Stories about: Pandemic

When disaster looms, who you gonna call? It could increasingly be a mathematician if IBM scientists succeed in one of their current research efforts.

Here's a tricky question: Could your company operate during a flu pandemic?

Last November, a fire broke out in one of the buildings on ISTA Pharmaceuticals' main campus, forcing about 50 employees to move to another location on the property. After the building's sprinklers kicked in, the entire network had to be shut down because the water threatened the equipment carrying the company's inbound data traffic.

Imagine tapping out text messages on a device the size of an index card and as flat as a piece of paper, then folding it in thirds to hold it to your ear and make a phone call. Refold it in a slightly different shape and wrap it around your wrist, where it becomes a watch and also communicates with an ear bud that lets you talk hands free.

It doesn't take a genius to catch on to the fact that in IT, innovation is a mandate. Push the envelope of what's possible, or find yourself relegated to wayside. But, to borrow a favored David St. Hubbins Spinal Tap aphorism, there's a fine line between clever and crackpot when it comes to making good on technological breakthroughs in the enterprise.

A security researcher has claimed that Yahoo's system for blocking automated access to its systems - the CAPTCHA image-recognition system - has been effectively cracked.

If you had any doubts about Sun Microsystems' commitment to open source, it's time to set them aside. Sun put its money where its mouth is Wednesday, with the announcement that it would buy open source database vendor MySQL for a whopping US$1 billion. If the price tag set tongues wagging, however, it was no more tantalizing than the question that immediately sprung to the minds of IT managers everywhere: Now that Sun owns MySQL, what on earth does it plan to do with it?

The avian flu has a plot line similar to a Stephen King novel. It's a menacing presence, mysterious and somewhat hidden, striking in out-of-way places and threatening broader havoc -- a global evil. And until this year, it was a best-seller in newsrooms, spurring headlines that raised public attention and spurred organizations to plan for it.

Two years ago, I wrote a column, " Katrina's total system disruption," that highlighted the complete anarchy in the wake of that storm and argued for smarter predictive modeling to better understand not just the likelihood of extreme environmental events but also the human response to those events. The issue at the time, you may recall, was that a couple hundred thousand people failed to safely evacuate New Orleans, with disastrous consequences.

If an avian flu pandemic strikes the US, some IT workers in critical industries may get vaccinated before their co-workers or even their family members do, according to a draft version of a government report that attempts set a vaccination pecking order.

If you think you face integration challenges in 2007, consider the situation at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, U.S. Better integration between its information systems could help officials address new threats to public health that range from the increasing number of antimicrobial-resistant infections in hospitals to influenza outbreaks and terrorist attacks.