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A survey of 1,800 scientists and researchers finds that they are enamored of social network technologies not just for keeping up with friends, but for doing work. Over half said they think such tools will have an important role in how research is done going forward, and in fact, a lot of the younger respondents (ages 25-44) are already exploiting social networking for professional purposes, such as sharing findings. Security and other issues remain concerns, but not insurmountable ones.

The survey was conducted via Elsevier's 2collab research program. The top areas where respondents said social networking will have a role for them over the next 5 years (more than one response allowed):

1. Professional networking and collaboration (34.4%)

2. Career development (26.4%)

3. Critical analysis and evaluation of research data (25.3%)

4. Dissemination of research output (24.5%)

5. Conducting primary research (23.4%)

6. Grant application and funding (22.7%)

The University of Montreal has formed a new institute to steady addictions, including Internet addictions.

"The [Internet addiction]problem isn't widespread but we know of serious cases in which teenagers don't leave the house, don't have interpersonal relationships, and have been isolated in front of their computer screen for the past two or three years, and only speak in the language of the characters they play with in network video games," says Louise Nadeau, a professor at the school and director of the new institute. "In a few years we'll have couples in therapy because the Internet will have become their main occupation."

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People participating in online virtual worlds react to others' avatars in many of the ways they might in the real world -- carrying biases based on skin color, for example. That's one of the major findings in field studies conducted by a pair of social psychologists from Northwestern University. Their findings are published in a report called: "Is It a Game? Evidence for Social Influence in the Virtual World."

The study, conducted within the virtual world of There.com, involved one avatar making requests of others to see how the others would react to avatars with different characteristics, such as skin tone.

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The Large Hadron Collider leaped into action today and yes, there is a network angle.

Terabytes of data per second will be zipping from the big particle accelerator story along the France-Switzerland border to researchers in the United States and elsewhere via fiber-optic cables. Networks including the U.S. Department of Energy’s ESnet, Internet2 and the transatlantic USLHCNet will all play key roles in handling the data and should really be put to the test. Data from the LHC will be divvied up for processing among 150 computing and data storage sites worldwide. More here from Internet2.

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In this week's deep dive into Google Chrome, reviewer Thomas Powell runs some benchmark tests that show yes, it really is faster than other browsers.

He also gets into the nitty-gritty of Chrome's standards compliance, the advantages of its browser-as-OS approach, and the shortcomings of its privacy mode.

Check it out.

 

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Last year the word on the street at Interop involved HP's eventual $4.5 billion acquisition of Mercury Interactive. At this year's show, there have been mumblings that virtualization market leader VMware (a subsidiary of storage giant EMC) could be shopping for management and automation technology by way of another acquisition. Sources say the vendor could be looking into buying data center management and automation vendor Opsware. Sources speculate that virtualization technology may become more of a commodity, forcing vendors in the market to differentiate themselves and win customers by providing advanced management, provisioning, orchestration and data center automation technologies along with their virtualization wares.

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The keynote by Avaya CEO Louis D'Ambrosio looks enticing, based on Avaya's description:

"Louis D'Ambrosio, president and CEO, Avaya will share his vision of how intelligent communications, along with interoperability within the vendor ecosystem, is transforming business and changing lives."

And if that's not enough to lure you, if you sit through the talk, you get a free dessert.

The company slipped a flier under doors of people registered for the show urging: "Don't miss the Avaya keynote on Wednesday, May 23 1:00 p.m. Mandalay Bay Ballroom G-H and enjoy a complimentary dessert after the session!"

Sweet.

During a session in one of Interop's new tracks, virtualization, Duncan Hill told attendees of the dire importance of managing the technology on their nets. Hill, an entrepreneur in residence at Ventures West, loosely quoted Gartner as saying virtualization (in this case, x86 server virtualization) "will be the most impactful technology on infrastructure and operations through 2008." In light of the research firm's forecast, Hill delivered his own warning to standing-room only session attendees: "I cannot emphasize enough that you must get management nailed down when it comes to virtualization. If you don't, you are going to be in for a world of hurt in the virtualized environment."

"Foundry Man" stood guard on the periphery of the network equipment maker's booth, but sadly company executives say the mascot had run out of action figures in his likeness years ago.

SSL VPN vendor offered Interop attendees a radio control car after just about every presentation. As for its raffle prize, Aventail said it would be forking over a video iPod.

DNS, DHCP and IP address management vendor BlueCat Networks never fails to deliver on both high-tech fun and low-brow expectations at Interop. For instance, at last year's show the company equipped its booth with an FA-18 fighter jet flight simulator system for booth visitors to test. And in 2005, BlueCat executives donned Nascar outfits and set up in front of their booth a genuine Nascar car equipped with simulated driving systems so not only could attendees check out the vehicle up close and personal, but they could also sit in the driver's seat and run a simulated race.

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In another product blast from the past, Rock'em Sock'em Robots took the stage in Mazu Networks' booth and the network behavioral analysis vendor put a new twist on an old favorite. Dubbed NOC 'Em SOC 'Em Robots, the punching pair represented how network and security teams fight for visibility into performance and security problems across their nets. Yet this battle poses no need for concern, as you might have guessed, as Mazu products promise to solve both IT operations and security issues by monitoring traffic for anamolous behavior. Aside from the boxing matches, the vendor also promised a Nintendo Wii to one lucky raffle winner at Interop.

Fans of CBS' "The Amazing Race" this week at Interop got to witness network and application performance managment vendor NetScout's take on the show. To complete the parody of the hit TV show, the company managed to get a couple of "very good" employees to play "The Swifts," a duo racing to find the root cause of a performance problem on the network. With NetScout survey results among its customers showing they can shave close to 70% off the time it takes to solve such problems using NetScout's nGenuis Performance Manager product, the show could have been called "Amazing Results."

LifeSize Communications' booth babe this year was an unfortunately dressed and perpetually nauseated character named "Barf Boy." With his poor color and peeked pose, Barf Boy was a "life-size" representative of Grossology Live, a video-conferenced educational show that explains to students across the country the science behind the biology of barf and other really gross human anatomy things. Grossology Live uses LifeSize's high-definition video-conferencing technology to present its educational shows such as "Do the Bathroom Hussle" and "The Zoo on You" to teachers, students and this week Interop attendees at any location.

Application acceleration and security vendor Blue Coat Systems this week at Interop borrowed a page from Citrix's booth attraction from year's past. Blue Coat set up a mini-raceway and challenged Interop attendees to speed their electronic cars around the track that boasts the company's tagline to "secure and accelerate business." But these racers weren't thinking about application traffic or secure packets. They had their eyes clearly on the prize for the best overall time: a Bose iPod Docking Station. For its part, Citrix also had its raceway set up to demonstrate how its NetScaler and Orbital Data aquisitions speed application traffic for customers.

SolarWinds passed out Rubik's Cubes to those Interop attendees that stopped by the network and systems management vendor's booth. The company, which this week announced it had acquired Neon Software, promises its network management wares -- such as the updated LANsurvey 10 and Engineer's Toolset 9.0 debuted here this week -- are easier to install, use and maintain than many competitive products. And maybe, just maybe, putting SolarWinds software in place makes network fault and performance issues easier to troubleshoot and solve than the popular 1980s brain-teaser puzzle, the Rubik's Cube.

At a dual Interop keynote, IBM Internet Security Service’s Tom Noonan spoke first, taunting the speaker who followed him, Dave DeWalt, the new CEO of McAfee.

Noonan knocked McAfee for trying to lure away IBM/ISS customers by offering free software if they switched to McAfee.

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LAS VEGAS - Layer 8 is coming to you from Sin City this week at the Interop convention. Part of any trade show of course are the sometimes corny sometimes down right scary things vendors will do in their booth to grab your attention. Here we have "Pastor Steve" in Extreme's booth. Now the singers could sing but there's something wrong with the songs which were all about failing links and other bad things that can happen to your network. A chorus of "Praise VoIP," and can I get an "Amen to security," were a little disconcerting. Amen.

General Motors is always looking for the best ways to protect its data and is in the process of a multi-year plan to evolve its data center security techniques. "Our idea is to provide protection in the data rather than provide protection for that data on components around it," said Wallace Dalrymple, manager and chief architect of networking, telecommunications and security at Interop's Data Center Summit Monday. "Security is an underlying infrastructure in our data center." In a nutshell, the plan involves the following steps: 2007: Identify data, data classification and handling. 2008: Enterprise encryption: the company has over 10,000 applications an d it would be impossibly expensive to retrofit all of them with encryption, Dalrymple says.

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It would probably be cliché to complain about taxi lines at any show in Las Vegas. But still, I can't help myself....at 2:30 am Monday morning the line was at least 45 minutes long....Now the consolation prize (coming from Boston mind you) was that it was also 82 degrees at 2:30am. The cabs advertising a Joe Piscopo show didn't help. Joe Piscopo?! Complaining from other Interop showgoers indicates that the cab lines haven't gotten any better at 2:30 pm. Still...