10 Emerging
Technologies
Push to Replace Voting
Machines Spurs Confusion
Local election officials are at loss over what voting
machine technology to purchase with federal grants as the
deadline for using the money approaches. Governments have
until Jan. 1 to purchase new equipment that will improve
accuracy, but academic experts and state officials continue to
...
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U.S. Dominates
Supercomputing, But for How Much Longer?
Congressional legislation currently under review would
boost government funding for high-performance computing, even
as some departments are reducing their research investment in
that area. The House recently sent the High-Performance
Computing Revitalization Act of 2005 to the Senate, ...
[read more]
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Court Tosses FCC Rules On
Copying, Sharing TV
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) overstepped its
authority with the "broadcast flag" rule that would have
imposed device design requirements for digital television,
according to a federal appeals court ruling. The D.C. Circuit
U.S. Court of Appeals said the FCC is meant to ...
[read more]
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Professor Believes Software
Can Determine Quality Work
More educators are using automated analysis programs to
help grade student essays. University of Missouri-Columbia
sociology professor Ed Brent created a program called SAGrader
with support from the National Science Foundation. He uses the
software to identify basic, necessary components ...
[read more]
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H-1B: Patriotic or
Treasonous?
Politicians, academics, labor representatives, and industry
leaders are engaged in a fierce debate about whether the H-1B
visa program harms U.S. workers or empowers U.S. businesses.
At a recent panel discussion in Washington, D.C., Microsoft
Chairman Bill Gates said, "The whole idea ...
[read more]
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A Virtual World With
Peer-to-Peer Style
A number of developer groups are merging online "massively
multiplayer" gaming with the peer-to-peer computing model,
hoping to create a radically new mode of online interaction
similar to that depicted in Neal Stephenson's "Snow Crash"
science fiction novel. That book described a ...
[read more]
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Technology for Social
Inclusion: An Interview With Mark
Warschauer
The digital divide wrongly suggests a digital solution,
says educational IT expert Mark Warschauer. Instead of
focusing solely on access to technology, solutions should
consider the social, political, and economic context.
Warschauer is an assistant professor of education and
information ...
[read more]
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Virtual Music Box Makes
Sound Visual
Researchers from Sao Paulo, Brazil, are using
human-computer interface technology to enable people to
interact in a virtual environment that records their movements
visually as a sound. The work of artist Daniela Kutschat
Hanns, coordinator of post-graduate studies at SENAC
Communication ...
[read more]
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Wireless Developers Use
Diverse Toolset
Applications that wireless developers are working with
continue to evolve, and signs indicate that there will be a
dynamic market in the years to come, according to a survey of
nearly 500 wireless developers by Evans Data. The survey
reveals that the chance to mobilize applications more ...
[read more]
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Speech Technology for
Persons with Disabilities: Are We Breaking Down Barriers or
Creating New Ones?
University of Washington senior computer specialist Terry
Thompson writes that speech technologies' mainstream
penetration can make lives easier for persons with
disabilities, but it can also complicate them because some
disabilities may limit the technologies' usefulness. For
example, a person ...
[read more]
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Grassroots
Supercomputing
Public distributed computing efforts have grown
significantly since SETI@home was launched in 1999, enabling
scientists from a number of fields to tap tremendous computing
power. "There simply would not be any other way to perform
these calculations, even if we were given all of the ...
[read more]
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Europe Annexes Caribbean
Islands
ICANN has come under fire for its failure to garner support
for its country-code Names Supporting Organization (ccNSO).
Most recently, the chairman of Centr, an organization
representing domain name registries worldwide, sent a letter
to ICANN accusing it of trying to regulate ...
[read more]
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Glacial Environment
Monitoring Using Sensor Networks
GlacWeb is a wireless sensor network deployed to study how
climate change affects the dynamics of the Briksdalsbreen
glacier in Norway, and represents one of the few environmental
sensor networks that demonstrate their value. Eight sensor
nodes, or probes, in the ice and sub-glacial ...
[read more]
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Edgy About
Blades
Blade servers reduce cable clutter, are easy to manage, and
save floor space in the data center, but companies are still
hesitant about adopting the relatively immature technology; IT
managers say blade servers generate excessive amounts of heat,
lack architectural standards, and cost more than ...
[read more]
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The View From
California
Heather Barbour, an Irvine Fellow with the New America
Foundation's California Program, writes that the flipside of
California's vaunted status as a science and technology
(S&T) pioneer is its poor management of S&T
policymaking. She describes the current California legislature
as ...
[read more]
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Silver Bullets for Little
Monsters: Making Software More
Trustworthy
Professors David Larson and Keith Miller of the University
of Illinois at Springfield agree that while a single solution
for all software development problems may be a pipe dream,
existing "silver bullets" can solve a few problems in the near
term as long as developers select them carefully. ...
[read more]
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10 Emerging
Technologies
Among a bevy of promising technologies is a software-driven
airborne network of planes that removes the need for
ground-based air traffic controllers; the system could yield
short-term benefits such as shorter flights and lower fuel
consumption, and long-term benefits such as the ...
[read more]
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