jet in, report on a calamity and dispense aid with whatever data they have. The new paradigm is many-to-many-to-many: victims supply on-the-ground data; a self-organizing mob of global volunteers translates text messages and helps to orchestrate relief; journalists and aid workers use the data to target the response."

Long article but you can use an extract. Good description of a factory run with software. The advantage to making things in Asia has always been that their labor is cheaper. Now they have another advantage, one that is worrying some big names in American business. ...How do they do it? In Tata's case, a crucial element is a $417 million "smart factory" in the state of Gujarat that uses intelligent-automation hardware, software and services supplied by Milwaukee-based Rockwell Automation Inc.

Detailed description of the use of technology in law enforcement. Mapping of crime locations etc. Department officials say a new commitment to technology is a key factor behind police statistics that show a 40.2% drop in reported violent crime in Milwaukee for the first quarter of 2010 when compared with the first quarter three years ago.

The Basel Action Network, an American watchdog group that has sought to curb the export of toxic electronic waste from the United States, plans to begin a new certification and auditing program on Thursday for both recyclers and companies that generate electronic refuse.

Good description of new device which mechanizes all the fingers in a hand.

Just what it says. Good overview of how stores keep track of us. Short and accessible.

This document is designed as an introduction to thinking ethically. We all have an image of our better selves-of how we are when we act ethically or are "at our best." We probably also have an image of what an ethical community, an ethical business, an ethical government, or an ethical society should be. Ethics really has to do with all these levels-acting ethically as individuals, creating ethical organizations and governments, and making our society as a whole ethical in the way it treats everyone.

With e-readers like Apple's new iPad and Amazon's Kindle touting their vast libraries of digital titles, some bookworms are bound to wonder if tomes-on-paper will one day become quaint relics. But the question also arises, which is more environmentally friendly: an e-reader or an old-fashioned book?

India is launching a new census in which every person aged over 15 will be photographed and fingerprinted to create a biometric national database.

Makes a picture of all the words you key in. Good to use with IT terms.

The annual Horizon Report describes the continuing work of the New Media Consortium's Horizon Project, a qualitative research project established in 2002 that identifies and describes emerging technologies likely to have a large impact on teaching, learning, or creative inquiry on college and university campuses within the next five years. The 2010 Horizon Report is the seventh in the series and is produced as part of an ongoing collaboration between the New Media Consortium (NMC) and the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI), an EDUCAUSE program.

Urgent action is needed to tackle the "mountains" of e-waste building up in developing nations, says a UN report. Good short summary of the problem. Global perspective.

Neerjaal is an Information Communication Technology enabled water resource management system for grassroots communities. It is about collation of ground water related content and information and management of water resources with the available information. The Neerjaal software facilitates generating, storing and making public the water related information in a village.  The core objective of Neerjaal is to contribute towards managing scarce water resources across communities in India.