A new look at systems engineering

The system idea?solution of a complete problem in its full environment by systematic assembly and matching of parts to solve the whole problem in the context of the lifetime use of the system, considering all aspects?is one of the most important ideas of modern times. It has made possible the solution of complicated problems that previously could not be touched. However, there exists a rising tide of problems and general disgruntlement (expressed by many people) that indicates trouble. Therefore, the author speaks as an ``engineering critic' (intended in the sense of a music critic: ``Are we turning in a good performance?') and, contrary to the many who are taking the positive side of systems engineering, offers the negative side of the controversy.     

New options and insights for survivable transport networks

This article is devoted to a selection of recent topics in survivable networking. New ideas in capacity design and ring-to-mesh evolution are given, as well as a systematic comparison of the capacity requirements of several mesh-based schemes showing how they perform over a range of network graph connectivity. The work provides new options and insights to address the following questions. How does one evolve from an existing ring-based network to a future mesh network? If the facilities graph is very sparse, how can mesh efficiency be much better than rings? How do the options for mesh protection or restoration rank in capacity requirements? How much is efficiency increased if we enrich our network connectivity? We also outline p-cycles, showing this new concept can realize ring-like speed with meshlike efficiency. The scope is limited to conveying basic ideas with an understanding that they could be further adapted for use in IP or DWDM layers with GMPLS-type protocols or a centralized control plane     

Patenting propagated data signals: what hath God wrought?

The US Patent Office is now issuing patents on propagated data signals that embody computer programs. Result: patent infringement can now occur in a mouse click. While patents have always been available for new and useful processes, machines, manufactures, and compositions of matter, the extension of patent law to computer data signals is new. After losing a series of battles in the courts, the Patent Office now considers a computer program embodied in a carrier wave to be a manufacture, and hence patentable subject matter. This rather surprising development provides a powerful weapon against software patent infringement over the Internet; and it represents a dangerous snare for the telecommunications industry. Is there anything beyond the reach of patent law? The Supreme Court remains steadfast in this: patents cannot be obtained for abstract ideas, laws of nature, and natural phenomena     

The Art of Peering

For Concert, as an Internet service provider operating one of the many thousands of networks that make up the Global Internet, there are two key questions — 'How does Concert connect to and fit within this single global network?' — and — 'If any of the traffic generated by Concert customers goes to destinations that are not on CIP (Concert Internet Plus, Concert's Internet service) network, how does it get there?' The answer to both questions is by 'peering'. This paper covers peering from Concert's broad commercial view, looking at various interconnecting strategies, key principles and policies.     

Are you protecting your intellectual property?

Engineers are employed for their ideas and ingenuity. Patents protect their inventions or programs. Accountants are rapidly becoming aware of the value of all such intellectual property rights (IPRs), even to the extent of a few forward looking companies putting IPRs on their balance sheet as assets. The author describes some of the legal ramifications involved in ensuring this intellectual property is adequately protected. The author describes software patents, business method patents, patent costs and valuation of IPRs     

信息时代新闻评论工作者的职责与角色转型

随着信息技术的快速发展,各种媒介的信息量也呈几何增长.并引发了当今信息传播形态的深刻变革:人们接受信息的方式,由听命于一家之言到多元意见复合交流,及时反馈;传播关系发生了演变,媒介的一家独尊、传受分明的模式,转向以传为主、传受交互、受传合一的交流网络关系.同时,新闻评论的传播生态发生了变化,在仍然保留主流意见传播者的地位的同时,形式更为灵活,它成为一个议题设置者,开始搭建各种意见交流的平台.新闻评论出现了个性化、专业化的势态.这也要求新闻评论要遵循公共利益的原则,更加注重采用客观公正的表现方式,运用事实说话,而不是不加解释地直接发表结论.     

Scanning our past from London. Using yesterday's engineeringtomorrow: Eric Laithwaite

Old ideas can sometimes gain a new lease on life. Ideas that have once been tried and then discarded as impractical can be re-introduced when changed circumstances or new materials make it possible to do things that were impossible in earlier years. A good example of this re-application of earlier technology is the linear motor and the work of Eric Laithwaite (1921-1997), who applied these devices to modern transportation systems, including a possible future application in space. Originally, the idea was clearly described in patents from the 1840s, and at least one piece of a linear motor made by Charles Wheatstone survives from that time. Such machines could not have been exploited in the mid-19th Century. The necessary current was not available in the days when electrical engineers were dependent for their supplies on batteries or massive permanent magnet generators. Towards the end of the century, practical generators with wound fields became available, and these were capable of producing large currents, but at the same time, it was also found that the same machines could operate in reverse, as motors, and so it was not necessary to design electric motors as separate machines     

Creating the path to success: The impact of crowdsourced exploratory and exploitative activities of expert graphic designers on creativity performance

This article investigates (a) how serial idea generators in crowdsourcing contests adjust strategies (e.g., exploiting existing expertise and exploring new approaches) over time in response to the relative success of their prior creative ideas, and (b) how these changes in competitive strategies influence subsequent creativity performance. The research was conducted on Threadless, a website that crowdsources the creation of graphic designs through an ongoing competition. Empirical results from a longitudinal sample of 86 serial designers and their 1,714 submissions indicated that a higher level of design expertise was related to less exploration and greater exploitation behavior. Exploitation was also found to contribute to generating ideas that were highly rated by the crowd. For the crowdsourcer’s decision as to whether to transform a submitted idea into a product for sale, neither exploration nor exploitation was found to be significant when controlling for crowd rating. Theoretical and practical implications for crowdsourcing are discussed.     

Search methods used with transistor patent applications

As the world has become more technically oriented, the number of patent applications has been increasing also?too rapidly for the Patent Office to assimilate them comfortably with current techniques. When an application for a patent is received, it must be evaluated as to novelty by a specialist who searches the prior art for similar patents. Previously, all such searches were done manually, which meant that the examiner had to rely entirely on his knowledge and experience. In an effort to remedy the situation the Office has instituted mechanized search methods. In order to ascertain the differences in patterns of thinking associated with manual and mechanized searches, a study was carried out in which a patent application in the transistor art was searched both manually and by a mechanized method. The mechanized search in this case permitted more patents to be analyzed more quickly but, being completely literal, it does not allow for hunches or browsing.     

Speech?man's natural communication

Most of the universe runs along perfectly well without the need of speech for command and control. Why, then, does man need speech? How did he acquire speech? Can it be optimized? What is the future of this form of communication? These questions were put to a group of men who have done distinguished work in diverse fields relevant to speech. Their provocative discussions, reported here, do not add up to a definitive or overall unified theoretical structure such as scientists love to build; nor could they at this stage. Certainly, for those who look closely at speech and language there is no question that the subject is mysterious and complex. It may be that language is mysterious because it is too close to us, too deeply imbedded in the inherited structure of the human organism for us to ``see' it. However it is, there is no doubt that many of the questions and ideas raised here belong in the vortex of concerns of all those who are interested in human communications.?N.L.     

Invention on demand

A Fab Four partnership brainstorms boisterously to spice up new but mundane products. A. Ze'ev Hed, Richard Pavelle, Sol Aisenberg, and George Freedman meet once a week to thrash out ideas for new products that are leading to many patents and hefty sales. They have to their names more than 300 products, 130 issued and pending patents, and more than 50 licensing arrangements for such gizmos as the 10 second hand dryer, a credit card-sized calculator, a microwave popcorn popper, and a more effective sunscreen. What these products lack in glamour they make up for in royalties from several hundred million dollars in sales of their products by companies like Raytheon, Canon, Casio, Lockheed, and General Electric. The quartet got the idea to join forces about 10 years ago while attending meetings at a now-defunct consultant networking group in Cambridge called Qube. Figuring that by joining forces, they could achieve greater success than any could alone, the four worked part-time for three years before devising a viable business model for a new company.     

Modernization of telecommunications in Central Europe and the CIS—What happens next?

Thoreau once wrote, “In the long run, men hit only what they aim at.” I think that idea is central to a discussion about reaching the potential of anything; one must have a clear idea of where one is going in order to arrive at the right place.This article presents a realistic growth target, and then discusses how Central European nations and the CIS will be able to “hit” it. Specifically, it focuses on the capital requirements necessary to aim at the target, and offers a few ideas on how those requirements might be met.     

A quick tutorial on searching and evaluating Internet resources

Do you know the difference between Yahoo and AltaVista? Do all your friends and students know? If no, this tutorial is for you. It explains some basic concepts, understanding which makes life on the Internet much easier. Now that the Internet is moving into the general knowledge of everybody and is taught in schools, we need to find some general, underlying ideas of how to deal with it. Wiring schools, as is happening now throughout the United States and other countries, is not enough. Teachers and students must be trained. This tutorial covers two small but important aspects of that training. The first part considers searching on the Internet; the second deals with quality and authority of information found on the Internet. It is a common mistake to assume that high technology guarantees high quality. Just because something is on the Web does not necessarily mean it is true     

Down and out in Ham lake

This paper presents a cautionary tale to all inventors who surrender their patents in return for funding. The paper relates the experience of Corliss Orville Burandt, who claims to have invented a method called variable valve timing. Burandt discovered that Honda's intelligent VTEC engine used a technique that he believes is identical to his patent. He also claims that four other major auto companies have recently filed for patents on concepts that would infringe his patents. Unfortunately, Burandt found out that he didn't own the patents and that Investment Rarities Inc., which had initially provided funds to develop his inventions, had failed to pay the US Patent and Trademark Office in maintenance fees that were due on the 12 patents Burandt had assigned to the company in exchange for funding. This case should serve as a lesson to all inventors not to assign the patent to their development partners, but instead to give them an exclusive license. That way, the inventor maintains control over the invention, can monitor and ensure payment of maintenance fees, and can work language into the contract that stipulates that the exclusive license can be terminated if the licensee does not make a reasonable effort to commercialize the technology.     

An empirical evaluation of the technology cycle time indicator as ameasure of the pace of technological progress in superconductortechnology

The technology cycle time indicator (TCT) is a new measure of technological progress. The TCT is the median age of the patents cited on the front page of a patent document. The measure assumes that the more recent the age of the cited patents, the more quickly one generation of inventions is replacing another. The main purpose of the study was to evaluate the TCT in a dynamic context to determine how accurately it measures the pace of technological progress. This study found the trend in TCT changed abruptly from gradually increasing (slowing in cycle time) to steadily decreasing (speeding up in cycle time) following the discovery of high-temperature superconductors. The methodology prescribed in this study could potentially be used in assessing the pace of progress for different technologies or different nations in the same technology     

Quality matters, especially in sharing knowledge [From the Editor]

These days, all it takes is a few clicks of the mouse for a person to access massive amounts of information and data through Web pages, blogs, or social-centric Web sites. This easy-to-access and fast-to-find information is what makes the era we live in a special one. But with all this advancements comes the question of quality . Does the shared knowledge have high quality? What sources can one rely on to access quality knowledge? This is where publications such as IEEE Signal Processing Magazine (SPM) play an important role. Signal processing as indicated by our new editor-in-chief, Dr. Li Deng, is going through a transformation from focusing on low-level signals such as waveforms to dealing with semantic and human-centric signals. This signal processing transformation has to be accompanied by a metamorphosis in how the community exchanges high-quality knowledge and how the community members learn from each other.     

A Balancing Act: The Interplay of Status Effects on Dominance in Virtual Teams

Findings from a previous study indicate that dominance was a key inhibitor of creativity in virtual teams. This study extends understanding of dominance through an in-depth, qualitative analysis of eight virtual teams. Two research questions are addressed: (1) how is dominance manifested in virtual teams? and (2) why does dominance occur in some teams, and not others? Findings indicate that dominance occurred in three different patterns. Although both males and females dominated, a commonality across patterns was that the dominant individual belonged to the majority sex in each team. Furthermore, dominance was driven by a combination of a few team member status traits. When one or more status markers belonged to a single person - the dominant member - and were absent in other team members, dominance was pronounced. In teams that did not experience dominance, these status indicators were spread across multiple members. Additionally, even though all teams communicated strictly via asynchronous computer-mediated communication (CMC), equalization was not evidenced in the majority of teams. Status characteristics theory and proportional representation theory provide a basis to explain the prevalence, as well as the absence, of dominance in these virtual teams.     

场致发射显示领域专利分析

由于优异的显示特性,场致发射显示器被认为是最有发展前景的平板显示器件之一.分析场致发射显示领域的专利有助于了解该领域的技术发展动态.通过检索欧洲专利局的专利数据库,对筛选出的主要场致发射领域相关的专利进行统计分析,讨论了美国、日本、韩国、中国等的厂商在场致发射显示领域技术的发展现状和未来发展趋势,着重研究了我国场致发射显示领域专利的发展趋势和存在的问题.     

Tools for evaluation of social relations in mobility models

In MANET-DTN, the main idea is to detect the social relations between nodes in mobility models because the wireless mobile devices are carried by humans and the network uses the social relations to transport messages between isolated islands of the mobile terminals in order to increase the network performance. Today there are a lot of social and non-social mobility models. The problem is how to use these models in MANET-DTN. Therefore, proper evaluation method is needed, that is able to reveal the social aspect of investigated mobility model. Since there are a lot of methods that do not directly exhibit the social aspect of mobility models, in this paper the new evaluation method was proposed based on Louvain method for community detection and the other network graph parameter (average weighted degree). Simulations of evaluation method were made as a comparison between two random mobility models and one social based mobility model in order to point out differences between social and non-social mobility models. All models were evaluated by proposed method and other existing protocol dependent and independent methods. The main idea of the simulations was to analyse how the mobility models with social and non-social mobility models can affect the network performance and provide new and reliable tool, which enables analysis of the mobility models from social behaviour point of view.