The Menlo Briefs

Moody's error gave top ratings to debt products - As if the credit market doesn't have enough problems these days, a Financial Times investigation has revealed that Moody's awarded incorrect triple-A ratings to billions of dollars worth of a type of complex debt product designed for institutional investors due to a bug in its computer models. Those who still hold the products will have suffered some paper losses while others who have bailed out have lost up to 60% of their investment. [more]

To curb truancy, Dallas tries electronic monitoring - What's a school district to do when a student is habitually truant? One option is sending them to juvenile detention, but East Dallas, Texas, has a different idea -- electronic monitoring. As part of a pilot program, some chronically truant students are now required to wear a GPS device that shows their whereabouts at all times. [more]

How Dirty is Your Keyboard? - You clean your toilet, but do you clean your computer keyboard? If not, you could be harboring germs such as E.coli and staph. A consumer advocacy group commissioned a test of 33 keyboards, a toilet seat and a toilet door handle. The test found that four of the keyboards were potential health hazards -- and one had levels of germs five times higher than that found on the toilet seat. Ack! (It prompted me to clean the keyboard on my laptop, which took lots of alcohol swabs and more than a fair share of compressed air to remove 6 years of dust and crud. Eeeeew.) [more]

Man Allegedly Bilks E-Trade & Schwab of $50,000 - A California man has been indicted for an inventive scheme that allegedly siphoned $50,000 from online brokerage houses E-trade and Schwab -- a few pennies at a time. The man allegedly used an automated script to open 58,000 online brokerage accounts, linking each of them to a handful of online bank accounts. He subsequently accumulated thousands of dollars from the micro-deposits which the online brokerage houses used to verify the accounts. [more]

Researchers Develop Wall Climbing Robot - Spider Man isn't the only thing climbing walls these days. Researchers have developed a new technology that enables some robots to scale walls. The researchers took advantage of a basic law of science: positive and negative charges attract. The researchers induce negative charges into the wall being climbed, while at the same time imposing positive charges in the robot, using an on-board battery source. This enables the robot to climb the wall, even if there is dust and debris, or if the wall is made out of concrete, wood, steel, glass, drywall, or brick. [more]

Life in the Looking Glass - Sometimes when I look at our industry I start feeling like Alice when she fell through the looking glass. Nearly all companies have failed investments in software initiatives -- many in the six and seven figure range -- and yet they insist on acting as if nothing's wrong! Curiouser and curiouser, indeed! The good news is that the leading causes of these failures can be avoided by applying Menlo's High-Tech Anthropology^® practice. Join us for the next FREE 90-minute presentation on June 19th to learn how our approach creates the right software for the right application.

Alarming Open-Source Security Holes - Many businesses are considering the switch to Open Source software as a way to save money. However, a recent article revealed that there exists an alarming problem. According to the article, "after a week of analysis, we now know that two changed lines of code have created profound security vulnerabilities in at least four different open-source operating systems, 25 different application programs, and millions of individual computer systems on the Internet." Ironically, the programmers were using an automated software application to help them identify code that could lead to security vulnerabilities. [more]

Sensors for Bat-Inspired Plane Under Development - The Army has a vision: a compact robotic spy plane modeled after a bat. It has awarded the University of Michigan College of Engineering a five-year, $10-million grant to help make it happen [more]

Self-Healing Airplanes - The aging fleet of airplanes that shuttle most of us around the country rely on the sharp eyes of the ground crew to detect problems such as tiny holes or cracks. That may change in the future as researchers at the Engineering and Sciences Research Council are developing composite materials that "bleed" resin when stressed or damaged, effectively creating a "scab" that fixes the damage. [more]

The Future of Movies? - In March, four major studios (Disney, Paramount, Universal, and Twentieth Century Fox) announced that they were working on a financial deal to help theaters install digital projectors for 10,000 movie screens. (Currently only 4,600 of the approximately 40,000 screens in US theaters are digital compatible.) According to the article, the rush is "in large part it's due to an upcoming spate of new stereoscopic films that require digital projectors. Five 3-D films, mostly animation fantasies and action thrillers, are scheduled for release this year and a dozen or so for release in 2009." [more]

Doodling for Profits - In a corporate landscape awash with slick computer presentations, charts, graphs, and logos, some managers still utilize an age-old tool for business problem solving: the hand-drawn doodle. "The reaction that you get from an audience is like magic, because they are with you, seeing the idea being built as opposed to coming in with a set of charts already prepared," says Dan Roam, author of the book The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures. [more]

This Game Didn't End Well - A real life game of cat and mouse caused a 72-hour black out across parts of the Albanian capital of Tirana. Apparently the cat and mouse ran into some high-voltage cables. [more]