3) to address questions as to what engineers and engineering professional organizations, such as the NAE, can and should do to ensure that these technologies are developed in socially responsible ways.

You can listen to the sessions in streaming RealAudio. Two of particular interest may be:

Neurotechnology and Brain-Computer Interfaces: Ethical and Social Implications

Nano-Ethics: Framing the Issues

Emerging Technologies and Ethical Issues

Cable TV seems to have become the home of any programming with the least hint of political controversy. Meanwhile, the networks grow increasingly brave about broadcasting shows featuring lingerie models parading in the latest fashions, and ordinary people competing for cash by eating live insects.

At this time of year, we can be thankful that "free" television is so aggressively engaged in its own creative destruction. Would that other outmoded industries shared this apparent zest for death.

The ineffectiveness of much-maligned "banner" advertising is not a failure of the Internet in general or the Web in particular. Rather, it is a sign of the times.

In the industrial era, the typical middle class laborer suffered through day after day filled with tedious, repetitive tasks. Many workers found themselves performing one simple task, over and over, for hours on end. Television was an escape and a diversion that delivered variety, in rapid fire segments, interspersed with messages from sponsors promising to satiate the public's new and growing desire for consumer products. At a time when much of the public was still employed in jobs that involved manual labor, an evening on the couch in front of the television was a well-earned respite after a hard day's work. The intangibility of television was a welcome contrast to the hard products of the assembly line, and the intentional inanity of the sitcom was simple escapism.

In today's world, sedentary "knowledge workers" spend their days at a desk, in front of a computer and a telephone, struggling to juggle a multitude of ill-defined tasks. In many cases, workers can no longer point to a pallet full of products, neatly packaged for shipment, as evidence of eight hours' effort well spent. Instead, they are left to measure their productivity by tallying up the number of emails sent and the PowerPoint slides generated. At the end of a day like that, broadcast television is far less attractive than it was in the previous era. When friends can reach each other by telephone, immediately, at any time of day or night, regardless of their location, without any prior coordination among them, and when even a "normal" family rarely gets everyone together for evening dinner, it hardly seems appropriate to demand that the entire nation sit down together for an episode of "The Bachelor." As the world of work becomes increasingly unreal, television adapts to the change, foil-like, to offer viewers the real, but it overcorrects, and thus ends up creating the surreal.

TiVo is the cellular telephone of television. TiVo does to time what mobile telephony does to space. To argue against the inevitability of TiVo is to deny the proven successes of Nokia, Motorola, Qualcomm, T-Mobile, and the rest. The broadcast flag is but a finger against the dam that is the Internet.

In this environment, the road less traveled by is the product less advertised, or not at all, and this will make all the difference. This apparent contradiction of Metcalfe's Law is in fact the very engine of growth in a network society, because it keeps the world forever in transition.

CBS Cancels 'The Reagans'

Our economic future is wedded to technological change, and most of the jobs of the future are still ours to invent.

This op-ed by former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich appeared in the Sunday edition of the Washington Post.

High-Tech Jobs Are Going Abroad! But That's Okay

Ed Yourdon: "I think that many of the jobs that are shifting overseas now from the United States are never coming back. That's particularly true for the low-end IT jobs."

Who'll develop tech's 'next big thing'?

This study of information storage and flows analyzes the year 2002 in order to estimate the annual size of the stock of new information contained in storage media, and heard or seen each year in information flows.

An accompanying tidbit from Ross Mayfield, to the theme of the recent Jim Gray interview with ACM Queue, blogged here: Netflix ships 1,500 terabytes worth of information a day. Andrew Odlyzko suggests that daily traffic flow on the Net is 2,000 terabytes.

How Much Information?

It supports a much larger research effort examining the future of the structure, innovation, and competition of the U.S. military aircraft industrial base that responds to congressional concerns about that future.

The table of contents is as follows.

1. Introduction
2. Industry Structure And Competition In The Biplane Era
3. The Monoplane Revolution
4. The Subsonic- And Early Supersonic-Jet Revolutions
5. The Agile Supersonic Technology Revolution
6. The Stealth Revolution
7. An End To Competition And Innovation?

The U.S. Combat Aircraft Industry, 1909-2000: Structure, Competition, Innovation

Drawing from a wide variety of data sources, many of them previously inaccessible, Cities Transformed explores the implications ...

Cities Transformed: Demographic Change and Its Implications

All this points to a long, long struggle ahead in the war against terrorism.

This op-ed article, by RAND's Bruce Hoffman, appeared in the Sunday LA Times.

In a battle of the Bruces, I would recommend Hoffman's article 100 times before I would recommend Schneier's latest op-ed even once. For one thing, this is actually Hoffman's area of expertise! He captures the essential challenges we face without resorting to silly analogies or taking pot-shots at "technology."

In the Calculus of Fear, Terrorists Have an Edge

Too good to be true? You already know the answer.

Yet another case of "do what I mean, not what I say", and the recording industry digs itself another foot into the grave.

Apparently, the founding fathers did not intend for copyright to protect the public, nor to protect the artists, but rather to protect a particular business model. Progress be damned!

Out Like a LAMP

"Can you imagine the nightmare our roads would be if everybody had one?"

Device Lets Drivers Control Traffic Lights