Infotrade

1. Caveat Emptor (KAV-ee-OT emp-TOR): “Let the buyer beware” Before money-back guarantees and 20-year warranties, caveat emptor was indispensable advice for the consumer. These days, it’d be more fitting to have it tattooed on the foreheads of used-car salesmen, infomercial actors, and prostitutes. For extra credit points, remember that caveat often makes solo appearances at cocktail parties as a fancy term for a warning or caution. Oh, and just so you know, caveat lector means “let the reader beware.” 2. Persona Non Grata (puhr-SOH-nah non GRAH-tah): “An unacceptable person” Remember your old college buddy, the one everybody called Chugger? Now picture him at a debutante ball, and you’ll start to get a sense of someone with persona non grata status. The term is most commonly used in diplomatic circles to indicate that a person is unwelcome due to ideological differences or a breach of trust. Sometimes, the tag refers to a pariah, a ne’er-do-well, a killjoy, or an interloper, b...

U.S. senators Wednesday participated in a multi-agency exercise to simulate how the government might respond in the event of a cyber attack that cripples New York City’s electric supply during a summer heat wave. The demonstration was part of an effort by lawmakers to encourage bi-partisan cooperation on cybersecurity to underscore how important it is for the feds to align on the issue. In addition to members of the Senate, top cybersecurity officials from various departments and agencies--including the White House, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), FBI, and National Security Agency--also participated in the event, which illustrated the consequences of a massive cyber attack at a critical time in a major U.S. city. Officials were keeping exact details of what happened at the exercise confidential. The senior administration officials involved--including DHS secretary Janet Napolitano, White House cybersecurity coordinator Howard Schmidt, and FBI director Robert Mueller--u...

Out of body experiences   (OBEs or OOBEs) involve the vivid sensation of moving outside your physical body and sometimes traveling far beyond it. OBEs are most likely to occur when you are asleep, meditating or practicing wake-induced lucid dream exercises. Indeed, many dream explorers agree that out-of-body phenomena are extensions of the lucid dream experience. Around 1 in 10 people have experienced an OBE at some time in their lives - and some people have them frequently. There are many ways to induce an OBE and we'll look at a practical technique for doing so at the end of this article. The Link Between OBEs and Lucid Dreams Our scientific understanding of the OBE strongly suggests that it is a type of lucid dream. It's no coincidence that out-of-body induction techniques are virtually identical to   Wake Induced Lucid Dreams . They are virtually the same phenomenon: An OBE/WILD begins when you're lying down, ideally having recently woken from a sleep. T...

This week, the   OCW Consortium   is holding its annual meeting, celebrating   10 years of OpenCourseWare . The movement to make university-level content freely and openly available online began a decade ago, when the faculty at MIT agreed to put the materials from all 2,000 of the university’s courses on the Web. With that gesture,   MIT OpenCourseWare helped launch an important educational movement, one that MIT President Susan Hockfield described in her opening remarks at yesterday’s meeting as both the child of technology and of a far more ancient academic tradition: “the tradition of the global intellectual commons.” We have looked here before at how   OCW has shaped education   in the last ten years, but in many ways much of the content that has been posted online remains very much “Web 1.0.” That is, while universities have posted their syllabi, handouts, and quizzes online, there has not been — until recently — much “Web 2.0″ OCW resources — l...