Karen A. Frenkel

The Wisdom of the Hive
Jaron Lanier rails against the social trends being fostered by the Internet--in particular its power to stifle creativity and grant anonymity as well as encourage groupthink and a lynch-mob mentality.

Sustainability: How Computer Scientists can Help: Blog@CACM

Science in the Arts: ScienceFriday.com and TalkingScience.org

Therapists Use Virtual Worlds to Address Real Problems
Virtual worlds serve as icebreakers for troubled teens reluctant to interact with therapists. In these online environments, which they are accustomed to playing in, they practice ways to cope and engage faster than with face-to-face role-play.

Flying on a Wing and an Isotope
Should there be nuclear-powered planes to save the environment? Engineers reconsider a Cold War-era proposal scrapped decades ago

Scientific American MIND
How do vesicles, which carry neurotransmitters, release their cargo? And how quickly can these carriers reconstitute themselves for the next round?

Unwelcome Science
Battling Negative Stereotypes of Scientists and Ivy Expansion Anger, a Principal Gets Experimental

Your Brain on 9/11
Adults who witnessed the attacks close-up have subtle changes in their brains four years afterwards. Their amygdalae, the center of the brain responsible for certain types of memory, are hyperactive. Children orphaned that day pump out above-normal amounts of cortisol, a symptom of stress.

Scientific American
A New Algorithim Could Soon Vanquish Go Pros

Womens eNews Mentor Programs Help Girls Engineer Their Futures
Women continue to lag behind men in engineering in terms of degrees awarded, presence in the field and sheer numbers. But several mentorship programs are helping to attract girls and young women to the profession.

Scientific American MIND

Oral history Interviews with Geneva Overholser
Three oral history sessions with the renowned editor of the DeMoines Register, who became known for choosing to print the name of a victim of rape, with her permission, so that readers could absorb the personal, violent nature of the crime.

Oral History
Interviews with Harvard Children's Hospital's Mark Fleming and Princeton University's Michael Berry.

Scientific American MIND

Book Review/Essay Scientific American
Why Aren't More Women Physicists?
A biography of an 18th century Marquise and profiles of 20th century female physicists examine how they pursued their talents.

Book Review Scientific American MIND
Play = Learning
Cognitive scientists and other experts describe 40 of years of research showing the many varieties of play by which young children learn. The authors claim that the Bush Administration's program, No Child Left Behind, with its emphasis on worksheets and memorization, ignores a huge body of research that includes long-accepted, reproducible data.

Looking at Light

Listening to Sound

Light and Sound Technology

Feature: The New York Times and International Herald Tribune
Suppose you manage a mall where visitors merely window-shop and rarely enter stores to make purchases. If your merchants can't survive, you lose, too. That is the phenomenon plaguing many Web retailers and portals today.

Medical Spare Parts
How implants and other man-made devices are prolonging life and enhancing its quality.

Catching the Customer
Experts discuss ways to improve Web sites and exstablish trust so that customers overcome their fears of shopping online for expensive goods.

Battling CyberFraud
How online merchants in the diamond and jewelry business can ascertain whether their customer's are who they claim to be, and avoid "transhippers," who re-box gems and export them to crime rings abroad.

Computers in Court
Technology Review, April 1982

With some 12,000 computers humming away in various government branches in 1976, Abraham Ribicoff, then a U.S. Senator from Connecticut, sensed a tempting target for data defrauders and instituted an investigation into federal computer security.

CyberTimes Toy Story: Origin of a Species
CyberTimes: The New York Times on the Web January 15, 1996)

John Lasseter was a new Disney animator back in 1981 when two friends working on “Tron,” the first feature-length movie to employ computer animation, showed him dailies of a sequence in which motor cycles zoomed around a video game inside a computer. Lasseter was dazzled.

Robots: Machines In Man's Image (Contents, Excerpt, Review)

net.LEARNING
This two-hour documentary explores the trade-offs students and faculty are willing to make in online classrooms. Profiles a student of library science in Alaska who collaborates in cyberspace with cohorts in Chicago and Urbana-Champaign, a professor of literature in San Luis Obisbo, and many others pioneering this medium.

Minerva's Machine: Women and Computing
This one-hour documentary asks why so few women are designing the machines that are changing how we do everything. Profiles show how several women overcame barriers in the workplace. Experts on gender differences, educators, and psychologists discuss whether women are inately different than men, or whether a chilly environment in classrooms––from grade school to graduate school--contributes to their small numbers.

Women and Computing

Profiles and Interviews with Computer Scientists