Intrinsitivity

Researcher: Info Overload Costs Economy

NEW YORK (AP) — Think twice before you copy someone on an e-mail or hit "reply all." Such practices have made today’s workers less productive, a research firm concludes.

After years of naming a product or person of the year, Basex Inc. decided to forecast "information overload" as problem of the year for 2008.

Information overload seems to me to be the biggest problem for us netizens to solve. We are only now beginning to understand how to live in an instantaneously interconnected world.

Storing light with sound

The information in a beam of light can be stored for a while by converting it into a sound signal, then reading it back out again as light, researchers have found. The process, which can be done in commercially-available optical fibres, could be used to help make computer processing more efficient in future.

• Abstract
• Paper (PDF)

Google unveils rival to Wikipedia

Knol will pitch authors against each other, effectively creating a marketplace for knowledge and advertising revenues.