Computer: Internet

Visionaries see a future of telecommuting workers, interactive libraries and multimedia classrooms. They speak of electronic town meetings and virtual communities. Commerce and business will shift from offices and malls to networks and modems. And the freedom of digital networks will make government more democratic.

Baloney. Do our computer pundits lack all common sense? The truth in no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works.

We're spending a lot more time tweeting and Facebooking, says Nielsen. The average social-networking user around the world spent more than five and a half hours on sites like Facebook and Twitter in December, according to data released Monday by Nielsen. That marked an 82 percent jump from December 2008 when Tweeters and Facebookers surfed their favorite sites for around three hours the entire month.

The @DalaiLama account is up and running. And, unlike a previous hoax account, this appears to be the real deal. Twitter's new vice president of communications, Sean Garrett, just welcomed the Tibetan spiritual leader to the site. The account is here. The Dalai Lama already has more than 6,000 followers.

Imagine how much sooner Dr. Jonas Salk could have discovered the polio vaccine if in 1955 if he was on Facebook. Often, researchers work in a vacuum. They can be stuck on a problem blocking progress on their research that someone on the other side of the world has already solved. Yes, there’s a wealth of information online and in scientific journals, but what if there were one central place online where a researcher could ask a question and someone else could answer it?

When will China emerge as a military threat to the U.S.? In most respects the answer is: not anytime soon -- China doesn’t even contemplate a time it might challenge America directly. But one significant threat already exists: cyberwar. Attacks -- not just from China but from Russia and elsewhere -- on America’s electronic networks cost millions of dollars and could in the extreme cause the collapse of financial life, the halt of most manufacturing systems, and the evaporation of all the data and knowledge stored on the Internet.

Sweden took the number one spot from the United States to top the annual rankings on the usage of telecommunications technologies such as networks, cellphones and computers, a report released on Thursday shows.

The study of social networks has thrown up more than a few surprises over the years. It's easy to imagine that because the links that form between various individuals in a society are not governed by any overarching rules, they must have a random structure. So the discovery in the 1980s that social networks are very different came as something of a surprise. In a social network, most nodes are not linked to each other but can easily be reached by a small number of steps. This is the so-called small worlds network.

Even as we are acquiring ever more extraordinary knowledge, we are storing it in ever more fragile and ephemeral forms. If our civilisation runs into trouble, like all others before it, how much would survive?

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Thursday called for an unfettered worldwide Internet and urged global condemnation of those who conduct cyber attacks, as China sought to contain tension with the United States over the hacking and censorship of Google.

Bone-bending rickets can now be added to the list of ills linked to children spending uncounted hours before a computer screen, British researchers said Friday.