Currency values, prices, consumption and incomes are at the heart of the economic performance of all countries. In order to make a meaningful comparison between one economy and another, economists routinely make use of purchasing power parity (PPP) exchange rates, but while PPP rates are widely used and well understood, they take a lot of...

My journey down the social media road began years ago, and many people have praised me for my foresight and brilliance. They are very kind, but the truth is, what really took me down this road was desperation. A few years ago—perhaps you remember—the economy took a heck of a dip. On its way down, it punched me in the...

Our world faces an unprecedented energy crisis. Fuel shortages, skyrocketing energy prices, climate change, nuclear contamination, catastrophic oil spills and energy wars define the global scenario. The nonrenewable energy path of oil, natural gas, coal and nuclear is headed for a dead-end at an accelerated speed. In our race for survival we...

Cryptography has made a peculiar journey to become a modern science. It had long been associated with the military and with magic. The rst published work in the eld was Steganographia, by an alchemist named Trithemius. Although written earlier, the book was published in 1606. Cryptography has continued this connection with the arcane...

By the time you’re reading this in a bookstore, BizTalk will have celebrated its tenth birthday. Over the past decade, there have been seven releases of Microsoft’s enterprise integration server, and it has become the most broadly deployed integration middleware technology in the industry, with over 10,000 customers worldwide....