Communications Media

Put aside images of World War II espionage and codebreaking. Today cryptography is vital to the security of a form of communication and commerce never imagined 60 years ago: the Internet. Researchers at Northwestern University now have demonstrated a new high-speed quantum cryptography method that uses the properties of light to encrypt information into a form of code that can only be cracked by violating the physical laws of nature.

In the open and global communication world of the Interne

As cable companies and Internet access providers compete for customers by offering broadband service, cable modems and digital subscriber lines (DSLs) as faster access to the Web, slower download speeds sometimes prompt greater user response than faster download speeds, a study says.

Dr. S. Shyam Sundar, associate professor of communications and co-director of the Media Effects Research Laboratory at Penn State, and Carson Wagner, assistant professor of advertising at the University of Texa

New research enables computers to name that tune

A team of British and American scientists claim a world’s first in online music recognition, paving the way for the musical equivalent of web search-engine Google; and the potential to resolve musical copyright disputes. Researchers at Queen Mary, University of London; King`s College London; Oxford University and the Universities of Indiana and Massachusetts have developed a new system which enables computers to recognise complex pieces

Telecommunications companies worldwide must make “fundamental adjustments” to their business models if they are to survive in the complex and highly competitive new economy, according new research by the Universities of Newcastle and Strathclyde, UK.
A research paper published in a special issue of the journal Telecommunications Policy (1), urges companies to sharply examine and revise their pricing policies to encourage greater revenues and reverse the recent stock market slump in telecommunica

The first complete map of drug related web-sites on the Internet is under construction. Dr Fabrizio Schifano and colleagues at St George`s Hospital Medical School in Tooting, London, will collect and analyse data from web-sites relating to the design and sale of recreational and illicit substances. The purpose is to provide healthcare professionals in the European community with as much information as possible on the latest drugs – drugs that are often unrecorded in medical textbooks.

The la

Hope for shareholders; warning for salesmen

In these roller coaster times for the economy, there is qualified hope: operations researchers report that peoples’ reaction to a sequence of occurrences in which an initial event is unexpectedly reversed is more favorable if the first event is a loss than if it is a gain, according to a study in a journal of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS®). “Our research supports the casual observation that