Spinning a Smarter
Web
E-Voting Commission Gets
Earful
The Election Assistance Commission's (EAC) first public
hearing on the state of elections and voting systems on May 6
was characterized by opposing testimony from supporters and
critics of electronic voting machines. Johns Hopkins
University computer scientist Avi Rubin warned ...
[read more]
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Faces of Globalization:
Jobs for Tech Grads
Technology job opportunities for graduates--at least those
who fail to specialize in creative areas--will grow scarcer
because of layoffs and offshore outsourcing, attest people
such as University of Texas at Arlington senior Brad Pitman,
who has interviewed with defense department ...
[read more]
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Plan for Spectrum Is Making
Waves
Lobbyists from the technology industry are making their
presence known in Washington as the FCC and the White House
put pressure on television broadcasters to make better use of
airwaves: Technology firms want greater use of spectrum to
expand their wireless Internet offerings while more and ...
[read more]
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How Much Does Information
Technology Matter?
Nicholas G. Carr has written a follow-up book to his much
debated Harvard Business Review article published in May 2003,
"IT Doesn't Matter;" the new book, titled "Does IT Matter?,"
expands on his original hypothesis, giving detailed examples
and analysis. The basic idea is that companies no longer ...
[read more]
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Helping Exterminate Bugs in
Spreadsheets, Web Applications
The National Science Foundation has awarded a five-year,
$2.6 million Information Technology Research grant to the End
Users Shaping Effective Software (EUSES) project, a six-campus
initiative to help eliminate glitches in spreadsheets and Web
applications developed by "end-user ...
[read more]
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NASA Reassessing a Role for
Robots
Robots could be employed to extend the life of the Hubble
Space Telescope, assist in the maintenance of the
International Space Station, set up lunar habitats, and
perform other missions deemed too dangerous or costly for
humans. Saving the Hubble after the scrapping of a shuttle
mission in the ...
[read more]
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Nanotech: Beyond the
Hype--and Fear
The potential benefits of nanotechnology could be undercut
or limited by unrealistic public expectations fostered by
hype, or because of panic spread by alarmist musings on the
technology's darker aspects. Kristen Kulinowski of Rice
University's Center for Biological and Environmental ...
[read more]
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How the Word Gets
Around
The purpose of Brandeis University senior Sam Arbesman's
Memespread Project was to track the route of a meme throughout
the blogosphere in real time in an attempt to study the
mechanisms behind the spread of ideas on the Web. Arbesman set
up a Web site and submitted the meme to the popular Boing ...
[read more]
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Smalltalk With
Object-Oriented Programming Pioneer Kay
Dr. Alan Kay recently won the Association of Computing
Machinery's (ACM) Turing Award for helping develop the first
fully-fledged object-oriented programming language, Smalltalk.
Now a Hewlett-Packard senior fellow and president of
Viewpoints Research Institute, Kay says enterprise developers
...
[read more]
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ACM Announces Award
Winners and Fellows
As part of ACM's mission to bring broad recognition to
outstanding technical and professional achievements within the
computing and information technology community, ACM has
announced the winners for 12 awards that span a variety of
professional and technological expertise. ...
[read more]
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Computer 'Mobile Agents'
and Robot Tested by NASA
NASA researchers are putting "mobile agent" software
through its paces in Utah's Southeast Desert in a test
involving exploratory research conducted by human scientists
and a prototype robotic assistant dubbed Boudreaux. The test
is designed to simulate communications between planetary ...
[read more]
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Presenting the Case for
Industrial Qualitative Modelling
The goal of the Information Society Technologies-funded
MONET2 project is to attain new insights into and industrial
applications for Model-based Systems and Qualitative Reasoning
(MBS&QR) technologies. The project focused on the
automotive, education and training, medical, and applied ...
[read more]
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The Internet's Wilder
Side
Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is older than the World Wide Web,
but still untamed: Virus writers research and launch code,
hackers direct denial-of-service attacks, and copyright
pirates offer music, video, and software for free on the IRC.
Experts estimate no more than 500,000 IRC users are online at
any one time, yet the network has a disproportionate ...
[read more]
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How to Build a Better
Hand
Tom Chau of the Bloorview MacMillan Children's Center has
developed an artificial hand that responds to sounds produced
by muscles in the arm, and employs a sensor to filter out
background noises. The prosthesis is outfitted with a small
computer chip that is trained to interpret the ...
[read more]
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Internet Addresses, Phone
Numbers Could Soon Be Interchangeable
Widespread adoption of the ENUM domain naming system could
vastly change telecommunication by making Internet addresses
and telephone numbers interchangeable. ENUM has already been
endorsed in the United States by President Bush's
administration, but Canada has not yet taken an official ...
[read more]
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Making Up for Lost Time on
IPv6
U.S. companies may not be as interested in Internet
Protocol version 6 (IPv6) as their foreign counterparts, but
the recent involvement of the U.S. government has given at
least some boost to national IPv6 development. The Moonv6
project started last June, at the same time the Department of
...
[read more]
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Linux Weighs
In
Linux is taking over the high-end computing sector because
of its flexibility, increasing maturity, and
cost-effectiveness, according to scientists at government
laboratories: New clustered supercomputers are almost all
built to run Linux, which is much cheaper to implement across
...
[read more]
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The Interactive
Nightmare
A group of concerned scientists warned President Bush in
2002 that the United States' critical infrastructure is very
vulnerable to cyberattack, and that massive disruptions of
electrical power, finance, transportation, and other systems
could take place by accident or through deliberate ...
[read more]
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Spinning a Smarter
Web
The Semantic Web is a project under investigation by the
World Wide Web Consortium, veteran research labs such as
Stanford University's Knowledge Systems Lab, and other
facilities such as Ireland's Digital Enterprise Research
Institute to develop a shared system that will help computers
...
[read more]
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