The world's preeminent futurist explains what's next for an industrial civilization bursting at the seams.

The Tofflers employ a deep intellectual and practical understanding of technological, economic, political, and sociological progress to predict the course of our culture at large. So far, they've been disturbingly correct.

In this week's episode of "Big Thinkers," Alvin Toffler will explain in his own words what the immediate implications of the information revolution will be, and what we as a society must do to ride out the cultural turbulence to come.

RAND is helping the Institute for Information Infrastructure Protection to develop a national R&D agenda to protect the nation's existing information infrastructure.

One way that we are doing this is via on-line surveys of different focus groups that either rely heavily on the existing infrastructure or develop products, services or technology for it. Two such groups are the academic researchers community and IT security hardware and software vendors.

For more than a year now, there has been a deluge of stories and op-ed pieces about the failure of the American intelligence community to detect or prevent the September 11, 2001, massacre. Nearly all of these accounts have expressed astonishment at the apparent incompetence of America's watchdogs.

Building Virtual Communities examines how learning and cognitive change are fostered by online communities. Contributors to this volume explore this question by drawing on their different theoretical backgrounds, methodologies, and personal experience with virtual communities.

Each chapter discusses the different meanings of the terms community, learning, and change. Case studies are included for further clarification. Together, these chapters describe the building out of virtual communities in terms that are relevant to theorists, researchers, and practitioners.

The chapters provide a basis for thinking about the dynamics of Internet community building. This includes consideration of the role of the self or individual as a participant in virtual community, and the design and refinement of technology as the conduit for extending and enhancing the possibilities of community building in cyberspace.

social swarming (soh.shul SWOR.ming) n. The rapid gathering of friends, family, or colleagues using technologies such as cell phones, pagers, and instant messaging.

SBC announced it will cut its workforce and reduce CAPEX in response to a continued weak economy and outmoded regulation that could threaten the future viability of its telecommunications networks in many of its states.

CEO: "These actions ... should be of concern to every consumer ... Wholesale prices are below cost. SBC has lost 3 million retail access lines year-to-date."

Advances in hardware and software technology are leading to exciting new computing applications ranging from robotic brain surgery to autonomous flying sensors. Innovations like this are saving lives and enabling us to do things previously thought impossible.

"Computing Meets the Physical World," is a one-day public symposium in Washington, DC, organized by the National Academy of Engineering in conjunction with the National Academies Computer Science and Telecommunications Board.

A series of extraordinary advances in physics claimed by scientists at Bell Labs relied on fraudulent data, a committee investigating the matter reported yesterday.

The findings, in effect, dismiss as fiction results from 17 papers that had been promoted as major breakthroughs in physics, including claims last fall that Bell Labs had created molecular-scale transistors.