An Industrial Operating System For the Cyber War Era

Security Guru Pledges to Strengthen Critical Computers

Computer-security researcher Eugene Kaspersky says he is testing control software that won’t run malicious code.



           Stuxnet, a piece of malicious software discovered in 2010, targeted industrial software controlling Iran’s uranium-enrichment centrifuges. But the code got loose—and it continues to spread: Chevron, for example, said last week that its network had been infected by Stuxnet.

The prospect that malware like Stuxnet could infect and disrupt critical pieces of infrastructure worries government officials (see “Old-Fashioned Control Systems Make U.S. Power Grids, Water Plants a Hacking Target”) and computer scientists like Eugene Kaspersky, CEO of the Moscow-based antivirus company Kaspersky Lab. He has been talking about building secure operating systems for industrial systems, a subject he discussed with MIT Technology Review.


How far has Stuxnet or similar malicious software spread beyond the intended target? What damage or costs are known to have resulted?

I am sure there are more critical companies, critical to national economic and national security, infected by Stuxnet. Unfortunately I don’t have any hard data on this. Stuxnet had infected an estimated 100,000 machines in approximately 30,000 organizations in the month of September 2010.....

Read More: 

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/507556/security-guru-pledges-to-strengthen-critical-computers/?utm_campaign=newsletters&utm_source=newsletter-weekly-energy&utm_medium=email&utm_content=20121126

Smoking May 'Rot' Your Brain

Researchers in London have identified several heart disease risk factors associated with the accelerated decline of memory, learning, attention, and reasoning.

                    Here's yet another reason not to smoke: Scientists say smoking "rots" the brain.

Researchers at King's College London analyzed information on almost 9,000 people over the age of 50 and found that smoking negatively affected their memory, learning ability, and reasoning capacity.

Researchers analyzed data on smoking, blood pressure, cholesterol levels, and body mass index (BMI), as well as individuals' 10-year risk levels for heart disease and stroke based on risk categories developed by the Framingham Heart Study.

Participants were evaluated at four- and eight-year follow-ups, where they were asked to perform brain tests, like learning new words or naming as many animals as they could in a minute.

The study showed that of all the risk factors, smoking had the most consistent negative impact on cognitive performance in all three tasks designed to test memory recall, verbal fluency, attention, and other cognitive functions.

Those with high BMIs did worse on the memory task, while high blood pressure was linked to lower scores for memory and overall cognitive performance. Those at high risk of stroke were found to perform more poorly across all three cognitive assessments, according to a news release from King's College.

Read More:

http://www.everydayhealth.com/stop-smoking/1126/smoking-may-rot-your-brain.aspx?xid=fb_EH_sf

MIT Developing 'Solar Energy Funnels'

MIT Developing 'Solar Energy Funnels' That Could Harvest More Electricity From Sunlight

        Researchers at MIT recently announced plans to create a “solar energy funnel” that could harvest energy from a much broader spectrum of sunlight than silicon photovoltaics are currently able to achieve. Ju Li, an MIT professor, and Xiaoteng Qian, a postdoc student, published a paper this week in Nature Photonics describing the funnel, which is made from a vanishingly thin material called Molybdenum Disulfide (MoS2).

Li and Qian’s solar energy funnel is much more sophisticated than your household funnel. The device is created by using a microscopic needle to poke a tiny hole in a thin film of MoS2 that is only a single molecule thick. This indents the surface and creates a funnel-like shape. The pressure exerted by the needle creates elastic strain, which is highest at the film’s center where it’s poked. The varying strain on the material created by this solar funnel changes the atomic structure just enough to “tune” different sections to different wavelengths of light – not just visible light, but also some of the invisible spectrum which happens to account for a great amount of the energy in sunlight.....

Read more:

MIT Developing 'Solar Energy Funnels' That Could Harvest More Electricity From Sunlight | Inhabitat - Sustainable Design Innovation, Eco Architecture, Green Building 

Education Giant Adapts

Pearson is the world’s largest book publisher. Now it wants to be a one-stop shop for digital education.

Pearson should be among the walking dead of global media conglomerates, fatally wounded by the shift to digital media. Pearson is the world’s largest book publisher and dominates the market for textbooks, which are facing a competitive attack from inexpensive or even free course material online.

But education has been one of the last holdouts against the onslaught of computing and communications advances, and that’s given this 168-year-old company time to adapt. It grew sales in its education division by nearly 70 percent to $7 billion over the last four years, as profit margins also increased. That alone has lifted the company’s overall results as its other two main divisions—Penguin, a publisher founded in 1935, and the group that publishes the Financial Times—have grown more slowly.


Pearson pulled this off with a decade-long string of acquisitions that helped it shift its emphasis from selling books to selling education services. The London-based company styles itself as the “world’s leading learning company,” even if that learning isn’t delivered through traditional books. These days, Pearson is more like an IT department for classrooms and schools. It sells technology infrastructure, software, and consulting services to schools—services that in turn help deliver the vast stock of textbook content Pearson owns. The company says its revenue from online content and services will surpass those of the traditional publishing business this year.

The company says it thinks that nearly half of U.S. K-12 schools use at least some Pearson software, ranging from its student information systems that let schools track kids’ schedules to “learning management systems” that help teachers construct lessons.

Universities are also expanding their online course materials, offering courses over the Internet both for enrolled students and through free “massive open online courses” for anyone around the world. But setting up and running the required infrastructure isn’t a job colleges want to do themselves. So this fall, Pearson spent $650 million to buy EmbanetCompass, a startup with technology that helps universities launch online courses.

California State University, the nation’s largest four-year university system, with 427,000 students, hired Pearson to launch some distance-learning course options in 2013. Professors will use Pearson’s system to post class material for students who can’t make it to the lecture. The company, not the university, will field technical questions from students. The Cal State system, which has seen budgets cut by 40 percent in the past few years, is betting that technology will let it stretch its resources. Mike Uhlenkamp, a spokesman for the chancellor’s office, says that by putting courses online, the California schools might reduce dropout rates and eventually admit more students.

Read More:

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/506361/the-education-giant-adapts/

Most Important Education Technology in 200 Years

If you were asked to name the most important innovation in transportation over the last 200 years, you might say the combustion engine, air travel, Henry Ford’s Model-T production line, or even the bicycle. The list goes on.

Now answer this one: what’s been the single biggest innovation in education?


Don’t worry if you come up blank. You’re supposed to. The question is a gambit used by Anant Agarwal, the computer scientist named this year to head edX, a $60 million MIT-Harvard effort to stream a college education over the Web, free, to anyone who wants one. His point: it’s rare to see major technological advances in how people learn.

Agarwal believes that education is about to change dramatically. The reason is the power of the Web and its associated data-crunching technologies. Thanks to these changes, it’s now possible to stream video classes with sophisticated interactive elements, and researchers can scoop up student data that could help them make teaching more effective. The technology is powerful, fairly cheap, and global in its reach. EdX has said it hopes to teach a billion students.

Online education isn’t new—in the United States more than 700,000 students now study in full-time "distance learning" programs. What’s different is the scale of technology being applied by leaders who mix high-minded goals with sharp-elbowed, low-priced Internet business models. In the stories that will follow in this month’s business report, MIT Technology Review will chart the impact of free online education, particularly the “massive open online courses,” or MOOCs, offered by new education ventures like edX, Coursera, and Udacity, to name the most prominent.

These ideas affect markets so large that their value is difficult to quantify. Just consider that a quarter of the American population, 80 million people, is enrolled in K–12 education, college, or graduate school. Direct expenditures by government exceed $800 billion. Add to that figure private education and corporate training.

Because education is economically important yet appears inefficient and static with respect to technology, it’s often cited (along with health care) as the next industry ripe for a major “disruption.” ....

Read More:

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/506351/the-most-important-education-technology-in-200-years/

Technology of Massive Open Online Courses

Experts in artificial intelligence are leaving academia to bring online learning to the world. But their most radical ideas are still on hold.

The wave of enthusiasm for online education is unearthing some hard and interesting computational problems that Daphne Koller would love to solve. But first she has to find the time.

Last January, Koller and her colleague Andrew Ng took leave from faculty positions at Stanford University’s artificial-intelligence lab to create Coursera, a venture-financed online-education startup with offices five miles from campus.


Since then, Coursera’s growth has been rapid and all consuming. The company has posted more than 200 free classes taught by professors at 33 top universities, such as the University of Pennsylvania and Caltech. More than 1.5 million students have signed up, and about 70,000 new students—the equivalent of four or five Stanfords—join every week.

Koller, 44, now spends her average day “probably on a plane somewhere” headed to pitch Coursera to university administrators and faculty. The last 10 months have transformed her from a celebrated expert in statistics into the co-CEO of a large and complex educational website whose money-making plans are still nascent.....

Read More:
 http://www.technologyreview.com/news/506326/the-technology-of-massive-open-online-courses/

China Chip Advances

Loongson Chips May Compete with Intel Soon | The country's first homegrown microprocessor could be used in Internet servers and routers.
        The processors at the heart of computers and mobile devices today come in two basic flavors: Intel- and ARM-compatible. But since 2002 the Chinese Academy of Sciences has been working in a public-private partnership, BLX IC Design Corporation, to establish and third type of processor—designed and made in China. Early next year, the latest fruit of that project will be unveiled, reports ComputerWorld, a new chip in a family of designs known as Loongson that is intended to drive PCs, servers and supercomputers.

The latest chip, the Godson-3B1500, is said to have twice as many transistors on a chip the same size as its predecessor, launched in 2011, and to be 35 percent more power efficient. Earlier versions of the Godson chip family were used as the basis of the chips for China’s first fully domestically built supercomputer.

Despite that progress, Loongson chips are still far behind Intel’s technologically. The chip to be launched next year is made using a process that carves features as small as 32 nanometers into a chip, but Intel already sells processors with features as small as 22 nanometers. Loongson chips are also incompatible with Microsoft’s Windows operating system, which many consumers in China as elsewhere find synonymous with desktop computing. Read More : http://www.technologyreview.com/view/507846/the-china-chip-advances-and-may-compete-with-intel-soon/

Windows Phone 8 An Excellent Mobile OS

       For a smartphone operating-software maker whose name doesn’t rhyme with “Snapple” or “frugal,” success doesn’t come easy. The market is littered with companies that have succeeded in grabbing only a small number of users.

Microsoft approached its recent launch of Windows Phone 8 as a member of this brotherhood of stragglers. It had just 2 percent of the global smartphone market in the third quarter, according to data from IDC, compared with 75 percent for Android smartphones and 15 percent for the iPhone.


Fortunately for Microsoft, Windows Phone 8 is a strong effort. It’s snappy, easy to navigate and customize, and good-looking to boot—all traits that will help the company as it tries to surpass Research in Motion’s ailing BlackBerry and Nokia’s dying Symbian platforms.

But—and of course, there has to be a “but”—the operating system still faces an uphill battle to become a strong third-place player in the smartphone market, and the weakness of its app store won’t help.

If Microsoft wants to be taken seriously by consumers and app developers, it will have to make serious strides with its Windows Phone Store, which for now includes just a fraction of the apps available for Android and iOS. But Microsoft is an old hand when it comes to wooing developers, and Windows 8—its operating system for desktops and tablets—is designed to make it easier for developers to create software components that work on both mobile and conventional computers. So I’m going to bet they can do it, even if it may take some time.....

Read More : 

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/507496/windows-phone-8-despite-some-issues-an-excellent-mobile-os/?utm_campaign=newsletters&utm_source=newsletter-weekly-communications&utm_medium=email&utm_content=20121126

Tablets In Public Schools

                Every fifth-grader at Barron Park Elementary School in Palo Alto has an iPad—and it’s not because their parents plunked down $499 apiece to buy them.

The students in Barron Park’s two fifth-grade classes are part of a pilot program that began this fall, supported by funds from a local tax measure. They use the tablet computers for solving math problems and making videos on field trips, checking the devices out each morning and returning them to their teachers at the end of the day. Soon, they’ll be allowed to take the gadgets home.


Educational technology teacher Smita Kolhatkar believes the tablets help students with lessons, improve memory and language skills, and cause them to act more independently. “It’s simply amazing to see the level of engagement and excitement with the children,” she says.

The excitement among tablet makers is almost as great. Research firm IDC says global shipments of tablets will reach 177 million this year, and 11 million of them were purchased by businesses or government agencies rather than consumers. Of those, IDC analyst Tom Mainelli says, the “vast majority” were sold to schools.

Mainelli thinks that within a few years all U.S. students will have some access to a tablet at school. With 55 million students in the country’s elementary and secondary schools, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, that’s a lot of potential sales. And it’s not just a one-time product push: beyond selling tablets to schools and districts, tablet makers see a chance to set up future sales by establishing brand loyalty with young users.

“All these guys see huge opportunities here,” Mainelli says.....

Read More : 

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/506321/tablet-makers-pursue-public-schools/?utm_campaign=newsletters&utm_source=newsletter-weekly-communications&utm_medium=email&utm_content=20121126