This column may be the most futile of my long career. I am about to plead for Saddam Hussein's life.

It's not quite Soviet-style airbrushing, but the Bush administration has been using cyberspace to make some of its own cosmetic touch-ups to history.

Since 9/11, administration Web sites have been scrubbed ... "This smells like an attempt to revise the record, not just to withhold information but to alter the historical record in a self-interested way."

She said: "There was going to be a cost. That's why they're not there."

The Washington area tech community has been waiting for Blackboard -- listed by Inc. magazine last year as the nation's sixth-fastest-growing business -- to go public. Speculation about a Blackboard IPO is Washington's version of the Google IPO watch.

Musicians rocked for peace in the 1960's. They rocked for Africa in the 1980's. Now they're rocking for stricter corporate media regulation.

Tom Morello took the stage with musicians like Billy Bragg, Steve Earle, Lester Chambers and Boots Riley. Here the raging was mainly against the star of media consolidation, Clear Channel Communications.

"This is about radio, TV and who owns your newspaper. We have to make sure the media represents everybody."

Some musicians argue that consolidation of recording labels and radio stations has homogenized music across the country and stifled free expression. It is becoming more difficult for new artists to break into the mainstream, and the quality of music is suffering.

Grokker takes the data culled by an online search and organizes it visually into categories that enable you to quickly dig deeply to find the exact site or information you need. The application that works on top of many different databases, including the all-important Google.

This really could be the future for finding information.

When you use Grokker you realize just how brain dead even the best search tools are today.

Soon you will also be able to use it in conjunction with social networks like Linkedin.

The White House and Pentagon have characterized the arrest of Saddam Hussein as a major victory in the war on terrorism. But is Iraq really the central battleground in that struggle, or is it diverting our attention while Al Qaeda and its confederates plan for new strikes elsewhere? There's strong evidence that Osama bin Laden is using Iraq the way a magician uses smoke and mirrors.

The dashboard is a piece of software which performs a continous, automatic search of your personal information space to show you things in your life that are related to whatever you happen to be doing with your computer at the time.

While you read email, browse the web, write a document, or talk to your friends on IM, dashboard does its best to proactively find objects that are relevant to your current activity, and to display them in a friendly way.

The Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum has built a new museum for the display and preservation of its collection of historic aviation and space artifacts.

Nanotechnology genomics and cognitive neuroscience ... are large, game-changing areas that deserve more attention.

The public's trust in government has decreased steadily over the last 25 years.

What will surprise us in the future is likely to arise from the interstitial spaces between disciplines.

We have entered the 21st century with outmoded bureaucratic structures firmly in place.

When it comes to public policy in IT developments, in most cases, you end up throwing lawyers at each other for 20 years. That model is not very productive ...

The scientific community is far too insular ... Scientists haven't done a good job of insinuating themselves into the fabric of the policy research infrastructure. In fact, there are few rewards, and more penalties, for scientists that leave their fields and academic institutions to engage in public policy.

The further you get ahead of the curve, the less you get into contentious situations where people have made large investments of money and ego and simply won't bend.

If people don't understand something, how does that lack of knowledge get filled and by whom? The answer will have enormous impact in terms of how people will perceive technologies ...

The number of channels available to people for getting information has multiplied exponentially. But you cannot "Google" your way to enlightenment on complex issues. What is needed are more credible, mediating institutions that can help people sort, digest and understand information.

Celebrating a century of innovation, the National Academy of Engineering and a consortium of professional engineering societies present the most significant engineering triumphs of the era.