Fulbright experience

My Fulbright experience began with a great start at the University of Arizona for my three weeks pre-academic orientation program in July 2008. Pre-academic orientation is the fun part of the Fulbright program and often called the “the honeymoon” before the serious studies starts. In Arizona, I had the opportunity to meet great minds from all over the world (about 40 Fulbrighters) in the same place with the same purpose.

Senator J.William Fulbright had a great vision to end wars through cultural exchange, and through getting to know one another to help make the world a better place. My views regarding other cultures have changed by spending time with people from other countries, trying to live in their cultures, and clearing up misconceptions about their countries as well as my country.

After my pre-academic program, I went to University of Pittsburgh in Pittsburgh, situated in the state of Pensylvannia. I was enrolled as a visiting research scholar in the school of Information Sciences. University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University are neighbor universities and both campuses are side-by-side, thus I had the opportunity to interact with students and academics from both universities, attending several talks and seminars. I participated in research activities as part of the Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) project that has Dr. Tipper and Dr. Krishnamurthy as principal investigators and other PhD students. During my academic stay, the American students, international students and professors I have met at the University of Arizona, University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Melon University were very helpful and made me feel at home. In addition to the high quality research experience I’ve received, I have been able to appreciate the beauty of cultural interactions.

I also had the opportunity to attend a Fulbright Enrichment Seminar in New York. Throughout the seminar, Fulbrighters from over 60 different countries participated in social entrepreneurship workshop. The goal of the workshop is to identify a problem in key issue areas of the society and create a social enterprise that will solve it.

Having participated in this Fulbright Foreign Student Program, it will definitely leave a long-lasting impression on me and with experiences that have changed my life in many positive ways. I returned back to Mauritius, filled with memories of the fun I had sharing our Mauritian cultures with the world and broaden my insight into better understanding other peoples and cultures.

WOMEN – Careers in Computing and Information Technology

Girls Inc. – http://www.girlsinc.com/ This website is about providing information for girls about science and technology careers. There are profiles of professionals as well as games and interactive pieces for the girls to participate in.

University of Washington – Why CSE – http://www.cs.washington.edu/WhyCSE This website contains videos and profiles of University of Washington graduates who now work in the IT firm. It is recommended that you show the “A Day in the Life” video as well as the additional profiles at the bottom of the screen.

4000 years of Women in Science – http://crux.astr.ua.edu/4000WS/4000WS.html This website profiles important contributions of women in science over the last 4000 years. Point out such women as Grace Hopper and Ada Lovelace and their contributions to computing.

Role Model Project for Girls – http://www.womenswork.org/girls/compsci/ This site will randomly display a biography of a woman in science or technology at the click of a button.

Girl Geeks – http://www.girlgeeks.org/ An online community for girls interested in technology and computing.

Women in Technology International – http://www.witi.com/ This website is primarily focused on professionals, but looking at the hall of fame, photo gallery, and Women on the Move section under WITI Community can be useful for the purpose of educating girls about what careers are available in CS and the women who work in them.

HCRBAC – An Access Control System for Collaborative Context-Aware HealthCare Services in Mauritius

HCRBAC – An Access Control System for Collaborative Context-Aware HealthCare Services in Mauritius

Oveeyen Moonian, Sudha Cheerkoot-Jalim, Soulakshmee D Nagowah, Kavi K Khedo, Razvi Doomun, Zarine Cadersaib

Abstract

Healthcare is an area dealing with an enormous amount of highly sensitive data being handled by a number of users. As a first step towards an e-health service, Mauritius requires the electronic management of patients’ data at its different healthcare institutions. Such data management should allow easy non-obtrusive, but secure, access to data by in house personnel of each healthcare institution, while also providing secure remote access to other institutions within the healthcare service as well as external bodies such as the police and insurance companies.. This paper presents HCRBAC (Healthcare Context-Aware Role-Based Access Control) a data access system for the Mauritian healthcare service, where data access within a healthcare institution is facilitated and controlled through the use of context-awareness, while remote access to data is provided in a secure way. A number of different existing access control mechanisms are first analyzed and a comparative study of these is performed. A combination of the different techniques is then used to provide efficient management of the data access system and allowing any healthcare institution to open up data access to other related institutions, without compromising confidentiality and integrity of data.

Full Text: FULLTEXT

Five things we have learned from Bill Gates

Whether or not you’re a fan of Bill Gates, it’s impossible to deny the role he has played in spreading computer technology across the planet during the past three decades. His retirement as a full-time Microsoft employee in June 2008 marked the end of an era — and it’s one worth looking back on. This Sanity Savers for I-T executives discusses the five of the most important lessons we’ve learned from the meteoric and often turbulent career of the world’s most famous IT professional.

Whether or not you’re a fan of Bill Gates, it’s impossible to deny the role he has played in spreading computer technology across the planet during the past three decades. His retirement as a full-time Microsoft employee in June 2008 marked the end of an era — and it’s one worth looking back on.

Five of the most important lessons we’ve learned from the meteoric, often turbulent career of the world’s most famous software engineer.

Number 5: Geeks can be businessmen, too

Before Bill Gates came along, computer programmers were mostly considered to be a necessary evil. They were stereotyped as misanthropic weirdos, and they were stuck away in dark corners of the back office. But then Gates became the most successful businessman on earth — if you judge business success by profits — and almost single-handedly transformed the term “geek” from an insult to a badge of honor.

Number four: You don’t have to be first to win

Gates and Microsoft rarely got to the party first with new technologies, but they were better at bringing their products to the masses than anyone else in the industry. Internet Explorer is the most famous example, but Microsoft Windows, Word, and Excel are also great examples. Microsoft was simply better at executing a business plan, and that’s why Microsoft software is now the industry standard. It didn’t hurt that Microsoft often had the most resources, but Gates and company showed over and over again that they knew how to best take advantage of those resources.

Number 3: Computing will spread everywhere

In the 1980s, when the computer was still mostly a novelty, Gates expressed his vision that there would one day be “a computer on every business desk and in every home.” That vision has nearly come true in the United States, and it’s likely to become a reality that will spread across the globe in the decades ahead.

Gates  vision of the computing experience has continued to inspire the industry in general as well as Microsoft’s product plans — from the smartphone to the Tablet PC to speech recognition to the touch-based interface.

Number 2: Arrogance breeds failure

In the movie Pirates of Silicon Valley, the Bill Gates character says to Steve Ballmer, “Success is a menace. It fools smart people into thinking that they can’t lose.”

He was referring to IBM and the fact that it let Microsoft sneak in and steal its thunder in the launch of the PC. Ironically, a decade later, Microsoft’s own success and arrogance led to its anti-trust defeat to the U.S. government.

But Microsoft also remained on the lookout for the next small company that might do to it what it had done to IBM. Some of the most popular targets in its cross hairs: Apple, Netscape, Linux, and Google.

Number 1: Software matters

The one message that Bill Gates spent his career reiterating was that software matters. Gates and Microsoft always believed in the magic of software to create amazing digital experiences.

When Microsoft first launched in the 1970s, the computer business was all about the hardware. It was Gates and his vision of what people could do with computers that moved software to the center of the computing experience.

Bill Gates has had a tremendous influence on the direction and advancement of computer technology over the past 30 years. And although his era is coming to an end at Microsoft, we’ve discussed the five most important lessons that the technology industry has learned from his vision and accomplishments.

(Author Jason Hiner) e-mail : sanity@techrepublic.com.

SkyRock.Com

SkyRock has been named as the largest social network in France, according to the latest comScore World Metrix report on French social networking sites. A youth culture phenomenon, Skyblog was started as an adjunct to France’s leading independent radio station in 2002 and has grown in to not just the Francophone web’s hottest property but also the world’s ninth most popular social site and Europe’s third. Skyrock.com started off as a blogging site, Skyblog.com. Skyblog’s easy-to-use interface proved a hit right from its launch with its young, primarily French-speaking audience. In May 2007, after abandoning the Skyblog.com brand , Skyrock.com was launched as a full-scale social network, with new functionalities such as adding friends, an inbox, chat rooms and member profiles. Skyrock.com is a social networking site offering its members a free, personal web space. One can create a blog, add a profile, and exchange messages with other registered members. The site also offers a specific space for members who create blogs showcasing their original musical compositions.

I would have to admit that this the first time that I’ve heard about this social networking site. It currently boasts of more than 9 million members worldwide and 19 million Bebo blogs which it supports and manages. Hence, Skyrock Network made it to the top 5 of the June 2008 social networking site analytics. Though Skyrock.com already has WAP carriage on Orange and Vodafone and i-mode on Bouygues, its pioneers reckon the potential is even greater because “social networking is the future of telecoms”.

The popularity has been attributed to its focus on the French language, and its appeal to other French-speaking countries, including Belgium and Switzerland. With 13.2 million unique visitors from within France for the month of July, Skyrock claims 50% of the country’s entire online population. For July, MySpace came in second place, with 2.3 million unique visitors. The thought for MySpace’s launch in France was that it would be a direct competitor to Skyrock, but it’s clear that Skyrock’s blogging platform and social network has remained dominant so far.

Kadoo.Com

Kadoo has launched a new super-social network that aggregates all types of data and files and gives the user control over with whom to share them, users can manage, store, and selectively share their digital content from one place. The service, which offers 10 gigabytes of free storage, gives users one place to manage, share, and store digital data, contacts, photos, files, video, bookmarks, and blogs. People can share information with people who are not members of Kadoo using a feature called “selective sharing.” The service is integrated with a service for university and high school environments called Blackboard.

Although the site is targeted to consumers, it could also be used by teachers and students who wish to make videos, photos, bookmarks, tags, and other digital content across multiple sites available to others. Kadoo provides a single interface to manage Web applications such as e-mail and contacts as well as for social networking functions such as tagging and sharing. The site provides 10 GB of storage for digital content. All of a Kadoo user’s digital content is sharable and available to each of Kadoo’s other applications. The service’s Share Mail application, a type of e-mail integrated with Kadoo, enables the sharing of large files typically too large to send as e-mail attachments.

Kadoo content can be shared with other Kadoo members, with people outside the community, members of Facebook, the Blackboard educational community, and other networks. Kadoo is at the leading edge of this movement and has the potential to change the way consumers think about their online persona.”

(www.kadoo.com)

Enotes.Com

eNotes features online study guides, lesson plans, and other reference material in a wide range of academic areas. eNotes is a comprehensive educational resource used by millions of teachers and students. It is a new online resource for those in the education field, or others that are just interested in learning. Similar to some other tools for aggregating content and creating personalized notes on various topics, eNotes allows you to bookmark items, take notes and organize your referenced data. eNotes, however, is unlike most similar services in that it provides all of its own content, which comes through a regimented in-house publishing team that verifies all work available on the site. Upon registration you can tell eNotes what type of user you are — student, teacher or neither — so the content can be presented, organized and recommended accordingly. Some of the features I particularly found useful on eNotes are the highlighted-text dictionary search options, the deep categorization of available content, the ease of search, and the study guides. One feature that students will especially appreciate is the ability to print and cite content; the citation option gives you the reference already formatted so all you have to do is copy and paste it into your term paper, granted this is the bibliography format your professor requires. If you’re hoping this service is free, you’ve already gotten your hopes up. It will cost you $49.95 per year. Fortunately for you, eNotes has given us 50 premium accounts for Mashable readers, so you can check out the full eNotes service. Just click here and enter “Mashable-50″ as the invite code, and proceed to the registration process from there. Enotes have thousands of literature study guides, lesson plans, literary criticism, and a vibrant community that invite you to join. Post your question to thousands of teachers and students In addition, eNotes offers custom versions of its service for schools and organizations, which would be ideal for shared lesson plans across a school district, or a collaborative graduate project at a university. The real question, though, is concerning the attitude certain educators will have towards this online resource that’s aiming to be an all-inclusive research tool. Given the instant gratification that Web search provides us is enough to make certain educators fearful enough to ban specific Web searches all together. So what happens when a premium service like eNotes comes along and provides search, filtering, study guides, lesson plans, and ready-formatted citations? I personally think it’s a step in the right direction. It won’t dumb us down, and such a resource can only be improved with the support of academia.

www.enotes.com

PicVi Entertainment Portal

The most favorite tags in PicVi (PictureVideo) entertainment portal  are girls and humor, and many other tags are available such as video, art, ads, and some others are international celebrity names. Visit PicVi website, and you will find out why most people called that PicVi was new entertainment portal in the world wide web. If you are a type of person who likes to be sitting in front of your computer for hours, and search for a popular and interesting video, maybe you should try to click on your mouse to the Pic Vi website. You can find anything that you search for fun, from funny videos, funny pictures, pictures of babes, funny advertising videos and many more. . You can also search the pictures and videos by tags available on the PicVi web, and you can also view the top rated such as funny accidents video, champions league, girls amateur photos, Adriana Lima Rihanna, Mila Jovovich, Avril Lavigne, Durex Ads Video, adult shooting, social advertising, and Angelina Jolie, all are completely featured on the website, or you can also search manually page by page.

There are categories available to make you easier in doing your fun search and download, which contain of babes, cars, fun, games, nature, sport, and the uncategorized ones. In PicVi you can view hot babes pictures and videos, art pictures, extreme photos, beautiful photos, animals, and even games

Scientific Commons

Scientific Commons.org is a search engine for scientific publications made available via open access repositories. These repositories include institutional repositories such as the California Digital Library’s e-Scholarship, as well as discipline-based repositories. The major aim of the project is to develop the worlds largest communication medium for scientific knowledge products which is freely accessible to the public. A key challenge of the project is to support the rapidly growing number of movements and archives who admit the free distribution and access to scientific knowledge. These are the valuable sources for the ScientificCommons.org project. The ScientificCommons.org project makes it possible to access the largely distributed sources with their vast amount of scientific publications via just one common interface. ScientificCommons.org identifies authors from all archives and makes their social and professional relationships transparent and visible to anyone across disciplinary, institutional and technological boundaries. At the time of this posting, ScientificCommons.org included nearly 25 million documents from around 100 different repositories around the world.
Check it out: www.scientificcommons.org

Halaltube.Com

HALALTUBE site was made with the intention of organizing every single Islamic lecture, talk, khutbah, video, etc. from YouTube, Google Video, etc. Halal Tube makes it easy for everyone to find a lecture by a specific speaker instead of searching throughout the web to find it. Just click the speaker and bam, the list of lectures are there. The only way to make this really work is for everyone around the globe to submit videos that are not on Halal Tube to us so we can put it up. Halal Tube is the easiest and fastest way to locate lectures by various speakers. It’s updated by you, the viewers, who submit videos/audio files you come across online via YouTube, Google Video, and other various websites.