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The purpose of any business investment is to deliver net economic value. Yet, research has shown that in more than 60 percent of IT implementations, the value expected or “promised” is not being received. So the critical question is, “How can CIOs optimize the value achieved through critical IT investments?”

Cassini Jupiter Portrait

This true color mosaic of Jupiter was constructed from images taken by the narrow angle camera onboard NASA's Cassini spacecraft on December 29, 2000, during its closest approach to the giant planet at a distance of approximately 10 million kilometers (6.2 million miles).

It is the most detailed global color portrait of Jupiter ever produced; the smallest visible features are approximately 60 kilometers (37 miles) across. The mosaic is composed of 27 images: nine images were required to cover the entire planet in a tic-tac-toe pattern, and each of those locations was imaged in red, green, and blue to provide true color. Although Cassini's camera can see more colors than humans can, Jupiter's colors in this new view look very close to the way the human eye would see them.

Everything visible on the planet is a cloud. The parallel reddish-brown and white bands, the white ovals, and the large Great Red Spot persist over many years despite the intense turbulence visible in the atmosphere. The most energetic features are the small, bright clouds to the left of the Great Red Spot and in similar locations in the northern half of the planet. These clouds grow and disappear over a few days and generate lightning. Streaks form as clouds are sheared apart by Jupiter's intense jet streams that run parallel to the colored bands. The prominent dark band in the northern half of the planet is the location of Jupiter's fastest jet stream, with eastward winds of 480 kilometers (300 miles) per hour. Jupiter's diameter is eleven times that of Earth, so the smallest storms on this mosaic are comparable in size to the largest hurricanes on Earth.

Unlike Earth, where only water condenses to form clouds, Jupiter's clouds are made of ammonia, hydrogen sulfide, and water. The updrafts and downdrafts bring different mixtures of these substances up from below, leading to clouds at different heights. The brown and orange colors may be due to trace chemicals dredged up from deeper levels of the atmosphere, or they may be byproducts of chemical reactions driven by ultraviolet light from the Sun. Bluish areas, such as the small features just north and south of the equator, are areas of reduced cloud cover, where one can see deeper.

This is what researchers at the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider expect data from a Higgs boson to look like. The Higgs boson is the subatomic particle that scientists say gives everything in the universe mass.

Recent cyber-attacks have shown that cloud computers are resilient to distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks that overwhelm traditional Web servers. Here are three reasons why cloud computers are able to thwart cyber-attackers.

Google’s Chrome OS platform could potentially be a major headline-stealer in 2011. Not only does it come from one of the most important (and prominent) tech companies in the industry, but it delivers a unique operating system experience that consumers and even some enterprise customers will be keen on getting to know more about.

“We have seen juveniles occasionally carrying sticks for many years, and because they sometimes treated them rather like dolls, we wanted to know if in general this behavior tended to represent something like playing with dolls,” said Professor Richard W. Wrangham.

David J. Malan (right), lecturer on computer science, speaks with students Max Sabor '13 (from left) and Arun Viswanath '13 at the CS 50 fair. Photo by Rose Lincoln/Harvard Staff Photographer

The NextWindow 1900 Series Touch Screen installed on the HP TouchSmart All-In-One PC turns it into a giant touch-screen tablet.

When it comes to mobile phone carriers, AT&T is the worst, according to Consumer Reports. The company examined the overall value of service, customer support, voice and data service quality to make its recommendation. In every category, AT&T placed behind the competition.