The King of QWERTY Takes on the Virtual Keyboard
Andrew Froehlich   5/16/2012   6 comments
In my circle of friends, there are one or two who are hanging on to their beloved BlackBerries for one singular reason -- the QWERTY keyboard. There are some users that rely on their smartphones strictly for text communication purposes, and at this point, the tackiness of physical keys is still appealing.

Virtualization: Land of the Hypervisor
Stephen Spector   5/16/2012  
In my last blog, I discussed the basic idea of virtualization and how cloud computing is enabled by this concept. In this post, I will present more details on the technology within virtualization that allows hardware and software components to be "virtual." The fundamental piece of technology most commonly used for virtualization is referred to as a hypervisor.

Merchant-Funded Incentives
Ivan Schneider   5/16/2012  
By now, we've all had some experience with retargeting, a technique used in online advertising that propagates search queries throughout your subsequent online experiences. If you visit an online harmonica store, you'll soon start seeing harmonicas alongside your daily headlines. If you search for antifungal powder, you're soon up to your ankles in the stuff on the Internet.

Today's Students Need Personalized Learning Environments
Chad Gillis   5/15/2012   20 comments
I'm a realist -- the kid of guy who actually raises his hand in a room full of journalists, editors, and publishers when the rhetorical question "Who is the smartest person in the room?" comes up during a whiteboard session.

Social & Technical Innovation Still Paper-Based in Healthcare?
Elisa Sylvester   5/14/2012   3 comments
Could one of the oldest human inventions -- paper -- be the solution to improving point-of-care diagnostics? In a May 3 lecture, Dr. Andrew Ellington, a professor of chemistry and biochemistry at The University of Texas at Austin, suggested just that.

Analyze Everything
Curtis Franklin Jr.   5/16/2012  
If you're like most manufacturers, you depend heavily on statistical sampling for your quality control. Out of every 10,000 widgets, some small number will be chosen for testing in various important ways. There are many reasons for the statistical sampling method. One is that it doesn't make economic sense to test every piece of your production run to failure, since that leaves you with nothing to sell. Another is the difficulty of dealing with the flood of data that would result if every single piece rolling off the line went through significant testing.