Word: connection
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Seated in cubicles in a nondescript office in Hong Kong, 1,500 workers are turning the wheels of the global economy. Employing e-mail and the telephone, these merchandisers at Hong Kong-based trading outfit Li & Fung connect the far-flung dots of today's international manufacturing system. Without leaving their desks, they make sure that Victoria's Secret gets its bras, American Eagle Outfitters its T shirts, and Disney its stuffed Winnie the Poohs. One moment, the workers in Hong Kong are haggling over the phone with fabricmakers for the best price on denim; the next, they're ensuring...
...crackdown on bandwidth hogs began after Computer Services announced in September that it had received repeated complaints from students who couldn’t connect wirelessly from their dorms...
...they did spectacularly on Dec. 26 when an earthquake off Taiwan's coast damaged seven undersea fiber-optic cables that handle some 90% of phone calls and data traffic in the region. Millions of homes and businesses across Asia were left without Internet access, e-mail and international phone connections. Financial markets were interrupted. And those lucky enough to connect to overseas websites experienced exasperatingly sluggish data-transfer speeds. While most services have been at least partially restored, a flotilla of repair vessels is expected to be working on the knocked-out cables for up to four weeks before networks...
...Internet as it exists today is far from shockproof. It has been built by independent consortia of private telecom companies and investors, and network design has been driven by economics. Reliability is important, of course, but intercontinental cable systems can cost billions of dollars, so they tend to connect to countries where demand is greatest and they often lack costly parallel backup circuits that would be underused most of the time. Vulnerabilities exist, and the recent quake found a chink in the armor. It struck in the Luzon Strait south of Taiwan, an area that has an unusual concentration...
...with Hezbollah militants, 28 undergraduates will finally board a plane for Israel today. Students participating in the Harvard Israel Leadership Initiative, a 12-day traveling study seminar, will have the chance to “explore the challenges that face Israel” today as well as connect with local communities, according to Michael Simon, Associate Director of the Harvard Hillel. The ten students who were orginally slated to arrive in Israel on July 30 were notified less than a week before departure that their trip had been canceled. This October, the program—funded by the full-funding...