Daily News Archive

Please note that The Daily News is publishing (hopefully) twice a week for the foreseeable future due to time constraints.

Tuesday, October 31st

"However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results.” -- Sir Winston Churchill

 

The Picks of the Day

Scientists uncover new bird flu strain

“Scientists have discovered a new strain of bird flu that appears to sidestep current vaccines. It's infecting people as well as poultry in Asia, and some researchers fear its evolution may have been steered by the vaccination programs designed to protect poultry from earlier types of the H5N1 flu.”

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20061031/ap_on_sc/new_bird_flu

http://www.forbes.com/forbeslife/health/feeds/hscout/2006/10/30/hscout535762.html

 

PCAOB Reveals What's Next for AS2

“Possible amendments to the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board's Auditing Standard No. 2 include rethinking the auditor's role in assessing management, improved term definitions, and an emphasis on a top-down, risk-based audit approach, revealed Thomas Ray, chief auditor and director of professional standards for the PCAOB. Ray made his comments at a Foundation for Accounting Education conference in New York on Thursday.”

http://www.cfo.com/article.cfm/8099387?f=alerts

 

IT Process Improvement / Quality Management

Bank of America: Investing in Six Sigma

“The investment is already paying off in more efficient processes, better alignment with business and even increased sales.”

http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=265873&source=NLT_ROI&nlid=44

 

Legal and Regulatory Compliance

Bush says won't risk over-regulating U.S. economy

“President Bush said on Monday that tough rules on corporate executives may warrant fine-tuning, but he would not back changes to corporate governance laws that scare capital from the United States.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/23/AR2006102300698.html

http://www.marketwatch.com/News/Story/Story.aspx?dist=newsfinder&siteid=google&guid=%7BE160D840-1325-45E9-B2EC-9AE364AEF84D%7D

 

MySpace to use 'audio fingerprinting'

“MySpace, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., said it will review all music files uploaded by community members to their online profiles. The files will be run through a music database from Gracenote Inc.”

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20061031/ap_on_hi_te/myspace_copyrights

 

Ponemon: Sarbanes-Oxley to Blame for Pretexting

“Ponemon Institute chairman Larry Ponemon has come out in defense of Hewlett-Packard’s (HP) use of ‘pretexting’ to track confidential information leaks from the board stating Sarbanes-Oxley requirements are the root cause of the problem.”

http://www2.csoonline.com/blog_view.html?CID=26189

 

Security and Risk Management

Seagate puts a padlock on drive data

“The Seagate technology called DriveTrust encrypts all data written to the disk, making it accessible only to users who have the correct password when the computer is hard booted.  The 128-bit encryption technology has been welcomed by notebook users, in the light of a number of recent high profile thefts of notebooks containing sensitive data in the US Government.”

http://www.itwire.com.au/content/view/6772/53/

 

CERT Lessons Learned: A Conversation with Rich Pethia, Director of CERT

This podcast covers the history of CERT, what is going on today, and promising solutions.

http://www.cert.org/podcast/show/pethia.html

 

Information Security: Coordination of Federal Cyber Security Research and Development

GAO-06-811, September 29, 2006

http://www.gao.gov/cgi-bin/getrpt?GAO-06-811

Highlights - http://www.gao.gov/highlights/d06811high.pdf

 

Human Error / Safety

BP chided in report on fatal Texas fire

“BP documents reveal the oil company's knowledge of ‘significant safety problems at the Texas City refinery,’ months or years before the March 2005 explosion that killed 15 workers and injured more than 170 others, according to preliminary findings released Monday by the U.S. Chemical Safety Board.”

http://money.cnn.com/2006/10/30/news/companies/bp_refinery/index.htm?cnn=yes

 

Caffeine-stoked energy drinks worry Docs

“Nutritionists warn that the drinks, laden with caffeine and sugar, can hook kids on an unhealthy jolt-and-crash cycle. . . . But the biggest worry is how some teens use the drinks. Some report downing several cans in a row to get a buzz, and a new study found a surprising number of poison-center calls from young people getting sick from too much caffeine.”

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20061029/ap_on_he_me/energy_drinks

 

Global Warming Will Devastate World Economy, Report Says

“Unchecked global warming will devastate the world economy on the scale of the world wars and the Great Depression, a major British report said Monday.  Introducing the report, British Prime Minister Tony Blair said unabated climate change would eventually cost the world between 5 percent and 20 percent of global gross domestic product each year.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/30/AR2006103000375.html?nav=rss_world

 

Outsourcing / Globalization / International

IBM to set up development centres in India, China

“The new centres, in the Chinese capital of Beijing and Pune in western India, will each employ 500 people, Jeby Cherian, director of IBM's global business solutions center, told Reuters in a phone interview from Bangalore.”

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20061031/bs_nm/india_ibm_dc_1

 

China turns to salt water to ease drought

“Drought-stricken China, where hundreds of millions of people are without regular access to drinking water, is turning to desalinated sea water to help end the crisis, the government said on Tuesday.  Apart from widespread drought, factories have ignored pollution hazards and dumped toxic industrial waste into rivers and lakes in China, home to one-fifth of the world's population but only 7 percent of its water resources.”

http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=scienceNews&storyid=2006-10-31T034446Z_01_PEK333134_RTRUKOC_0_US-ENVIRONMENT-CHINA-WATER.xml&src=rss

 

Economics / Business / Misc.

Why PCs Fail

“Leslie Fiering is the computer coroner. As an analyst at Gartner, the Stamford, Conn.-based technology-research firm, it's Fiering's job to figure out why some computers seem to last forever while others give up the ghost after only a few weeks.”

http://www.cfo.com/article.cfm/8071822/c_8072185?f=alerts

 

CFOs Say Time Is Their Scarcest Resource

“According to a new survey, nearly half (46 percent) of CFOs cited time management as their greatest challenge these days.  This was more than double the second most common response — keeping up with technology — cited by 22 percent of the 1,400 CFOs surveyed by Robert Half Management Resources.”

http://www.cfo.com/article.cfm/8070409/c_8070761?f=alerts

[Yet another example why we need to tailor communications to senior management’s needs vs. pushing a ton of data to them to try and interpret.]

 

Astronauts to visit Hubble for service call

“The shuttle Discovery will pay the Hubble Space Telescope a final servicing call in 2008, NASA Administrator Michael Griffin announced Tuesday.  The new plan reverses a decision made by former NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe in the wake of the Columbia disaster that such a mission would be too risky to attempt.”

http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/space/10/31/hubble/index.html