Facebook Shares

Facebook Shares Its Cloud Designs Cloud hardware could get cheaper because of the social network's self-interested altruism. The machinery: A Facebook employee shows one of the servers  that the company’s engineers designed from scratch for its massive data center in Oregon.  Jason Madara If you invented something cheaper, more efficient, and more powerful than what came before, you might want to keep the recipe a closely guarded secret. Yet Facebook took the opposite approach after opening a 147,000-square-foot computing center in rural Oregon this April. It published blueprints for everything from the power supplies of its computers to the super-efficient cooling system of the building. Other companies are now cherry-picking...

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Computerization

English Articles Computerization ‘‘Computerization’’ refers to worldwide technology integration and adoption of computers and other electronic IT devices, along with the Internet, to support the activities that people do in the course of their daily lives. A person who uses a computer online exemplifies computerization, as do millions of other people who use any type f IT device. Thus, computerization generally has to do with the integration of IT evices and computerized systems into communications, transportation, manufacturing, ilitary weaponry, entertainment systems, and virtually all other technological reas of modern life. The process of computerization began in the late 1940s with he invention of modern computers to provide...

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Gold Standard

Gold Standard A standard defining a national currency in terms of a fixed weight of gold, and allowing a free exchange and trade of gold. Until the nineteenth century, most of the countries maintained a bimetallic monetary system, in which national monetary units were valued against a certain weight of either gold or silver. The widespread adoption of the gold standard during the second half of the nineteenth century was largely due to the Industrial Revolution that brought a tremendous increase in the production of goods and widened the basis of world trade. During its existence, the classical gold standard is widely seen to have contributed to equilibrium of balances of payments worldwide. The same institutions that lent support...

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Breast Cancer photographer makes women feel beautiful

Breast cancer photographer makes women feel beautiful (CNN) -- Nearly every day, Terri Shaver comes face to face with cancer and can't help but think about her life and how short it could be. For more than four years, the 56-year-old photographer from Laingsburg, Michigan, has taken free portraits of people with terminal and life-threatening illnesses as part of the Oldham Project, the nonprofit she founded in 2008 after her husband's two sisters-in-law died from breast cancer. Although the Oldham Project, named for the two sisters, provided photos for families and children, Shaver started Be Bold, Feel Beautiful, a campaign specifically aimed at women with cancer, in summer 2010. "I'll never be the same," she said. "These...

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Advertising on the Internet

English Articles Advertising on the Internet Like broadcast or print, the Internet is an advertising medium. Companies and organizations working to promote their products and services must consider this medium as they would television, magazines, outdoor, and so on. Advertising on the Internet employs a variety of forms. Banners The most common form of advertising on the Web is banner ads. Banner ads may be used for creating awareness or recognition or for direct-marketing objectives. Banner ads may take on a variety of forms as well as a number of names such as side panels, skyscrapers, or verticals. Initially banner ads constituted the vast majority of advertising on the Net, but studies indicating their questionable effectiveness...

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Computer Ethics

English Articles of Computer Ethics The ethical use of computers and other types of electronic information technology (IT) devices is known as ‘‘computer ethics’’ or ‘‘cyber ethics.’’ These concepts informally emerged beginning in the 1950s with the invention of mainframe computers initially used by U.S. government agencies, followed by colleges and universities. However, the term ‘‘computer ethics’’ was not articulated until Walter Maner did so in the mid-1970s. The ideas behind computer ethics involve complex considerations about how to behave properly—i.e., according to the laws, social customs, and moral standards of society—when using IT devices and information systems including the Internet. All forms of technology, including IT,...

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Child Labor

English Articles Child Labor According to the INTERNATIONAL LABOR ORGANIZATION (ILO), some 250 million children between the ages of Bonded labor is otherwise known as debt bondage or peonage. It is outlawed by the 1956 UN Supplementary Convention on the Abolition of SLAVERY, the Slave Trade, and Institutions and Practices Similar to Slavery. Bonded labor involves a business transaction whereby an advance payment is made to a (usually destitute) family, who in exchange hands over their child to an employer. The amount paid may be as little as $15 depending on the type of work and the age and skill of the child. In theory the child can work off his debt, but in practice this almost never occurs; the child is unable to work off the debt,...

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Silent Reading

English Articles Silent Reading Reading to oneself, without producing any sound or moving the tongue or lips. A relatively new technique of reading, in historic terms, silent reading contrasts with and has different purposes from oral reading, which is concerned with pronunciation, enunciation, voice control and communication. Until the early 20th century, students universally learned to read orally, because reading was the core of family recreation in the home before radio and television. As a result of eye-movement research just before World War I, silent reading was found to increase reading rates, reading comprehension and the ability to infer word meanings from their context. For several decades thereafter, silent reading replaced...

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Schools Without Walls

English Articles Schools Without Walls So-called openspace schools, with few interior partitions, allowing groups of students to work in separate areas of a huge, open space. An outgrowth of escalation in school construction costs in the decades following World War II. Especially effective in elementary schools, schools without walls are particularly conducive to team teaching. Seated in different parts of a huge room, on carpeted floors that minimize noise, groups of students and their teachers work on one topic at a time, and, when appropriate, a second teacher specializing in another subject may arrive to introduce applications of the first subject to a second subject. Groups of students will join or separate, according to what...

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