"Nanomagazine.com is a new online magazine devoted to publishing original content on nano-scale technology and molecular nanotechnology. Our current format includes interviews with several people who are making nanotechnology a reality. We hope to encourage participation from the general public. Nanomagazine.com is also searching for advisors and peer reviewed papers. It is fun and educational to read the interviews and remains a free resource for everyone to learn new opinions and different perspectives."

Nanomagazine.com: small is powerful and beautiful!

"To win the war against terrorism, we have to think like a street gang, swarm like a soccer team, and communicate like Wal-Mart. The latest thinking from the military's greatest minds: It takes a network to beat a network." [...]

Business 2.0 talks to RAND consultant and Naval Postgraduate School professor John Arquilla about the "netwar" concept. Also talks with Peter Schwartz of the Global Business Network, as well as people from the International Network for Social Network Analysis.

America's Secret Weapon | Business 2.0

NYT film critic A.O. Scott writes: "I hope that little will change about the indomitable four-fingered family that resides in a pink bungalow on Evergreen Terrace. For nothing has summed up the promise and confusion of American life in the post-cold-war era better than "The Simpsons." Nothing else has harnessed the accumulated energies and memory traces of the civilization with so much intelligence and originality."

Why "The Simpsons" always was, is, and always will be better than "South Park." (Not that this was ever in doubt.)

NYT: How 'The Simpsons' Survives

Summary/Review from The Scout Report:

This new site from Southern Methodist University (SMU) features just over 200 government documents from World War II. Plans are to enhance the database to approximately double its size by May, when 300-500 documents will be included. Users can either view the documents in a simple list (sortable by title, author, or publication date) or perform a fielded search (title, author, subject, or keyword). Advanced searches allow for boolean operators and additional fields (series, SuDoc number, and publisher information). Results provide cataloging information, links to lists of other titles by the same subject and agency, an image of the document's cover, and a link to the document itself (.pdf). While it might be nice if the site offered more of a guided browse by subject option, this is nonetheless a nice collection of archival material that should be welcomed by historians in a variety of fields or general readers with an interest in World War II. The project documentation section, which includes, among other things, cataloging guidelines and information on catalog configuration, should be useful to users working on similar Web archives. Rounding out the site are an Other Resources section, which offers half a dozen annotated links, and a link to SMU's World War II Memorial Plaza.

World War II-era U.S. Government Publications

"Most collaboration software is not used as fully as it might be because it lacks a natural interface, and if collaboration tools are ever to be crucial business applications, vendors must improve the way users interact with them, said Ray Ozzie, founder of peer-to-peer technology vendor Groove Networks."

'Collaboration tools must be natural', says Ray Ozzie

Princeton physicist Freeman Dyson will present "Ten Tales for Technophiles" lecture on Thursday, Nov. 15. The presentation, co-sponsored by the Office on Public Understanding of Science and Smithsonian Associates, will begin at 7:30 p.m. in the National Academies' main building. The lecture is open to the public.

An Evening with Freeman Dyson

"Welcome to the National Academies' Intellectual Property website. From Internet content protection to human gene patenting, IP rights in many forms have emerged from legal obscurity to public debate. This website serves as a guide to the Academies' extensive work on Intellectual Property and a forum to discuss ongoing work."

Current articles include:
    New Research on the Operation and Effects of the Patent System
    Internet Navigation and the Domain Name System
    Global Networks and Local Values

IP @ The National Academies

Visit AllTheWeb.com on Monday, November 12 to try out the latest up-to-the-hour index of web content.

From InfoWorld: FAST SEARCH & Transfer ASA will launch an upgraded version of its Alltheweb.com search engine on Monday that offers near real time searches in over 3,000 online news sources.

Entering "Anthrax," for example, can bring up news stories that were updated less than an hour ago from both national and local news organizations from various countries, and in a multitude of languages. The advanced search allows a user to set language preferences and also to pick what sections of the news to search.

Fast shows off near real-time indexing

Check it out! A new search engine startup by Todd Miller, a second-year PhD student at Georgia Tech's College of Computing.

"HyperBee is an attempt to crawl the web faster than ever thought possible. Current search engines can't keep up with the growth of the web and only index about 40% of the pages! HyperBee is a screensaver that runs while you're away from your computer, helping us crawl the web faster than any other search engine can, because we crawl it with your help along with the help of many others!"

HyperBee

"We consider distributed (threshold) cryptosystems over a composite modulus N in which the factors of N are shared among the participants as the secret key. This is a new idea for threshold cryptosystems based on a composite (i.e., different from the typical treatment of the much-studied RSA-based threshold systems where a "decryption exponent" is shared among the participants). The paradigm enables solutions to open problems in threshold cryptography and it also yields substantial efficiency improvements when generation of N is done in a distributed manner (i.e., without a trusted dealer)."

Threshold Cryptosystems Based on Factoring